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

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?

[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.
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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?

[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.

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.

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.