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Rovers May Survive Martian Winter
yokem_55 writes "According to this article on Yahoo News, Mars rover engineers are beginning to consider the possibility that the rovers may be able to survive the oncoming Martian winter in a hibernation mode, and then return to activity when spring returns to the red planet. The article ends with a quote from Steve Squires speculating that, 'we're looking at the final demise of these vehicles perhaps as late as the onset of our second winter on Mars.'"
Why wouldn't this work in the first place, a couple of solar cells and you're good to go?
I'm probably missing something.
The way they put it, the rovers are on the ground and suddenly somebody at NASA went "Oh crap, winter's coming!" and the solution they came up with is to put them on sleep mode, cross their fingers for a long amount of time, and see if the screensaver's still on when spring comes. Couldn't they prepare better for this or did I miss something?
Always nice to see the reminder that NASA can do great fucking engineering when the mission is properly separated from politics.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
Does anyone else get the feeling that the rovers were actually designed to last this long, but the lifespan that was published was a PR version that was extraordinarily short, so that in the event the rovers didn't last this long, they could save having to answer questions?
Plus if it worked to spec, they could spin it up like this now, saying it lasted way beyond spec?
Anyway, I'm not complaining, it's good that the rovers are still healthy and are expected to last longer.. it's way overdue.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
Just a question I am curious about: given that the problem of dust buildup degrading the operation of the solar panels was anticipated, was there no way of incorporating some cleaning mechanism?
It is utterly inhumane to send them to Mars without building a hut for it to hibernate through the winter.
Dude! it is a robot!
IT FUCKING FLEW THROUGH MILLIONS OF MILES OF SPACE.
They're NASA, you're just some chump behind a computer.
Lets just hope they park them somewhere out of the worst of the weather. Oh, and that they remembered to pack the jump leads.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
As a system admin/engineer/operater etc etc, the wait for something to come up again, and seeing something like the following is a nice and satisfying feeling:
.......
Rover>ping -t mars_rover
Pinging mars_rover with 32 bytes of data:
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Reply from 192.168.1.2: bytes=32 time=2ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.1.2: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.1.2: bytes=32 time=6ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.1.2: bytes=32 time=6ms TTL=64
Ping statistics for 192.168.1.2:
Packets: Sent = 9, Received = 4, Lost = 5 (55% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 1ms, Maximum = 6ms, Average = 3ms
Well, I hope _somebody_ remembered to pack the snow chains...?
You know it doesn't sound half as funny as it did 20 years ago, stuck in an overladen Volvo estate halfway up a French mountain with night closing in.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
It seems that with many recent NASA missions they greatly underestimate the capabilities and timelines , then act like something is a great big bonus if it actually outlasts or outperforms the underestimated goal.
Sure... this is one way to make sure people are not disappointed, because if you always tell people the lowest goal then they'll only be overjoyed if it does any better... but is this the new way forwards?
**FREE** Track and view your phone's via CellID and/or WIFI and/or GPS
But found that with all of the weight constraints, it was easier to simply have larger panels than they needed. I heard about it on an interview over on NPR.
I know i'm asking for the imposible here, but couldn't you have read the article first before asking us to spend time telling you things that are already in the article? WTF makes our time so cheap, and you so precious that we have to digest this short article for you so you dont have to read it!
Anyhow to awnser your question, allow me to quote the article: "Part of the wintering over strategy will involve positioning the rovers to soak up as much continuous sunlight, even as the Sun moves low in the martian sky, Bell said. Secondly, the robots are to be oriented so that communications links with orbiters zipping overhead is maximized, he pointed out."
In otherwords, they will go into low power mode, but not be switched off, and hopefully be positioned so that they wont loose communication for very long, if ever
I always wanted to play with a teleguided car too, when I was little.
Damn *%$!%& Santa never brought one.....sob...
Even though I RTFA, I still don't know when spring will come on Mars. If I remember correctly the Martian year is about twice as long as Earth's year (or was it?). But what about the seasons?
Bitten Apples are still better than dirty Windows...
A-ha. I thought they were concerned that the winter temperature may be too harsh for the rovers (wouldn't space be colder than the surface of mars? Notwithstanding direct sunlight). However the article mentions: "Right now, we're seeing a pretty sharp drop off in solar power on both vehicles. That's a consequence of both the onset of winter and declining solar power because of the dust build-up" So wiat until spring when hopefully everything will fire up with more solar power.
