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Mars Rovers on New Missions
mycro writes "According to CNN, the Mars rovers are on a brand new mission. Because the Mars Spirit and Opportunity rovers are in such great condition and 'keep going and going', NASA will be using them for a longer period of time to study water, rocks, and formations on Mars." An anonymous reader writes "Today NASA has given its Opportunity rover a green light to enter the steep Endurance crater. Looking at deeper martian bedrock layers is considered now a rich enough science payoff to weigh favorably against the real chance that the rover cannot get back out of the crater."
Also every action the rovers take place them in danger, so there's risk associated with every day of their existance - if they get stuck, it's not like there's anyone there to pull them off a rock or turn them back over.
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
It's down to power mostly, as I understand it. These things are powered by solar panels, and Mars has quite a volitile weather system. I assume that the creators expect this little things to at some point get buried in dust, and no longer be able to get power.
The solar panels get covered with dust, and NASA has investigated solutions to stop that even using windshield washer type things and what not... all the solutions turned out to be worthless, impractical, and a waste of weight... NASA likes to equip multiple backup systems and they simply can't with that. Ultimately the solar panel cannot collect enough power and the battery dies... Mars isn't exactly a very nice enviroment to work in either... dust storms that last for days or longer...
Home robotics kits couldn't do nearly anything these guys do... We would have to send HUNDREDs of home robotics kits to even get close to the results of a couple of our rovers... The failure rate would be higher on those kits too...
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
Mostly, there's the problem of power. These robots are operating with only solar cells for additional power, much farther away from the sun, and in an extremely dusty/sandy environment.
The wind, sand, and dust puts a lot of stress on the rest of the mechanical workings, too.
The next one will. Not fission but thermal.
From the pictures in the link it doesn't look that difficult to get a rover into - I think the main problem is traction when trying to get it out.
According to NASA they're aluminium wheels and their main purpose looks like it was to absorb the shock and go over rocks than get the traction required to climb back out of a crater.
I'd imagine they have quite a bit of weight behind them too...
Well, you have the "deep sea" equivalent of NASA, called NOAA - National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration that explore the deep seas.
- "Every demand is a prison, and wisdom is only free when it asks nothing." Sir Betrand Russell
Just think of all the children that could have been fed with this $400 million. :( Or all the landmines that could be removed. Instead, we get playtoys for stupid white men. Micheal Moore needs to do his next expose on "science".
Think how many poor people the king of Spain could have fed with all the money he spend on Christopher Columbus' search for a new route to Asia. Had the king of Spain given the money to the poor, and assuming you are an American, I doubt you would be here on Slashdot trolling about the uselesness of science and exploration.
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Sure we could process the nuclear fuel on the moon! It's easy! All we have to do is set up an entire mining and refining and launch complex complete with those P2 centrifuges the Iranians aren't using. Then all we have to do is transfer it to the launch facility and put it in a mars-bound orbit.
Seriously; the cost for producing usable nuclear fuel on the moon would make the cost of the rover look tiny.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
You must be kidding. With all those ships moving around, do you think oceans are nice and clean? The bottom is full of muck, dead animals, plants and lots of junk. Check this Guardian article about what's happening to Titanic because of all the rubbish.
Just think of all the children that could have been fed with this $400 million. :( Or all the landmines that could be removed. Instead, we get playtoys for stupid white men. Micheal Moore needs to do his next expose on "science".
Why do these comments always come up when NASA's budget is neglible compared to others? In the big picture, NASA's funding has given them a hard time to find things already, since the government need the money for military funding. Oops, weren't you just argumenting against these things?
The Federal Pie Chart
NASA gets in total $15.5 billion for fiscal year 2004. Compare that to the billions in the pie chart above.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
a) the thing blows up in launch before you get it out into space. = some shit on the bottom of a sea bed somewhere (yes I know there is little risk of it going into the atmosphere.)
They're in really, really tough boxes. If your booster explodes, you comb through the debris, find the RTG still intact in its box, and recycle it --- they're expensive. (This has actually happened.)
b) you get nuclear waste "stuck" somewhere on top of a rock.
It's in a really, really tough box. It's not going anywhere and it won't leak.
c) you use a shortcut with nuclear fuel. Sure it might be better "now" but in principle running things of solar is damned fine engineering. Not only that, but any tech advancements that are made for space (remember the public is paying for all your little space toys, while people starve no less) can filter down to people everywhere.
