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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.
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.)
They were never designed to last past April. Both rovers are already well past their life expectancies.
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.
Both Rovers were designed to work for 90 days anything more than this is a bonus, they were not even designed to last till winter. If they can survive it thats a bigger bonus!
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
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?
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These things are engineered to last a certain ammount of time, as component specifications are generally conservative equipment will often last longer than it was designed for.
Take the voyager 2 probe, this was launched with the intent of exploring Jupier and Saturn. But they managed to extend the mission out to both Neptune and Uranus.
Of course they thought about these posibilities, they chose the launch date such that they could continue their slingshot in that direction :-)
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.
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
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
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
As one who actually works on the mars program (orbiters, though, not the rovers), I can tell you that MANY different options were considered. Most weighed enough that you'd have to sacrifice instrumentation to implement them, however, and as the nominal mission was only nintey days, it was decided that more guaranteed science results during that period were preferable to uncertian return during the extended mission.
The best idea I've heard so far for dust removal was to use electrostatic forces to make it all jump off, but for similar reasons this was not flown either.
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
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.
He meant "cue", unless he was planning on putting himself and pro-RTG anti-solar zealots in a line. Actully he seems to want to hit them with a cue, which seems like a fine idea to me ;)
What I will say is that just having solar panals and batteries on a couple of Mars rovers doesn't mean it's doing anything to advance the technology, beyond perhaps being one more order for the parts. Said parts are probably largely the same as if you'd ordered them for your solar powered house.
RTG's and related research are worthwhile too; being able to convert heat to useful energy is a technology which could be just as useful as solar power; we are sitting on top of a huge nuclear reactor after all. Maybe one day we'll construct batteries based on similar technology (mmm, RTG powered laptop), or power cities from radiothermal generators using the mantle as it's heat source (something already done, but maybe we can scale it up).
Still, it's not as if we're likely to be able to run a rover for more than a fraction's of the life of an RTG (unless you make a *really* small one I guess); one argument for solar panels would be that even with perfect power a rover is likely to get stuck somewhere or be damaged by dust within (say) 6 months; a power source which is likely to last about that long makes more sense than a more expensive ickle RTG. that may well outweigh the panels and be useless over a lot of it's lifetime.
RTG's get a lot of use in other probes anyway; it's not as if we haven't "risked" blowing them up plenty of times. I think provided they're still used in places they obviously make sense (orbital probes which are likely to last decades), we can forgive NASA for choosing panels on something which isn't likely to take advantage of an RTG's primary feature (long life).
Getting solar to work on these spacecraft with the intent of using the spin-offs here on earth is overkille, and expensive overkill at that. Even if you develop solar cells efficient enough to make a household self-sufficient as you suggest (which still makes me nervous about all the batteries you'll need lying about), there are fewer watts per square meter to work with the further out from the sun you are. You'll get to the point where the solar cells and the associated batteries are the most expensive components of the mission, ultimately getting in the way of the goal of the mission itself.
Solar works well for Mars and closer, but once you get to Jupiter and beyond it just isn't a realistic option. Imagine giving Cassini two solar arrays, each 9 meters by 32 meters. JPL has, and and they've got diagrams.
And I personlly believe nuclear power sources are more environmentally friendly than all the batteries you'll need to get you through those long, dark winter nights.
Not exactly. First of all, there are the political issues--NO ONE wants to launch a nuclear reactor into space in case the rocket blows up, as an explosion could set off a nuclear explosion too. Second of all, there are really two types of nuclear reactor. There is the kind we use on earth, which requires massive cooling (yes, not even the cold of mars would be enough). The second type is a radioactive reactor, which simply uses the radiation from a chunk of highly radioactive material for power. Many of the space probes, such as Voyager, used this type of reactor.
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.
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".
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
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
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.
There is enough wind on Mars, even with the extremely thin atmosphere, that it's possible the dust will stop building up before the power output of the cells drops below the amount required to run the rovers. Even at reduced cell output, the rovers could be run on a day-on day-off cycle (for example) until the batteries can no longer hold a charge or the cell output drops below what is necessary to charge the batteries.
The point I think that NASA is making is that their predictive models used fairly pessimistic assumptions as to how badly the solar cells would degrade over time, and the actual cell performance and dust coverage is proving to be better than their predictive models anticipated. That plus the fact that they've managed to almost completely overcome the relatively few hardware failures suffered so far, is grounds for being optimistic about the rover's lifespan.
The flip side of the coin - somewhere a budget analyst is kicking himself because he let the engineers talk the rover team into building in excess power margin based on a more pessimistic prediction on solar cell dust coverage. In a "perfect world" according to the budget people, they'd spend only enough to ensure that the rover dropped dead the day AFTER it completed the planned mission. It now looks like they apparently overbuilt the rovers based on what's happened with the 2 rovers at widely separated mission locations, and that's bad news for whoever controls the checkbook. Hopefully the next set of landers won't fail prematurely due to a redundancy or excess margin backlash because of how well these rovers have performed.
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?