On the next mission, include windshield wipers for in solar collector design!
From article: "If both of those things hold out, then what is probably going to get us is dust build-up on the solar arrays"
Maybe they were made by Toyota?
On a more serious note I remember reading that after a certain amount of time in this extended mission they would have shut the rovers down because they didn't have the money to keep the control room going, but I guess as they're talking about keeping them going longer still I'd hope they've been able to find a bit more cash
They would hang if you tried to put them in sleep mode and wouldn't wake up ;P
The article doesn't go into enough details, but I would think that even in the worst Martian winter the solar panels would generate *some* power, with battery backup for the worst storms.
You're right to say that if you were to keep in continuous radio contact it would use too much power, but waiting for the spring and then getting into radio contact shouldn't use that much power. After all, the rovers will have been in hibernation for many months on the journey to mars.
"As a writer / novelist you might want to spellcheck your sig.
should have wings so they can fly south in the winter and then back again in spring.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
que the pro-RTG anti-solar zealots.
que me not caring.
Yes there are safe nuclear designs. Yes they are more "efficient". But if you are going to fund research give it a DUAL purpose, because we could use advances in solar down here too. It's not just blind enviro ranting. Think what improved solar could get us:
Houses independent of power grids.
Single person cars totally solar and larger cars topped up (who knows how powerful they could get).
Also battery technology research benefits from this. Which we sorely need for laptops, electric cars, independent house units, wifi etc. etc.
I got shit-canned last time I suggested solar was good by the RTG lobby here at slashdot. I was characterised as some enviro-loonie. But there are just too many fringe benefits to advancing solar and battery technology that allow money spend by NASA to double up for applications here on earth. And lets face it, NASA gets a hell of alot of money for poking around on some rocks.
It is smart environmentally.
It is smart economically.
And yes RTGs would have been better if you only measure by ONE metric.
Hey tell Nasa that to survice the winters on mars they only have to get some guy to go into the mountain where the alien machine is placed. But your hand on some funny looking device with a hand holder thing. once your hand goes in the hand holder thing the machine will melt all the stored ice and create an atmosphere.
Duh!!
You would think they would have seen "Total Recall" already, what have they been doing?
I wonder if the Martians will think they're some kind of strange tortoise, and put them away in a cardboard box?
Linux/Open Source/Anti Microsoft News
well, why would dust build up to such large levels, wont the dust just blow off?
o well, if i had had something with this project to do, i would have made a nuklear reactor, so thta they could run continous for the next 50 years, but thats me.....
I missed the June 8th press conference. Anyone have a link to a free archive of it?
When I read this, the first thing to pop into my mind was the theme song from Gilligan's Island: "A three hour tour..."
-?-
So, here's the problem.
NASA does astronomy. To be very blunt and honest, astronomy provides very few concrete short-term benefits.
Most people think in the very short term when it comes to deciding who should get money -- and when politicians are strapped for cash for a project, NASA is always a likely source of money to divert.
As a result, it's always an uphill battle for NASA's research to get funded.
This is why NASA spends so much effort marketing what they have done -- for instance, providing free, beautiful pictures that consist entirely of false-color images that have been tweaked by hand to look attractive...they're more a credit to the artistic nature of the postprocessors than to the people doing the research itself.
One major problem is mission failures. The response to NASA getting mission failures appears to be a counterintuitive "cut their budget". My guess is that when positive public opinion and awareness of NASA goes up (as with successful missions), NASA's likelihood of getting funding increases markedly.
So all NASA has to do is make significant public underestimates of their mission potentials. That way, after completing, say, 10% of their expected work, they can announce that the mission "is a success". When the mission finally does end, the media can crow about how it "vastly exceeded anyone's wildest imaginations", and make public lots of hand-retouched images.
That doesn't mean I disapprove of what they're doing. I like seeing basic research being funded, and I don't think that there's a really good alternative method for NASA to get money.
It does mean, however, that it's *very* unlikely that this is an off-the-cuff decision by an engineer at NASA. It's a good bet that they have pre-made strategies for dealing with dust, extreme temperature change, power loss, signal loss, failure of particular systems, etc.
May we never see th
You gotta give these people credit.
Not only did they build a robot that flew millions of miles through space, survived a crazy landing, and has held up in alien terrain, but now they're extending the life of the robot long past what it's meant.
