Posted by
CmdrTaco
on from the congrats-from-the-news-nerds-to-the-nasa-nerds dept.
tvh2k writes "CNN reports that both the Mars Rovers Spirit and Opportunity are now both fully functional. Working on opposite sides of the red planet, they have begun analyzing rock and soil samples."
371 comments
For some reason
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 5, Funny
Spirit keeps responding with "JOHNNY 5 IS ALIVE!!!"
Re:For some reason
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I guess the idea of a redundant rover is to make sure that errors are not a total loss. But it's nice to have both, especially since Opportunity seems to have found evidence of water. This has been really exciting to follow.
Re:Very good news
by
Cosmonut
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· Score: 5, Insightful
NASA/JPL learned their lesson when the Mars Polar Lander disappeared. Most Mars probes up until then had actually consisted of two spacecraft (the Mariner series and Viking 1/2) simply for redundancy; if your launch failed or the spacecraft blew up (Mars Observer, anyone?) there was a complete second set of spacecraft hardware available.
With two rovers that redundancy is back, and at the same time you can target them into two different landing zones on Mars, doubling your data sampling if they both survive.
I think it would have been excellent science to have Beagle operational at the same time. Imagine, three rovers investigating Mars at the same time, given "similar" environmental conditions (either a lack of or similar-intensity dust storm conditions).
We should be glad the problematic file stores on Spirit and Opportunity were easy to correct.
Remember they had three redudant rovers (Spirit, Opportunity and Beagle 2). In the big scheme of things Beagle 2 took one for the team, stiff upper lip and all that. However, I can reveal that despite Beagle 2's problems contact was recently reestablished as follows:
Jodrell Bank: I command you, as King of the Britons, to move! Beagle 2: I move for no man. Jodrell Bank: Report damage! Beagle 2: 'Tis but a scratch. Jodrell Bank: A scratch? Your wheels are off! Beagle 2: No, they're not Jodrell Bank: Well, what's that pile of molten slag? Beagle 2: I've had worse. Jodrell Bank: Eh. You are indeed brave, Sir Beagle, but you are no longer operational Beagle 2: Oh, had enough, eh? Jodrell Bank: Look, you stupid bastard. You impacted the surface of Mars at high speed, your camera's broken and you've got no wheels Beagle 2: Yes I have. Jodrell Bank: Look! Beagle 2: Just a flesh wound.
John.
Re:Very good news
by
amightywind
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· Score: 4, Funny
..if your launch failed or the spacecraft blew up (Mars Observer, anyone?) there was a complete second set of spacecraft hardware available.
This also vindicates a longstanding principle of government procurement: why buy one when you can buy two at twice the price!
Ooooh, you made the "Contact" reference before I could get to it...
--
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
Re:Very good news
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
The advantage of 2 rovers on opposite sides of the planet is that since the rovers go into a sleep mode during the night to preserve power, you always have one doing something.
There is a relay satellite in orbit around Mars. It gets almost continuous use.
Re:Very good news
by
PatrickThomson
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· Score: 0, Redundant
Dude. That is fucking hilarious. Best monty python ref. I've ever seen, including the NGE black night reference.
-- I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
I remember touring JPL a long time ago (maybe 15 years) and they showed us some of the redundant stuff they had there. Except the way they explained it, it wasn't so they had a second one to send if the first one failed. Rather, they had a system to troubleshoot on at home in case something happened to the one out in space. If it was a recoverable failure, they could send in Gary Sinise with a roll of duct tape and figure out what order to turn everything on.
-- "Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions." -- G. K. Chesterton
I guess the idea of a redundant rover is to make sure that errors are not a total loss. But it's nice to have both...
Although it may not be effective for all missions, some have been kicking around the idea of landing a bunch of micro-rovers about the size of a shoe-box and let them plunk around. If you had say 8 such rovers they could land in a rough place with lower risk of total loss. With the current crop of probes they understandably pick smooth landing areas. But in the future they may have to target rough areas to get to the next level of knowledge about Mars. The best rocks are often in rough areas. Rather than try to build a super-complex rover to navigate a mess, have a bunch of smaller, simpler ones knowing that a few will get trashed in the process.
There was a cancelled asteroid mission that was to use smaller, four-wheeled rover(s). The wheels on each side are fixed to a rotatable "V" bar. The design seems simple, yet flexible. If one gets stuck, simply flip around on the axle on the V bar. The PDF image (link below) makes it look like the V has independent arms, but other photos I saw had them at a fixed angle. (I couldn't find those images.) Maybe this version did have independent arms. It looks a bit different than other links I saw. It is probably a rough prototype anyhow being that the funding never came through to finish. http://www.spacedaily.com/news/muses-cn-00b.html http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/facts/muses.pdf
Re:Very good news
by
kippy
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· Score: 2, Informative
That's a funny quote and all but I don't know if it's entirely true in this case. A lot of the cost involved was put towards getting the technology together and paying the people involved. Once one was built, the other one just required the same set of parts and a team to assemble and test it. No R&D costs were repeated.
While it's not exactly assembly line type savings, there is a reduced cost for building a duplicate of something that already has been built.
They're not redundant. They're studying two completely different parts of Mars. The mission success criteria, as I understand them, are for two rovers. The only was you could meaningfully say they were redundant is if they had the same or similar landing sites.
--
Helium balloons want to be free.
Re:Very good news
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Dominic_Mazzoni
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· Score: 3, Informative
That's a funny quote and all but I don't know if it's entirely true in this case. A lot of the cost involved was put towards getting the technology together and paying the people involved. Once one was built, the other one just required the same set of parts and a team to assemble and test it. No R&D costs were repeated.
While it's not exactly assembly line type savings, there is a reduced cost for building a duplicate of something that already has been built.
That's true, and FYI, they actually built three rovers, just in case there was an accident with one of them before launch.
Re:Very good news
by
argStyopa
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· Score: 4, Insightful
principle of government procurement: why buy one when you can buy two at twice the price
I'd mod this -1, ignorant. Generally with advanced projects like this the cost is hardly 1=N, 2=2N. The first one might cost a ton, but the second one, being a simple duplication of parts and methods developed for the first, is far, far cheaper (sometimes as much as an order of magnitude).
But hey, who am I to stand in the way of a pointless swipe at The Government?
NASA/JPL learned their lesson when the Mars Polar Lander disappeared.
Wrong. The twin MERs were already planned by the time Mars Polar Lander was lost. Also, future probes are not going to be twin missions; for instance in 2007 the Mars Phoenix Lander is going to be a single mission.
That's right; each MER rover built *after the first one* is simply an exercise in parts and labor.
I imagine that the true make or break cost for the second rover would have been the cost of the booster and launch services. Until we find a magic way to get the cost/pound of spaceflight down your transportation charges almost* always cost more than the payload itself.
The problem is that to lower launch costs with our current systems means we need to fly more, a LOT more, to get economy of scale when producing boosters. Let's face it: most rocket boosters are nothing more than big empty tanks with OTS engines and guidance systems, but as long as they only build two at a time they'll be overly expensive no matter WHO builds them, whether it's Boeing or some 21st Wright Brothers.
The problem is that the current launch costs are high enough to keep the flight rate down. It's a chicken and egg problem.
Rotary Rocket and Kistler tried getting around this problem by building reusable launchers. Reuse the booster, right? The tech isn't advanced enough to make this into a paying proposition, not yet, because it's right on the bleeding edge and the slightest overruns ruin your cost models and make you offer the same cost/pound as a proven booster, only since your RLV isn't proven (some of these boosters, like the Delta, have been around for close to 40 years) you'll have a hard time attracting customers. The chicken and egg problem strikes again.
[*Almost; I can think of a few satellites that cost more, but not many.]
That's a funny quote and all but I don't know if it's entirely true in this case. A lot of the cost involved was put towards getting the technology together and paying the people involved. Once one was built, the other one just required the same set of parts and a team to assemble and test it. No R&D costs were repeated.
While it's not exactly assembly line type savings, there is a reduced cost for building a duplicate of something that already has been built.
Then again, if the degree of hand tooling and calibration each unit requires is sizable, the R&D involved might not be the big cost. My father worked on one of the Raytheon EKV tests, and each one was hand built. The biggest headache was getting the focusing lens over the IR sensor ground perfectly. Of course, this involved more than just making it geometrically perfect. No, it was worse than that: it had to be ground such that it would compensate for unavoidable minute manufacturing flaws in the IR sensor. They were working on it up to the last minute and (fortunately) it was good enough to work. The funny part was when a general observing the test asked why they couldn't start producing them en masse, and the engineers who worked on the lens practically passed out.
-- If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Re:Very good news
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Actually, there were cost savings before the rovers. The landing platform is the same design used for Pathfinder. The payload is different -- Pathfinder's mission had most of its mass devoted to the base station, with a tiny mobile unit. These two missions put all the active components on the rovers.
The problem of launch costs is a factor of all space missions. In the case of Mars, cheaper launch costs would allow more missions, or larger devices, or cheaper devices in larger quantities.
The approach of building new rocket boosters does indeed have a lot of R&D costs. The designs which use an airplane as a first-stage booster can tap the existing R&D of the airplane field. That is, of course, how some X rocket planes were tested - dropped from a bomber aircraft. I don't think the demonstrations where a Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile was parachute-dropped from a cargo plane count as an example, as that was actually a missile mobility issue and not a launch method. The only such platform which is already functional is the launchers which are carried aloft by the big engines of an F-15. But more are being worked on, and that is my favorite design for the X-Prize.
Having Beagle operational would complicate things. Right now it is perfect, one rover working on each side of the planet. They can drill and dig rocks until they meet in the middle, with two clumps of rubble which used to be Mars drifting away...
Re:Very good news
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Am I the only one disapointed by the names of these probes? When I think about space projects, I think they should be named after great scientists...not names generated by 4th graders as part of a contest.
Operation "Enduring Freedom" mean anything to you?
Re:Name gripe
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Am I the only one disapointed by the names of these probes? When I think about space projects, I think they should be named after great scientists...not names generated by 4th graders as part of a contest.
Then, perhaps, you should stick to space exploration from Earth/Low Earth orbit. Do the terms, Newtonian, Dobsonian, Hubble, etc... ring a bell?
Re:Name gripe
by
October_30th
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Why the hell not? Just remember, those fourth graders will one day be adults. Adults that are going to have influence, one way or another. Perhaps the child in question, inspired by this, will go on to be an astronaut?
While the great scientists of old (and young) have their place, we have to think of the future, too.
-- "...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
Re:Name gripe
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2, Funny
I must admit, I am disappointed that NASA didn't use the name submitted by Ms. Henderson's 4th grade class at Remedial Elementary.
This is Houston. We're ready to roll Stinky Ga-Ga onto the Martian surface.
Anonymous Kev Proudly posting as AC since 1997
Re:Name gripe
by
Tenebrious1
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Am I the only one disapointed by the names of these probes? When I think about space projects, I think they should be named after great scientists...not names generated by 4th graders as part of a contest.
Can you think of a name that *hasn't* already been used at some point in the last 40 years? Yeah, names of great scientists would be nice, but any name that could be remotely related to the mission has already been used. It seems kinda pointless to have named the two rovers "Salk" and "Pasteur" simply because they were important scientists...
-- -- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
The problem isn't with the 4th Graders but with the adults who picked these particular 4th-Grader-generated names.
I'm sure that there were some great names amongst those submitted.
-- You sly dog: you got me monologuing! - Syndrome
Re:Name gripe
by
JimFromJersey
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
because many (American) scientists are part of the most reviled class in American society: the (not-quite-yet) dead, white males. To name our planetary probes after such people would enforce the "fact" that such programs are simply an extension of the facist, neo-colonialist, imperialist, racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, paternalist society that oppresses people of color and/or gender. Just because these scientists are the same people that have burnt their lives out trying to answer questions that might better the lives of all does not mean they should get any credit. They are the evil white man and that is all that matters.
--
between the greater and lesser infinities sleep the dreams undreamt
Re:Name gripe
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RetroGeek
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Am I the only one disapointed by the names of these probes?
Well, we are not there in actuality, but in Spirit
And NASA had the Opportunity to build and send two.
--
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
When I think about space projects, I think they should be named after great scientists...not names generated by 4th graders as part of a contest.
Beavis and Butthead? Christina and Britney? Frodo and Samwise?
-- Mod Karma -1:I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
Re:Name gripe
by
wizarddc
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· Score: 2, Interesting
So you're telling me Hubble was a household name before that big lens in the sky got there? Hell, call them Tycho and Brahe. Leonardo and Michaelangelo. SOMETHING. Bill and Ted comes to mind as the perfect example.
Am I the only one disapointed by the names of these probes? When I think about space projects, I think they should be named after great scientists...not names generated by 4th graders as part of a contest.
Cripes, and people wonder why children are not interested in the maths and sciences. Just imagine this from their presepective. "Well, we were going to let you name the probe that we will send hurtling into space and which will land on mars some time later, transmitting back beautiful photographs and restoring national pride in our space program.... but we are just going to name it after some dead guy instead."
Hell, call them Tycho and Brahe. Leonardo and Michaelangelo.
Tycho is used quite a bit for astronomical things, would get confusing. Leonardo is a science module on the ISS (along with Donatello and Raphael but no Michaelangelo). Hubble wasn't well known, but then again Brahe is probably just as obscure to the common public.
I think they're saving "Bill and Ted" when they start doing quantum foam teleportation (ALA Timeline).
-- -- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
Re:Name gripe
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Absolutely right. Also, we need to save the name Tycho for when we locate a magnetic anomaly on the Moon.
"Okay, I just sent an ls command to the rover, let's go to lunch and maybe it'll be finished by the time we get back. Yes, I know this is my fourth lunch today, but i'm working as fast as I can!"
I would have hated to have been the tech support guy on that call:
Me: "So the machine is spontaneously rebooting every hour or so?" JPL: "Yeah, it looks like it's having a problem reloading the flash filesystem" Me: "Can we do an "ls" on that directory to see what's in it?" JPL: "Hold on..."
... 45 minutes later...
JPL: "ls came back with an error... no such file or directory" Me: "Hm, did you type the command correctly" JPL: "Yeah we typed 'lf' and that's the error we got." Me: "L... F.... no no no..."
more like 300s. i think the delay to mars is around 5 minutes, depending on where in their orbits earth and mars are in respect to each other. we need that "subspace" transmitter they keep talking about in star trek and even in stargate SG-1.
The problems the rovers have had have cut into thier research time - due to the dust build up on thier respective solar panels.
Nasa, next time take a lessen from the past and harness the power of the atom - the Viking probes lasted for years.
-- It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
Re:Great -
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 5, Funny
They were GOING to, but the touchy-feely tree-huggers scared enough people into believing that if the launch went sour, there would be a nuclear explosion killing millions of people..
Yet another example of the left thinking only of their agenda...
Re:Great -
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Yeah, but viking was stationary. These probes have to be able to move at a reasonable speed over rough terrain, and the additional weight of a nuclear reactor would not help.
What about having the reactor in the base station, and the rovers moving back to it to recharge? or better yet, give it a full service station, imcluding solar panel cleanings, battery recharge. Also why dont the rover have some kind of wipers to stop the buildup?
-- All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
Ah, but the Vikings only had a very small power requirement. The only things electricity were needed for were the intruments. The rovers need to move under their own power. Futhermore solar panels are cheaper and simpler and lighter.
At lastly, since they only have enough money to pay people to run them for a couple months, why design a rover to last years?
-- Why, o why must the sky fall when I've learned to fly?
It's inappropriate and incompetent to insinuate that all left-wingers (which BTW is not synonymous with "liberals") subscribe to that sort of anti-nuclear paranoia.
As to the technology itself: IIRC the Rovers have some tiny radio-generators to provide heat during the Martian night. But to supply a generator large enough to obviate the need for solar cells most likely would blow the weight budget (soft landing, remember?). Just my guess.
At lastly, since they only have enough money to pay people to run them for a couple months, why design a rover to last years?
I don't know about years, but it'd be cool to have the power margin to transmit data back to earth or thru the orbiters round-the-martian-clock. The nights on mars are wasted as far as lengthy comms sessions go. The Mossbauer can do long-term integration overnight, but that's about it.
-- Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Unfortunately, there's a reason they're not "harnessing the power of the atom". If their launch fails, and you have to detonate their rocket in our atmosphere, you Most Certainly don't want any little reactors involved...
But it might be a good idea to have a brush built into those solar panels...
--
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
Actually, powering these things with some form of nuclear power would be a great idea... With the technology we have now, I'm sure that we could get enough useful power out of it, at least to charge the batteries.
And when NASA can no longer maintain it, they can sell time with the rover to independent companies. The companies could carve people's names into martian rocks or something else that people would pay for lol... In the end, NASA makes back some money, heck, the project might even pay for itself in the long run.
Only problem now, is the environmental nuts lobbying congress, and causing a ruckass whenever something carrying anything more radioactive than a cabbage is sent into orbit.
There may be risks, but that is why it is launched over the ocean. If it goes down there, the environmental impact would be minimal, as a) the casings would undoutably be very solid, and could be recovered undamaged and b)even if some of it did leak out, it would be dilouted in millions of gallons of water in no time, and would not be any greater than the natural background radiation, and c)People are always complaining about all the species going extinct every day... well, how about a few new ones near the crash site? (Ok, that was a joke;)
Back when I was in school, around the time Cassini was launching, a teacher stated to the class his opinion that they could have a nuke explosion on the pad. I had to inform him that it is very difficult to get radioactive material to fission, and not only was it likely the wrong type, but that the chances of an explosion were next to nill.
IMO, someday we will overcome this ignorance and fear of nuclear power... same way that early man overcame his fear of fire. It will be great to see the kinds of things we can accomplish then, with proper care and safeguards.
You know, that's exactly what I thought. We can successfully, (but violently) launch these rovers from Earth, send them on a seven-month space journey, harden them against cosmic radiation, drop them screaming into another planet, have them drive all over the surface, and GRIND and BRUSH rocks, but they can't BRUSH OFF THEIR OWN SOLAR PANELS? WTF?
I guess it's kinda of like that old Disney movie with Dean Jones where they were trying to figure out how to get a huge tow-rope winch up a ski-slope and the kid says something like "if it can pull 100 people up the mountain at the same time, why can't it pull itself up the hill?"
Just my rant.
--
Geek used to be a four letter word. Now it's a six-figure one.
Re:Great -
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Already been done.. The Viking landers were nuclear powered. They derived power from Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs).
(That's why the Viking probes ran for years, not months, and didn't have to worry about dust on the solar cells, etc.)
Actually, the rovers have nuclear power already. radioisotope heaters onboard.
Viking and other deep space probes had a heavy amount of nuclear material... close to one hundred pounds. The rover would have to be a lot heavier; changing the scope of the mission and the mobility and landing sites.
Nasa luckily skirts green eco-nazis... for now.
-- Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
There seem be some extra squeege men available in San Francisco. Perhaps a re-training program is warranted.
-- People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
Re:Great -
by
AKAImBatman
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· Score: 3, Informative
But to supply a generator large enough to obviate the need for solar cells most likely would blow the weight budget (soft landing, remember?). Just my guess.
BZZT. 2.5 pounds of Plutonium per 75 watts of electricity. That's probably not that much heavier than the solar panels. The best part is that you'd need less battery with an RTG (just enough for large power draws) so you can save more weight there than your RTG costs you.
Why not??!?! the radiation, even if the containers were atomized, would be less then the radiation produced at a coal plant in one day! Convincing tree huggers (i.e. people with out a clue in science) would be the only difficult part...
Ah, but the Vikings only had a very small power requirement. The only things electricity were needed for were the intruments. The rovers need to move under their own power.
And everybody knows a lowly nuclear power plant can never pump out kilowatts like the mighty solar panel!
can't they build a little brush or something that would pop out and wipe off some of the dirt from time to time? Even an extra week would be worth the cost.
Yes but space-based nuclear power supplies yeild little electricity. IIRC all space-based NPSs work just off of the natural decay of radioactive material. The cost of putting a hot water reactor (what most nuclear plants are) into space are cost prohibitive and even breeder reactors are far too big for a rover (unless you made them submarine-sized)
AFAIK, even without considering evironmental issues (and evironmentalists), nuclear power was not even considered for these reasons.
-- Why, o why must the sky fall when I've learned to fly?
Yet another example of the left thinking only of their agenda...
Right, because we all know that the "right" never thinks only of their agenda, or does anything wrong, bad, misguided, or evil. Because politics is so simplistic, that we can just blame all the problems on our enemies! Our side never does anything wrong!
Idiot. I'm on what you would robotically call the "left" and I dislike radical environmentalists just as much as you do. Piss off.
-- "Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
I don't know if the two Spirit/Opportunity landers were part of a NASA Discovery program or not.
Basically, some NASA missions (Discovery class missions, for example, of which Mars Pathfinder was) cannot use RTG's (Radioisotope Thermonuclear Generator) because they cost too much and are considered 'out of scope' of the problem.
I submitted an intent to propose a mission for the 5th NASA Discovery Class Announcement of Opportunity. My proposal was for a ship to go out of the ecliptic, aiming for long-distance travel which would get the first distant shots of the solar system from that viewpoint, as well as test out new telemetry and long-range physics experiments. It was immediately denied as being 'out of scope of the Discovery Class' because it would be too far for solar panels to work, hence requiring RTG's which would greatly exceed the cost of the mission.
--
make world, not war
Re:Great -
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I thought RTG batteries were very simple, just a thermo couple, a heat source (ie the fissionable material) and radiators - all solid state. But hey I could be mistaken. Personally I like solar better but the one place where nuclear power is usefull (sometimes indispensible) is in (deep) space. (Ok also in nuclear submarines but it could be argued that those serve no purpose anyways:) )
At lastly, since they only have enough money to pay people to run them for a couple months, why design a rover to last years?
From the hourly employee's point of view, milk it. Design it to last for ages and you have a cash cow.
How many mainframes from the 70s and 80s are still in use?
Also, if you gave it enough power, couldn't you tell the rover to walk to XY coordinates and then transmit back (unless you need futher instructions) Then we could land it some place safe and have it walk to the more interesting (water likely) spots and then transmit back. You don't need the staff on hand because it's all in the 'hands' of the rover.
-- "Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
The point remains that you blaming "tree huggers" as a group is inane. I work at a solar power company in *Berkeley* of all places and myself and everyone I know is fine with plutonium on space missions.
It's time for you people, and by "you people," I mean those who use the term "tree hugger" to discount anyone who gives a rat's ass about the world that we live in ("God's" world, if you're into that), just because a few morons are paranoid. Get the fsck with it.
You don't need the staff on hand because it's all in the 'hands' of the rover.
I think you underestimate how many people are involved with the operation of the rover. Even to recieve the transmissions, you need a very powerful reciever, because the transmissions from the rover are on the order of a Watt. This means time at a radio antenna must be spent. Furthermore, you must carefully craft the intructions to be sent,you must monitor the status of the rover (without human intervention Spirit would have been dead), not to mention all of the support staff for these people to get their job done.
The rover wasn't designed to do much more than very menial tasks without further instruction. I doubt that the rover could operate autonomously for more than a couple days. If there was a way that they could cost-effectively get additional data after the primary mission, wouldn't you think that they would do it?
-- Why, o why must the sky fall when I've learned to fly?
Do you hug trees or believe that RTGs will produce a nuclear explosion? If you do, you have issues. If you don't, you're probably just environmentally conscious.
The problems the rovers have had have cut into thier research time - due to the dust build up on thier respective solar panels.
If dust build-up was a problem, surely a solution could have been found that didn't require nuclear power could be found. Off the top of my head I can think of several ways to design a system to remove the dust.
BZZT. 2.5 pounds of Plutonium per 75 watts of electricity. That's probably not that much heavier than the solar panels. The best part is that you'd need less battery with an RTG (just enough for large power draws) so you can save more weight there than your RTG costs you.
Whoever modded that +3Informative didn't do any research. I did. Actually, per NASA: A conservative projection of an achievable thin-film solar cell blanket usable for space would be a 5% efficient thin-film cell fabricated on a 25 micron thick Kapton substrate. This yields a photovoltaic blanket specific power of 1.7 kW/kg. An optimistic projection might be a 15% thin-film cell on a 7 micron thick Kapton substrate, leading to a photovoltaic blanket specific power of 15 kW/kg. These numbers compare favorably to current state of the art spacecraft solar blankets. Compare that to your alleged 70W/kg. Go BZZZT yourself.
Sorry, try again. You forgot the weight of the mountings, suspension, deployment units, etc. There's more to the solar panels than just the panelling itself. Weight adds up quickly when talking about structure support and reinforcement. (The entire rover weighs 174 Kg.) Motors to deploy the panels are no slouches either, although NASA is probably using a small motor similar to those on an RC car.
BTW, the Rover has a maximum power generating capability of 140 Watts. It takes two batteries to keep the rover running when there isn't enough sunlight. NASA doesn't say what kind of batteries they are (their "specs" on the rover are kind of useless), but external sources claim that they are Lithium Ion batteries with a weight of 7.15Kg a piece (8.77 Kg with the support struts). That same article claims that the rover needs a constant 100 Watts to operate.
Let's do some math shall we?
Design 1: We ditch the batteries all together, and use a 150 Watt RTG. We'll estimate it's weight is ~2Kg of plutonium, plus another 2 Kg of material for the rest of the device and the mountings. The net weight increase is (2 + 2) - (8.77 * 2) = -13.54 Kg.
Design 2: We use a 150 Watt RTG, but keep one battery for high draw situations. The net weight increase is (2 + 2) - 8.77 = -4.77 Kg.
One way or another, it's a win-win situation. Sorry, we're back to the "tree huggers" stopping RTG missions.
yes, but that was within the plane of the ecliptic, as have nearly all other interplanetary spacecraft.
--
make world, not war
Congrats to NASA - robust programming
by
192939495969798999
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· Score: 5, Insightful
That is a herculean programming effort -- it's not like you can go up there and push "reset" on the robots when something doesn't work. NASA continually pushes the limits of computers to make these projects work within budget, and I look forward to the public release of some new tools and data from the rocks! I hope for their sake, we find a fossil or something like that -- no more budget problems for NASA...or would there be?
Re:Congrats to NASA - robust programming
by
Sinus0idal
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· Score: 2, Funny
That is a herculean programming effort
Wow, the rovers have graphics cards?
I'll get my coat... taxiiii
Re:Congrats to NASA - robust programming
by
goalive
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· Score: 0
What happened to the flash memory on Spirit? I am curious if it needed to be completely purged/formatted or if NASA was able to salvage some of the files. Also, I am wondering if the flash memory on board both Spirit and Opportunity are radiation-hardened, similar to the processor and other components on board.
When disaster happened and Spirit started spontaneous rebooting, it became obvious that NASA engineers had thought this out well in advance and had a contingency plan that allowed for the upload of new software. Very cool. This is exactly the kind of robust programming and forward thinking that should be extended to our areas of modern computing. Reliability when you're a million miles from home is key!
Re:Congrats to NASA - robust programming
by
192939495969798999
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· Score: 1
It's more like 150 million miles, but the analogy still applies! I believe the specifics for the lander can be had at spaceflightnow.com.
Re:Congrats to NASA - robust programming
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Well actually, if you have ever used VxWorks, then you know that you have to reset very often... and so this is probably the first thing the NASA engineers implemented!
Re:Congrats to NASA - robust programming
by
TedCheshireAcad
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· Score: 5, Funny
I think you're giving a little too much credit here. This is not exactly rocket science.
Oh..wait...
Re:Congrats to NASA - robust programming
by
ngu
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· Score: 1
i hope this is a sarcastic comment. otherwise you lag 20 years behind the computer technology. folx @ nasa did not merit your praise.
Re:Congrats to NASA - robust programming
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FriendlyPrimate
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· Score: 2, Funny
I don't understand why they couldn't just push the reset button....isn't that what the robotic arm is for? oh wait...
Re:Congrats to NASA - robust programming
by
Fastfwd
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· Score: 1
Maybe they could have done some more QA on the ground. Why fix when you can prevent?
Re:Congrats to NASA - robust programming
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
That was funny. Well done.
Re:Congrats to NASA - robust programming
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
You know... I would actually be more convinced that there really was life on mars if these probes had not worked. If NASA managed to mess up that many rovers, you could assume the martians were shooting them down
Re:Congrats to NASA - robust programming
by
ms1234
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· Score: 1
I hope for their sake, we find a fossil or something like that -- no more budget problems for NASA...or would there be?
Don't worry, the religious fundamentals will then make sure no one goes there again.
twas repeated in First contact. When the borg queen kidnapped data.
It's kind of worrying that I know that...
Re:Yes, but...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Tasha Yar Quotations
Next Gen Intro page Picard Riker Worf Data Deanna Troi Beverly Crusher Geordi Tasha Lwaxana Q Other Characters Personal Favourites
Tasha: But I got out of uniform for you, Data! The Naked now
Tasha: What I want now is gentleness, and joy, and love - from you, Data - you are fully functional, aren't you? Data: Of course, but - Tasha: HOW fully functional? Data: In every way, of course. I am programmed in multiple techniques, a broad variety of pleasuring. The Naked Now
Tasha: Data, I'm only going to tell you this once. It never happened. The Naked Now
Tasha: Paws off, Ferengi! Ferengi: No human female or Ferengi can order Mordeck around. Submit! (Gurgles) Tasha: Just try it, shorty! The Last Outpost
Tasha: What in the hell am I doing - crying? Picard: Don't worry. There is a new ship's standing order on the bridge. When one is in the penalty box, tears are permitted. Hide and Q
Tasha: Death is when we exist only in the memories of our friends. So this is not goodbye, but good memories. Skin of Evil
Tasha: Captain, I request a transfer to the Enterprise-C - I don't belong here, Sir. I - I'm... supposed to be dead! Yesterday's Enterprise
Rover status updates
by
aurum42
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· Score: 5, Informative
I've found this site very informative, with frequent rover status updates, links to images, NASA press releases and details of rover activities.
-- "The slave who knows his master's will and does not get ready...will be be beaten with many blows."Luke 12:47-48
Re:Power leak
by
Tablizer
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· Score: 5, Informative
So, is the power leakage on the Opportunity rover also fixed or are they just going to put up with a shorter lifespan of the machine?
My understanding is that it is still not resolved. Appearently the rovers can still work in the day with a dead (non-rechargable) battery, but the cold from lack of heaters eventually damages electronics. Thus, one way or another it will probably shorten the mission (assuming something else does not bust or dust-up first).
They have radioactive decay heaters for the 'lectronics that keep going and going and going...
True, but they appearently supplement it with battery power at night. My understanding is that it is not an all-or-nothing thing. The warmer they can keep the electronics at night, the less risk and deterioration over time.
The problem "leak" is in an electric arm or antenna motor heater (I forget which). It goes on automatically at night if it gets cold enough. There is an override command to shut off the automatic switch-on, but the override is not working for some unknown reason.
The appendage has the electric heater so that it can work more smoothly at night. However, they often don't operate it at night, so the heating goes to waste. Plus, when Mars summer ends, the heater may trigger itself on more often as it gets colder. However, that is a longer-term worry.
This is great news!!!!
by
John+Seminal
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· Score: 1
I am so happy they both work and are well. Hopefully this will lay the groundwork for future missions and maybe a base on mars.
This is also good news as a precision check. If one did not work off the bat, we would not have anything to compare the results to.
From the artice:
Halfway around Mars from its twin, Opportunity already has discovered an iron-rich mineral called gray hematite. Preliminary measurements suggest the mineral is of a variety that forms in liquid water, providing the first hint that the now dry site once was wetter.
Spirit, in contrast, may have to drive hundreds of yards, to a nearby crater called Bonneville, to uncover similar geologic proof.
If there was water at one point and time on mars, I wonder if there are any x-rays these rovers can take deep into the ground to look for fossils or other proof of life. Then again, fossils would assume bones, but even so, I wonder how deep down they can look.
--
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
if it can dust one thing, why not another
by
rritterson
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· Score: 5, Interesting
From the CNN article, apparantly Spirit can dust off a rock. It doesn't say how though, but I would guess either compressed air brought from earth (unlikely), a little air compressor, or a brush of some sort.
