Slashdot Mirror
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'm glad to see that we've gotten our money's worth on this one.
Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/
When will the Opportunity rover get some love? It's the twin that gets swept under the rug and left behind while Spirit gets all the attention...
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?
Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain.
Surely somethings must be about done for now. Tires on a car don't last a year on a smooth road for example. Did Nasa have anything prepared (like the tires are good for X miles or the cameras are good for Y shots), for this kind of thing?
I like muppets.
This looks familiar. Oh wait, it was posted here earlier.
Its realy closer to 3 years old, its only been on mars for a year
I've seen this many times, where NASA projects grossly live past their expected lifetimes. It's more of a PR stunt, to say that the rovers lived much longer than anybody had ever hoped, and had the rovers failed after 2 months, I'm sure a lot of people would be upset.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
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.
I dont know what type of child hood you had, but it was a reference to this book:
The Little Engine that Could
The rover just dont drive like you.
It now seems obvious that Slashdot "authors" (story submission moderators) don't read Slashdot. Maybe they're on to something...
--
make install -not war
Who is really counting? Oh, wait, the /.'ers who went "oh, oh, I learned this in school and NOW I can ... oh, damn, someone posted it before me..."
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
One thought that has crossed my mind- Did NASA build the rovers knowing that they would last much longer than three months, and claim the three month life span to save face in case something went wrong? I know that we have the mysterious cleaning element on Oppertunity, but Spirit is holding up pretty well on it's own, too.
This is something that the USA just does so much better than anything else - well done guys.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Quite amazing life span for the bugger despite the OS glitches that rendered it almost unusable. Maybe they should use embedded Windows instead of DOS and 640K ram next time to prevent crashes :)
Someone must be held accountable! In order to maintain the proud, bureaucratic tradition of post-apollo NASA we must fire the engineers responsible. Do you have any idea how many man hours have been wasted trying to operate a rover that should have been dead months ago?
====
Crudely Drawn Games
Does it worry anyone that the guys at NASA grossly miscalculated the life of the bot? Was this done to save face if it screwed up, because this margin of error, and if you look at it as it is, it's pretty embarrassing. I mean great that its still going, but what pencil pusher calculated the battery/recharge time or batt life and came to the conclusion that it will probably last 3 months?
In terms of years operating and miles run. Whatever these people did, we need to bottle it, pronto.
The Spirit Rover marks its one year aniversary ... It has traversed more than 2 miles of Martian landscape and sent back thousands of pictures and reams of data.
Two miles in only a year? Wow, at this rate it'll only take a few hundred thousand years to explore all of the Martian surface! Yay rovers!
It's hard to take the "we don't need to send humans to Mars, we can explore with rovers" crowd seriously when our best and brightest rover covers only two miles of ground in an entire year.
0 1 - just my two bits
A little OT here: I'm looking for the program that NASA uses to stitch those panorama images. I heard way back that it's some open-source program but I don't know the name and couldn't find it anywhere.
2 miles in a year. That averages out to about a foot an hour. Must have been a lot of down time. Hopefully it wasn't using the left lane.
--
yosd dieo sda reost felwo
Hey, give that dirt a break. When 200 billion years old you reach, look as good you will not.
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
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)
Are either of these intrepid little bots in an area even remotely near Odyssey or Beagle? It'd be kinda nice to see what happened to them.
I suspect that one of these choices is incorrect. Correct.
Well the rovers have been on Mars for one EARTH year, but not quite yet 1/2 a MARTIAN year. Mars DOES have seasons, so if the rovers landed in the summer, it's now winter there. If they make it a full Martian year, that would really be something!
Has there been any thought about adding microphones to these planetary rovers? I would be very interested to know what it sounds like on Mars.
You mean Windriver, right?
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 Venus Magellan radar mapper was designed nominally for one complete mapping cycle, but survived fve before NASA cut funds. Galileo went nearly triple its two year lifetime. Both were almost out of orientation propellant and some instruments had failed. Saturn Cassini is designed for four years and 86 moon flybys, but could go ten years or more. It costs a good amount of money for ground crews to operate the probes and space network capacity. Eventually you want the people to move on to the next probe, which is about every 2 or 4 years for Mars.
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?
The robots cannot make decisions on the fly, other than extremely simple obstacle avoidance.
Currently.
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.
Currently.
An astronaut can walk faster than these robots can move.
Compared to our current state of the art.
I'm being somewhat whimsical but you hopefully see my point - all the limitations you mention are simple, near-term technical challenges. They could be overcome with another few years' worth of development.
I think we should send humans, but only after we've sent so many damn robots that we can virtually (and thoroughly) tour Mars by telepresence beforehand.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Scott: "Do you mind a little advice? Starfleet captains are like children. They want everything right now, and they want it their way. But the secret is to give only what they need, not what they want!"
LaForge: "Yeah, well I told the captain I'd have this analysis done in an hour."
Scott: "How long would it really take?"
LaForge: "An hour!"
Scott: "Oh, you didn't tell him how long it would *really* take, did you?"
LaForge: "Well of course I did."
Scott: "Oh, laddie, you've got a lot to learn if you want people to think of you as a miracle worker!"
--"Relics", Stardate Unknown
This article marks its one day aniversary after an expected lifetime of just 3 hours. In honor of its important anniversary and the shortness of notice in the Slashdot editors' minds, here's the original link for this blast from the past!
That is all.
Perhaps if this project lasts long enough they will turn it over to the open source community when their funding runs out? Then we could have polls on slashdot to decide which features get added to the rovers software or which rock it visits next.
I've seen few other people making this point - everything these rovers have done in the past year could be done by a human in a day!!
Furthermore a humnan in a suit would have a lot more options about places they can go exploring - like in deep canyons which is where you'd like to go looking at things up close. But currently we cannot land too near a canyon, or go in one for fear of terrain and loss of communications.
As exciting as the rovers have been , a few humans there would yield a few orders of magnitude more data as well as a far higher quality, with trained observers knowing instantly taht one rock was better than another to look at instead of having a comitte decide if a rock ten feet away is worth the day or so it will take to get to and examine.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Does it worry anyone that the guys at NASA grossly miscalculated the life of the bot? Was this done to save face if it screwed up, because this margin of error, and if you look at it as it is, it's pretty embarrassing. I mean great that its still going, but what pencil pusher calculated the battery/recharge time or batt life and came to the conclusion that it will probably last 3 months?
When trying to guess the life expectancy of the rovers, NASA can only go by past experience, and the last rover they had on Mars, Sojourner, lasted 3 months.
That's my guess, at least.
Tires on a car don't last a year on a smooth road for example.
My tires have been on my car for 4 years and they still have tread left. Many tires are rated for 100,000 miles.
Its traveling at 2/8760, erm really slow, 0.000228311 MPH, soon enough it will be able to travel in reverse.
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. Add Bunny to your signature
(> <) to help him achieve world domination.
The MiniTES instrument needs to be kept above a certain temperature to avoid possible damage, and its heater has been disabled during deep sleep, and temperatures have gone into the danger range during the nights. In that sense, the MiniTES is getting mildly close to being permanently shut down, though I believe its still collecting data at the moment.
IIRC, it uses VxWorks, and the space shuttle uses QNX. I'm probably wrong.
It's sent back "reams" of data... how many Libraries of Congress is that?
Do you have a source to data on that? I haven't seen that reported.
Neurowiz
All of Opportunity's instruments are functioning normally. Amazing, considering they gave it 90 days as an optimum mission length.
Neurowiz