Those original engineers must be thrilled to see the robots lasting this long.
Props to NASA
The greatest experience we can have is the mysterious.
- Albert Einstein
Are they fully comp, or third-party only? If the latter, do NASA know something we don't!?
.
They will never know the simple pleasure of a monkey knife fight
I doubt it'll have the satellite communications running over the winter waiting for a wake up call, you're right - it'd use way too much power.
It's possible though that they have a timer which could count down over the winter and turn the machine back on some time in the spring.
That would take very little power, the batteries are certainly large enough for it to be possible (think of a battery clock which can last a year(s) on two AAAs, the power use would be similar).
The batteries can of course recharge in the spring.
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My other thought is, the solar powers would still be working over the winter. It's possible that the machine's hibernation mode consists of shutting everything down except the power supply unit (which'll be more complex than usual as it'll be recharging the batteries when the solar panels are working - more like a UPS) and the circuits needed to run the satellite communications and wait for a wake up call.
The solar panels won't generate as much power in the winter, but they'd probably generate enough to wait for a wait up call.
A few weeks back the guys over at Car Talk had a call from a guy who wanted some advice on how to properly prepare his vehicle for winter.
They asked him what type of car it was, he said it was a kit car. "How much did the kit cost?" they asked. "Oh, about 450 million dollars." replied the caller.
Yes, an engineer from JPL was calling to get some tongue-in-cheek advice on what to do to keep the rovers safe over the martian winter.
It was pretty cool.
He took a duck to the face at 250 knots.
Coat the solar cells in this dust eating stuff http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3770353.stm
The surface may obsorb some of the energy for cleaning purposes, but it is somehting to consider.
Am I the only geek here that heard the Guys from the JPL call into Car Talk to ask how to winterize the rovers? That was classic! Talk about Stump the Chumps. I think it's the first time I've ever really heard Ray flustered.
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
The original Viking missions went 7 years before petering out. The Voyagers which were launched in the early 70's finally died 30 years after they were launched. But now, JPL is happy if they get a few extra months over their initial 3 month plan. A billion bucks for 3 months of science...only Dr. Pangloss could be happy with that.
I wouldn't be so harsh if JPL didn't have any power options but the fact is they did. They could have sent a nuclear power source up there just as they did early on. But they lost their balls and figured it was politically safer to go with a crappy solar solution rather with a long term nuclear solution. Had they gone nuclear, they could have had enough power to move AND do science. With years of power, they could have covered a significant chunk of the Martian surface. Instead of creeping inch by inch, the Rovers could have moved foot by foot or gasp - yard by yard! Perhaps they could have even found the remains of Beagle and figured out what went wrong with it. As it is, they crow when they move 100 feet in a day.
NASA also used to historically "overbuild" these machines to as much of a degree as they possibly could too, within the bounds of such parameters as launch weight, power consumption, budget, etc. Surely these "overbuilt" qualities are a significant factor in the machines' ability to far exceed their original intended missions.
Nowadays, the beancounters have much more say over the engineers, and the "overbuilding" is done to a much lesser degree.
They will survive by eating beagle...
Uh, LOL! That musta been funny ;)
Anyways, lets hope they survive the winter. Because something tells me there aren't going to be more missions for a long time...
NASA does a ton of incredibly good things to encourage science and technology.
They supported over 30 FIRST teams when I was in FIRST - I would bet they support more now. Look at the link, it's an incredible program. If possible, get your company or school involved in it. FIRST was one of the best experiences of my career.
Note: FIRST stands for:
For
Inspiration and
Recognition of
Science and
Technology
Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but copyright will always protect me.
Should know that underscores are forbidden in hostnames...
In a related development, NASA announced the discovery of magnesium sulfate at the Spirit site. This compound is marketed to consumers under the name "epsom salts".
Why not send a couple hundred more rovers and then network them all. Imagine a giant Beowolf cluster of rovers scouring the surface of Mars for intelligent Bacteria!!!! Sounds like a movie in the making to me!
Before the MERa and MERb Bill Nye said he was looking forward to the Martian spring and expected the MER mission would continue.
I am not a big fan of Bill, but it was the first time I heard the idea about them lasting much longer than the 90 day mission period.
Props to the engineers who designed them to last.
WTF makes our time so cheap, and you so precious that we have to digest this short article for you so you dont have to read it!
