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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."
My whole kid's class is using Maestro to view the Mars photos in a similiar fashion to the NASA engineers.
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.
AC
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.
Oh no! Another 160 days of cover-ups and conspiracies! Well...perhaps, anyway! :-)
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.
Next week, once the four-day upload of the software is complete, Opportunity will head for Endurance crater
Isn' that really sad? those rovers that are millions of miles away get their data faster than I can download anything from eMule these days, right here on good old earth.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
and autonomous decisions ...who thought Gator?
Jonathanjk.com
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.
So far everything about this mission has shocked me, at least to some extent. We havnt just been rovering around mars to say we could do it. Thats what the previous mission felt like. But we have found amazing signs of water and the conversations around what has been found has sparked for many a rekindeled interest in our favorite planet. Since the rovers have gone up I have been watching slashdot more closly for news from these bots.
I have seen reports of evidence of water and watched as we all ooo and aaa over what that could mean. I have read the debates on the possibility of methane producing microbes in the soil of mars, or the cows hiding out in a hidden green pasture. We have all wondered about the possibility that we could jumpstart the life on mars or make it inhabitable for us with teraforming. Basically I have seen more interest in the red planet in the last few months than ever before. I cant wait to see what another 160 days can do for our imaginations. Do you think anything new and amazing will be found as this trek on the red planet continues, I certanly do.
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.
... debugging while the software is live! :}
Still, an amazing feat. These people deserve a medal.
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.
To further pick apart the wording of this summary...
I'd hardly describe them as "plagued". Both landers have been astonishingly successfull. They did suffer what MIGHT be characterized as a minor glitch and that was quickly circumvented.
Really the hardware and software have worked fine. I'd be more interested in seeing some reporter cover the people aspect of the mission, which I don't think has gone perfectly, but maybe with so many smart people involved couldn't have. Consider:
(1) Reporters early on asked how soon Opportunity would leave the crater it landed in to explore other areas. The scientists seemed to be unable to tear themselves away from those rocks and go topside and peek around. Had they done that they would have discovered several other outcrops like that in the area they characterized as flat an uninteresting. They could have always gone back into the crater, but it was almost as if they were afraid the rover would topple over on its way out and didn't want to run any risk. I wish they had been more open about this. Even Spirit spent way too much time hanging around its landing platform IMHO. Spirit had the misfortune of landing in a less interesting place than Opportunity. Still they spent days taking pictures of the lander. I think they could have done better by driving farther, sooner, and they'd bee almost to those hills by now.
(2) It was announced with great enthusiasm that the rover teams were going to "go to mars time" which meant each person would report to work during the Martian day for the rover they worked with and go home for the corresponding Martian night. Within a couple of weeks they were all complaining about how horrible this was. It's called jet-lag otherwise, but most of the staff seemed unable to cope with it. So why hadn't they experimented with that during the several years it took the rovers to get to Mars? It's almost as if they didn't actually expect both landers to land successfully, so they never bothered with the logistics that would be involved. Now, according to the last press conference they have had to re-invent their planning process so that more can be done during the Earth day and they seem willing to sacrifice some downtime for the rovers activities when the Martian day and Earth day don't coincide. At least that's the way it sounded to me.
(3) Personnel changes: The director of the mission (I forget his name) got promoted several weeks after the landings. Couldn't that have waited a few more months? I rather know how government works, and this promotion thing is just about all they think about, but why shuffle everyone around now? I would think maybe after both rovers had passed the 90 day mark would be a better time for any discretionary staff changes.
(4) Reporting to the public. It really started out great, with live video of the control center during both landings, daily press conferences and a great web interface for making pictures available to the public. But I really don't understand why you get different content if you go to http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/ than when you go to http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html Seems clear to me the first one should just point to the second one. Looks like a case of dueling webmasters to me. But my real gripe is how quickly the coverage has scaled back. The press conferences went from daily, to 3 times a week, to once a week to every other week, and then turned away from raw information sharing to more dramatic presentations from the east coast. Other forms of communications rapidly tapered off too. For example the simple two minute long flight directors update is now much less frequent. At least the text based updates are still daily, almost. I've wondered whether this was more a burn-out issue or if public interest has dropped off that fast. In either case, Americans sure have a short attention span these days. You would wonder whether the expected "lifetime" of 90 days for the landers didn't almost
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.
Well, it depends. If that life is a few bacterias, then no, it won't make any difference here. On the other hand, if that life is a bunch of bloodthirsty technologically advanced aliens waking from a million-year hibernation and setting their sights on Earth... Then tadah, we now have a common enemy, and humanity will immediately unite since we now have better targets than each other for our homicidial tendencies.
