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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."
How even though given the anti-intellectual culture of the US we are still the only ones able to land this very successful rover, and I feel the world actually respects the US for it(almost makes up for the other stuff), unfortunately, unless we get more kids interested in science, and more funding for research, the rest of the world will quickly catch up and surpass the US. Hopefully having this mission be more than anyone ever imagined, it will counteract both of these things.
I don't think you understand how these robots actually work. They could not have been debugged and fixed if they were "unfunctioning" or "unresponding".
Actually this is just a game to set the right expectations. They designed whole thing with a much larger project life right from the beginning.
But, given the fact that the rover technology is low-cost and still unproven, they expected a certain risk for various glitches. So, a 250 days "published" interval followed by a deadly clitch would mean a very bad image for NASA.
NASA played the same "stay on the safe side" tune on many otehr missions - see for example the Voyager missions, etc.
Don't try to use the force. Do or do not, there is no try.
There are some really smart and talented people at NASA, and it's nice to see that their work has finally been recognized after a period of NASA-bashing. It really peeves me that people have settled into this anti-American groove over the last few years.
Some of the top minds in history have been American, few modern scientific or engineering feats have been untouched by Americans in one way or another. Half the people who criticise Americans haven't actually been to the United States. I studied in the US for 3 years, and before I left for the US from South Africa, I had a few pre-conceived ideas about Americans, all of which turned out to be untrue. So before you bash Americans, think about these things, and consider actually spending some time in the US.
The thing that keeps us ahead of the rest of the world is innovation. As long as our kids grow up thinking they can do anything, we're ok. If we let the safety grannies and lawsuit lotteries prevail, then we're sunk.
American education has, in my lifetime, been a lot less rigorous than European or Asian education. Don't play Trivial Pursuit with a German. Don't argue about equations with a Japanese engineer. Yet most of the innovation has come from the USA.
Our success has mostly to do with freedom. Our real enemies are things like software patents and DMCA.
It amazes me that, having spent so much money to get the suckers there, that the plan wasn't originally to run them until they broke.
It's a real shame the Beagle 2 didn't make it, to be quite honest it was better than both our American bots, because it could carry out real complex tests on the soil, smell the soil and air for certain chemicals etc, it could really do much more, and with what Spirit and Opportunity have found out - which have lead to estimates - Beagle could have solved these, it's a shame, but lets look to the positive, 2/3 ain't bad.
I don't know how much difference it will make, but it will certainly make a difference. Religions will have to adapt to explain it (of course, they won't admit they were every wrong though), which will probably be the biggest change.
(1) Reporters early on asked how soon Opportunity would leave the crater it landed in to explore other areas.
Because it was a scientifically rich target. Besides, Opportunity would have spent that first half of its mission looking for a decent target with what happened to be in front of the rover when it landed in that mimi-crater. Besides, what is the hurry. In order to understand the stuff on the plain well, it pays to investigate the crater so that we have data to compare (control and variable in experimental contexts).
(2) It was announced with great enthusiasm that the rover teams were going to "go to mars time"...
They have done experiments on this in the past... it's challenging to do this. I would have said the team should have at least warmed up a couple of weeks on the new schedule.
(3) Personnel changes: The director of the mission (I forget his name) got promoted several weeks after the landings.
It's not like day-to-day operations are as demanding as they were. Practice makes perfect, and now they don't need as many people to run the rovers as they used to.
(4) Reporting to the public. It really started out great, with live video of the control center during both landings...
So go to this web site. It's got daily updates with streaming video. So I have no idea what you're talking about there. At the very least you can take a look at the raw images there being downloaded from Spirit and Opportunity. It's easy to "make your own Mars images" with Photoshop or the GIMP with these pictures. :^)
--- Journals are boring; Go to my web page instead
i always wonder how these people first decide the estimated lifetime of these probes? i mean is the factor of safety huge or something? literally everything that they throw into the space, if it survives the unit conversion mistakes made by the designers, outlives its expected short lifetime. i guess they keep their estimates VERY conservative... you can then celebrate once the probe/rover outlives your estimates!
Just a note on the Mars time issue.
p arties have pretty set routines that if you don't match up with causes problems. Crossing up day/night cycles leads to circadian rythem problem which leads to sleep problems which just feeds a whole host of other problems. This is all bad enough if you are single and free to do odd stuff without affecting others around you but it can have catastrophic effects on families.
That is most likely not so much an issue of lack of preperation/dedication as it is simply something that does not work well.
Shift work is a royal PITA as anyone who has worked it knows. Shift work with constantly sliding start/stop/handover times would be a PITA^umpteenth power.
The world and human physiology just do not work well for off nominal working routines... telemarketers/relatives/friends/banks/restraunts/
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
Your sig should say "Karma: Insanely Great, because I work at NASA and deserve it."
Stuff like what you guys do is why every kid wants to be an astronaut until the school system beats all their creativity, curiosity and ambition out of them.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
Your sig should say "Karma: Insanely Great, because I work at NASA and deserve it."
Ha, well it's true that NASA has definitely increased my Karma quite a bit (see this post) working there is quite reward enough. It's a privilege to be paid by the taxpayers to help understand the universe better (especially our little corner!)
Stuff like what you guys do is why every kid wants to be an astronaut until the school system beats all their creativity, curiosity and ambition out of them.
Yes, it would be nice if there was some way to preserve creativity better in the school system. Maybe more emphasis on problem solving and concepts and less on memorization (okay spelling is important but that's about it).
One of NASA's main objectives is to inspire people into the field of science/engineering, and I think that that alone is worth every dollar spent.
Cheers,
Justin Wick