Now, apparantly the lifetime of the rovers is limited by the rate at which dust build up on the solar panels. How hard could it have been to reticulate the arm so that it can bend around and dust the panels off themselves? Even if it were to cost $1mil, it'd still be worth it as it would extend the lifetime of the rovers indefinately.
(Personally, I'd still like to see a better solution- have the rovers shake like dogs do when they get wet)
-- -Ryan AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
Re:if it can dust one thing, why not another
by
Xolotl
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· Score: 1
They should send up an automated Rover Wash next time; every once in a while Spirit could drive in for a full wash'n'wax (and maybe check the tyres)...
Re:if it can dust one thing, why not another
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Thagg
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· Score: 4, Informative
I have heard that it's really important that space probes -- especially ones that have large staff to run them like the MER-A and -B -- need to have some kind of life-limiting feature. Otherwise, you could never realistically budget them. Also, you have to consider the strain on the shared resources -- the Deep Space Network in particular. There are quite a few systems that depend on the Deep Space Network, which is monopolized to a large extent by Spirit and Opportunity today.
The other major life-limiting feature on Spirit and Opportunity are the batteries. They can't be cycled indefinitely. Opportunity, in particular, with its arm heater always on, is going to overtax its battery system relatively quickly. It will probably get to its 90-day design life, but not much further.
Spirit will likely go quite a bit longer. It's warmer there than expected, which means that they don't have to run the internal heater at night as much as they thought. They are seriously talking about an extended mission for Spirit -- maybe up to 180 days. This would give it time to drive quite a long ways, maybe even up to the nearby mountains about 1.5 km away.
thad
-- I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Re:if it can dust one thing, why not another
by
krlynch
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· Score: 5, Informative
My understanding from earlier articles is that they aren't "brushing off" the rocks, but rather "grinding" off a circular area of the rock so that they can get to the unmodified interior of the rock. So, even if the arm can reach up to "scratch its own back", so to speak, you probably wouldn't want to use the grinder to dust off the solar panels:-)
Re:if it can dust one thing, why not another
by
kazrak
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· Score: 1
Because it's not dusting off the rock, it's abrading it so it can see inside. Doing that to solar panels is bad, mmkay?
Cost isn't the issue in cleaning off the panels; mass and effectiveness are the issues. The panels are very large; something that could dust them off would be very massive, which would mean that it would cut singificantly into the scientific payload. So you'd have a rover that could go forever, but couldn't do any research...
except that not even that would work. The dust that will cover the panels is too small for a mechanical system like that to really be effective. The Rover FAQ says 1-2 micrometers.
In other words...yes, this is rocket science, and yes, they did think of your brilliant idea, and yes, it got shot down in flames because it doesn't work.
Re:if it can dust one thing, why not another
by
Muad'Dave
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· Score: 1
In yesterday's briefing, Jennifer Trosper mentioned usinig the RAT brush to clean accumulated dust off of Adirondack before taking surface measurements with the Mossbauer and APXS.
-- Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Re:if it can dust one thing, why not another
by
FreshFunk510
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· Score: 1
Yes, I thought the same thing. But my solution would be some sort of pump or vacuum because if you packed compressed air you'd have a limited supply. At least with some mechanism for shooting air you'd be able to use it time and time again.
However, this answer seems so obvious and trivial so I'm pretty sure it's already been addressed.
--
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice
everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
Re:if it can dust one thing, why not another
by
hayesjaj
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· Score: 2, Informative
The rovers can either use their Rock Abrasion Tool (RAT) to grind a short way into rocks or (leave it to nasa to think up very simple solutions) dig a small hole using one of its wheels if the top layer is too deep to penetrate with the RAT. They are considering doing this at the Opportunity site.
-- The world is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel.
Re:if it can dust one thing, why not another
by
iminplaya
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· Score: 1
From the CNN article, apparantly Spirit can dust off a rock. It doesn't say how though,...
The cartoon network explains it very well. A hand pops out with a small wisk broom.
-- What?
Re:if it can dust one thing, why not another
by
TrevorB
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· Score: 1
The JPL answer to this is that the dust in the atmosphere is so fine and the solar panels so (relatively) warm that the dust ionizes and literally gets glued to the solar panel glass. If you went up to it with a big brush it would be a real bugger to get clean.
Maybe we should send Martha Stewart. That would be a good thing.
Re:if it can dust one thing, why not another
by
dellis78741
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· Score: 1
A couple of 'windshield wipers', used once a month, would probably be sufficient to keep the solar cells in good working order. Since they're both near the equator I would imagine that the sun never gets too low at any point in the martian year. Warm critical electronics to extend their life and that just leaves the problem of making a battery that can take enough charge/discharge cycles in that environment.
I suspect that including a nuclear powerplant would exceed the delivery systems' weight capacity.
.
-- =======
~\_/~\_O
Burmese
Re:if it can dust one thing, why not another
by
JBoelke
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· Score: 1
How about a bristle brush, on the arm. Very low tech, but would a brush scrape the panels too hard and degrade them? It must depend on the material.
Re:if it can dust one thing, why not another
by
valkraider
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· Score: 2, Funny
The other major life-limiting feature on Spirit and Opportunity are the batteries. They can't be cycled indefinitely.
What, no $99 battery replacement plan?
Re:if it can dust one thing, why not another
by
danlb2000
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· Score: 2, Informative
On this close up picture of the RAT:
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/press/oppor tunity/20040202a/2_rock_abrasion_tool-B009R1.jpg
you can see a small (probably metal) brush that extends out further then the cutting blades. This must be what they use to dust off the rocks.
The problem with cleaning off the solar panels is that you have to be aggressive enough to clean the dust, but gentle enough not to damage the panel. This is not a problem when dusting off a rock.
At one of the press conferences they said they explored a couple options for cleaning the panels but it was decided that it wasn't worth it. One of the problems they mentioned was that the dust on mars is extremely fine and would become elctro-statically attached to the solar panels thus making it even harder to get off.
Although dust on the solar panels is the most common "life-limiting" problem you hear about there are others. For example amount of sun light they get per sol will go down due to normal movement of mars thus making it harder to keep the rover warm at night, and leading to damage of other components in the rover.
Re:if it can dust one thing, why not another
by
Docrates
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
RAT stans for Rock Abrasion Tool which is the grinding tool. The fact that they're going to use it to clear away the dust doesn't mean it's a brush type tool.
And in relation to the parent post, you don't want to use a grinding tool to clean the rover itself. That's the same type of speculaiton and extrapolation that you see in the media: using very little information to reach "common sense" conclusions on zero research.
I don't wanna get TOO off topic here, but that's exactly the sort of "thinking" that causes unreasonable fear of nuclear power or hydrogen based engines when compared to, say, internal combustion.
--
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
Re:if it can dust one thing, why not another
by
Muad'Dave
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· Score: 1
She specifically mentioned that a RAT BRUSH was going to be used before "RATting" the rock.
WTFNC (watch the ** news conference).
-- Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Re:if it can dust one thing, why not another
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
To clarify on this, it doesn't really dust the rock off. On the rover's robotic arm there is a device, I believe it is referred to as the Rock Abrasion Tool or something like that. It is basically a metallic scraping tool which scratches the rock surface. It would be far too abrasive to use on the solar panels.
There is a very good animation available here, which shows how this tool is used:
Re:if it can dust one thing, why not another
by
LinuxIsStillBetter
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· Score: 1
Toward the end of the video called "Exploring the Martian Surface" it shows the little grinder being used.
But Quicktime only? What the hell's up with *that*? Jeez, NASA....
Re:if it can dust one thing, why not another
by
Hooptie
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· Score: 1
Its the $200,000,000 shipping and handling cost that is the killer.
Hooptie
-- "Heavens, it appears that my weewee has been stricken with rigor mortis!" -- Stewie Griffin
stateside however
by
way2trivial
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· Score: 3, Funny
freedom and privacy have both died.
-- every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Re:stateside however
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
thank you for your input your request will be processed in 6-8 weeks
Re:stateside however
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
So when will NASA start sending probes to your planet?
Window for Opportunity?
by
ferralis
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Anybody have an update on the heating problem and how that affects the longevity prospects of Opportunity?
-- Any generalization is a stupid one.
More, nearer.
by
LoudMusic
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I heard rumblings a while back (may have been on/.) about alternative space exploration to our current methods. Basically launching hundreds of smaller robots at a task rather than a single highly developed bot. They mentioned lots of benefits, like 80% failure rate would still generate something. Additionally they would be near eachother and possibly work together and even repair one-anothother.
Has there been anymore talk about things like this?
There are many flaws with that idea that would have to be overcome. One major flaw is that you'd have to have communications... communications requires lots of power and the antenna and transmitter have a certain minimum size.
On the other hand, I think they sorta are already doing this, I remember hearing about smaller bots piggybacking on one of these main bots.
-- I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
In theory it sounds like a good idea, but in practice you run into a lot of difficulties. Small robots are not as good at navigating rough terrain (like, say, Mars) as large robots. Also, you have to deal with the complexity of managing scores of robots (it takes a large team of people to manage the two rovers we have up there now). Plus, there are some parts of the design that do not scale down well, that ever robot will need, such as high gain antennas to talk back to Earth and the Solar Panels and whatnot. You could theoretically stick all of that on some basestation, but the basestation would end up only somewhat smaller than our current rovers... Basically, it's just not a feasable idea right now. The complexity is too high and the little rovers end up with too many limitations (and end up being too big) to be practical.
--
I read the internet for the articles.
Re:More, nearer.
by
plopez
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· Score: 2, Insightful
There are other advantages as well. Suppose you were to build 8k explorers in batches of 100. Suppose 80% of the first batch failed. Taking the information from the failures, the second batch could be better as the bugs would be found and reduced. Say a 50% failure rate for the second batch. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Instead of 'one offs' a standardized product would be developed, built on the learning of the previous batch. Once the failure rate was below a certain percentage, say 1%, some (maybe 10%) could be used as beta testers of new equipment.
In addition, the manufacturing process would become standardized allowing for lower costs. Since the contractors know that there is at least 8000 units in the pipe, they can reduce thier profit margin saving even more money.
"Basically launching hundreds of smaller robots at a task rather than a single highly developed bot. They mentioned lots of benefits, like 80% failure rate would still generate something. Additionally they would be near eachother and possibly work together..."
Sounds to me like they've decided to outsource it.
I would also like to add that while we might get better coverage, all the redundancy in the robots (transmitters, receivers, motors, batteries, panels) increases the weight, which really adds to the launch costs. It's just easier to work on one or two robots and try to get 100% of the design right. Besides if you have a failure mode that destroys all of the robots, you're screwed.
Finally, they can now make the next Rovers by incorporating what they've learned so far. So we already have an iterative design process in place, which will get us better Rovers. The launch window only happens every two years, so it's not like we can iterate any faster than that, whether we have 2 rovers or 100 mini rovers.
Re:More, nearer.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
"Basically launching hundreds of smaller robots at a task rather than a single highly developed bot. They mentioned lots of benefits, like 80% failure rate would still generate something."
You just described the robot which crashed. It cost something like 1/20 of the NASA missions.
[I am quoting with asterisk because Preview is acting up]
(* Small robots are not as good at navigating rough terrain (like, say, Mars) as large robots. *)
I don't know if that is true. It might be easier to recover if you are small. I have seen some innovative yet simple designs that allow a small bot to flip over if needed (I gave a link somewhere around here). Besides, the loss of a few will matter less.
(* Also, you have to deal with the complexity of managing scores of robots (it takes a large team of people to... *)
If the risk of mistakes and loss is lower, then it may not require as much high-end personal, imaging, and simulations.
(* Plus, there are some parts of the design that do not scale down well, that ever robot will need, such as high gain antennas to talk back to Earth *)
There would probably be two or so "base stations" or "comm-bots" which act as a relay. If by chance they fail, then we could still get low-bandwidth signals.
Science instruments would possibly have to be divided up so that bots specialize. They may have to travel in groups so that other instruments can be brought over as needed.
(* and the Solar Panels *)
Smaller bot means smaller motors meaning smaller panels.
Overall, botlets seem better for high-risk areas with lots of slopes and boulders because One Big Bot is fairly likely to get into a jam.
Well first, this is the reason they launched TWO rovers to Mars.
Second, the cost of the rover itself is just a fraction of the cost required to 1) hire the staff to man and control it and 2) to get any payload at all to critical velocity and out of orbit.
Stewey
-- There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
I don't know if that is true. It might be easier to recover if you are small. I have seen some innovative yet simple designs that allow a small bot to flip over if needed (I gave a link somewhere around here). Besides, the loss of a few will matter less.
The risk is generally not flipping over (NASA is really careful with their rovers, they're not going to do wheelies with them), rather it's getting stuck in soft soil or hung up on a rock. This is where being small is a problem, as there are many more opportunities to get yourself stuck.
As for management, even if you allow your team to be a bit sloppier with the robots, there is still alot of management that you have to do with each one to keep them productive.
Plus, the extra redundancy comes at a cost. The cost is the extra redundancy. Every rovor is going to have to have some of the same basic parts (locomotion system, solar panels, computer, radio, navigation cameras, rad shielding, electronics heater, chassis, heat shielding, landing system, etc...), and duplicating those parts over many rovers means you will end up eating into your scientific payload weight just to launch the fifth or sixth redundant navigation camera (among other things).
--
I read the internet for the articles.
Another story about the Mars rovers?
by
TwistedGreen
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Commence lame jokes lag and robot wars.
Knowledgeable discussion? On Slashdot? That'll be the day.
Erosion caused by water
by
nycsubway
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I have seen many many pictures of the erosion and channels and lake beds on mars over the years. Many many pictures... and they all looked very convincing, because it was so similar to the effects that water has on earth.
Then at the start of the Spirit and Opportunity landings, I started to think about it more. Something bothered me about the way the erosion appeared. It seemed there was no source for the water. I started thinking what might have caused features similar to that caused by running water. I think it is caused my lava flows. I could be completely wrong, and probably am, but maybe what I interpret as not being features caused by water, are really features that were caused by a very early and short-lived time of running water.
Re:Erosion caused by water
by
Feyr
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· Score: 4, Informative
the "source" you're looking for is usually the clouds (rain) AFAIK. though i'm no geologist, but i'm pretty sure of that
Re:Erosion caused by water
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Well golly gee, get this man a grant and space in the journals, he's gonna need it! Seriously, the level of scientific sophistication on this site has gone to decent to utterly deplorable in the span of seven years. Everything is off the cuff, with no real research to back up any claims. And it still gets modded up. It's depressing to see how things are going these days. Everyone is too busy to actually learn about something.
Re:Erosion caused by water
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Informative
sources could include groundwater, condensation runoff, rain, or runoff from those darn martian's canals.
Most likely the "erosion" IMHO has nothing to do with water but more to do with a fine talcum-powder like substance pooling in low levels and flowing like water. By the way, true deposition by volcanic ash behaves very much like water deposition so the volcanic theory does...(bad pun alert)...hold water.
How about comets - wouldn't they hit the ground and bury themselves under the impact debris, and then gradually melt away?
Re:Erosion caused by water
by
Tablizer
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· Score: 1
How about comets - wouldn't they hit the ground and bury themselves under the impact debris, and then gradually melt away?
I have read some theories by planetary scientists on such comet crashes. It was not a favored theory, but could not be ruled out. Nobody really knows. That is why we send probes:-)
Re:Erosion caused by water
by
notcreative
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· Score: 1
Actually, according to "Red Mars," the source for the erosive effects seen in the pictures is probably underground aquifers that burst. When they burst, they send insane amounts of water forth in a short time, carving channels quickly before the water boils off due to the low atmospheric pressure, or freezes.
Sorta OT, but still relevant
by
The_Rippa
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Has anyone heard anything about the "19" rock that was found? I heard on the radio yesterday morning that one of the rovers took a picture of a rock that "clearly" had the number 19 scrawled on it. Numerologists are going ape-shit because 19 = AI.
Re:Sorta OT, but still relevant
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Informative
it was photo-shopped, really
Re:Sorta OT, but still relevant
by
Feyr
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
numerologists going apeshit... hah! numerologists by definition eat and spew shit anyway. move along, nothing to see
Re:Sorta OT, but still relevant
by
preric
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· Score: 2, Insightful
here is a website with more of that stuff... personally, i see it as a 'seeing what you want to see' syndrome, just like the 'face of mars'.
