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Spirit Rover is One Year Old
dolphin558 writes "The little rover that could, did. The Spirit Rover marks its one year aniversary after an expected lifetime of just 3 months. It has traversed more than 2 miles of Martian landscape and sent back thousands of pictures and reams of data. There is no indication that it will die anytime soon as it climbs the Columbia Hills."
Happy Birthday!
As an employee I would like to point out that the quality and flexibility of QNX is really apparent on these devices. Of course, the hardware is pretty damn good too!
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As bad of an image NASA has had recently, let us not forget the success they have had.
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I'm glad to see that we've gotten our money's worth on this one.
Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/
Must be those Aliens that service the thing...
Merry Christmas :)
"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell
When will the Opportunity rover get some love? It's the twin that gets swept under the rug and left behind while Spirit gets all the attention...
If the spirit rover can last for a year on Mars, why do we need to send astronauts (naughts?)? Wouldn't the money be better spent on more robots?
Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain.
Surely somethings must be about done for now. Tires on a car don't last a year on a smooth road for example. Did Nasa have anything prepared (like the tires are good for X miles or the cameras are good for Y shots), for this kind of thing?
I like muppets.
This looks familiar. Oh wait, it was posted here earlier.
Its realy closer to 3 years old, its only been on mars for a year
I've seen this many times, where NASA projects grossly live past their expected lifetimes. It's more of a PR stunt, to say that the rovers lived much longer than anybody had ever hoped, and had the rovers failed after 2 months, I'm sure a lot of people would be upset.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
But given that it's on Mars (686.98 Earth days to complete one solar revolution), its actual Martian anniversary will come November 19th, 2005.
Must be those Energizer (tm) batteries on board.
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:-)
It keeps on going . . . and going . . . and going . .
Perhaps there's a bunny at the helm!
I dont know what type of child hood you had, but it was a reference to this book:
The Little Engine that Could
The rover just dont drive like you.
It now seems obvious that Slashdot "authors" (story submission moderators) don't read Slashdot. Maybe they're on to something...
--
make install -not war
Who is really counting? Oh, wait, the /.'ers who went "oh, oh, I learned this in school and NOW I can ... oh, damn, someone posted it before me..."
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
One thought that has crossed my mind- Did NASA build the rovers knowing that they would last much longer than three months, and claim the three month life span to save face in case something went wrong? I know that we have the mysterious cleaning element on Oppertunity, but Spirit is holding up pretty well on it's own, too.
Kind of funny I think..
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"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
This is something that the USA just does so much better than anything else - well done guys.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Jesus is a profit
No kidding. Christmas was a godsend for this economy.
Quite amazing life span for the bugger despite the OS glitches that rendered it almost unusable. Maybe they should use embedded Windows instead of DOS and 640K ram next time to prevent crashes :)
Someone must be held accountable! In order to maintain the proud, bureaucratic tradition of post-apollo NASA we must fire the engineers responsible. Do you have any idea how many man hours have been wasted trying to operate a rover that should have been dead months ago?
====
Crudely Drawn Games
I think you meant:
this storys a dupe
maybe it doesn't matter
i'll read 'bout it twice
its mars after all.
i'll live vicariously
through pricey robots
-w
Does it worry anyone that the guys at NASA grossly miscalculated the life of the bot? Was this done to save face if it screwed up, because this margin of error, and if you look at it as it is, it's pretty embarrassing. I mean great that its still going, but what pencil pusher calculated the battery/recharge time or batt life and came to the conclusion that it will probably last 3 months?
In terms of years operating and miles run. Whatever these people did, we need to bottle it, pronto.
The Spirit Rover marks its one year aniversary ... It has traversed more than 2 miles of Martian landscape and sent back thousands of pictures and reams of data.
Two miles in only a year? Wow, at this rate it'll only take a few hundred thousand years to explore all of the Martian surface! Yay rovers!
It's hard to take the "we don't need to send humans to Mars, we can explore with rovers" crowd seriously when our best and brightest rover covers only two miles of ground in an entire year.
0 1 - just my two bits
A little OT here: I'm looking for the program that NASA uses to stitch those panorama images. I heard way back that it's some open-source program but I don't know the name and couldn't find it anywhere.
Actually they need to have the thing blow up now. Seems most news sources only covers NASA stuff when it explodes. I mean come on, they have the mis-calculation part of the good news equation! MK
2 miles in a year. That averages out to about a foot an hour. Must have been a lot of down time. Hopefully it wasn't using the left lane.
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yosd dieo sda reost felwo
This post should be moderated non-factual.
The solar panels are not "degrading" as much as their ability to collect solar energy is being limited by dust covering them and the winter season. Now that Martian winter is over for both Rovers, they are going to see increased power. Interestingly, and noted elsewhere, Opportunity is seeing up to "landing day" power levels, due perhaps to some Martian dust devils "cleaning" the panels.
JPL instituted energy conservation measures - no instruments were permanently "shut down" - all of the instruments on both MERs are functioning. Opportunity is put into a "Deep Sleep" which does temporarily shut off all instrumentation, but they are brought back online. This was done not for the winterization of the rovers, but in answer to a problem Opportunity had with one of it's heaters for an instrument.
