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Mars Rovers Still Going Strong, Mission Extended
Loconut1389 writes "The Mars rovers' missions have been extended from 90 days to about 250 and have been upgraded with some new software to give them extended single run distances as well as other features. Yahoo has a similar article, also at Reuters.
I think it's great that these initially plagued robots are doing more than expected and are still going strong, mostly thanks to engineers figuring out how to make the most of the software and hardware onboard and figuring out how to diagnose an unfunctioning, unresponding machine millions of miles away. The whole project amazes me and I'm happy for NASA to be getting some good news for a change."
The main driver is really the batteries. They have to maintain a certain level of heating during the night cycle to get the rovers viable. Otherwise, there is some pretty nasty thermal cycling as the electronics ramps up in the day cycle as the solar panels. That requires a certain percentage of the electronics to run all night. It was the battery failure that immediately preceded the other landers and rovers major hardware problems.
Kinda funny what the press latches onto. In February, the issue was "Oh, my god. The solar panels are collecting dust which will shorten the mission". ehhh.. Nope. Doesn't look that way, does it? As long as the panels are able to provide power to the batteries, they can keep extending this. They just have to slow down their power discharge during the days to allow the rover to store up enough energy to make it through the nightcycle. Eventually, that means immobility, but they don't really need that as much after a certain point.
So, how I can revoke my slashdot account than?
Yep, dead Iraqi kids are off topic btw.
I am not arguing politics with nazis of 2000s
Of course it was. But you do these things in stages - first you have a brief "warranty period" (with full funding) and then "mission extensions" (with ever decreasing funding) as the spacecraft keeps on going.
This keeps the initial cost under control - if you plan for 90 days, things need to work for several times that. If the mission goal is, say, four years, then you have to test things accordingly - which really drives up the cost.
The perfect example of this is Voyager - still going after 26 years, although the primary mission was only to get to Saturn (6 years) - and Congress specifically refused to fund a mission going to Uranus and Neptune. Of course, once the spacecraft was actually _going_ to Uranus and Neptune, getting the money to complete the tour was pretty easy.
Also, as the mission wears on, you can do ever riskier things with the spacecraft. You've already completed the mission, so there is less of a downside if it breaks.
As the mission wears on, the staff keeps decreasing, which is a danger in and of itself. The Viking 1 Lander was killed after 4 years by a bad software upload - at a time when no remaining Viking staff member was fluent in the assembly language used to program the Lander !
The attention is definitely waning - here is plot of the NASA web site traffic. (The plot is courtesy of Alexa and may not work in all browsers, so I put a JPEG of today's ranking up.)
You can clearly see peaks for both Landings - according to Alexa, greater than the peak at the time of the Columbia disaster and a decline more or less to baseline since.
My whole kid's class is using Maestro to view the Mars photos in a similiar fashion to the NASA engineers.
:)
Wow, really glad to hear that! I'm one of the Maestro developers and I am very proud to see it being used in educational settings. Don't forget that you can also build mockup activity plans in the very same way that the scientists do! It's more than just an image browser
Great science... and great learning as well. It's java driven... and crunches older computers. However, it really shows the excellent work that we are doing there.
Sorry about the speed, the main problem is that in order to handle certain real-time image processing (band arithmetic, mosaic warping, image rescaling, anaglyphs) etc, we had to use an architecture that burns significant RAM. The data sets are huge and you wouldn't believe what's going on behind the scenes. Also I believe that on the network at JPL most operations are IO bound so making the code faster would not speed the application for the scientists.
Much of this is because we weren't able to spend much time on the public version of our tool due to funding reasons. If you like this kind of software and want to see more of it, write to NASA and ask that they fund it. It's part of NASA's mission, to inspire the next generation to explore and to take part in science and engineering.
If you email maestro@telascience.org today I'll get you more info on how to do this.
Glad to see you're enjoying the software, and I hope your kid's class now has a better understanding of what it's like to explore mars.
Cheers,
Justin Wick
Maestro/Science Activity Planner Developer
Mars Exploration Rovers