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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."
I wonder how much terrain these rovers can explore in 5 months, or if they're basically useless because of range limitations?
It's "liberation" instead, people.
Hate me!
It's an occupation of Mars now? I thought the were just tourists.
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"However, while Spirit is past its 'warranty', we look forward to continued discoveries by both rovers in the months ahead."
Maybe they should have gotten that rust-proof coating after all.
Unmanned missions are great. Humans can run out of food and air, and get tired and homesick. Robots can run basically forever, until something breaks or they run out of juice. If these things prove 1/50 as durable as Galileo did, they'll provide science more than we ever could have hoped for.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
Who would have thought they would extend it again this soon after extending it the first time?
Burn Hollywood Burn
Its always good for future missions if the current ones exceed expectations.
Looking at Mars, now a distant orange glow in the sky, it amazes me that we have intelligence there.
Good job NASA.
This was posted on JPL's rover site on Thursday. It's got a lot more info.
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wouldn't it make sense to initially plan the mission for as long as the rovers remain operational, however long that may be?
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
I expect at least part of the reason is because it is inexpensive. According to the Reuters report, "NASA said it would spend $15 million more to keep the rivers exploring the planet's surface through September." Can you think of a more cost-effective way for NASA to spend that money?
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has done it again, it would seem. When the Voyager 1 and 2 missions were launched in 1977, they estimated that they would only last until the encounter with Saturn roughly four years later. Now, in 2004, they are still returning useful data, at a distance of over 90 AU from the Sun (in comparison, Pluto is only 40 AU from it). Sure, they had their problems during the mission, but it looks like Spirit and Opportunity may share a similar quality construction. It's definite that they won't last 27 years, but with how well they are functioning, I think the only limit will be the Martian dust collecting on their solar panels. When they Next Generation Rover lands on Mars in the latter part of this decade, it will hopefully use nuclear power, and overcome this obstacle.
Unmanned missions are great.
So Are manned ones in the right context like Mars.
Humans can run out of food and air, and get tired and homesick.
On Mars humans can make their own air water and food provided a power source like a portable nuclear reactor and the air and ground around them. It's called living in-situ. As long as you don't send flakes, the homesickness isn't an issue. They're allowed to sleep and would have more waking time than the rovers so I wouldn't worry about them getting "tired".
Robots can run basically forever, until something breaks or they run out of juice.
You just contradicted yourself there.
If these things prove 1/50 as durable as Galileo did, they'll provide science more than we ever could have hoped for.
Perhaps but humans on the surface would have been able to work faster and smarter these probes. Galileo was well suited to its mission and a human would not have been. In the case of Mars, humans are much better suited.
Blaze a trail to the New World
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
while the rovers look poised to greatly exceed their planned life cycle, they could basically die at any time.
Kinda like Dick Clark?
"Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion." - Democritus
Every day or so, I head over to this site to check out the latest images. Some of the high-res color photos look like something I could have shot with my digital camera out in the desert somewhere, but then I remember: they were taken on ANOTHER FREAKING PLANET. It really is a amazing thing to be alive to see. The folks at NASA and the JPL should be proud of themselves.
Personally I'm sort of tired of all the "cute" stuff. Like the wakup music and the rock names.
It's like reading a wedding announcement or something. "And the chief scientist wore a stunning black outfit, and his research maids wore matching green shirts with long sleeves rolled up. Custom pencils were used by all. The guests were delighted to see palm pilots made available for everyone, each customized with a charming orange Mars theme!"
Mozilla is red like Mars. Mozilla is strong like a rock. Scientists know Mozilla. Mozilla will go to Mars, and followers of Mammon will cower in horror :-)
Hi Justin,
How about we get the ball rolling by naming a rock 'Tux', after the Linux mascot penguin?
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