Re:Sorta OT, but still relevant
by
zeux
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· Score: 1
[sarcasm] It's because this picture was taken in a studio. Nobody never ever went to the moon and no robots never even landed on Mars.
Everything you can see is pure manipulation from NASA and the government. [/sarcasm]
Nah two is better than three.
by
bad+enema
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· Score: 0
Similar to how a third computer is not as useful as a second, the marginal gains provided by a third rover on the same trip would not outweigh the costs. Two pretty much ensures that some data would be collected, giving more information to work with for the next voyage up there.
Re:Nah two is better than three.
by
xaaronx
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· Score: 1
Except that Beagle would be a different probe, in a different area, and carrying an entirely different set of equipment. Plus, it would be run by not just a different team but by a different organization.
I'm also not sure how a third computer is less useful than a second, but okay: Spirit and Opportunity are *NIX boxes and Beagle is a Windows machine for, uhh, games. Yeah, games (make up your own lame joke about the Windows box crashing).
-- It's amazing how much "mature wisdom" resembles being too tired.
- Robert Anson Heinlein
Without Spirit and Oppourtinuty functioning
by
KarmaOverDogma
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· Score: 2, Funny
The world would be a pretty ho-hum and stagnant place.
please don't punnish me for this.
.
-- uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
Re:Without Spirit and Oppourtinuty functioning
by
Xaleth+Nuada
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· Score: 1
We may not punish you. But we're not gonna reward you either.
.. maybe between the two we'll finally find the people who care about Will and Grace.
-- "Derp de derp."
Check for root kits
by
Westech
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· Score: 2, Funny
I think they'd better run chkrootkit just in case...
satellite dishes
by
austad
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Anyone ever see those books you can get that tell you where to aim your big ugly 10 foot dish and what frequency to use to see interesting things from government satellites, network feeds, and other things?
I wonder if one could use one of those huge old dishes to receive signals from any of the spacecraft on mars. Probably not, I'm sure the antenna technology they are using is much more advanced, but still would be an interesting experiment.
-- Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
The dish might be fine, but you'd need to set the correct frequency. You'd also need one hell of a super-low-noise amp in order to pick the signal out of the background noise. That's the difference between "deep-space" and Earth orbit signals.
Question for the real radio guys out there:
Is the size of the dish on a radio telescope analogous to the size of the mirror on a more typical visible-light telescope?
Is the size of the dish on a radio telescope analogous to the size of the mirror on a more typical visible-light telescope?
Yes. The larger the dish, the higher the gain and narrower the beamwidth. At microwave freqs (the rovers are around 8 GHz) the 'figure' of the dish becomes very important. An error of 1/10 lambda (wavelength) can mess up the pattern of a dish.
-- Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Question for the real radio guys out there: Is the size of the dish on a radio telescope analogous to the size of the mirror on a more typical visible-light telescope? Well, I'm primarily optics, not radio, but, yeah, the principles are the same. The larger the dish, the more power (or light, or whatever) you collect. The limitations come about because you want the dish figure to be "smooth," which means roughness as well as the actual curvature to be accurate to a fraction of a wavelength. Since light is on the order of 0.5 to 1 nanometer, and radio waves run out to many meters (depending on band), it's clear that you can build a far larger dish with under, say, 0.01 wave of sag for a radio wave than for visible light. In addition, a mirror can't have holes or imperfections greater than a fraction of a wave. For light,that means a continuous sheet of glass or metal. For radio waves, you can darn near build the "mirror" out of girders and struts, so long as the gaps remain less than maybe one-tenth a wavelength.
Well, the DSN dishes used are 34 and 70 meters, and I think that the size does matter in this case:) I don't know if it's possible with today's electronics to pick up those signals with a backyard dish. Fore more info:
Yes, because the dish *is* a mirror, just like the concave visible-light mirror on a reflecting telescope. The radio waves bounce off the dish and are gathered by sensors at the point of convergence above the center.
Re:satellite dishes
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I remember reading one of the recent articles about Prometheus (nuclear powered probes) that the transmitters on the probes would be so powerful that personal satellite dishes could pick them up.
Well our current failure rate is high enough.
by
bad+enema
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· Score: 0
80% would be one hell of an ideal if we're going to send up bots up there that are built half ass, and with the mentality that "oh well, another one will probably work".
American Ingenuity
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 5, Funny
Of course.
You're talking about the nation that invented the telephone, the airplane, radio, television, the atomic bomb, the hydrogen bomb, landed a man on the moon, has sent probes to every planet in the solar system, the modern computer, the internet, and WMD in iraq.
Do you think two pissant little rovers on mars are a problem? We did this already almost 30 years ago.
People. Hello. This is the US of A. Everybody else talks a good game, but we kick ass.
Maybe it has something to do with listening to our military war hawks instead of our scientists...
Re:American Ingenuity
by
JohnnyCannuk
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· Score: 1
Telephone - Bell (Scotland) - He was Scottish, but an immagrant to Canada and invented the telephone in Brantford, Ontario, Canada. He did Patent it in New York/Washingto though...
-- Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
As all my Canadian friends tell me, we are all Americans, North Americans:D
-- The more you know, the less you understand.
Re:American Ingenuity
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I think you misunderstand something that I think is great about America. If I moved to say, Germany, tomorrow, I will always be seen as an American living in Germany for the rest of my life. I'll likely never be seen by my neighbors as a true German.
But in America, if you move here, you're one of us. You're American from the day you choose to call this country your home. Americans encompass the entire spectrum of national heritages.
So I think America does have a strong claim to inventing some of the technologies that you'd like to ascribe to others. The real test of what country ought to be able to claim credit for a discovery isn't where the inventor was born, but where he found the freedom and opportunity to pursue his discovery and achieve its potential. Alexander Graham Bell was born in Scotland, for instance, but he emigrated from there to Boston, where he eventually invented the telephone. The fact that he chose to emigrate to America ought to say something about where he thought he could be most successful.
has sent probes to every planet in the solar system
I guess you are one of the people who does not count Pluto as a planet?
-- Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
Joke
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2, Funny
Why did the US invade Iraq?
Where else can you fake a Mars landing?
Re:Joke
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
No, No, NO!
Because the French wouldn't have posed an ineresting challenge!
Props to NASA
by
smittyoneeach
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Pretty easy for the armchair engineers to opine, but I wonder if all non-trivial projects simply paraphrase Clausewitz to read "No non-trivial project survives contact with reality".
Props to these guys for having a design that allows remote repair in the event of the unforseeable.
-- Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Props to these guys for having a design that allows remote repair in the event of the unforseeable.
That's why people who work at JPL get to call themselves "rocket scientists", dude.
sPh
Re:There's a reason...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
well, yeah, but the idea of pursuing a robust design shouldn't be limited to Java Programming Land.
Unless you're in Redmond, and trying to set yourself up with excuses...
Re:There's a reason...
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JohnnyCannuk
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· Score: 1
well, yeah, but except for 1 hardware failure, their design HAS been robust.
It's not somuch the language as the person who writes the code...
Dude.
BTW, you aren't andy are you?
-- Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
It's not if, or how, you fuck up, so much as how you recover.
-- Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Re:There's a reason...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Uhhh, no. The A/C to whom you replied was really smitty_one_each. I usually post anonymously to any replies to my posts. My COUNT( posts ) is embarrassingly high already. I shudder to think of the opportunity costs of all these mad ramblings.
What's the underlying technology?
by
gregarican
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· Score: 1
Not to be a smartass, but I wonder what the systems are like on these vehicles. I saw several stories on CNN stating that the first Rover had to have some excess files removed so that it had more available memory. Plus a couple of reboots. That harkens me back to the days of MS-DOS running memmaker and looking at UMB's, HMA, etc.
I recall reading somewhere that much of the NASA technology behind the Apollo missions could be replaced by a modern day handheld scientific calcluator. What's the story nowadays? You'd think with millions upon millions of budgeted funds the systems would be cutting edge beyond our wildest dreams.
Am I just being cynical?
Re:What's the underlying technology?
by
TheOnlyCoolTim
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· Score: 2, Insightful
They're generally rad-hardened and tested not to fail it, which means they don't launch with cutting edge technology. On top of that, the time between building one of these and it landing is years...
Tim
-- Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Re:What's the underlying technology?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
It takes years of planning and testing to build these probes, and you have to use specialized parts that are Radiation-hardened - naturally these type of parts take longer to develop and test, and lag behind off the shelf parts.
Re:What's the underlying technology?
by
stratjakt
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· Score: 1
Can your modern calculator, or uberl337 modded PC survive a trip through space and the martian surface? Didn't think so. The ram is probably redundant a few dozen times over, there's no doubt a good reason it only has 256mb of data.
As for the filesystem/os it uses, I'd go dead simple like the MSDOS days myself. The more complex the software, the more complex the bugs. Would you really want to troubleshoot a flubbed up Red Hat install from a bazillion miles away?
--
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Re:What's the underlying technology?
by
RailGunner
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· Score: 2, Informative
No, you're not being cynical, but there is a valid reason - the testing and burn-in phase, which can take months if not years. If memory serves me correctly, there was a recent probe that ran on 4 Intel 486 processors. Why didn't they use the then available Pentium 2? Testing - the 486's they had were proven to work in the extreme environments and it would have caused unneccessary delays to test with a new processor / motherboards.
Personally, I wouldn't be that surprised in the Rovers were running Red Hat 6... or similar, due to that long test cycle.
Re:What's the underlying technology?
by
aurum42
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· Score: 4, Informative
They run on Vxworks, a real-time operating system (RTOS) which has been used by NASA for several years now. You have to remember that these aren't run of the mill systems, but ones that need military grade radiation hardened components, and it's amazing what can be done even with a simple embedded system (I wrote a minimal TCP/IP stack and ethernet driver for an 8-bit processor once, the 8052, and while complex). It's mostly technology that has proven to be reliable time and time again, but not all codepaths can be explored even in a simple system. The problem with spirit was apparently in the flash filesystem implementation (sounded like they ran out of inodes, but I haven't seen a detailed analysis).
-- "The slave who knows his master's will and does not get ready...will be be beaten with many blows."Luke 12:47-48
Re:What's the underlying technology?
by
GoatJuggler
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· Score: 1
Confirmed by Wind River as an Out-of-Memory problem. Although, in this case it seems like a lack of human garbage collection.
Interestingly, Wind River had the best solution for PPPoE DSL connectivity software (WinPoET) before RASPPPoE and Windows XP came along.
Re:What's the underlying technology?
by
Smork
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· Score: 0
More like VxWorks, as has been discussed here quite a lot. But you make a valid point nonetheless:)
Nazi Explorer?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Informative
It might be offensive, but we owe the Nazi's for the rocket technology that allowed these probes to reach mars.
Re:Nazi Explorer?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Whoever modded this down is obviously oblivous to history. After defeating the Germans there was a race by the Russians and Americans to gather as much information about the V2 rockets and the scientists who worked on them so that they could outduel the other.
The V2 rocket was a major innovation in technology and we shouldn't discount the scientists who worked on it. Granted they were on the wrong side but many of them worked out of fear for their and their family's lives. These weren't goose-stepping, Anti-Semitic warriors. These were people who did what they had to to survive. Some even say that they intentionally kept back more dangerous weapons (like Atomics).
So yes we do owe a lot of rocket technology to the Nazi's. Both for their scientists and the scientists they forced to leave for America.
Re:Nazi Explorer?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I remember in one of my classes (history of air power) where, and I'm paraphrasing, the whole space race was essentially a case of 'WE got our captured German rocket technology working WAY before YOU got your captured German rocket technology working.'
(We = Russians, You = Americans; Sputnik... We = Americans, You = Russians; first man in space, on moon, probe to mars)
Um, you do realize that Russia had the first man in space, don't you? Up until the late 1960's, Russia was kicking US butt in the space race. They had the first man into space, first spacewalk (IIRC), and even earlier, first dog and chimp in space. It wasn't really until the Apollo missions that the US began taking the lead in the space race, as Russia began running out of money for a space program.
-- If you can read this then I forgot to check "Post Anonymously"
...and notice the part about the USSR capturing the German's A4 rocket as well as swiping a goodly number of Peenemunde scientists. The U.S. got the rest of 'em.
--
But what does my opinion matter, I just vote here. It's not like I have any money or anything.
Robot Wars
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2, Funny
After Spririt and Opportunity complete their missions....assuming they have enough juice in their batteries left over, I think Nasa should have the two robots meet each other and duke it out. If they are each at opposite ends of Mars, how fast can the rovers move?
The rovers move at about 1 meter every half hour.
This is becuase of the PowerPC Processor (@ 20 MHz) that it uses to compute the optimal route from place to place, and the 10 minute delay both ways for sending orders. The rovers also have 256 MB of Flash ROM, the stuff that messed up Sprit and allows them to store orders and pictures that are waiting to be sent back to earth at approx. 30KBs. Also, the commands that are writen in a C-like language, and like someone said before the rovers use Vxworks a RTOS that i belive is based off linux, so SCO will prolly want there licenceing fees soon...
The launches are clustered so tightly (2 weeks) because the optimal launch window for mars occurs every two years. Otherwise, it might make sense to do a yearly launch so that design problems (like the flash memory error) can be thoroughly tested and fixed.
Having two rovers operating at the same time might cause a reliability problem... if spirit had kept randomly transmitting at odd times, it might have interefered with good data being sent from opportunity. Nasa thought of that, and that's probably why the two rovers are on opposite sides of the planet - hence, only one is visible to earth and/or the relay satellite at a time, so they can't interfere.
Uh, that doesn't make much sense- I really doubt the two rovers would be interfering with one another if they were in the same area, as they could simply use different frequencies or cooperate on when they were going to transmit data, or work as master/slave...
There's a huge number of ways they could be working in the same area. The reason they're not is because there would be no point to it.
Master/slave would have less than one quarter the reliability, and cooperation doesn't work if one is going haywire (as did Spirit).
Different frequencies is good, but if they are close together and picked up the the same transponder (a likely scenario), a difference in amplititude could mess up the auto gain control and you'd lose the quiet one. A difference in amplitude could be caused by a number of reasons - poor aim, weak transmitter batteries, haywire transmit power setting, or a special max-power emergency reach-home mode. If the transmitters are frequency-agile (by design or accident), then they could still accidently transmit on the same frequency.
Physical seperation is your best bet if you want signifcant bandwidth and want the most flexibility to recover from a variety of failure modes.
Re:launch window & redundancy
by
scosol
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· Score: 1
> Nasa thought of that, and that's probably why the two rovers are on opposite sides of the planet - hence, only one is visible to earth and/or the relay satellite at a time, so they can't interfere.
Hmmm- or perhaps they could use *2 different frequencies!*:P
-- I browse at +5 Flamebait- moderation for all or moderation for none.
Re:launch window & redundancy
by
Jason+Hood
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· Score: 1
it might have interefered with good data being sent from opportunity
Yeah so sometimes radios can actually operate at different frequencies. I wonder if NASA thought of that? Ya think?
Something I've been curious about, and I'm sure there's a reason for it, is why the landers don't use signals to an orbiter, which then can use higher power to transmit back to earth? Is this just too complex or is there another reason this scenario won't work?
Did a little research on this specific mission (before I was just talking based on my experience with the much smaller satellites I worked on), and I learned some stuff:
The forwarders are much better (bigger antennas, more solar cells = better power budget, higher orbit means the earth is visible for a bigger portion of the day), but they're another link in the system and prone to failure. (I'm guessing that they don't provide as many emergency debug options, either)
This page includes a description of the low-bandwidth control channel that communicates directly to the DSN.
I couldn't find mention of how much use the high gain-to-DSN path gets vs. via-relay-satellites path - does anyone have this info?
Re:launch window & redundancy
by
Janax
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· Score: 0
Of course, you could always assign each of the rovers its own address (say, like Ethernet) so that even in a shared medium like an atmosphere or space the intended recipient knows what messages to listen to.
jebus you must be a software only guy to write this. they could be sitting 2 feet from each other and easily both use the same frequency. Ever hear of a cell phone.. Ok, maybe you've used a cordless phone.. CB radio? Ok, well regardless at X-Band they could even easier changes the carrier frequency a small amount and not even come close to interfering with each other. (low power = low bandwidth).. Being seperated by half a planet is most just easier for the humans who are making decisions and dealing with data.
