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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."
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!
This looks familiar. Oh wait, it was posted here earlier.
Yes, but an astronaut can do in one day the labor this 'bot took a year to do.
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.
It now seems obvious that Slashdot "authors" (story submission moderators) don't read Slashdot. Maybe they're on to something...
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make install -not war
Opportunities birthday is in 21 days (Jan 24).
Actually, its Insurance, not PR .. projects at NASA are often only insured for very specific lengths of time .. true fact, I saw it on NASA's site somewhere ..
Its just the way engineering for reliability works.
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To GUARANTEE with any certainty that something will last for 3 months, you have to build it with a much longer expected lifetime. You'll probably get "lucky" and it will work much longer (10x is not unrealistic).
FWIW: Thats hypothetically why they can push the Enterprise to 110% and not instantly explode
Lurking in the desert
I think the main impediment is the degradation of the solar panels. They generate less and less power, and eventualy there is not enough juice to run the rover.
The solar panels are getting cleaned for some reason, at least for opportunity. Anyway, Martian winter is now behind and they are heading into spring.
The Voyagers had a similar problem with their thermonuclear batteries; it got to a point where they were generating less than 100 Watts (I think), and the JPL guys were (and are) doing miracles to keep the craft functional.
The voyagers are doing just fine. Note the report date. And the output is near 300W. Maybe you confused it with Pioneer 10?
The rovers cost about 820 million.
The government spent about 3 trillion dollars last year overall.
So the mars rovers were about 0.02% of the US budget. How much did you pay in taxes last year? Take that number, multiply by 0.0002 and that's approximately how much you personally paid for the mars rovors.
Even if the tax rate was exactly the same for every individual in the US, you would owe less than 820M$/220Mpeople, or about $2. Chances are, following the previous calculation, your contribution is much less.
This being a quick observation, and not a rigorous analysis it is going to be slightly off, but it's certianly less then $2 for you.
I'd guess that the "majority" feels the same way.
You guess wrong. This article says: -Adam
JPL guys were (and are) doing miracles to keep the craft functional.
JPL is not performing a great deal of real-time operational control over the Voyager craft. They are more monitoring what is left of the various experiments and power levels.
The miracle was performed back in the 70s when these craft were built - they certainly engineered them damn tough! Say what you will about how we've lost 2 shuttles, but NASA has shown some huge successes in our robotic craft: Voyager, Pioneer, NEAR, Deep Space 1 and MERs.
A 25 Year Partnership - Voyager and the Deep Space Network
Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM)
Science being performed during VIM
Weekly Status Reports
Neurowiz
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
IIRC, they had expected the solar panels to be covered up, and the climate has been surprisingly helpful in keeping the dust off the panels...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Don't be a dumbass, grasshopper.
The first flight of the Wright brothers (Orville And Redenbacher, according to Cartman) was less than the wingspan of a modern airliner.
Also remember that the rovers were not doing the Baja rally. They stopped a lot to do actual science and exploration.
--- Ban humanity.
The Beagle 2 [rest in peace] included a microphone.
No, the rover's run VxWorks, which is a closed source, for profit real time OS, which Nasa purchased to run them.
/. as being available just recently.
The propriatory rover code may be OS, I know some of the apollo guidance code was mentioned on
As has been said before, they did their best to make sure the rovers would survive to three months, but the biggest problem they expected in the long term was heat cycling from daytime temperatures to nighttime temperatures slowly cracking and destroying the rovers, which must have happened as a lesser rate than their worse-case estimates.
Most design documents for space projects say that increased funding simply decreases the risk, because you can buy more of each part and test more to destruction to see the exact limits of your hardware. I believe the rock abrasion tool was tested to destruction dozens of times by honeywell before the current ones were put on the rovers pre-launch, and so they have a very good idea of exactly what it can do. It also means that there's less risk of pushing the hardware too far and breaking something. They weren't wasting money, they were making sure these things completed the mission objectives, and they did; and then they didn't break immediately afterward, while it was entirely possible that they would.