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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."
This looks familiar. Oh wait, it was posted here earlier.
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.
Opportunities birthday is in 21 days (Jan 24).
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?
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