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Mars Rovers Alive Until 2005?
maggeth writes "The BBC is reporting that negotiations are under way to extending funding for the Mars rovers beyond this September. Originally designed to work for 90 Martian days, they now predict they may last well beyond the 250 Martian days they had announced previously." hoferbr writes "A new analysis by Phil Berardelli at the United Press International quotes Steve Squyres, chief scientist for the Mars rover mission, in which he says that the Mars rovers '... could go into 2005'. Spirit and Opportunity will complete six months on the Martian surface on July."
This is great news. Not only for the science, but it also adds to NASA's credibility. Sure, they thought it would only last 250 Martian days, but when it comes to funding in the future, this may help, however little.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
A Martian day is not much longer than an Earth day - 24 hours, 37 minutes as opposed to 23h, 56m.
The Raven
I read that last line as " Spirit and Opportunity will compete six months on the Martian surface on July."
I hope they do. Might as well go out with a bang after such success. Might be a way to get funding too.
Go here for teh [sic] funny.
I'm glad that NASA and JPL have had such a great success with the two rovers. Maybe the amazing results of this will inspire manpower and funding for future missions.
Unmanned robotic missions are great for doing science work, and they should definately continue without scaling back funds. However, it is equally important to continue working on human space flight simply to prove that we can do it and to prepare for the time when a human colony on the moon or mars is paved by the groundwork of unmanned missions.
If anything it'll give us some good data on what Martian conditions do to hardware in the long term.
I know that right now one of Spirits wheel motors was starting to act up a bit.
As Martian "Winter" approaches, it'll be interesting to see what really cold weather does to the rovers (other than breaking them).
However, with that all said, I think we should be vigorously working on putting a colony on the Moon.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Starbucks have just opened on Mars and the helpful staff have offered to clean the rover's solar panels once a day and stick in a couple of extra AA batteries.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
In other news, NASA plans on visiting all 3,158 Starbucks locations on Mars.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
Kodos to the designers !
Kang to everyone else !
LaForge: "Yeah, well I told the captain I'd have this analysis done in an hour."
Scott: "How long would it really take?"
LaForge: "An hour!"
Scott: "Oh, you didn't tell him how long it would *really* take, did you?"
LaForge: "Well of course I did."
Scott: "Oh, laddie, you've got a lot to learn if you want people to think of you as a miracle worker!"
-- "Relics", Stardate 46125.3
...the second they release Mars Rover: Longhorn.
Having spent $X billion so far, (and worth it, imho), the worst blunder possible is to deny the additional funding. Now that the probes are up and operating, a dollar spent here is worth ten (if not more) spent tomorrow, because the risk phase is over. Everything we get now is bonus.
<semi-sarcasm>Anyway, most of our politicking seems to be based on "not telegraphing weakness"... So, don't cut short the mission, or else the terrorists win.</semi-sarcasm>
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
I destroy stickers trying to peel them off. Imaging a robotic arm doing the same. It would be more retarded-looking than those Skill Crane games at the bowling alley trying to pick stuff up.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
His website offers insight into why he does this ('to be different') and has pictures of the 4000+ craters he's visited.
"Is this just useless, or is it expensive as well?"
Okay, did some searching and found that at a press conference he said that the reason a mechanism was not made to clean the panels was that any ones that they could think of were not worth the extra weight that would have to be added for that mechanism.
I forget the title of the Arthur C. Clarke story, set on the moon, but it presaged another part of the problem, here.
But basically, if you whisk off the solar cell panels with a broom, you have to worry about static electricity buildup. It's just possible that by wiping the solar panel, you'll build up a static charge and attract even more dust.
Of course this possiblity suggests another possability - some sort of static device to repel the dust, so you need no moving parts, beyond deployment.
Or you just estimate the dust accumulation rate, the solar panel degradation due to that, and the design lifetime of the mission. Then make the panels sufficiently oversize to accomodate, and live with it. Don't forget that one rover already has a bum wheel, so other things are showing wear and tear besides the panels.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I don't think the analogy quite fits. Even if they are over-engineered, the extra rover lifetime isn't wasted as the hypothetical bridge's load-bearing capacity would be. Their extra life is probably even more valueable when you factor in the realities of how infrequently we have the opportunity (mod me down for the pun, i'll burn the karma) to conduct this sort of research. Unless we run out of rocks to look at and gullies to traverse, let the rovers operate as long as they are able to return useful data.
Bush Lies On the Record.
The parent refers to the length of an Earth day when the planet's rotation is measured against the "fixed" stars (sidereal time). More precisely, this "sidereal day" is 23 hours 56 minutes 4.091 seconds. Measured against the sun, however, the length of an Earth day is 24 hours. When you use the fixed stars as a frame of reference, the motion of the entire solar system puts a little extra "English" on the spin of the Earth.
They might not have for a simple reason. It may originally have been decided that the parts on the rover had a very limited lifespan due to problems like the temperature swing throughout the day. Given the existence of these problems it was probably assumed that the lifespan limitation due to dust collection would never come into play. Now that we realize that the parts have lasted it may be an error, admittedly with hindsight, not to have dealt with the dust.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Actually they are looking at the technology used on nascar outside cameras. The problem is that current polymers do not stand up to the increased UV light on mars and the thin film blocks more light energy than a 2 month's worth of dust on the panels will.