This has nothing to do with idealism, it's simple survival. We root for ourselves first, our kin second, our tribe (nation) third, and humanity in general fourth. If we have no accomplishments of our own to feel pride over, then we are proud of our family/nation.
Nothing would pacify the world like an alien invasion.
And nothing will enrage humans more than competition. "How dare they take our jobs/homes/solar system !?! DIE ALIEN SCUM !!!"
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
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 !
Maybe now that we're experts in Martian exploration we can send one of these to Iraq to finally find the WMDs or to SCO to locate the infringing code.
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!
Did anybody else notice the top-of-the-hour news announcement on Air America, I think, that the mission was extended and the probes would "remain on Mars"? Yup, I bet they will. Few things amuse me more than confused science reporting.
Yeah, that's because both the German trivia master and the Japanese engineer are living in the USA and are working for innovative American companies and universities.
Or at least, they were back in the 20th century. Now the Department of Homeland Bureaucracy imposes vast amounts of red tape on foreign nationals. (Don't you dare go home to Germany for a visit - you might not be allowed back into the US.) Meanwhile, foreigners (as well as American citizens) can be imprisoned without trial. And the President has declared war on stem cell research.
I wonder which nation will become known for innovation in the 21st century?
Can I ask what you did, what your major was, etc. before you got to work on this project?
:)
Well basically I just went in and interviewed to work for Professor Squyres as a freshman in 2000, my very first week of school at Cornell University. After that I landed internships at JPL every summer working on related software. I picked up the skills I needed on the way, however I had been programming since 3rd grade. The design aspects were actually much more difficult than the programming. I'm now one semester away from my bachelors degree in Applied Physics w/ minor in Computer Science.
I really, really want to work in space operations and my original plan was to join the Navy, log some military high-performance jet flight time, then either get out and go to grad school or go to Naval War College for engineering. Unfortunately, the Navy idea has since been nixed and now I'm sort of floating around and not knowing what my next step should be.
Well, I know software engineers at JPL that didn't even major in computer science. They key is too get a degree, some 'leet skills, and then interview. It's almost impossible to get fired from somewhere like JPL (my boss says "You don't just have to be criminally incompetant, you have to actually be a criminal") which means that they are very selective about who they hire. If you're serious about it, the best thing you can do is get a hardcore education (masters degree from prestigeous university helps) and then interview. The pay isn't great but the perks (working with badass equipment, exploring the universe, etc) more than outweigh that
I would just take the GRE and apply to grad schools (probably for Comp. E. or maybe AE), but I'm afraid that might be a little too directionless. Are there research assistantships available anywhere you know of that are looking for people and are willing to pay your way (or at least most of your way) through grad school? Basically I'd like to hear what path you took and what you think would be a good way to get started.
Direction is something that has to come from inside you, not from a structured program. There's absolutely nothing wrong with going for a graduate degree before deciding where you want to go with your career. I'd actually suggest it because it's harder to get back into school after you leave. I do know a lot of companies pay for their employees to earn their masters degrees though. My friend at RSA Security is doing this.
In short I don't know what you should do. I'd suggest reading the NASA center websites, looking at what criteria they are specifically looking for, and calling the HR department. I know there are people who are "Accademic Part Time" at JPL and study while working (some at the undergrad level!) You might look into that.
As long as you feel you have what it takes, you just need to talk to the right people and find out what to do. I'm still working on my career (eventually I'll have a PhD in physics and do computational physics of some kind).
Cheers,
Justin Wick
Just a thought.
Remember that movie Silent Running? Or the tribute at the end of Babylon 5 to Silent Running where they blew up the station because of Navigational Hazards?
I was just wondering if there was a 'kill' switch or plans to Euthenasia the two rovers when they're crawling across the mars scape with a half productive wheel drive, or a crotchy old camera arm trying to fullfill their latest commands?
Its kinda sad..
When the Pioneers and Voyagers crawled across deep space with stiff fingers as it were.. they got a second chance.. and proved they could make it to Galactic frontier before going silent.
But on the other hand.. if they're never silenced.. will the martian rovers become the new Flying Dutchmen of mars? The Mary Celeste where future travelers will listen for whispers from corners of mars long since abandonned.. but pleas for new commands go unanswered?
Once every Summer season when the Sun rises in the murky Martian sky.. and the sandstorms have accidentally swept their solar panels clean.. will they wake like the Ghosts of Mars and call
home?
Sounds silly.. a martian Ghost story..
I'm sure NASA will carefully park them in some well known crater.. and generations from now they'll wind up in a Martian Smithsonian Annex exhibit near Gustave Crater.
- john