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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 was a very basic attempt at a robot. If we redirected the money spent on manned space flight, the space station, and other human-based space flight projects into the robotic missions, you'd see some damn fine robots.
We aimed very small with this mission. Yet we got big. Very big. What we really need is a coherent team of robots that work together to go to Mars. Overlapping functions, semi-autonomy, semi-intelligent bots that are able to function together for a common goal.
Robots are the best future of NASA.
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?
The robots cannot make decisions on the fly, other than extremely simple obstacle avoidance. 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.
An astronaut can walk faster than these robots can move. Put a moon rovor type vehicle up there with a few astronauts and you can do as much exploration in a day as the Spirit and Opportunity have done their entire existance.
Plus, we can, there are those who want to, and there are those willing to pay for it. Who are you to tell them to stop? So far this mission has cost you less than $10 of your taxes. I fully support the government using taxes to perform such missions, and apparently a majority of Americans feel similarily.
-Adam
If the spirit rover can last for a year on Mars, why do we need to send astronauts (naughts?)?
Not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
rage, rage against the dying of the light