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."
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?
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.
Re:Very good news
by
Cosmonut
·
· 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.
Congrats to NASA - robust programming
by
192939495969798999
·
· 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?
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.
Another story about the Mars rovers?
by
TwistedGreen
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Commence lame jokes lag and robot wars.
Knowledgeable discussion? On Slashdot? That'll be the day.
satellite dishes
by
austad
·
· 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
Re:Sorta OT, but still relevant
by
preric
·
· 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'.
Props to NASA
by
smittyoneeach
·
· 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
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.
Re:What's the underlying technology?
by
TheOnlyCoolTim
·
· 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...
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:Name gripe
by
Tenebrious1
·
· 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.
Is it me or could this have been debugged on earth
by
thbigr
·
· 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!
Re:Name gripe
by
RetroGeek
·
· 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.
It vindicates "them"
by
FreeUser
·
· 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"
Re:More, nearer.
by
plopez
·
· 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.
Cheap commodity robots could make good sense.
-- putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Re:Very good news
by
argStyopa
·
· 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?
-- -Styopa
Re:Armchair Engineering
by
thbigr
·
· 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!
Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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 |
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.
Commence lame jokes lag and robot wars.
Knowledgeable discussion? On Slashdot? That'll be the day.
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
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'.
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
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.
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.
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.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
Cheap commodity robots could make good sense.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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?
-Styopa
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!