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Mars Landers - Opportunity, Bedrock, Aerosmith?
Iphtashu Fitz writes "As was reported last week, the first Mars rover Spirit had some communications problems that the folks at the JPL have finally managed to trace to problems with its flash memory. Reuters is reporting that Opportunity seems to be having some power-related problems, too. It appears a faulty thermostat is turning a heater on overnight without being told to do so. While NASA isn't concerned about the rover overheating, they're exploring the long-term effects of continued power drain on the second rover." The article also notes: "The first three-dimensional, panoramic images beamed back from Opportunity showed an intriguing outcrop of exposed bedrock" - there's now a color version of the same image. Finally, lightwaveman points to the Spaceflight Now status page regarding new priorities for the Mars mission: "The airing of today's Mars rover news conference is being delayed on NASA TV to show the band Aerosmith touring International Space Station Mission Control at Houston's Johnson Space Center."
After the last couple weeks of living in constant cold and snow here in the northeast I think I have a little insight on the Opportunity issue - I'd randomly turn on the heat if I was on mars too! It's cold!
The anti-salmon
if we could have picked any landing site on mars, it would be Opportunity's. An examination of bedrock will tell us much more about mars than analyzing rocks that may have come from space. Also, is Opportunity set up to look for life?
btw, Firebird on OSX says the color image contains errors. Anyone else having that happen?
Seriously though, it's been a pretty good week for NASA so far, with Opportunity landing safely and Spirit slowly coming back to health.
My question is: When they locate a fix for Spirit, will they apply it to Opportunity as well? Are the two really identical, and if so wouldn't Opportunity run the risk of the same sort of major nervous breakdown that Spirit had? Or do they plan on leaving well enough alone?
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Yeah, right, that's really Tatooine, if you look closely you can see Luke's uncle's 'farm'. in the distance. I'm pretty sure there some sand people messing with these rovers. At least when the rovers burn out the Jawas will be able to clean things up.
Obviously they didn't launch rockets to put those there, they used the same hyperspace portal that George Lucas uses.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Bad economy, war in Iraq, dodgy dossiers, terrorists on the loose, no WMDs, Gov. Schwarzenegger (I live in California...), rising national debt, companies fleeing offshore in droves, corporate scandals, high unemployement. I'm depressed.
Then there's Mars. Drama, excitement, scientific adventure: I feel proud of our messed up little species. Stuck somewhere between monkeys and angels, we manage to pull off some cool stunts once in a while. Go Team!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Interestingly there seems to be some sort of horizontal feature that in a terrestrial rock could very well be stratification, which would make it a sedimentary rock. I would guess that it's more likely some sort of weathering effect. Although you do quite often see this sort of effect in dykes. Very interesting :)
After being launched into space, experiencing many Gs, travelling hundereds of thousands of miles to fall onto a big rock, bounce around and then to be controlled from earth... I think its a wonder they both work at all.
Kudos to NASA for doing so well
How many computers are too many?
They heard that Liv's dad knew about digging space rocks or somesuch thing...
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
- If the thermostat incorrectly activates, someone will turn it off.
Not so sure about that. Send people up there and, if the thermostat incorrectly activates (Opportunity) or a software error causes the entire system to shut down (Spirit), people die. Manned space exploration is expensive and dangerous.As a representative of the League of the Perpetually Offended, I would like to express outrage over all of this heat speech.
Harumph
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
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- so how about reusing the Spirit/Opportunity platform for further robotic missions to Mars? They seem to work (somewhat) and the remaining problems will probably be ironed out. Has the time come for commodity Mars probes?
What's all you space geeks saying? Is there something we would really miss by using slightly modified versions of these landers that would justify development costs? Or is the question moot since Bush wants manned missions anyway?
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
Or is the press just dying for some bad news? I mean, everyone knows the news saying "You report the one house on fire, no one reports the 10,000 that didn't burn today" (or something like that).
For the media, bad news is good news (storywise). Here we have unprecidented sucesses of the MERs (and Mars Express - within DAYS of working it has found evidence of it's top mission objective), and now there's all this press about the "failures."
Or has NASA been "asking for it," as they keep saying how "amazingly perfect" things are going, setting themselves up for scrutiny when they fail? My opinion: no, but what about you?
"Opportunity is contributing to global warming on Mars!"
---------
George W. Bush in 2004!
NASA seems to be having so much trouble with them
I can't think of a single mission in which everything was sucessful:
-Hubble had it's famous initial "disaster."
-Galileo had it's near-catastrophic antenae failure (which made the mission produce like 10% of the intended science/pictures).
-The Voyager Probes had various instruments which conked out before Neptune (granted the mission was only engineered to work for Jupiter and Saturn)
-Mars Express's Lander has presumably failed (but it's primary mission appears to have already found some evidence of it's main goal - finding water)
-The Soviet Venera Probes each had problems (one mission in particular returned no pictures due to an unremoved lens cap!)
-Pathfinder, like Spirit, had periods of breached-communications (including a much-longer delay in communcating with Earth after touching down on the surface).
