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."

Comments

One-way trips?

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.

Accounting still favors robots over humans

[Tablizer]

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.

Overengineered or Lucky

[RosenSama]

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?