Hmmmm... Maybe the fact that you do digest the article for him and post an answer?
I've been watching space probe operations since the 1960s. They always say, "Mission X will last a maximum of six weeks" and then five years later we are still getting useful data from the thing. Their estimation skills are almost as poor as mine. :-/
Thats great that the rovers have lasted as long as they have. Imagine the resume lines on that one "Designed solar panel array system that powered Mars rovers 500% of their life expectancy". Heck think of all those parts inside that have stood up to tempeture cycling. They really did a good job.
meh
Any launch of a spacecraft that uses any sort of nuclear power requires a sign-off from the president, which is not assured, and will of course result in the massive protests that heralded Galileo and Cassini. Plus, the only RTGs that exist now are earmarked for the forthcoming Pluto mission. New ones need to be designed and built.
Fortunately, plans are in the works for the next-generation Mars rovers to use nuclear power and therefore to be able to last for a Martian year or two.
You say Two words: Insurance Policy. and NASA can't keep paying insurance on the rovers for years and years
Do you mean the cost of operating the rovers, or an actual insurance policy?
Who is insuring it against what? Does Lloyd's of London underwrite a collision plan on the rover with a $10,000,000 deductible or something? It's not like there is any risk of anything which would actually *require* insurance.
I'm confused by what exactly you mean in this case, and I'm not convinced your talk about the Insurance premium mafia isn't just a little too tinfoil-hat.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I think of it more as a design specification: each subsystem engineer has to have high confidence that their subsystem is going to last the requisite 90 days. But a high confidence for 90 days equates to a pretty good confidence for 180 days and a decent chance for much longer than that.
I believe the segment in question can be found here. It's in real audio, hoorah.
7 7384
dupe comment, i know. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=110501&cid=93
You know the Bush administration is taking its toll when NASA's experts are a radio call-in show...
I hope they brought a shovel, road salt and a jug of windshield washer fluid!
Oh, and tow chains.
plays havoc with getting any traction. I don't think there's anyone around to put the tyre chains on either.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Scotty would always overestimate how long he could get the shields or warp drive back online. Then, just before the Enterprise is about to get destroyed and his original estimate is still due, Scotty whips out the miracle and saves the day.
He even revealed his secret of actually doing this to Geordi LaForge during a ST:TNG episode.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
If there is dust building up on the solar panels, what makes them think that when spring rolls around again, that there will be enough of the solar panels left uncovered to power the things back up again?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
As much as you'd like to say this, the links you later provide make ABSOLUTELY no reference to NASA taking out insurance. NASA's probably "self insured" as in they handle such a large portion of space launches etc, that it makes no sense to get third party insurance.
Furthermore, your oh so cunning plan argument falls even FURTHER apart when you take into account that these sorts of policies are for launches, which are the points at which they are most likely to fail. If the launch goes off well then the insurance policy is over, regardless of whether or not they advertise their mission as being 1 month, or 1 year.
Also, they could always just insure it for 1 month, IF you were right anyways, which you're not.
Finally, the insurance policies are for businesses who want to make a profit and must exhibit some measure of prudence.
If you really want to be such an ass to that other person who responded to you, you should at least be able to back up some of the mindless, pointy-haired boss bullshit that you want to spout out. Saying things like I'm smart don't go very far anywhere, particularly when followed by idiotic statements that you can't back up.
Hey, in Sleeper Woody Allen was able to fire up that VW bug that had been stored for like 200 years... and if a V-Dub can start after that, surely these rovers can manage one little winter!
- Leo
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
That was John Wright, one of the rover drivers (scroll to bottom). I had suggested another joke for them to use:
CAR TALK: How old is your car?
JOHN: Less than a year old.
CAR TALK: And how many miles on it?
JOHN: About three hundred million.
Unfortunately, they didn't use it.
``Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.'' -- Richard Dawkins
Entrepreneurial:
1. Add a stoplight and several dollar bills to each rover's payload
2. Park rover at stoplight before martian winter
3. Wait for martians with squeegees to show up
4. Tip them
I wonder if NASA was playing it a little too safe once again in regard to estimating the lifetime of the rovers. 16 months is a much longer lifetime then what they "expected". Same thing happened with Pathfinder as it lasted much longer than they "originally thought".
I say 16 months to cover late January to early June. I realize 1/04 - 6/05 is 17 months technically.
