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."

Comments

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[madaxe42]

They make it sound like the rover is undergoing a massive risk, and doing something utterly untoward, by entering the crater - this is nothing new in science - the majority of space probes are designed for limited function, and not to survive their missions, witness voyager and the like.

Why would they stop working?

[lancomandr]

Because the Mars Spirit and Opportunity rovers are in such great condition and 'keep going and going'

Could someone please explain to me what exactly would cause a rover that cost $400 million to develop and deploy to fail after several months? I'm not trying to start a ruckus. Perhaps I should've kept up more but I honestly wonder what causes these rovers to cease functioning. It seems like the expectations for home robotics kits greatly exceed those of the Mars rovers. Hopefully someone can explain it.

Re:Why would they stop working?

[twoshortplanks]

They run out of power. The units are recharged by solar panels which stop working as well over time as they slowly get covered by dust and dirt that can't be cleaned off.

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.

Re:Why would they stop working?

[SB5]

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...

Re:Why would they stop working?

[Pete Brubaker]

Seems like a prime opportunity for a nuclear powered rover! I mean seriously, couldnt we have a nice little home base nuclear reactor for the thing to plug into? Perhaps it's or even housed within itself?

That might actually make it more worth the $400m pricetag.

Re:Why would they stop working?

[Sven-Erik]

And to avoid the risk of launching rockets with nuclear material, this would be perfect for basing this on a lunar base that extracts nuclear materials, process it and launch rockets with nuclear-powered rovers, probes etc.

This lunar base should probably be based somewhere around Mare Imbrium where there most likely are concentrations high enough.

Re:Why would they stop working?

[mrright]

You can thank the fear of everything nuclear for this. Usually you would run a mars rover from a RTG. That way they would have enough power to run the rover continuously for years, and also enough heat to make sure none of the components fails because of excessive thermal cycling.

But since nuclear==BAD, they have to run the rover from a solar cell which gives only a tiny trickle of power during the daytime and none at all during the night. All components are subject to massive thermal cycling. So sooner or later either the solar panel will be too coated with dust to work, or the battery will no longer work, or components will fail because of excessive thermal cycling.

Note that all of these problems would be trivial to avoid if you had 50W electrical power and 1kw thermal power continuously, like you would get from a tiny RTG.
--

Re:Why would they stop working?

[Jugalator]

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.

Re:Why would they stop working?

[david.given]

hey hey kids, and what happens when;

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.

Re:Why would they stop working?

[HeghmoH]

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.

Re:Why would they stop working?

[foidulus]

What is even more interesting is that the interest on the debt is about 4.5 times what we spend on education, and about 18 times what we spend on NASA. Maybe we should reduce that number first, gives more money for everything else.
My offtopic 2 cents.

Worth It

[ErichTheWebGuy]

Looking at deeper martian bedrock layers is considered now a rich enough science payoff

In my humble opinion, the geological data that might be extracted fom such a deep crater is more than worth it. Just think, potentially millions of years of Martian history, and who knows, maybe even a fossil or two? Wouldn't that be sweet?

Way to go NASA, for considering the bigger picture in the face of losing such a wonderfully resilient craft. Although, I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility that a manned mission could someday retrieve the rover, and bring it all the way back to the Smithsonian.

Re:Worth It

[Darkon]

I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility that a manned mission could someday retrieve the rover, and bring it all the way back to the Smithsonian.

I'd like to think that by the time we have people on Mars with the equipment and time to go looking for old rovers and the like, we might have a museum on Mars itself to put them in.

Re:Worth It

[AndroidCat]

People being people, by that time we'd also have protests and demonstrations by the Free Mars Movement over the removing of historic artifacts of Mars' past from their native land.

Exciting, but perhaps down is the way...

[InternationalCow]

It's really exciting science. I am still marveling at the fact that we can see actual pictures of the surface of Mars, from millions of kilometers away, as if we are looking at someone's holiday snapshots... I do wish, however, that NASA (or ESA) would turn all this ingenuity someday to an area that is even less explored than the surface of Mars or the Moon - our deep sea. Every time a mission goes out there, new species are discovered. The pay-off that may be generated by having a good look at our seas may be much greater than that of space exploration. Some of the reagents we use in the lab are derived from sea animals and have enabled us to gain deep insight into molecular biology. And I should think that the technical challenges of deep sea exploration should be worthy of the best NASA engineers' skills. Come on, guys, down is the way to go, not up :)

Re:Exciting, but perhaps down is the way...

[M1FCJ]

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.

NASA should have consulted Q

[Alain Williams]

Looking at the picture of the crater, the rover presumably may not have enough grip to get out.

If only NASA had fitted the tyre grips used by James Bond in 'Die Another Day', it is not as if they cost a lot .

Falling down?

[anshil]

I actually wonder if the only real danger as the story posts constits of never getting out of the crater, but actually also to make a safe journey downward without stumbling, falling and bursting? (Then you've a wreckage without any scientific data to make it payoff)

Re:Falling down?

[Technonotice_Dom]

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...

We're in the future

[aussie_a]

NASA hopes both rovers will remain functional until at least September.

As people we often take everything for granted. Unfortunately it's just too difficult to constantly be amazed by everything around us (take a moment to think about how a computer works, it's fucking amazing). But this article really does show this isn't the present but the future. We have rovers on another fucking planet.

I remember thinking that the rovers wouldn't land successfully. But now they have and they're roaming around another planet. I'm sorry, but that's just amazing to me. And the above quote just reminded me.

Shadows?

[bigattichouse]

Going down in the crater will decrease the rover's daily income of sunlight, won't it.. granted maybe only a few seconds. But those seconds will add up to shave that lifespan down quite a bit.