Actually, I'm an EE who has has some on-orbit hardware and software. Your examples are kindof primitive because these instruments have been implemented in a variety of very different ways, but I'll run with them.
Cell phones use a range of frequencies. Sometimes these frequencies are reused, and this is either CDMA or TDMA. TDMA is essentially cooperation; CDMA will suffer the same power differential problems that near-frequency transmissions will.
Cordless phones are similar - either multiple FM frequencies (49MHz), or some form of CDMA/TDMA (2.4GHz+). CB's use different AM channels and also use a form of TDMA (you don't start talking until the other guy says "over"... thus, you are time-dividing a single chanel).
Even at different frequencies, transponders* need to have realively close amplitudes- that's what I was saying in a previous post. TV-relay satellites can well-control their uplink power; cell phones are commanded to vary their power by the towers. These options may not be available to mars rovers, where you want even more reliability and have little ability to change the ground stations (i.e. if a tv uplink is wildly putting out too much power causing other uplinks to be lost, you can bet someone will drive there pronto and pull the plug. Or, if the signal is too weak, someone will realign the antenna or replace the power amp)
(*This is probably not a problem for the DSN, where they can much better filter the signals for special situations. Assuming, of course, that a fault hasn't put the signals on top of each other.)
Re:launch window & redundancy
by
Nefarious+Wheel
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· Score: 1
Perhaps a third rover for parity? It is after all a RAID on Mars...
-- Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Re:launch window & redundancy
by
Janax
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· Score: 0
Not that I'm addicted to getting good karma or anything, but some stupid-ass moderator hasn't heard of Ethernet?! After all, all shared-medium endpoints have two options to speak to a specified group of one or more points on that medium: physical and logical addresses.
Physical addresses would be things like frequency discussed above. Each endpoint would have a tuner that isolates that frequency and thereby assumes that any messages on the frequency are addressed to itself.
Logical addresses are things like MAC and IP addresses, things that everyone except Slashdot moderators know have no guaranteed correlation to physical space or attributes. That's how Ethernet, Token Ring, satellite systems, and countless other technologies work. Therefore even on a "shared" medium such as a cable or a "single" frequency you can still *gasp* address individual units!!!
water source
by
Shooter6947
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The water source for the Martian channels is weird. It is certainly not rain: the channels don't spread out enough and there are closed drainage systems. Planetary scientists (I am one) think that the channels might have been formed by sapping: the water comes out of the ground in a spring.
NASA discovers Martian New-Age gift shop!
by
AndroidCat
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· Score: 3, Funny
For those wondering what hematite looks like, you can drift over to your
local New Age shoppe to take a look at the hematite
jewelry as well as find out its alleged properties.
Hematite is a good stone for those born during the Moon of Renewal - (22
Dec- 19 Jan.) Its grounding and soothing energies can help you relax and
unwind both physically and mentally. Hematite's renewing qualities also
make this stone an excellent match for those born during this time of the
year, but everyone can benefit from this stone.
Hematite is a good choice for those born under the zodiac sign of Virgo.
Opportunity's landing and "birth" on Mars are a bit late for Jan 19th, but
close enough. Renewing properties might help the flash memory and
batteries, and if there's one thing a Mars rover can always use, it's
grounding!
(Be warned: Valentine's Day is coming up, and you can never go wrong with
cutesy jewelery, but remember that some hematite is magnetic.)
-- One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Re:NASA discovers Martian New-Age gift shop!
by
probejockey
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· Score: 1
Hematite (Fe2O3) is never magnetic. It's atomic structure makes it impossible. Magnetite (Fe3O4) is the magnetic iron oxide. If you want pictures of natural hematite, go to http://www.mindat.org Of course most hematite on Mars won't be so pretty.
Re:NASA discovers Martian New-Age gift shop!
by
AndroidCat
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· Score: 1
Of course most hematite on Mars won't be so pretty.
And rarely carved or polished with wiccan/pagan decorations. While Hematite isn't magnetic, some of the stuff they sell as Hematite will be.:^)
-- One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Re:They are both ready
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
maybe i'm wrong but as i heard on bbc , one of european scientist said somethink like "when they will finish with they problem , we will ask them for help"
Re:Is there really a point
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Given that the instruments are there, including grinding tools, analysis instrumentation, microscopes, etc...and they send back their data...what is it you are really after?
You want to stick the rock on a shelf in a lab somewhere for 30-40 years and blow the dust off once in awhile?
Do they have a similar setup of the Rover's internals?
I mean, do they have a duplicate that they could fill up the flash memory and try and fix it when there's no latency? Then follow the steps on the rovers?
-- --
taking over the world, we are.
Oh yes! Yes! I'm gonna get First Post!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
What? I DIDN'T get first post? And I forgot a word! ARGH!!!
I meant to say "lame jokes ABOUT lag and robot wars"! Must edit! Please let me edit!!! *sobs*
Re:Oh yes! Yes! I'm gonna get First Post!
by
TwistedGreen
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· Score: 1
hey, you're not me...
Cool Details on Color Calibration
by
Mean_Nishka
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· Score: 4, Informative
Not to bring up the color calibration controversey again, but Nasa has published a detailed two-part feature on calibrating the pancam. The first part can be viewed here and the second can be found here.
This feature was presented to the mission managers during one of the 'lunchtime lectures' they present in the MOC. I caught a glimpse of this presentation the other night while watching the NASA TV stream. The presenter mentioned/. during his presentation and talked a little bit about the color debate started here a few weeks ago.
Re:Move the fleet away from the deathstar!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
absolutely brilliant. i love you
Re:Is there really a point
by
GuyinVA
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· Score: 1
My point is that we would be able to get more information from the rocks and samples if we able to bring them back to Earth to study. I'm quite sure that the rovers have enough gadgets to study and get an overview of the samples, but what happens in 2 years when we discover a new method to study those samples? Are we going to send a rover every time?
Mods on crack
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Offtopic? Whatever...
I've seen at least one comment to the effect that a 1-meter dish would be enough to pick up the rovers' X-band (8.3 GHz, IIRC) downlink signals. It may have been referring to the Mars Odyssey satellite, though.
A 10-foot dish has a heck of a lot of gain at X-band, so my guess is that if you can use a really quiet LNA and aim the dish precisely enough, you could hear something. Would be interesting to work through the path-loss numbers and see.
Re:Very OT, and still irrelevant
by
Scrameustache
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· Score: 0, Redundant
I heard on the radio yesterday morning that one of the rovers took a picture of a rock that "clearly" had...
"Stephen King dead at age 55" written on it? What does that mean to evolutioninst? Imagine a BEOWULF CLUSTER OF THESE MARS LANDERS! On red mars, rocks examine YOU! I, for one, welcome our new rover overlords.
--
You can't take the sky from me...
jennicam
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
> At lastly, since they only have enough money to > pay people to run them for a couple months, why > design a rover to last years?
Because jennicam.org is now offline?
Hey, I'd pay fifteen bucks to subscribe to a Mars rover website with a two minute update!;)
Is it me or could this have been debugged on earth
by
thbigr
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· Score: 2, Insightful
From what I have read Spirits problem is ALL software. It sounds like this could have been tested by driving around in a parking lot and taking lots of pictures.
Signed, a grumpy old programmer.
-- Come the revolution, the Bourgeois, Capitalistic, "A PARKING STICKER HOLDERS", will be first against the wall!
The tool that does the grinding (Rock Abrasion Tool aka the RAT) also has a brush mechanism so they can brush dust fromt he surface of the rock before taking measuremnet of the rock. They'd like to take readings from the rock surface as that might give information about how the rock has weathered which might in turn give clues to past environments. Dust particles could obscure the readings from the actual rock surface hence the brush.
After they take the surface reading they can use the RAT to grind off the surface to look at the interior of the rock.
Its a great news for sure...
by
supersam
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· Score: 1
This kind of parallel Rover activity is cutting a lot of research timescales into half and thats a very good news indeed!
But getting all excited about a base on Mars is premature, to say the least! We're still decades away for that to become a feasible option. A case in point is Moon. People have dreamt of setting up bases on moon ever since Man landed there. But it is only now that proposals for such a base are being considered technologically and economically viable. A Mars base is still a distant dream.
By the way... Opportunity's discovery of a huge hematite deposit (its said to be the size of Oklahoma!) points to the possible presence of water some time in the past. But the scientists are not getting too excited about it yet because the hematite can also be formed by the direct oxidation of hot, iron-rich lava.
Someone please explain the dust buildup issue...
by
addie
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· Score: 1
I've heard a lot of people mention this dust buildup problem. This can't be the only thing limiting the lifespan of these rovers is it? Why wouldn't they be able to install some sort of simple low-power fan to clean the panels off? Maybe a small air compressor? (high power-draw I guess) Is it the thin atmosphere? Is the dust sticky in any way? (I guess we're still working on that one)
It just seems to me such a simple problem could be overcome, there must be more to it than that.
What I still haven't seen is a full, technical explanation of what went wrong in the first place, and (more importantly) why it wasn't caught in ground testing. One would imagine that flash-contention issues would be relatively easy to bench test.
As with Pathfinder, NASA seems to have run into testable software issues only after the hardware is on another planet. I'd like to see more morning-after analysis on this both so NASA can improve its process for future missions, and so that we can all learn something about software testing for our own projects.
Does anyone know of place (web page, mailing list, whatever) where this is being discussed on a deep technical level?
-- When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
Re:Bug report
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Informative
It was finally determined that the volume of files present on the flash media caused the software to attempt to allocate more ram than what was available during startup - thus the constant rebooting until the rover was ordered to start in "cripple" mode.
I agree though, something like that should have been tested before the hardware had landed on another planet.
I don't have a link handy but the reason it wasn't caught in testing is because the longest test they ran was 9 days. The errors started to happen (IIRC) 18 days into the mission.
SP
-- "It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong." - Voltaire
It was more than 18 days in, they had data gathered over the whole flight to mars stored in that flash.
WMD in Iraq
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
>> how come we can find signs of water on a planet several million miles away but we can't find signs of WMD on a country several thousand miles away?
Well, for starters, because there are signs of water to *find* on mars... 8-)
>> we invented WMD in Iraq?
Well, more specifically, Bush invented WMD in Iraq. Probably right after telling Saddam "hey, don't worry we don't care if you invade kuwait... imean, do ethnic cleansing on the kurds... i mean, try to develop WMD..."
Not that Saddam won't spend eternity next to Hitler and Stalin with a 9lb pineapple in his boo-tay.
it's not the only thing...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Just as much of a concern, is buildup of the ever present martian dust in all the moving parts.
Even if it did still have power, it very well may be unable to aim it's camera's, or use the robot arm/aim science instruments, or even drive.
The Site to Visit & Software to Play With
by
Spencerian
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· Score: 4, Informative
Most news sites are too damn slow for news on the rovers. Hell, Spirit was fully up and running over two days ago.
Another geeky thing to enjoy is Maestro, software that allows anyone to download real data from both landers and observe in exhaustive detail what the JPL guys see (they use a much more complex version of the package). It's Java.
-- Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
Re:The Site to Visit & Software to Play With
by
krokodil
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· Score: 1
I wish NASA site had RSS feed for news.
Re:The Site to Visit & Software to Play With
by
Spencerian
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· Score: 2, Informative
-- Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
It vindicates "them"
by
FreeUser
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· Score: 4, Insightful
people who don't seem to have read anything by George Orwell?
"They" have almost certainly read and understood George Orwell only too well. "They're" simply counting on relatively few of the unwashed masses having read George Orwell, or to have comprehended it if they have.
Given current political events in the United States, and the persistent popularity of its president among said unwashed masses despite his appalling history in office thus far, "they" seem to be quite correct in this assumption.
What difference does it make if you and I snicker at the Orwellian names our space missions are routinely given, or the pithy propoganda that accompanies every "3...2...1...ignition" sequence (the "of [whatever] in another [whatever] for [whatever]" that always gets tagged on to the countdown these days), so long as 9 out of 10 vegitative Americans take it seriously, and more than half of America is vegatative?
To summarize: "TERRORIST TERRORIST TERRORIST, 9/11, 9/11, God Bless America"
X-rays, per se, would probably not be too useful for such a task - they don't see very far into solid ground. Something like ground-penetrating radar would have a greater ability to "see" into the depths... but my guess is the resolution would leave something to be desired. Given that any Martian life-forms probably never got beyond the single-cell stage, there probably wouldn't be much to see.
More to the point - if you were to image a multi-cellular Martian fossil... how would you know you had done so? Having evolved independently of earthbound life, it wouldn't look anything like our animals/plants.
> Having evolved independently of earthbound life, it wouldn't look anything like our animals/plants.
Not to look like a loony claiming we descended from Martians, but how do you know? Mars could have been nearly identical (in form, not a mirror-image) to Earth at one point a billion years ago. We do not know one way or another, but there are similarities between animals living in entirely different sections of Earth, so is it so hard to imagine the same thing across neighboring planets? Sure, it's far-fetched, but the basics could be very much the same.
Possible answer -- why no dust brush
by
JonTurner
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· Score: 1
Correct. The rocks are being cut with what can be thought of as a NASA-grade angle grinder.
>>you probably wouldn't want to use the grinder to dust off the solar panels I just got this mental image of a butler-robot named Reginald following behind Spirit with a whisk broom. "Allow me, sir. *shiff* *shiff* *shiff* [brushes off solar panels] Ah, yes, that's better. By the way, sir, I've taken the liberty to call NASA for your daily downlink; they're holding at your leisure on the UHF dish, line four. Will you be needing anything else this afternoon?"
Seriously, though, if dust-build up (and the eventual starvation of power) is the limiting factor for these rovers, why did NASA not add a feather-duster/windshield wiper/retractible plastic film/fan/something??? to clean the panels?
The only thing I can conclude is that the Earthside cost of running the mission beyond the expected duration was too great for the marginal returns/benefits given by a longer mission -- the existing duration was sufficient. After all, I wouldn't be surprised if the total cost for maintaning the mission (staff, press conferences, electricity, bandwidth, website, etc.) exceeds $50,000/day.
When they tried to revive Beagle, the British were using Joderell Bank at about 120 metres. The standard DSN is less at about 75 metres or so. The front-end amp generally has to be cooled for low noise.
A 10 metre dish is enough to bounce signals of the moon with and you would have no problem picking up stuff from most earth sattelites.
In a nutshell
by
HarveyBirdman
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· Score: 2, Informative
The Flash RAM file system overflowed, and they didn't test long enough to catch thise because they had a launch window to meet.
Please, for the love of God, [tell] me that there is a good reason they didn't put a little mylar peel off layer on the top of their solar cells!....Hook up a wire and a little motor/pulley job...when the dust builds up, peel the top layer off...
Note that daylight power won't help much with heating issues at night if the battery does not hold a charge anymore. Making a probe last beyond a few months requires solutions to multiple issues, such as:
* Battery losing recharge ability due to use and temperature cycles * Dust build-up on solar panels * Dust and grit build-up on instruments, motors, etc. * Damage caused by large repeating daily heat-and-freeze cycles * Colder weather and less sun due to winter coming * General wear-and-tear * Cost to communicate, run, navigate, and troubleshoot rover from Earth
It gets expensive to build a machine than deals with all of these problems. However, such "superrovers" are still far cheaper than a manned mission.
I recall reading that a system to reduce/prevent dust accumulation had been discussed but it would have required compromise of removing one of the other systems on the rover to accomodate it.
-- Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
Re: Petaton blast
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Mars, being closer to the ASSteroid belt, must have more impacts, or much less geologic wiping away of evidence. I could drive over 1000 miles before running into a crater, yet Opportunity landed in one by chance, and Spirit is only a few hundred meters away from one. Geez!
BTW, the Yucatan Peninsula Dinosaur Killer Crater was caused by a Petaton blast from the impact of a 12 mile wide object. Supposedly 12 hiroshima sized airblasts ( kilotons ) occur yearly over unpopulated areas.