The confusion in this post with Voyager/Pioneer has already been noted.
Neurowiz
Let's say we ship a human to Mars for a 60 day stay. That means we need to ship 14 months of life-support supplies for each human.
I wonder how much actual training an explorer on Mars would need. What if there was an average Joe who had an inoperable brain tumor or something that was going to kill him in a year's time, but he was otherwise healthy. What if he was a total space geek and would like nothing more than to explore Mars or perhaps build settlements in his final days?
I don't think the US population would be OK with the idea right away, but I also can't put my finger on a specific moral problem.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
If only there was columbian snow on that columbia hill, it would just keep going and going...
...the real worthless shred of human debris is floating in the streets of Indonesia.
Are either of these intrepid little bots in an area even remotely near Odyssey or Beagle? It'd be kinda nice to see what happened to them.
I suspect that one of these choices is incorrect. Correct.
Well the rovers have been on Mars for one EARTH year, but not quite yet 1/2 a MARTIAN year. Mars DOES have seasons, so if the rovers landed in the summer, it's now winter there. If they make it a full Martian year, that would really be something!
Squyres and other mission team members have become so adept at handling Spirit and Opportunity from Earth, they no longer need to congregate at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to plan each moment of each rover's day. Instead, telephone and video conferences allow researchers to operate the rovers remotely.
I don't know about the rest of you, but my offshoring finger got twitchy when I read that.
I really think that within a decade, remote-controlled robots will be flipping burgers and painting houses. The bandwidth will eventually drop enough to make it economical. I just hope there is a way to make money off of the trend this time. Time I profit from globalization instead of get eaten by it.
Has there been any thought about adding microphones to these planetary rovers? I would be very interested to know what it sounds like on Mars.
You mean Windriver, right?
I think the motor died on one of the 12 wheels, so Spirit has been driving backwards for several months. Brakes are bad on two other wheels. I hear the rovers may be able to traverse flat ground with only three functional wheels apiece. And they could still return some results immobile.
Agreed...I brought my Firefox 0.8 crashing in about 3 seconds. One of these days I will update glibc so I can run 1.0.
The Venus Magellan radar mapper was designed nominally for one complete mapping cycle, but survived fve before NASA cut funds. Galileo went nearly triple its two year lifetime. Both were almost out of orientation propellant and some instruments had failed. Saturn Cassini is designed for four years and 86 moon flybys, but could go ten years or more. It costs a good amount of money for ground crews to operate the probes and space network capacity. Eventually you want the people to move on to the next probe, which is about every 2 or 4 years for Mars.
The robots cannot make decisions on the fly, other than extremely simple obstacle avoidance.
For the same cost as astronauts, we can have 20 or more robots with higher bandwidth at 20 different locations. And, they can stay there a long time, unlike astronauts (unless we build a very expensive base). The Tortus wins this race in the end.
An astronaut can walk faster than these robots can move.
20 robots over 4 years are going to do more science than a couple of humans can in a month. And, cover a wider variety of territory.
a few astronauts and you can do as much exploration in a day as the Spirit and Opportunity have done their entire existance.
I don't know about that. Some of those spectrometer readings take several hours to perform even if a human is there. With more money, some of that would happen a lot faster. But power on Mars is going to cost money regardless of whether it is produced for humans or robots.
Further, the rover operators have been very cautious. If they were less cautious, then more can happen in a day. We just may have to live with losing say 3 out of 20 robots to "go for it".
What would really be helpful is sample returns enabled by robots. The problem is the potential biological contamination. But this issue if faced by both scenarios.
And, Spirit and Opportunity are still mostly low-end robots. With more funding, fancier ones can be built, and still be much cheaper than humans. Here is a summary of ways to beef them up:
* More bandwidth to Earth
* More power (either bigger panels or "nuke" packs)
* More instruments
* Take more risk
* Improve auto-guidence (more R&D)
* Sample returns
* Multiple "arms"
I am sorry, but the accounting favors robots. They can cover more territory per dollar.
Table-ized A.I.
So when the specs say 3 months and it lasts 1 year, are we just getting lucky on MTBF? Is it that anything designed to reliably travel all the way to Mars and then run unmaintained for 3 months has just got a good chance of quadrupling the design lifetime? Or are we wasting money and resources overengineering things way past spec because we had the budget to do so?
The robots cannot make decisions on the fly, other than extremely simple obstacle avoidance.
Currently.
When a decision is to be made, the robot talks to us, we think about it, and then command the robot. This takes a huge amount of time.
Currently.
An astronaut can walk faster than these robots can move.
Compared to our current state of the art.
I'm being somewhat whimsical but you hopefully see my point - all the limitations you mention are simple, near-term technical challenges. They could be overcome with another few years' worth of development.
I think we should send humans, but only after we've sent so many damn robots that we can virtually (and thoroughly) tour Mars by telepresence beforehand.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Scott: "Do you mind a little advice? Starfleet captains are like children. They want everything right now, and they want it their way. But the secret is to give only what they need, not what they want!"
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 Unknown
This article marks its one day aniversary after an expected lifetime of just 3 hours. In honor of its important anniversary and the shortness of notice in the Slashdot editors' minds, here's the original link for this blast from the past!
