NASA Extends Rover Occupation of Mars

iocat writes "Reuters reporting that NASA is extending the Rover missions on Mars by another five months. However, they point out that while the rovers look poised to greatly exceed their planned life cycle, they could basically die at any time. Still, it will be cool to see a little more exploration."

Comments

NASA Press release 4/8

[morcheeba]

This was posted on JPL's rover site on Thursday. It's got a lot more info.

Duplicate?

[WayneConrad]

For more comments, see this article from the 11th.

Re:Almost first post

[Jott42]

If memory serves me, they have a range of 30-75 meters /day, after the recent sofware upgrade. Which would give a maximum distance of over 11km, given that they dont find anything interesting on they way and starts investigating it.

Re:unmanned missions

[anzha]

If these things prove 1/50 as durable as Galileo did

If I may extract something I read from a post on Usenet a few years ago by a real astronomer (Frank Crary) about Galileo:

JPL and NASA say that Galileo accomplished 80% of its science goals, and they got that number (as I understand it) by going through the list of science goals, giving each a yes/no value, and dividing the number of yes's by the number of items. Usually, it isn't that simple. There is, ``yes, but not as well as we wanted'',``definitely yes, but we could have done better'', ``no but we still got some good data along those lines'', etc. Nor were all the goals of equal value, although you could argue endlessly about which were worth more than others. Then you get into the never-never land of things that were not on that list. I'm fairly sure that magnetometer data on the existence of an ocean on Europa wasn't on the list, and I'm quite sure that similar data on an ocean within Callisto definitely wasn't (just to use one example I'm familiar with.) Often, when you observe something, you discover something you did not expect to find. In several cases, Galileo has done that. Would there have been more unexpected discoveries if the high gain antenna had opened? Yes, definitely. But how many and how important? How can you attach a number to something like that? I would say that Galileo is a success, but not a complete success, and that the sum total of the scientific results is between 50 and 100% of what it might have achieved. I don't know, and I don't even know how to figure out, where between 50 and 100% the ``real'' value is.

That's from here.

Two notes.

First being that Galileo didn't provide more science than we hoped for. In many ways, it provided a lot less than we hoped for. I'm not calling it a failure, BTW.

Secondly, be careful whatcha say online...it might come back to haunt ya years down the line. ;)

Software Issues

[QuantumFTL]

All the scientists here at JPL are very happy to see that we'll be getting more science, however one of the issues is that we're going to be moving to a less efficient planning cycle, planning for two days per rover at a time. Also it will all be being done on earth time, which is nice for scientists, however it means things have to be planned very far in advance.

Also one of the problems we are experiencing is that a lot of the mission software was originally designed to only run at JPL on our computing environment, and is very difficult to take back to home institutions because it is so specialized.

I'm currently working on making the Science Activity Planner (the tool used by all scientists to do high level planning before they start sequencing) work collaboratively over the web. It's exciting because we're dramatically increasing the amount of people who can participate in high level planning. You can grab the public version, called Maestro, here.

One of the other challenges is the bandwidth and latency associated with transfering autogenerated data products (imagery etc) to all of our satalite institutions. I'm currently working on ways to reduce the necessary bandwidth but without lossy compression there's only so much one can do.

Anyways, this part of the mission will test out a paradigm known as "Distributed Mission Operations". You can download a paper written by my supervisor about how this was used on Pathfinder here.

Future mars missions will last far too long to bring scientists away from their home institutions and pay for temporary housing etc (which is a significant cost). Scientists want to be with their collegues and families during the long periods of exploration.

Hopefully this will prove that it is both feasible and desireable. There are several studies going on about this, but I'm not aware of any relevant links.

Cheers,
Justin Wick
Science Activity Planner Developer
Mars Exploration Rovers

Re:Almost first post

[snake_dad]

Opportunity already drove 100 meters in one day. Ofcourse the terrain on Meridiani is completely different compared to Gusev.

Re:Almost first post

[Sgs-Cruz]

For those who, like me, aren't astrophysicists and had to look up an RTG, it's a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator. Basically a nuclear power source for the rover.

Re:You must mean "dust-proof coating"

[isaac]

You must mean "dust-proof coating". Given that there is no water on Mars and almost no oxygen, rust would not be much of a problem.

Actually, Mars is red precisely because of rust - iron oxide. Quite a bit of the dust, particularly the hematite-bearing stuff at the Opportunity site, is composed of iron oxides - the dust is rust!

Incidentally, it's suspected that the reason there's not significant molecular oxygen in the Martian atmosphere is precisely because it's been locked up in the iron-rich surface.

-Isaac

Re:Almost first post

[AKAImBatman]

The problem is RTG could contaiminate the planet.

No, it wouldn't. Not any more than the rover itself. There's millions of tons of radioactive material impacting every planet in the solar system each year. A pound of Plutonium-238 won't make a lick of difference. Besides, it's not like the stuff leaks like radiator fluid or something. It's just a hot rock that sits in the center of its container.