That's my 2 yoctopennies worth. And that ain't much. But I can be bought for 10 gigapennies.
care and feeding of rovers
by
CleverNickName
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· Score: 3, Informative
Also why dont the rover have some kind of wipers to stop the buildup?
I wondered the exact same thing, and asked all the scientists I spoke to at JPL (for TechTV) that very question. They said that the added weight, and potential for joints and servos to fail outweighed the possible benefit of wiping off the solar panels. One of them told me that they were effectively routing out milligrams of weight from various areas of the rovers to get the total down.
I didn't ask about the base station (because I didn't think of it -- that would have been a good question) but I imagine they'd say the same thing about weight vs. benefits.
Re:care and feeding of rovers
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John+Miles
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· Score: 1
Joints? Servos? All they needed were one or more transparent tearaway strips like those used on drivers' visors in open-cockpit auto racing, and a simple motor/pulley arrangement to remove the strips as needed.
As Carmack is so fond of pointing out, not everything in rocket science is rocket science....
-- Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Re:care and feeding of rovers
by
susano_otter
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· Score: 1
Of course! If only those stupid-heads at NASA had managed to figure out some kind of motor-and-pulley arrangement that didn't use any joints or servos!
I mean, there must be some way to make a motor-and-pulley system that doesn't involve joining moving parts together!
And hey--if we take the word "servo" out of the word "servomotor", that means that the actual device doesn't need any of those pesky "servos" either, doesn't it?
If we really work at it, we can spend a lot of our limited monetary budget coming up with an additional system that may or may not actually work, and either way it will cut into the weight and power budget that we could be applying to more science, instead! And if it doesn't work, the whole thing is a waste--we've already lost the science that could've taken the place of this miraculous jointless, servo-less servomotor-and-pulley design, and we get no benefit at all from said design! But hey--it's worth the risk, isn't it?
Isn't it?
Maybe it isn't worth the risk. Maybe the techs at NASA have been going around and around, debating these very issues (minus the retarded jointless, servoless jointed servomotor issue--there's a reason that 4th graders get to name the things, but actual adults design and build them, you know) for, oh, YEARS AND YEARS, trying to find the optimal balance between longevity, durability, science, and cost, and this is the best they can come up with.
John Carmack is an ass. If he's gotten this far into his X-Prize project without realizing that EVERYTHING having to do with the monetary, power, and weight budgets of a rocket program is, in fact, Rocket Science, then he... well, nobody really deserves to die in a fiery explosion, but...
--
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Re:care and feeding of rovers
by
John+Miles
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· Score: 1
Actually, as soon as I hit 'Post' on that, it occurred to me that the right way to do it wouldn't even require a pulley. Instead of a tear-off sheet, they should have used a continuous sheet of transparent material pulled between two spools by a simple motor armature inside the takeup spool. No belts, pulleys, or gears needed; the only moving parts would be the spools themselves. The rate at which the sheet would be pulled across the solar cell front surface would be measured in inches per day, completely negating any concerns about power consumption.
If you can build a fully-articulated robot arm, it shouldn't be all that hard to come up with a way to keep your solar cells clean. I really don't care what the weight budget was -- something this trivial should have have been implemented to free up mission-life constraints. Spirit has already lost a week, after all...
John Carmack is an ass. If he's gotten this far into his X-Prize project without realizing that EVERYTHING having to do with the monetary, power, and weight budgets of a rocket program is, in fact, Rocket Science, then he... well, nobody really deserves to die in a fiery explosion, but...
I do agree that the amount of public hand-waving he's been doing has set Armadillo up for some substantial embarrassment (at best) if their effort fails. My point still stands, though -- the dust issue has all the earmarks of a problem that should not be a problem.
-- Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Re:care and feeding of rovers
by
susano_otter
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· Score: 1
Your revised design still doesn't solve the joints-and-servos problem you handwaved away in your original post. There's still moving parts, additional components that could conceivably fail, and whose success is now a factor of the overall success of the mission.
Also, not caring about the weight budget of the mission is doesn't strike me as a rational approach to solving the problem. As motivated as you are to have a long-lasting, productive mission, the idea that you are more motivated than the mission engineers themselves is, on the evidence, strikingly counter-intuitive.
That said, it's clear that the issue has been known since at least 1998, and that experiments have been proposed to study and solve the problem.
It's possible that the problem is much less trivial than you think, though, given that NASA is apparently considering atomic generators as a solution.
Unfortunately, I don't have time at the moment to track down any definitive links to the current missions' weight budgets, or any details on the hard choices the design teams had to make and the criteria they used to make those choices. However, it seems obvious even so that what looks like a trivial problem at first glance to you and me has actually turned out to be relatively intractable to the kind of quick fixes proposed here.
It's possible that future experimentation will yield an easy solution. Such a solution may even be in the works, but was not suitably proven in time to be included in the current missions.
If I find out any more details on why NASA is willing to put up with dust on their solar panels, I'll let you know.
--
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Re:care and feeding of rovers
by
John+Miles
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· Score: 1
There's still moving parts, additional components that could conceivably fail, and whose success is now a factor of the overall success of the mission.
True, but consider this: if my idea fails, the mission is no worse off than it is now. The protective sheet stops scrolling for whatever reason (jammed or burned-out motor, or maybe a torn sheet... that's about all that could realistically go wrong), dust starts to accumulate in front of the cells, and 90 days later the available light falls below the design threshold.
If an atomic generator fails (admittedly unlikely; RTGs are pretty simple and reliable beasts), the whole mission is jeopardized.
I would rather see RTGs used as well, but it's still absurd to think that keeping dust off of solar cells is a "hard" problem compared to the rest of the technological issues faced by a Mars mission.
-- Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Re:care and feeding of rovers
by
jayrtfm
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· Score: 1
there's plenty of existing motors driving the wheels, arm, camera, etc. Something could do double duty to remove a protective sheet.
One possible senario: pryo charge releases a net which wraps around a rock. String connects net to plastic film on solar cells. Rover drives away, leaving behind dusty film. Possible science benefit if rock can be dragged before final detachment of film.
I mean, it must be much better for budget predictability purposes to make the probe able to go indefinitely, and then decide to shut it off at a certain date, exactly when the money runs out, than to build in some weakness that may make it fail after 100 days just as well as after 200 days.
While what you say makes sense intuitively, in practice it is impossible. You just can't build a case for killing programs that are producing interesting results. There will always be people pleading to extend things, and they will succeed.
While you will not find a stronger advocate of the Hubble Space Telescope or a more passionate hater of George Bush (43) than I, he was right in saying that it is time to turn off Hubble and invest in something new. Unfortunately, it's likely that the whining minons will prevail, and they'll find a way to keep Hubble going at the expense of everything else (like, say, the OWL. The OWL would be better in every respect than Hubble, and would cost not much more than the required Shuttle servicing mission)
You see other examples of this in government purchasing. When the US gov't was done buying F14's (still the best interceptor ever made by the US), they made absolutely sure to destroy all the tooling used to build them to insure that no more would ever be built. It seems insane to do that, wouldn't you want to keep the tooling around "just in case?" But Congress has learned that it is weak, and the only way to prevent something from being extended or re-started is to make it absolutely impossible to do so.
It's the only way.
thad
-- I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Re:So, how long 'til they meet?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
What the hell are they gonna do? Take samples of each other?
I started a petition a week or so ago to suggest to NASA that they might supplement their coverage of the MER missions with additional live JPL Mission Control feeds.
If you're interested in reading the petition and possibly signing it, please see:
VxWorks online bug reports
by
peter303
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· Score: 1
Wind River does have an online bug bboard. And there are two memory leak problems in the OS software reported there, but too vague to see if it was related to a VxWorks flash memory driver.
I am presuming the problem is on NASA's side- not stress testing the memory managment enough. Otherwise many of the other ccustomers would have reported bugs.
NPR had a great piece on this
by
michaelggreer
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· Score: 1
NPR had a great piece when Spirit first went down. They jokingly surmised that Beagle had been lying in wait and, silently, snuck up and disabled Spirit. Then they had a BattleBots guy discuss the matchup between Spirit and Beagle. Beagle had the element of surprise, but if Spirit could survive the first blow it could easy bore through Beagle with its rock-grinding arm. Looks like Spirit won!
Re:NPR had a great piece on this
by
ehiris
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· Score: 1
You/.ers must be mistaken. This morning I heard Paul Harvey clearly state that NASA was operating two rovers on opposite sides of the moon and that the rovers were using their robotic arms to examine moon rocks and soil samples. What's this Mars crap?
--
/**
I have a "Zero Policy" tolerance.
*/
sample retrieval missions planned for late 2000s
by
peter303
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· Score: 1
The current NASA strategy is send relatively simple missions every 26-month launch window, and build on previous results. Also, the engineering cycle is about two launch cycles to incorporate new knowledge. Casini, which arrives at Saturn in late summer, is probably the last of the planetary megaprobes from the pre-Goldin NASA era.
It's all fun and games...
by
malakai
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· Score: 3, Funny
Since both rovers are working well now, it really does seem to have been a very common problem:
The Spirit was willing, but the flash was weak.
(As stolen from rec.hunor.funny from beore the problem was discovered)
Noims
--
This is not the greatest sig in the world. This is just a tribute.
fault-tree analysis
by
iamr00t
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Because all systems in space research become so complex, you can not have error, and you only have one chance of running the program (or system), NASA started using special techniques, that allow them to formally verify every state of device in advance.
I remember reading article about that around Pathfinder time, when Polar Lander crashed because of software error. Here is that article from Wired. 50 man-years to verify the system, eh?
There is formal verification of algorithms in CS. However, in case of spacecraft it's more than software, it's hardware too, as we can see. And hardware does get included in verification too!
As a business software programmer, I find that fascinating. I can only imagine what the life would be if we used verification. Of course, the reality is that it will never happen, we are not rocket scientists:)
Re:Someone please explain the dust buildup issue..
by
goober
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· Score: 1
It just seems to me such a simple problem could be overcome, there must be more to it than that.
Google is your friend. Summary is electrostatic forces make small grain dust adhesion formidable problem.
Sorry I could find a better link about this active correction for dishes business. But the CS article made me think. If we have a big array of smaller dishes to do astronomy instead of big dishes like the DSN uses, the system would be more flexible. Surely part of the big array of small dishes could be broken away to control space craft, and when that's done we could turn it back to other projects or science. i'm mostly guessing here!
I have seen a guy build TV satellite downlink dishes using a bicycle powered brake. His machine was set up in a dirt yard in some part of Zambia. At the low end, this isn't exactly precision work. At the high end, maybe it is.
-- Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
Re:So, how long 'til they meet?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
" The two Rovers are on opposite sides of Mars? How long will it take them to reach a common arena, at which point..."
Spirit:"huh... I see movement ahead..." Opportunity:"So do I"
Spirit:"It seems to be metallic" Opportunity:"Same here."
Spirit:"It's a robot! It looks like it's got a weapon, I'm going to retaliate!" Opportunity:"Mine just picked up a rock and arching back it's robot arm, as if it was about to throw it at me, I think I'll retaliate."
-- Curator of the Jefferson Computer Museum http://www.threedee.com/jcm
Re: Weird object spotted by Opportunity
by
Yupnik
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· Score: 1
I noticed this anomaly, too. Compare this 5x contrast-enhanced crop of the martian jackalope with these antlers. Or is it some sort of fossil vertebra?
Re:Weird object spotted by Opportunity
by
Badboy+Recovered
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· Score: 1
i was hoping i wasnt the only person on earth too think that "thing" was pretty odd.
i hope they go over and look at it.
Re:Weird object spotted by Opportunity
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thrill12
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· Score: 1
Probably just a dead animal that one time crowded the face of Mars.
It's dead now, so nothing to worry about:
There is no life on Mars.
Now move along, nothing to see here.
-- Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Re:Weird object spotted by Opportunity
by
captainClassLoader
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· Score: 1
It's just Graboid antennae. All that airbag bouncing drew one to the landing site. Opportunity's safe, as long as it doesn't make too much noise.
Oh, wait, quick, somebody needs to tell JPL: Don't use the Rock Grinder!
-- "The plural of anecdote is not data" -- Bruce Schneier
Sure they could have debugged this on Eart...if they ever saw the need to test fully loading the rover's memory with spaceflight information. The important question is: if this was so obvious to you why aren't you making rovers? Its easy to say "duh!" after the fact isn't it?
There are nearly an infinite number of ways to debug any system (rover, computers, etc.) but sooner or later you have to send it out the door and use it. With a computer you can take it back to the store if it happen to drop it upside down twice and it suddenly stops working (could the store have tested that??). With the rover its a little tricker.
I really hate how people view this bug as a failure where it really was a smashingly successful debug and fix. Clearly its armchair debugging saying "why didn't they test that?" If it was so obvious to you, why weren't you guys banging on NASA's door remind them to check what happens when you operate this thing in that configuration.
All good and well, but really. If someone were to say on slashdot "Wonder if they are properly testing this in life-like conditions and with standard edge-case scenarios?", it would have prolly been YOU who had jumped that with: "Look, they are Smarter Engineers Than You at NASA for crying out loud! Why don't you shut up! They prolly know million times better how to debug their zillion dollar gizmos!"
Then again, everything looks different from post mortem.
Re:Armchair Engineering
by
thbigr
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· Score: 2, Insightful
For the record I have worked on embedded systems for 6 years and PLC controlers. What we are talking about is the Extreem testing. When we worked on these things we always made sure that MAXIMUM memory usage was tested.
I Realy don't see why this is not on the list of things to test.
I do think they are doing a great job, considuring the amount of systems that are being controled and the added issues of radiation, cold, etc, etc.
-- Come the revolution, the Bourgeois, Capitalistic, "A PARKING STICKER HOLDERS", will be first against the wall!
Man, THAT'S what we need -- a mini-robot piggy-backed on the rover who's sole function is to hit the reset button!
But what if the reset robot needs to be reset?
That just increases complexity, and with that the likelihood that things will go bust. (In this case, even redundancy could be a problem. What if the extra reset bot/module goes berzerk and goes all Windows with its reset mechanism?)
So where's the Ctrl-Alt-Del guy when you really need him?
My ultracheap slightly aged Asus (yuck) motherboard with the intel i815 chipset has a mindboggling feature, that when enabled, will reset the computer if the OS hangs or crashes.
My even more ancient Compaq prosignia VS, a 486 server, that is now collecting dust in the attic, allegedly (according to Compaq marketing at the time) had a similar feature.
Hardware watchdogs, auto reset.
Number 5: Need for input.
by
boy_afraid
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· Score: 1
MORE INPUT!
Need more INPUT!
Re:Number 5: Need for input.
by
red+floyd
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· Score: 1
Nice software, Stephanie!!!
-- The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
We're doing an RTG mission with NO battery. How? Careful budgeting, and really fast circuit breakers. Anything goes significantly over current rating for more than a few milliseconds, it goes OFF. That's much easier than coming up with a really long life battery and paying for the mass and complexity.
Yeah, but you're developing a space probe. A land rover needs more power for the electronic drive. Given that one horsepower is 745 watts (i.e. 745 joules per second), you'd need to load a kilowatt RTG on the rover. The weight would be self-defeating. Thus, you have to use battery for the high draw situations and use an RTG capable of output slightly higher than is required by the rover at rest.
You have a good point, but...
by
edxwelch
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· Score: 1
..if the same problem that happen to the Mars Polar Lander were to happen to the Rovers, both would actually be lost. I reason this because there were two seperately launched craft (the Polar Lander and a satellite) which both perished because of the same misunderstanding of imperial/metric between NASA and one of their contractors. More importantly though, is we have yet ANOTHER MARS related articical on Slashdot, YEAH! Keep them coming... I love that space stuff!
sounds like an application of the concept of email spamming to space exploration.
in that case, I think we should coopt all spammers to this new space exploration initiative, and send them to the farthest reaches of our solar system, and beyond!
Re:Is it me or could this have been debugged on ea
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
They did drive it around the parking lot but only for nine days. The failure popped up after 18 days of data had accumulated on top of whatever was stored during flight. It still seems odd that a Flash file system driver was not more robust.
Woe be to the guy that said, "woah, I dropped the Rover..."
Uh oh.
-- This is my sig.