Yet each of the above missions were HUGE sucesses in their own regard. NASA (and ESA and USSR) all has problems with them, but they were all very much redeemed themselves. It's like having a kid who turns out to be a hero firefigher/scientist or something. Just cuz he/she had a few temper tantrums doesn't mean that they're a failure. Look at the big picture...
Sure, someone could turn it off if they were there. Then they'd freeze to death when it actually did get cold. For that matter, NASA could probably do that now, from Earth.
Having somebody there would be useful if they had a spare part to install. It only makes sense for a manned mission to go to Mars after there's a reasonable amount of supplies already there. A long-lasting power source is one piece of that, but there are plenty of others. Also, before we can just "use nuclear power", someone will have to design a power plant that will reliably survive EDL and produce a significant amount of power afterwards. Playing around with rovers is giving NASA (and humanity) the experience necessary to supply a crew and get the crew there safely.
The Spirit/Opportunity landing system is heavily based on the Pathfinder/Sojourner design. The parachute and airbags had to be beefed up to deal with the additional weight, and some other modifications were made based on what was learned the first time around, but it's basically the same. I understand that squeezing the much larger Spirit and Opportunity into the lander was not easy, which is why the probes arrive folded up like elaborate origami.
--Larry
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence
I just downloaded a 4 meg image, they never heard of us or something?
Jonathanjk.com
I would like it if someone could give a real scientific or at least monetary reason to send people to mars.
As if science and money are the ultimate ends of the human experience. They're not.
You could just as easily have asked what the scientific or monetary reasons were for Marco Polo to go to Asia, da Gama to go around the Cape of Good Hope, Columbus to go to America, or Magellan to sail around the world. Or what the scientific or monetary reasons for NASA to put men on the moon 40 years ago. While each voyage had scientific and/or monetary justifications, they only became clear in retrospect and were in any event secondary to the experience and the human achievement.
If we can't get probeds and rovers there reliable, we have no business sending people.
;) and we need to think really big and long term.
We need to set up an infrastructure before we send people.
I would like to see 8-12 sattalites whose goals are, in order:
1)relay communication
2)track objects on the planet
3)Pictures.
we should also send a few big units full of supplies.
Then we should send people who Also have enough supplies to get there and back.
They should rotate supplies as new missions land
We should do experiments on building shelters from native materials.
That could mean caves, mines and/or adobe huts made from local materials.
Mars is really far away(yes you can quote me
I would also like to send 4 or five teams of 6, each about a month apart.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Having somebody there would be useful if they had a spare part to install. It only makes sense for a manned mission to go to Mars after there's a reasonable amount of supplies already there. A long-lasting power source is one piece of that, but there are plenty of others.
They're called RTGs, and they weren't used on Spirit or Opportuniry because of backlash from environmentalists. After all, how dare NASA send up a few pounds of plutonium on space craft. Why, that Cassini thing nearly killed everyone!
Right.
Also, before we can just "use nuclear power", someone will have to design a power plant that will reliably survive EDL and produce a significant amount of power afterwards.]
It's called a Gas Core Nuclear Rocket (GCNR), which is a advanced NERVA style engine. NERVA was completed in the '60s, but cold war fears of nuclear power killed the project. Over the past decade, NASA has had the GCNR under quiet development for use in space propulsion. What most people don't realize (an intentional oversight by NASA) is that GCNRs can produce more thrust than a chemical rocket, but at a much higher Isp. Even the completed NERVA technology had 4 times the lifting power of today's Space Shuttle.
The really beautiful part about GCNR, is that it could potentially breath gases like O2 and CO2 as fuel. That means that we could easily create space planes that work on Earth *and* Mars. Wouldn't it be nice to fly into Mars' atmosphere instead of falling? (Do a search for "Project Pluto". It wasn't the cleanest plane ever, but it did work.)
Playing around with rovers is giving NASA (and humanity) the experience necessary to supply a crew and get the crew there safely.
Bull. These rovers don't even have a tenth the amount of power, resources, propulsion, and ability that can be accomplished with today's technology.
We have the technology already. We just need to stop putzing around and *use* nuclear power.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Why doesn't NASA Open Source this rover code? Not for the outside world to contribute to the development, but for review. The collective intelligence of the open source community could certainly provide productive and insightful reviews. Perhaps problems such as file management could be avoided. At the very least the open souce community would be able to document weak points in the design that could be improved or avoided in production use.
Its not like this is proprietary, for-profit code. I helped paid for it. Its for the good of all mankind.
If nothing else, I would love the chance to learn something from NASA. The rover code might be as beautiful as the images coming back (or not!).
Those who can do. Those who can't sue.
I work at Speedera who is delivering their content and NASA TV. At 6pm EST when slashdot posted this story the traffic increased only about 100Mbps. Articles posted on AOL, MSN and Yahoo home pages increase the traffic much more. The NASA TV live stream when Opportunity landed was 4 Gbps. There are lots of other sources that are bigger than the slashdot effect.
See the press release for more details on the traffic and our SpeedRank index for historical performance and availabilty of NASA's site.