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Spirit Rover Makes Longest Trip Yet
ivan1011001 writes "Spirit traveled just over 88 feet in an attempt to visit the crater "Bonneville" to look for evidence of water on Mars. Engineers had hoped the rover would travel 164 feet, but Spirit didn't cover the full distance because it spent more time than initially planned studying rocks and soil along the way. This is longer than its earlier PR of 70 feet."
The latest information on Spirit's and Opportunity's adventures can be found here!
With a maximum speed of 10 feet/min, I don't think it would be avoiding any rockslides, period.
Lunokhod could manage between 0.8 and 2 kilometres per hour depending on soil conditions and slope. Lunokhod 1 survived for 10 months and covered 10.54 km, Lunokhod 2 lasted only 3 months but did 37 km. I'm not sure how much of that time was 'active' since the rovers were shut down during the 14 day Lunar night.
However neither vehicle was autonomous, they were remote controlled from Earth. This is possible with a 2 second lag to the Moon, but unfeasible on Mars.
Best wishes,
Mike.
a lunar day is equivalent to several earth days. this means the russian rover could drive across the moon on solar power for much longer than spirit. the drawback is that it also had to sleep for almost 2 earth weeks at a time.
What ? Me, worry ?
Strictly speaking, that's not a domain of artificial intelligence, but pure computer vision. There are known techniques for building a map, given processed camera images, and there is usually no reasoning involved. Just a simple algorithm to find the shortest path. The search space is usually small enough not to warrant AI techniques.
Of course, it is possible that they are using higher-level AI techniques for finding the optimal path, but I doubt it as the classical image processing techniques are fast and robust enough for this sort of task.
After watching that special I have more respect and admiration for the people at JPL. Alot of creativity and problem solving went into this project and I'm really happy for all of them.
Mars has some temporary cloud cover around mountains where air is forced up into cooler regions of the atmosphere. There are also some fogs and clouds around the polar caps where water vapour and carbon dioxide condense out of the atmosphere, but that's about it.
There are some beautiful images here.
Best wishes,
Mike.
You can learn more about how the rover works by downloading NASAs Maestro Program. It's a RAM hungry Javaapp that is nicely documented and let's you plan your own mission using their stripped down version of the Uplink-Browser. Give it a shot, it's pretty interesting (well, at least if you got some spare time on your hands to fiddle with it and are into Marsroving at all!).
cu,
Lispy