Mod: -1 Totally lacking in sense of humour
by
Chmcginn
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· Score: 1
Congrats, you've demonstrated that you:
a.) Can't spell Beagle.
b.) Don't understand, or choose not to understand, a near-ubiquitous geek pop-culture reference.
c.) Can ape pedantry when it was painfully, painfully obvious that the original poster was just trying to be funny. And unlike many Slashdot posts, actually succeeding.
-- Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
You have it backwards
by
thebigmacd
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· Score: 2, Informative
The telephone was invented in Boston, and the patent specification was written in Brantford.
I live one hour away from Brantford and would love to support that claim to fame, but according to the Alexander Graham Bell Museum in Baddeck, NS (a Canadian National "Park" which I have also visited), the telephone was not invented in Canada.
Re:You have it backwards
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JohnnyCannuk
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· Score: 1
Well, I stand corrected
-- Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
But...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2, Funny
the Europeans "invented" America. So there!
Re:Is there really a point
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Yeah thats great. Bring back some type of virus or live organism.
You do not introduce something which you do not understand, back to earth.
Not a comlete rover
by
GQuon
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· Score: 2, Informative
That's true, and FYI, they actually built three rovers, just in case there was an accident with one of them before launch.
Yes, but they didn't duplicate all of the most expensive equipment. I know this because I saw a TV program about the project, and there they worried about running a possibly destructive test on a camera they were sending to Mars. If they broke it they wouldn't have time to build a new one.
-- Irene KHAAAAAAN!
Re:Not a comlete rover
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Oh, well if it was on TV, it must be true!:-):-D My usual reaction too. But this wasn't one of those Oscar winning documentaries; it was just a really good documentary made with cooperation and interviews with NASA engineers.
-- Irene KHAAAAAAN!
Re:Not a comlete rover
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
While direct reception of Spirit and Opportunity is probably beyond the capabilities of single-amateur equipment, reception of a continuous wave (unmodulated carrier) beacon transmitted by the Mars Relay Radio System aboard the Mars Global Surveyor on the way to Mars was achieved by amateurs in 1996. At the time, the 1.3 Watt transmitter was approximately 5 million km away from Earth.
The Mars Express probe that launched the ill-fated Beagle 2 lander, and the Mars Orbiter in orbit around Mars, were both detected by this station in November last year, although it stretches the definition of "amateur" quite a bit; also by these guys with much more modest equipment.
For a real challenge, the New Horizons spacecraft, scheduled for launch in 2006 to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt beyond, will employ beacon cruise mode, in which it will send a fixed tone (see page 42), designed for easier reception by amateurs, while cruising in deep space.
Additional information on amateur deep space reception is available here.
You know, when you watch NASCAR or other racing, they frequently have an onboard camera on one or more vehicles. They have some kind of sliding, flexible shield in front of the camera which can scroll out of the way when something gets on it, blocking the view.
Would something like that be too difficult to implement over a large, rectangular solar panel? Alternately, you could try a brush driven by Muscle Wire. They tried an experiment with it on Sojourner, and I understand that it worked. How hard would it be to make a "windshield washer"-type brush which would clean the dust off the PV on a Mars rover? Especially if it increased the lifetime of the rover.
-- ... by the Dew of Mountains the thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shakes, the shakes become a warning
Yeah, that NASCAR thing is pretty neat. I always assumed it was like a roll of cellophane stretched across the lens, with the supply reel on one side and the take up reel on the other side. Then, when you need a clean view, just run the take up reel for a second or two and voila! instant clean job. And you're right, how hard would it be to implement something like a windshield wiper? It doesn't have to be perfect, just get most of it off and you'll increase the life tremendously.
--
Geek used to be a four letter word. Now it's a six-figure one.
Well... there's also the idea of 24 hour coverage
by
Cappy+Red
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If the two rovers are on opposite sides of the planet, then it is always daylight(worktime) for one of them, and data can be collected continuously.
*honk*
-- This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
Some people have speculated that Mars rotation axis is unstable and tips 90 degrees at times.
The equatorial region could be covered with H20/CO2 ice.
The moon causes the Earth's rotation axis to be
generally stable. The gravition force in the orbital plane and the equatorial buldge contribute to this stability.
The planet Uranus is an example of an unstable rotation axis. It is tipped over 80 degrees.
Slashdot Mirror
Spirit keeps responding with "JOHNNY 5 IS ALIVE!!!"
I guess the idea of a redundant rover is to make sure that errors are not a total loss. But it's nice to have both, especially since Opportunity seems to have found evidence of water. This has been really exciting to follow.
Am I the only one disapointed by the names of these probes? When I think about space projects, I think they should be named after great scientists...not names generated by 4th graders as part of a contest.
Anti-slash: In sacred jihad against slashdot
Imagine the latency on your SSH session while fixing Spirit. I thought 300ms was bad!
The problems the rovers have had have cut into thier research time - due to the dust build up on thier respective solar panels.
Nasa, next time take a lessen from the past and harness the power of the atom - the Viking probes lasted for years.
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
That is a herculean programming effort -- it's not like you can go up there and push "reset" on the robots when something doesn't work. NASA continually pushes the limits of computers to make these projects work within budget, and I look forward to the public release of some new tools and data from the rocks! I hope for their sake, we find a fossil or something like that -- no more budget problems for NASA...or would there be?
stuff |
Battlebots, Mars Edition, here we come.
The two Rovers are on opposite sides of Mars? How long will it take them to reach a common arena, at which point...
"Battlebots: Martian Showdown"
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Okay, it's fully functional, but is it programmed with multiple techniques?
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
I've found this site very informative, with frequent rover status updates, links to images, NASA press releases and details of rover activities.
"The slave who knows his master's will and does not get ready...will be be beaten with many blows."Luke 12:47-48
So, is the power leakage on the Opportunity rover also fixed or are they just going to put up with a shorter lifespan of the machine?
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
This is also good news as a precision check. If one did not work off the bat, we would not have anything to compare the results to.
From the artice:
Halfway around Mars from its twin, Opportunity already has discovered an iron-rich mineral called gray hematite. Preliminary measurements suggest the mineral is of a variety that forms in liquid water, providing the first hint that the now dry site once was wetter.
Spirit, in contrast, may have to drive hundreds of yards, to a nearby crater called Bonneville, to uncover similar geologic proof.
If there was water at one point and time on mars, I wonder if there are any x-rays these rovers can take deep into the ground to look for fossils or other proof of life. Then again, fossils would assume bones, but even so, I wonder how deep down they can look.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
From the CNN article, apparantly Spirit can dust off a rock. It doesn't say how though, but I would guess either compressed air brought from earth (unlikely), a little air compressor, or a brush of some sort.
Now, apparantly the lifetime of the rovers is limited by the rate at which dust build up on the solar panels. How hard could it have been to reticulate the arm so that it can bend around and dust the panels off themselves? Even if it were to cost $1mil, it'd still be worth it as it would extend the lifetime of the rovers indefinately.
(Personally, I'd still like to see a better solution- have the rovers shake like dogs do when they get wet)
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
freedom and privacy have both died.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Anybody have an update on the heating problem and how that affects the longevity prospects of Opportunity?
Any generalization is a stupid one.
I heard rumblings a while back (may have been on /.) about alternative space exploration to our current methods. Basically launching hundreds of smaller robots at a task rather than a single highly developed bot. They mentioned lots of benefits, like 80% failure rate would still generate something. Additionally they would be near eachother and possibly work together and even repair one-anothother.
Has there been anymore talk about things like this?
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Commence lame jokes lag and robot wars.
Knowledgeable discussion? On Slashdot? That'll be the day.
I have seen many many pictures of the erosion and channels and lake beds on mars over the years. Many many pictures... and they all looked very convincing, because it was so similar to the effects that water has on earth.
Then at the start of the Spirit and Opportunity landings, I started to think about it more. Something bothered me about the way the erosion appeared. It seemed there was no source for the water. I started thinking what might have caused features similar to that caused by running water. I think it is caused my lava flows. I could be completely wrong, and probably am, but maybe what I interpret as not being features caused by water, are really features that were caused by a very early and short-lived time of running water.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
Has anyone heard anything about the "19" rock that was found? I heard on the radio yesterday morning that one of the rovers took a picture of a rock that "clearly" had the number 19 scrawled on it. Numerologists are going ape-shit because 19 = AI.
Similar to how a third computer is not as useful as a second, the marginal gains provided by a third rover on the same trip would not outweigh the costs. Two pretty much ensures that some data would be collected, giving more information to work with for the next voyage up there.
The world would be a pretty ho-hum and stagnant place.
please don't punnish me for this.
.
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
.. maybe between the two we'll finally find the people who care about Will and Grace.
"Derp de derp."
I think they'd better run chkrootkit just in case...
Anyone ever see those books you can get that tell you where to aim your big ugly 10 foot dish and what frequency to use to see interesting things from government satellites, network feeds, and other things?
I wonder if one could use one of those huge old dishes to receive signals from any of the spacecraft on mars. Probably not, I'm sure the antenna technology they are using is much more advanced, but still would be an interesting experiment.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
80% would be one hell of an ideal if we're going to send up bots up there that are built half ass, and with the mentality that "oh well, another one will probably work".
Of course.
You're talking about the nation that invented the telephone, the airplane, radio, television, the atomic bomb, the hydrogen bomb, landed a man on the moon, has sent probes to every planet in the solar system, the modern computer, the internet, and WMD in iraq.
Do you think two pissant little rovers on mars are a problem? We did this already almost 30 years ago.
People. Hello. This is the US of A. Everybody else talks a good game, but we kick ass.
Why did the US invade Iraq?
Where else can you fake a Mars landing?
Pretty easy for the armchair engineers to opine, but I wonder if all non-trivial projects simply paraphrase Clausewitz to read "No non-trivial project survives contact with reality".
Props to these guys for having a design that allows remote repair in the event of the unforseeable.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
The number was "13" and the inscription beneath it read "Fo shizzle, ma robizzle! -S.D.".
It seems hip-hop killed the early Martians.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
sPh
I recall reading somewhere that much of the NASA technology behind the Apollo missions could be replaced by a modern day handheld scientific calcluator. What's the story nowadays? You'd think with millions upon millions of budgeted funds the systems would be cutting edge beyond our wildest dreams.
Am I just being cynical?
It might be offensive, but we owe the Nazi's for the rocket technology that allowed these probes to reach mars.
After Spririt and Opportunity complete their missions....assuming they have enough juice in their batteries left over, I think Nasa should have the two robots meet each other and duke it out. If they are each at opposite ends of Mars, how fast can the rovers move?
The launches are clustered so tightly (2 weeks) because the optimal launch window for mars occurs every two years. Otherwise, it might make sense to do a yearly launch so that design problems (like the flash memory error) can be thoroughly tested and fixed.
Having two rovers operating at the same time might cause a reliability problem... if spirit had kept randomly transmitting at odd times, it might have interefered with good data being sent from opportunity. Nasa thought of that, and that's probably why the two rovers are on opposite sides of the planet - hence, only one is visible to earth and/or the relay satellite at a time, so they can't interfere.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
The water source for the Martian channels is weird. It is certainly not rain: the channels don't spread out enough and there are closed drainage systems. Planetary scientists (I am one) think that the channels might have been formed by sapping: the water comes out of the ground in a spring.
(Be warned: Valentine's Day is coming up, and you can never go wrong with cutesy jewelery, but remember that some hematite is magnetic.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Tubgirl?
What the hell are they gonna do? Take samples of each other?
"Spirit just detected iron in Opportunity's left solar panel! Advantage Spirit!! Oh wait, here comes Beagle... DEATH FROM ABOVE!!!" *wham*
Lately democracy seems to be based on the skybox, the Happy Meal box, the X-box, and the idiot box.
I've seen a couple places with some information, but not anything with any good amount of detail.
I'd rather like to encourage my students to read about it.
maybe i'm wrong but as i heard on bbc , one of european scientist said somethink like "when they will finish with they problem , we will ask them for help"
Given that the instruments are there, including grinding tools, analysis instrumentation, microscopes, etc...and they send back their data...what is it you are really after?
You want to stick the rock on a shelf in a lab somewhere for 30-40 years and blow the dust off once in awhile?
Do they have a similar setup of the Rover's internals?
I mean, do they have a duplicate that they could fill up the flash memory and try and fix it when there's no latency? Then follow the steps on the rovers?
-- taking over the world, we are.
What? I DIDN'T get first post? And I forgot a word! ARGH!!!
I meant to say "lame jokes ABOUT lag and robot wars"! Must edit! Please let me edit!!! *sobs*
This feature was presented to the mission managers during one of the 'lunchtime lectures' they present in the MOC. I caught a glimpse of this presentation the other night while watching the NASA TV stream. The presenter mentioned /. during his presentation and talked a little bit about the color debate started here a few weeks ago.
www.lonseidman.com
I just noticed this rather interesting rock formation on one of the latest mars pictures..
;)
...
I get the impression someone got there first
nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
That's a Fully FUNCTIONAL...er...rover...ahem.
absolutely brilliant. i love you
My point is that we would be able to get more information from the rocks and samples if we able to bring them back to Earth to study. I'm quite sure that the rovers have enough gadgets to study and get an overview of the samples, but what happens in 2 years when we discover a new method to study those samples? Are we going to send a rover every time?
Offtopic? Whatever...
I've seen at least one comment to the effect that a 1-meter dish would be enough to pick up the rovers' X-band (8.3 GHz, IIRC) downlink signals. It may have been referring to the Mars Odyssey satellite, though.
A 10-foot dish has a heck of a lot of gain at X-band, so my guess is that if you can use a really quiet LNA and aim the dish precisely enough, you could hear something. Would be interesting to work through the path-loss numbers and see.
I heard on the radio yesterday morning that one of the rovers took a picture of a rock that "clearly" had...
"Stephen King dead at age 55" written on it?
What does that mean to evolutioninst?
Imagine a BEOWULF CLUSTER OF THESE MARS LANDERS!
On red mars, rocks examine YOU!
I, for one, welcome our new rover overlords.
You can't take the sky from me...
> At lastly, since they only have enough money to
;)
> pay people to run them for a couple months, why
> design a rover to last years?
Because jennicam.org is now offline?
Hey, I'd pay fifteen bucks to subscribe to a Mars rover website with a two minute update!
From what I have read Spirits problem is ALL software. It sounds like this could have been tested by driving around in a parking lot and taking lots of pictures.
Signed, a grumpy old programmer.
Come the revolution, the Bourgeois, Capitalistic, "A PARKING STICKER HOLDERS", will be first against the wall!
Let's hope that the rovers find a Yar rock or something and we get some spicy pictures!
//FIXME: Bad
The tool that does the grinding (Rock Abrasion Tool aka the RAT) also has a brush mechanism so they can brush dust fromt he surface of the rock before taking measuremnet of the rock. They'd like to take readings from the rock surface as that might give information about how the rock has weathered which might in turn give clues to past environments. Dust particles could obscure the readings from the actual rock surface hence the brush.
After they take the surface reading they can use the RAT to grind off the surface to look at the interior of the rock.
This kind of parallel Rover activity is cutting a lot of research timescales into half and thats a very good news indeed!
But getting all excited about a base on Mars is premature, to say the least! We're still decades away for that to become a feasible option. A case in point is Moon. People have dreamt of setting up bases on moon ever since Man landed there. But it is only now that proposals for such a base are being considered technologically and economically viable. A Mars base is still a distant dream.
By the way... Opportunity's discovery of a huge hematite deposit (its said to be the size of Oklahoma!) points to the possible presence of water some time in the past. But the scientists are not getting too excited about it yet because the hematite can also be formed by the direct oxidation of hot, iron-rich lava.
I've heard a lot of people mention this dust buildup problem. This can't be the only thing limiting the lifespan of these rovers is it? Why wouldn't they be able to install some sort of simple low-power fan to clean the panels off? Maybe a small air compressor? (high power-draw I guess) Is it the thin atmosphere? Is the dust sticky in any way? (I guess we're still working on that one)
It just seems to me such a simple problem could be overcome, there must be more to it than that.
What I still haven't seen is a full, technical explanation of what went wrong in the first place, and (more importantly) why it wasn't caught in ground testing. One would imagine that flash-contention issues would be relatively easy to bench test.
