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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."
I dont know what type of child hood you had, but it was a reference to this book:
The Little Engine that Could
Well, first of all, there's no tires on the rovers ;).
But I don't think there's problems with cameras, arms and whatever the rover has got, many such things back on earth often last much longer than a year - granted, they aren't in such a harsh environment, but then again, they weren't designed by NASA engineers.
I believe the biggest problem is the capacity of the battery, which, due to the memory-effect ought to be way lower than it is, but the big surprise is that it isn't. The fact that dust can be rumbled off the solar panels when driving upwards probably helps on the powerlevels too.
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. NASA shut down some non-essential instruments to lower the energy requirements some months ago. The tires should be ok, given the speed these things are driven ;-).
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.
I'm an allout Opportunity fan. Oppurtunity was by far the more interesting part of the mission.
First it was the one that discovered that there once was water, then it's the one that just explored it's own heatshield and of course it's the one with the most stunning panorama of a crater on mars that I have ever seen.
(Beware huge pic. Preview here)
Okay people, repeat after me:
"Space Exploration is not about Science, it is about Exploration."
If we are going to apply a cost benefit analysis to space exploration, NASA should close shop and the money spent elsewhere, robots or no robots. The whole "scientific research" angle has always been a fig leaf for the real reasons for the space programs - national prestige (politicians), playing with cool toys (engineers), and, hokey as it sounds, "going where no man has gone before" i.e. exploration (astronauts). And I use the ST:TOS "no man" wording vs. ST:TNG "no one" on purpose: it is my belief that the desire to explore is inherently masculine, either culturally or genetically. For that matter, the "prestige" and the "cool toys" angle are pretty much Y chromosome related too.
Many people say these are not worthy goals. Possibly so, but let's not kid ourselves that they are not the real, driving goals.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
When they make those lifespan projections, they go for a very high level of certainty (ie. we're almost positive they will last three months). Once the initial mission time is reached, you have some good science data, and can call the mission a success. Plus, you now have real operations data and can make better predictions on how far you can push it and how long it will really last.
Part of this is funding politics. Once the initial mission (with the big price tag) is a success, it's (relatively) easy to get additional funding (much smaller price tag) to continue running things as long as the hardware holds up.
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)
An R/C car with solar panel and big batteries could probably do better!
But how much would those batteries weigh, would they be able to power all the instruments, how would they perform at Martian temperature extremes, and how much would they cost to ship to Mars?
There's a reason they call what NASA does "rocket science", kid.
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.
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?
Second, budget estimates put the cost at around $100 billion for up to five missions. Even assuming a 100% overage, that puts the cost for 7.5 years on Mars at less than the Debacle in Iraq. And we learn about how to survive on another planet and how to travel between them. And we get 4-5 outposts on the Red Planet waiting for a refit to serve for future missions.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
Try Hugin, it's an open source GUI front end to Panorama Tools, and it works wonderfully--I've used it in Win32 and under Linux, but it's also supposed to run on OS X.
.tiffs). It does an awesome job of blending the photos together, better than most commercial software from what I hear. Autopano is also quite the handy piece... It'll save you from killing your fingers (and eyes) selecting dozens of control points.
The real trick is to use enblend to do the final stitching (hugin will arrange and orient the pictures then output them as individual
Dunno what NASA uses, but I'd guess it's either super expensive (isn't everything NASA buys super expensive?) or that it was done in-house.
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