I'm sorry, this paragraph makes no sense. RTGs are made of nuclear fuel, that's how they work. Yes, solar panels are good engineering, but RTGs are far more suitable for solving the job at hand. Yes, the public is paying, but space exploration is a pathetically tiny amount of money compared to what's spent on welfare or the armed forces, and the extra knowledge gained by extending the lifespan of the probe probably outweighs the (tiny) extra expense. Yes, technology trickles down, but solar panels are fundamentally only useful for certain specialised tasks on Earth, and they're approaching the theoretical maximum efficiency anyway; there are a lot of tasks for which RTGs --- even on Earth --- would be really handy. And there isn't any research being done into those because people think 'nuclear' rhymes with 'evil'.
I'm afraid everything you've said indicates that you've bought into the anti-nuclear propaganda. Try doing some research and getting an opinion of your own.
This has been discussed to death. The people working on these rovers are very smart, and they surely thought of this idea. Wiper blades imply a hefty wiper-blade subsystem, meaning less weight available to devote to other subsystems. Moreover, the solar cells are merely the first system likely to fail; find a way to keep them alive indefinitely, and you find something else that will die (such as the rechargeable batteries) in short order.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
I don't know the exact reason why solar power was chosen over nuclear power. Suffice it to say, an informed decision was made that weighed all of the pros and cons of all power generating technologies.
Furthermore, this "$400m each pricetag" is a red heering. The Mars Exploration Rover Project was funded with $800m. This included Spirit, Opportunity, and their identical twin rover which remains on Earth for testing (and certainly will become a museum piece sometime in the future). It pays for design, testing, development, and Q/A. It pays for the launch, cruise, and landing on Mars. The $800m includes the cost of staffing mission control around the clock, and pays for the time used on the Deep Space Network to send and receive commands and data.
Most importantly, the $800m pays for a mission that is done right. Looking at all the cost cutting the led to the loss of the Mars Polar Lander, the inadequate testing/contingency planning leading to the loss of the Beagle 2, the ongoing problems with the shuttle... I think the cost is cheap.
things that have been a direct result of the space program (like ball-point pens)
Huh?
The history of the ball point pen
"By 1950, Paper-mate was making good, cheap ball-point pens, and in 1954, the Parker pen company, which had stood aloof from the fray, brought out a quality ball-point. In 1957, the badly wounded Eversharp sold its pen division to Parker, and Eversharp assets were finally liquidated in the 1960s."
Fascinating facts about the invention of the Ballpoint Pen by Ladislas Biro in 1935.
History of Office Products: Ballpoint Pen
I believe he was talking about the space pen that was developed to work in zero gravitiy conditions.
I love it when people get facts distorted and toss them around anyway. It's so easy nowaways to just look things up. I guess laziness will never go away.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
Also, they also rely on water to keep the glass clean. Water is very heavy, and would be very expensive to ship all the way to Mars.
There is also the fact that water cannot currently exist on the surface of Mars in liquid form.
If you try to wipe off the dust without getting the surface wet, you scratch the surface and end up with a worse problem than dust. So in addition to your $20 blades (actually much more expensive because you'd need material that survives extremely cold temp), you'd need to find a fluid system that doesn't freeze at those temperatures, doesn't boil at that low pressure, doesn't interfere with any of the scientific instruments, and doesn't dissolve the panels or wiper components. To save weight you might try to recycle the fluid, introducing a filtration system, but there will be unavoidable loss to evaporation (it has to or it will remain and attract dust), so you'll need to bring more than enough for one wipe. Then one of your fellow engineers complains because the volume, mass, and energy requirements of your wiper system has bumped their scientific instrument out of the final design. An accountant finds your cost estimate was off by some 5 orders of magnitude. You're fired.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
You can get that now for free. I've been using NASA's Maestro program since Spirit landed. You get EVERY raw feed from the probes (pics before processing, out of focus, ones with the wheels in the way, etc). It's very cool. Try it out.
Considering columbus didn't discover america, nor even north america, nor the giant seperate landmass which includes north america and south america. I'd say nothing much was at risk. The vikings were here long before columbus.
So you are saying that Columbus had no influence on colonizing America? That's bull. Vikings may be the first Europeans to visit America, but they had absolutely ZERO influence on European colonization plans. Nobody else knew they had been in the New World. After Columbus found/rediscovered the America/Cuba the colonization of America started to catch wind.
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