As with Pathfinder, NASA seems to have run into testable software issues only after the hardware is on another planet. I'd like to see more morning-after analysis on this both so NASA can improve its process for future missions, and so that we can all learn something about software testing for our own projects.
Does anyone know of place (web page, mailing list, whatever) where this is being discussed on a deep technical level?
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
>> how come we can find signs of water on a planet several million miles away but we can't find signs of WMD on a country several thousand miles away?
Well, for starters, because there are signs of water to *find* on mars... 8-)
>> we invented WMD in Iraq?
Well, more specifically, Bush invented WMD in Iraq. Probably right after telling Saddam "hey, don't worry we don't care if you invade kuwait... imean, do ethnic cleansing on the kurds... i mean, try to develop WMD..."
Not that Saddam won't spend eternity next to Hitler and Stalin with a 9lb pineapple in his boo-tay.
Just as much of a concern, is buildup of the ever present martian dust in all the moving parts.
Even if it did still have power, it very well may be unable to aim it's camera's, or use the robot arm/aim science instruments, or even drive.
Most news sites are too damn slow for news on the rovers. Hell, Spirit was fully up and running over two days ago.
Visit the official MER web site from JPL for at least better day-to-day detail.
Another geeky thing to enjoy is Maestro, software that allows anyone to download real data from both landers and observe in exhaustive detail what the JPL guys see (they use a much more complex version of the package). It's Java.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
people who don't seem to have read anything by George Orwell?
"They" have almost certainly read and understood George Orwell only too well. "They're" simply counting on relatively few of the unwashed masses having read George Orwell, or to have comprehended it if they have.
Given current political events in the United States, and the persistent popularity of its president among said unwashed masses despite his appalling history in office thus far, "they" seem to be quite correct in this assumption.
What difference does it make if you and I snicker at the Orwellian names our space missions are routinely given, or the pithy propoganda that accompanies every "3...2...1...ignition" sequence (the "of [whatever] in another [whatever] for [whatever]" that always gets tagged on to the countdown these days), so long as 9 out of 10 vegitative Americans take it seriously, and more than half of America is vegatative?
To summarize: "TERRORIST TERRORIST TERRORIST, 9/11, 9/11, God Bless America"
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
X-rays, per se, would probably not be too useful for such a task - they don't see very far into solid ground. Something like ground-penetrating radar would have a greater ability to "see" into the depths... but my guess is the resolution would leave something to be desired. Given that any Martian life-forms probably never got beyond the single-cell stage, there probably wouldn't be much to see.
More to the point - if you were to image a multi-cellular Martian fossil... how would you know you had done so? Having evolved independently of earthbound life, it wouldn't look anything like our animals/plants.
Sean
Correct. The rocks are being cut with what can be thought of as a NASA-grade angle grinder.
>>you probably wouldn't want to use the grinder to dust off the solar panels
I just got this mental image of a butler-robot named Reginald following behind Spirit with a whisk broom. "Allow me, sir. *shiff* *shiff* *shiff* [brushes off solar panels] Ah, yes, that's better. By the way, sir, I've taken the liberty to call NASA for your daily downlink; they're holding at your leisure on the UHF dish, line four. Will you be needing anything else this afternoon?"
Seriously, though, if dust-build up (and the eventual starvation of power) is the limiting factor for these rovers, why did NASA not add a feather-duster/windshield wiper/retractible plastic film/fan/something??? to clean the panels?
The only thing I can conclude is that the Earthside cost of running the mission beyond the expected duration was too great for the marginal returns/benefits given by a longer mission -- the existing duration was sufficient. After all, I wouldn't be surprised if the total cost for maintaning the mission (staff, press conferences, electricity, bandwidth, website, etc.) exceeds $50,000/day.
When they tried to revive Beagle, the British were using Joderell Bank at about 120 metres. The standard DSN is less at about 75 metres or so. The front-end amp generally has to be cooled for low noise.
A 10 metre dish is enough to bounce signals of the moon with and you would have no problem picking up stuff from most earth sattelites.
The Flash RAM file system overflowed, and they didn't test long enough to catch thise because they had a launch window to meet.
--- Ban humanity.
Shortly after this conversation, the Beagle II rover was attacked and destroyed by a small white martian rabbit with "big sharp pointy teeth".
A goal is a dream with a deadline
really doubt the two rovers would be interfering with one another if they were in the same area,
Mine? Mine! Mine.....mine!mine!mine! mine!mine!mine!mine!MINE!mine!
As with most software problems, seems the real solution is to run Linux.
Please, for the love of God, ell me that there is a good reason they didn't put a little mylar peel off layer on the top of their solar cells!
Hook up a wire and a little motor/pulley job, 7 when the dust builds up, peel the top layer off. boom, there you go, another few weeks of life.
This is so simple that I must be missing something. The small loss in efficiency caused by a thin layer of plastic can't be it, or can it?
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
BTW, the Yucatan Peninsula Dinosaur Killer Crater was caused by a Petaton blast from the impact of a 12 mile wide object. Supposedly 12 hiroshima sized airblasts ( kilotons ) occur yearly over unpopulated areas.
That's my 2 yoctopennies worth. And that ain't much. But I can be bought for 10 gigapennies.
Also why dont the rover have some kind of wipers to stop the buildup?
I wondered the exact same thing, and asked all the scientists I spoke to at JPL (for TechTV) that very question. They said that the added weight, and potential for joints and servos to fail outweighed the possible benefit of wiping off the solar panels. One of them told me that they were effectively routing out milligrams of weight from various areas of the rovers to get the total down.
I didn't ask about the base station (because I didn't think of it -- that would have been a good question) but I imagine they'd say the same thing about weight vs. benefits.
That makes no sense!
I mean, it must be much better for budget predictability purposes to make the probe able to go indefinitely, and then decide to shut it off at a certain date, exactly when the money runs out, than to build in some weakness that may make it fail after 100 days just as well as after 200 days.
What the hell are they gonna do? Take samples of each other?
Sudden, horrible flashback involving the latest Red vs Blue Public Service Announcement... Donut's arse! Sample thereof! By a NASA rover! Eww!
If you're interested in reading the petition and possibly signing it, please see:
l
http://www.petitiononline.com/mercov/petition.htm
Wind River does have an online bug bboard. And there are two memory leak problems in the OS software reported there, but too vague to see if it was related to a VxWorks flash memory driver.
I am presuming the problem is on NASA's side- not stress testing the memory managment enough. Otherwise many of the other ccustomers would have reported bugs.
NPR had a great piece when Spirit first went down. They jokingly surmised that Beagle had been lying in wait and, silently, snuck up and disabled Spirit. Then they had a BattleBots guy discuss the matchup between Spirit and Beagle. Beagle had the element of surprise, but if Spirit could survive the first blow it could easy bore through Beagle with its rock-grinding arm. Looks like Spirit won!
alt.sex.binaries.wesley.crusher.die.die.nasa.mars. rovers.die
You /.ers must be mistaken. This morning I heard Paul Harvey clearly state that NASA was operating two rovers on opposite sides of the moon and that the rovers were using their robotic arms to examine moon rocks and soil samples. What's this Mars crap?
I have a "Zero Policy" tolerance.
*/
The current NASA strategy is send relatively simple missions every 26-month launch window, and build on previous results. Also, the engineering cycle is about two launch cycles to incorporate new knowledge. Casini, which arrives at Saturn in late summer, is probably the last of the planetary megaprobes from the pre-Goldin NASA era.
... until our replicators wipe out the Asgards.
Poor little guys.
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
Since both rovers are working well now, it really does seem to have been a very common problem:
The Spirit was willing, but the flash was weak.
(As stolen from rec.hunor.funny from beore the problem was discovered)
Noims
This is not the greatest sig in the world. This is just a tribute.
Because all systems in space research become so complex, you can not have error, and you only have one chance of running the program (or system), NASA started using special techniques, that allow them to formally verify every state of device in advance.
:)
I remember reading article about that around Pathfinder time, when Polar Lander crashed because of software error.
Here is that article from Wired. 50 man-years to verify the system, eh?
There is formal verification of algorithms in CS.
However, in case of spacecraft it's more than software, it's hardware too, as we can see. And hardware does get included in verification too!
As a business software programmer, I find that fascinating. I can only imagine what the life would be if we used verification. Of course, the reality is that it will never happen, we are not rocket scientists
It just seems to me such a simple problem could be overcome, there must be more to it than that.
Google is your friend. Summary is electrostatic forces make small grain dust adhesion formidable problem.
This is not my area of expertise, but we're now doing "active optics" for parabolic radio antennas.
CS Monitor Link
Sorry I could find a better link about this active correction for dishes business. But the CS article made me think. If we have a big array of smaller dishes to do astronomy instead of big dishes like the DSN uses, the system would be more flexible. Surely part of the big array of small dishes could be broken away to control space craft, and when that's done we could turn it back to other projects or science. i'm mostly guessing here!
I have seen a guy build TV satellite downlink dishes using a bicycle powered brake. His machine was set up in a dirt yard in some part of Zambia. At the low end, this isn't exactly precision work. At the high end, maybe it is.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
" The two Rovers are on opposite sides of Mars? How long will it take them to reach a common arena, at which point..."
...transmission lost... ...transmission lost...
Spirit:"huh... I see movement ahead..."
Opportunity:"So do I"
Spirit:"It seems to be metallic"
Opportunity:"Same here."
Spirit:"It's a robot! It looks like it's got a weapon, I'm going to retaliate!"
Opportunity:"Mine just picked up a rock and arching back it's robot arm, as if it was about to throw it at me, I think I'll retaliate."
Spirit:
Opportunity:
You will die alone.
NASA's press releases aren't mentioning a strange object spotted by Opportunity. It's no face on Mars, but it's just as ripe for imaginative interpretation: A snail's eyestalks? A rabbit head? A sea serpent? Under "As Far as Opportunity's Eye Can See", on http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/press/oppor tunity/20040202a.html
there's a large panorama at: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/press/oppor tunity/20040202a/MSPan_B1_2x-B009R1.jpg
and look down under the sedimentary outcrop at right.
You can also see that NASA was looking at it on Sol 2,
on a series of four images taken on Sol 2, 2/3rds of the way down at: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/opportu nity_p002.html
but strangely it looks like those pixels are whited-out
Curator of the Jefferson Computer Museum http://www.threedee.com/jcm
'Spirit is willing but the flash is weak' over and over again...
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"(assuming something else does not bust or dust-up first).
If the problem is dust accumulating on top of the solar panels, why not simply add a couple of fans here and there to remove it?
NEOCA - Custom LED Flashlights
Sure they could have debugged this on Eart...if they ever saw the need to test fully loading the rover's memory with spaceflight information. The important question is: if this was so obvious to you why aren't you making rovers? Its easy to say "duh!" after the fact isn't it?
There are nearly an infinite number of ways to debug any system (rover, computers, etc.) but sooner or later you have to send it out the door and use it. With a computer you can take it back to the store if it happen to drop it upside down twice and it suddenly stops working (could the store have tested that??). With the rover its a little tricker.
I really hate how people view this bug as a failure where it really was a smashingly successful debug and fix. Clearly its armchair debugging saying "why didn't they test that?" If it was so obvious to you, why weren't you guys banging on NASA's door remind them to check what happens when you operate this thing in that configuration.
Working on opposite sides of the red planet
No fooling, they are like 1 minute away from being precisely on opposite longitudes.
Nice aim, at that distance.
-Styopa
Man, THAT'S what we need -- a mini-robot piggy-backed on the rover who's sole function is to hit the reset button!
MORE INPUT!
Need more INPUT!
We're doing an RTG mission with NO battery. How? Careful budgeting, and really fast circuit breakers. Anything goes significantly over current rating for more than a few milliseconds, it goes OFF. That's much easier than coming up with a really long life battery and paying for the mass and complexity.
Helium balloons want to be free.
..if the same problem that happen to the Mars Polar Lander were to happen to the Rovers, both would actually be lost.
I reason this because there were two seperately launched craft (the Polar Lander and a satellite) which both perished because of the same misunderstanding of imperial/metric between NASA and one of their contractors.
More importantly though, is we have yet ANOTHER MARS related articical on Slashdot, YEAH! Keep them coming... I love that space stuff!
sounds like an application of the concept of email spamming to space exploration.
in that case, I think we should coopt all spammers to this new space exploration initiative, and send them to the farthest reaches of our solar system, and beyond!
They did drive it around the parking lot but only for nine days. The failure popped up after 18 days of data had accumulated on top of whatever was stored during flight. It still seems odd that a Flash file system driver was not more robust.
I browsed the images and found these raw images of the anomoly:
Filter 2 19nm
Filter 2 20nm
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Woe be to the guy that said, "woah, I dropped the Rover..."
Uh oh.
This is my sig.
a.) Can't spell Beagle.
b.) Don't understand, or choose not to understand, a near-ubiquitous geek pop-culture reference. c.) Can ape pedantry when it was painfully, painfully obvious that the original poster was just trying to be funny. And unlike many Slashdot posts, actually succeeding.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
The telephone was invented in Boston, and the patent specification was written in Brantford.
I live one hour away from Brantford and would love to support that claim to fame, but according to the Alexander Graham Bell Museum in Baddeck, NS (a Canadian National "Park" which I have also visited), the telephone was not invented in Canada.
Government of Canada's version
the Europeans "invented" America.
So there!
Yeah thats great. Bring back some type of virus or live organism.
You do not introduce something which you do not understand, back to earth.
That's true, and FYI, they actually built three rovers, just in case there was an accident with one of them before launch.
Yes, but they didn't duplicate all of the most expensive equipment. I know this because I saw a TV program about the project, and there they worried about running a possibly destructive test on a camera they were sending to Mars. If they broke it they wouldn't have time to build a new one.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
For news, status, updates, scientific info, images, video, and more, check out:
(AXCH) 2004 Mars Exploration Rovers - News, Status, Technical Info, History.
They're operational? Does this finally mean I get my chance at success and happiness????
This is retarded.
While direct reception of Spirit and Opportunity is probably beyond the capabilities of single-amateur equipment, reception of a continuous wave (unmodulated carrier) beacon transmitted by the Mars Relay Radio System aboard the Mars Global Surveyor on the way to Mars was achieved by amateurs in 1996. At the time, the 1.3 Watt transmitter was approximately 5 million km away from Earth.
The Mars Express probe that launched the ill-fated Beagle 2 lander, and the Mars Orbiter in orbit around Mars, were both detected by this station in November last year, although it stretches the definition of "amateur" quite a bit; also by these guys with much more modest equipment.
For a real challenge, the New Horizons spacecraft, scheduled for launch in 2006 to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt beyond, will employ beacon cruise mode, in which it will send a fixed tone (see page 42), designed for easier reception by amateurs, while cruising in deep space.
Additional information on amateur deep space reception is available here.
You know, when you watch NASCAR or other racing, they frequently have an onboard camera on one or more vehicles. They have some kind of sliding, flexible shield in front of the camera which can scroll out of the way when something gets on it, blocking the view.
Would something like that be too difficult to implement over a large, rectangular solar panel? Alternately, you could try a brush driven by Muscle Wire. They tried an experiment with it on Sojourner, and I understand that it worked. How hard would it be to make a "windshield washer"-type brush which would clean the dust off the PV on a Mars rover? Especially if it increased the lifetime of the rover.
... by the Dew of Mountains the thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shakes, the shakes become a warning
If the two rovers are on opposite sides of the planet, then it is always daylight(worktime) for one of them, and data can be collected continuously.
*honk*
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
Less italics, please.
Some people have speculated that Mars rotation axis is unstable and tips 90 degrees at times. The equatorial region could be covered with H20/CO2 ice.
The moon causes the Earth's rotation axis to be generally stable. The gravition force in the orbital plane and the equatorial buldge contribute to this stability.
The planet Uranus is an example of an unstable rotation axis. It is tipped over 80 degrees.
Discussion about machines interconnecting, questions about high-gain path relay ....
The first one that follows the thread with a question about Beowulf Cluster while popping a can of Wi-Fi Antenna... 8)
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
.
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Windscreen wipers! Or you could have it shake like a dog... whatever is best for the electronics ;)
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.