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

It's NOT "occupation".

[Dark Lord Seth]

It's "liberation" instead, people.

NASA Press release 4/8

[morcheeba]

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

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.

Let's hear it again for JPL

[Steve the Rocket Sci]

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.

Re:Almost first post

[Mal-2]

Even with range limitations they're hardly useless. Both rovers landed in relatively fertile areas for exploration, and Opportunity would have still been a big success even if it proved unable to leave the crater it landed in. The main thing that comes to my mind is to find the edges of the ancient ocean and explore there -- partly because tidepools on Earth are teeming with life, and partly because shallow water means fossils (if present) won't be buried very deep. I noticed very early on that the rocks Opportunity was looking at looked an awful lot like tidepool rocks, at least ones from the eastern Pacific shore (the only ones I've seen firsthand). I knew there was good reason for NASA to be REALLY damn sure before announcing there was a lot of water on Mars at one time, but I pretty well was convinced as soon as I saw those distinctive wormholed rocks.

However, it looks like their lifespan will be determined by a few factors, some of which are within human control and some which are not:

1. Dust storms. Seems to me one good one would pretty well take a rover out of service from dust buildup on the panels alone.

2. Equipment failure, particularly the "always on and draining power" type. One has already made Opportunity a little bit gimpy, but I doubt a single such failure would be fatal. Cumulatively, several would just be too much to bear.

3. Shorter and/or darker Martian days as the seasons and distance from the sun change. This won't take out a rover outright of course, but they could compound the prior two problems. At least these events are predictable.

4. The Martian Defense System finally tracks the rovers down and explodes them. Turns out the reason they didn't shoot the first time is they thought it was just another shipment of punching balloons for their nitrous oxide-fueled nightlife. Once they realize we sent ROVERS and not RAVERS, they're going to be mighty pissed off.

Mal-2

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

[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.

Name a rock, 'Tux'

[Megaport]

Actually, my friend Merideth considers herself to be the feature-naming goddess for Spirit, so if /.ers will reply to this post with possible names, I'll put in one of the highest moderated ones for consideration.

Hi Justin,
How about we get the ball rolling by naming a rock 'Tux', after the Linux mascot penguin?