I still don't understand why they couldn't have built some low-power-consumption air blowers to clear the panels now and again. These things wouldn't have to run all the time, so technically if there were energy concerns, couldn't they divert power from other system components temporarily to blow dust off the solar panels, before goin back into "working" mode? I couldn't imagine a bare minimum simple air compressor taking that much power.
Farnsworth: This is quite a large ranch you have. Mr Wong: 17.9 billion acres! We own entire western hemisphere. (Whispering) That the best hemisphere! Farnsworth: It's the same on Earth!
So, why are prices for solar cells still so high, and demand for them still so low?
Prices are still high because the demand isn't there - if solar cells were being demanded as much as computer chips, everything would be solar powered. So, why is demand so low?
One could say it is because prices are high (and hence run into a circular trap), but that isn't the whole story - the demand isn't there because the cost is still too high for people, because they want to live and use as much electricity as they currently do, and to provide that with solar cells is still very expensive. What do I mean by that?
Well, a lot of people use a lot of electricity per month - looking at my last bill, I used about 1500 kWh. My house is older, but even new houses still use around 1000 kWh. To supply that with solar electricity could easily set you back $15-20,000 for a new system (and then per-year maintenance cost on batteries and such). Most people cannot afford a system like this, unless they roll it into their loan or something as an "up front" cost of living. But where is all that energy going to, anyhow?
Most of it is for cooling and heating - mainly air-conditioning and hot water heating. The next big chunk comes from refrigeration (for food storage) and cooking.
We need to change how we live - then we would see that solar electricity (and other solar technologies) are actually *very* feasible.
What if instead of boxes, our houses were instead domes? One third the outside surface area (for the sun to fall on, or for heat to radiate away from in the winter) for the equivalent amount of square footage. Cheaply built using monolithic shotcrete construction, "R" values through the roof. At this point, solar water heating could efficiently heat the house (via in-slab thermal heating systems) and the water for washing/bathing. Bury a pipe system six feet down, and take advantage of air cooling via earth mass (and get a cool basement to boot!). Right there I just knocked a huge chunk of electricity costs out for very little money (in fact, the cost of the house plus the solar cooling/heating system described would probably be equal to a typical same-sized house). A much smaller solar electric panel array could be installed for much less to supply the electricity needs (use LED or flourescent lighting as well - in the daytime, solatubes or heliostat arrays could pipe light via fiber optics to where it was needed - use the electric for lights only at night).
Solar panels generate more power the more sun you can concentrate on them - but as they get hotter, their efficiency drops. So, if you could concentrate the sun on them (via mirrors or fresnel lenses), and remove the heat, you can get much more out of them - so how to remove the heat, but use it?
Well, integrate it as part of the solar water heating system - thermal epoxy the cells to alluminum water-block style heat sinks, and pipe the water through to heat it up. Increase your electricity output, as well as get the heat in the water.
What about at night - that hot water is sitting in storage - when you aren't using it (for washing or heating) - what can be done with it?
How about using the heat in the water, coupled with night-sky radiant energy - to drive a Stirling engine running a generator! Sure, the efficiency wouldn't be the greatest - but it is free energy, so anything you can get out of it would be better than nothing!
Finally - what about cooking? Well - you could run the solar hot water around an oven box, and have a solar oven (if you can get it to 100+ C - slow cooking is easy). I have seen solar concentrator designs with tracking systems that focus the light onto indoor hotplates as well (for tradition "stove-top" cooking techniques). I could imagine a solar concentrator heating up bricks or so
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Someone above mentioned budgetary issues for keeping the control rooms going even if the rovers still are.
So I've noticed fewer updates on mission status recently. Example: It's 9 June, but the last Opportunity update was on 25 May. Have they entered the crater yet?
Are they de-staffing a little, and could this be responsible for fewer updates?
about people who confuse 'cue' and 'queue' and come up with a word that doesn't exist.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
* * * 11 * /usr/local/scripts/wakeupRover.sh
I think the low survival time estimate is also partly due to the fact that martian daily temperatures have a huge range (too lazy to look it up), so the material they're made of expands and contracts accordingly with the temperature over the passing of one day. However, it can only take so much expanding and contracting before something gives and the rover breaks.
The nearest Mars gets to the Earth is closer to 3 light minutes, not 9. I was thinking about how far away Mars was when the rovers landed, not at opposition. Sorry for the brain fart.