If we can find a thin polymer that can transmit more of the light energy and not age/yellow so fast in higher UV environments we might be able to simply "roll the solar panels clean" by roling up the thin film for the width of the panel. have enough film on the roll to be rolled up 3 times and you just extended the life of the solar panels by 3!
this is the same technology that cleans the lens on the nascar cameras and is used on motocross helmet's and goggles.. (except the helmet version is a tear-away.)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
But the real logic is along those lines. NASA doesn't want to over promise, that will lead to trouble for them. If they say they'll get six months out of a device and it dies of normal wear and tear after 3, well then people are going to want to know who fucked up.
I'm sure NASA figured that, to a high degree of certianty, the rovers could pull 90 days no problem. So you report that as the expected life. If they last longer, great, but if they don't no one is going to bitch. Given the big unknowns of a mission like this, you want your estimate to be nice and conservative.
Also, you want to priortise your research. If you put a 90 day cap, you make sure to priortise the most important stuff to happen in that window. Then you can move on to other stuff, even if that's not the most efficient way of doing it. Even if you have to sacrafice some efficency, yuo don't want to do low priority stuff first because that's more efficient, only to find that your hardware broke so you never get to do the high priority stuff.
Having spent $X billion so far,...
The total cost of the Mars rovers (combined) was $820 million, including operations for the first 90 days. The extended mission - another 150 days - was budgeted at $15 million.
"Not to be too trollish, but if you are building a bridge to hold 10 tons and it ends up holding 100 tons, you are wasting resources."
As if your mama reads those signs before she crosses.
"Derp de derp."
200 MPH winds at 0.01 atmosphere aren't that big a deal. There's some dust. Here are Viking lander pictures taken during a Martian dust storm in 1976.
So the OP was correct, for X == 0.82.
That puts the 300 meg one at ~12 years old, and the 1.6 gig one at ~9 years old. Both drives are never turned off.
.. onto current media. ;)
High chance, then, that when you finally do turn it off, they won't come back up. I get a lot of clients that say their ancient servers worked great for a decade and then after a power outage *boom* nothing. Make a backup while it's still running
They were bad estimages, they were safe estimates. They designed the rovers to be tough enough that they would work for 3 months even under the worst situations (Like a bad landing, or bad dust storms and the like) So when none of these potentially bad things happen, the life expectancy of the rovers increases. Its like cancelling a cable substription and having them not disable your account for a month afterwards. You planned on having it terminated at the end of the month, but as a bonus you got free cable for a month.
The longer mission means they can accomplish everything they'd hoped to, not just everything they needed to. This means there's less of a case for "We need to send another rover to do more of this" in the future, so either another mission may not be needed or a future mission will not need to waste resources (especially weight, in space exploration mass is money) duplicating the instrumentation and capabilities of these rovers.
Also, since we know the rover design appears robust and successful, it could potentially be reused for another mission without designing a new rover. Let's send one to somewhere like Europa. That'd probably require a larger solar panel or some other power source but the rest of the design could be kept the same, saving the R&D budget.
If we're actually going to do a manned mission to mars, it's also a good idea to test our electronics and mechanical engineering for the environment BEFORE the people get there and depend on it to breathe, so better we learn how to build reliably for mars now.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
This has been debated a few times here at slashdot. I learned everything I needed to know from the following NASA report:
PDF file here
The reliability of a complex system made of thousands of parts depends on statistics, whereas the reliability of a bridge depends on much simpler stress calculations.
If you design a complex system such that there is very little chance that any one of its components will fail within 90 days, then each component must be individually designed to last much longer than 90 days. The center of each component's reliability bell curve must be well beyond 90 days so that the product of the tails at the 90 day mark is acceptably low. The system as a whole will therefore probably last much longer than 90 days. If it does, that's not necessarily a sign of overdesign.
The thing is, NASA really needs the rovers as long as possible, so NASA engineers them the best it can with the resources we give it.
Then, when it comes time for NASA to apply for a budget to run the rovers, the agency gives a conservative estimate on the rovers' lifespan. It gives an estimate they are confident they can deliver on.
This accomplishes two things: First, it keeps the budget request relatively low, which makes it more likely that the budget request will be approved. Since there's no mission at all without the budget approval, it makes sense to give a conservative cost estimate and a low budget number.
Second, it makes it easy for NASA to deliver on what it promises. If NASA announced that the rovers could last as long as six months or more, and one of them broke early on, NASA would get no credit for making it as far as it did. Rather, you and thousands of other asshats like you--including several asshats who have some direct authority over NASA's budget--would excoriate the agency for falling short of its goals.
Better to engineer the best rover you can with the resources you have, and give a conservative estimate of the mission's lifespan. If it exceeds that estimate, bonus! NASA goes back to the budget authorities with a clear win under their belt, another project delivered as promised, and some solid results to show that an addtional budget allocation is justified to continue the mission past the lower time limit and towards the upper end of the lifespan estimate.
What's more, by doing the budget approvals in stages like this, it gives you and I (and the budget authorities, of course) an opportunity to judge the value of the first 90 days before committing 250 days' worth of budget to the mission.
And the best you can come up with is "those NASA assholes must have been padding their engineering estimates! Unacceptable!"
Another thing: You don't win any credits by quoting "scotty" in "tng". Consider this: NASA is a government agency. It has to deal with politics, bureaucracy, and the human error that attends on every complex undertaking since the dawn of time. You yourself can't spell, punctuate or use basic grammar with any consistency. Yet you presume to criticize the methods NASA must use to achieve great feats of engineering and exploration. What is wrong with you?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.