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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.'"
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.
Absolutely. This mission can only be considered an unqualified success. What is most pleasing is the fact that they now have a better idea of how to make future missions work this well too.
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!
1) during winter sun is weaker, would get less power 2) I'm sure some things, like the batteries, are affected by the temperature. In general lower temperatures increase activation energy barriers, so there's a chance the batteries will be weaker as well 4) Temperature gradient between relatively hot parts of operating rover (such as computer equipment, etc) and outside air will stress the rovers; also temperature cycling from turning off at night and turning back on in daytime will take the rover's equipment along a fairly large range of temperatures which is a good way to break delicate equipment. 3) I sure don't want to be chipping at rocks when it's -100C.... But then again the rovers probably don't care about frostbite as much
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.
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...
Try
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 9000ms, Maximum=10000ms, Average=9100ms
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.
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
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.