That is all.
i mistakenly opened it in 1.0 and it held up no problem.
Perhaps if this project lasts long enough they will turn it over to the open source community when their funding runs out? Then we could have polls on slashdot to decide which features get added to the rovers software or which rock it visits next.
...that it's not always best to build or buy things from the lowest bidder. Proof positive that quality always lasts.
Earth is obviously the first step. The moon would be the second. The third mars. Problem? How do we do this feasibly? Its only a matter of time before we start colonizing Mars, but Mars is pretty far away. According to the laws of physics, one can not go faster than the speed of light. This includes ANY information whatsoever. It takes light from the sun roughly 8.3 minutes to reach earth and roughly 12.6 minutes to reach Mars, so lets assume that light takes 4.3 minutes to reach Mars from Earth. (3 x 10^5 km/s == speed of light, distance of Mars from Sun is 227,940,000km). That type of information lag is unpleasant by today's standards. Also, I seriously doubt that we will have developed an engine let alone a means by which to transport humans to Mars the way we transport humans from north america to europe. It takes over a year to travel to Mars right now. How much faster could we possibly go without hurting the human body in the process? Also, mars has less gravity, and more radiation. Even after "terraforming" Mars, it will not have the same conditions as Earth. This will have a considerable affect on human beings, even altering their physical apearances, altering their mental processes and what not. Will society develope a martian xenophobia? "OMG MUTANTS! KILL THEM ALL" the way we did to blacks, russians, and now arabs? So many questions, so few answers...
The majority of the degraded power is due to dust accumulation. But the panels are also degrading at a fairly significant rate due to the fairly difficult radiation environment.
I've seen few other people making this point - everything these rovers have done in the past year could be done by a human in a day!!
Furthermore a humnan in a suit would have a lot more options about places they can go exploring - like in deep canyons which is where you'd like to go looking at things up close. But currently we cannot land too near a canyon, or go in one for fear of terrain and loss of communications.
As exciting as the rovers have been , a few humans there would yield a few orders of magnitude more data as well as a far higher quality, with trained observers knowing instantly taht one rock was better than another to look at instead of having a comitte decide if a rock ten feet away is worth the day or so it will take to get to and examine.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Does it worry anyone that the guys at NASA grossly miscalculated the life of the bot? Was this done to save face if it screwed up, because this margin of error, and if you look at it as it is, it's pretty embarrassing. I mean great that its still going, but what pencil pusher calculated the battery/recharge time or batt life and came to the conclusion that it will probably last 3 months?
When trying to guess the life expectancy of the rovers, NASA can only go by past experience, and the last rover they had on Mars, Sojourner, lasted 3 months.
That's my guess, at least.
Tires on a car don't last a year on a smooth road for example.
My tires have been on my car for 4 years and they still have tread left. Many tires are rated for 100,000 miles.
I, for one, Welcome our new Martian robotic overlords.
Its traveling at 2/8760, erm really slow, 0.000228311 MPH, soon enough it will be able to travel in reverse.
(\_/)
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(> <) to help him achieve world domination.
The MiniTES instrument needs to be kept above a certain temperature to avoid possible damage, and its heater has been disabled during deep sleep, and temperatures have gone into the danger range during the nights. In that sense, the MiniTES is getting mildly close to being permanently shut down, though I believe its still collecting data at the moment.
Cut back version of UNIX very quick and strong.
You would not let windows near something this important. Yes Linux would be pushing it a little but a lot less than windows.
I remember that when the mission began the scientists controlling the rovers started to live according to Martian time and would do so throughout the mission (and consequently get out of sync with earth time) since all daily control tasks would be easier to schedule that way and they even received special watches for that (i.e. 24 h 39 min = one day). So I'm wondering if they're still doing that - one year without a normal daily rhythm might be quite bad for family life and so on...
If the funding is cut in half for one of these ongoing projects, as the history of NASA shows is likely to happen, the robots can simply be given more autonomous instructions and only checked on every once in a while by fewer operators. (e.g. "go west and upload a picture every km," or "go to location x,y and wait indefinitely..." or at the very worst "just wait...")
The option to reduce mission control people on the ground for manned missions is a far more risky one.
I don't know too much about how hard this Mars rover stuff is, but I think it is about the coolest way my tax dollars could possibly be spent. I'll give money to SE Asia to help recover from the tsunami, but I'll also give money to Spirit and Opportunity, because I think they represent the most noble intentions of mankind.
It's sent back "reams" of data... how many Libraries of Congress is that?
Do you have a source to data on that? I haven't seen that reported.
Neurowiz
All of Opportunity's instruments are functioning normally. Amazing, considering they gave it 90 days as an optimum mission length.
Neurowiz
I cannot wait for the view from atop the Columbia Hills.
It's called 'lowering expectations'. JPL Standard Operating Procedures: 1. Tell the taxpayers that the rover is designed for only X months of service when you and the designers know that it can last much longer. 2. Express surprise and delight when the machine accomplishes what it was supposed to do...last longer than the aforementioned X months. 3. ???? 4. Increased appropriations