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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'm glad to see that we've gotten our money's worth on this one.
Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/
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.
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.
I dont know what type of child hood you had, but it was a reference to this book:
The Little Engine that Could
Tires on a car don't last a year on a smooth road for example.
Tires can last much longer than a year. I know people who have had the same set for three years.
But relating to why the tires on the rovers last (and will continue to), it has to do with friction. Tires on car get very hot when driving at highway speeds, and abrasion occurs (when small pieces of it comes off and stick to the road). The rovers tires move at such slow speeds that the heat generated by friction is negligible and abrasion forces are very small.
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...
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make install -not war
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.
Opportunities birthday is in 21 days (Jan 24).
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 !
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)
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?
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Crudely Drawn Games
Its just the way engineering for reliability works.
...
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?
In terms of years operating and miles run. Whatever these people did, we need to bottle it, pronto.
Hey, give that dirt a break. When 200 billion years old you reach, look as good you will not.
JPL guys were (and are) doing miracles to keep the craft functional.
JPL is not performing a great deal of real-time operational control over the Voyager craft. They are more monitoring what is left of the various experiments and power levels.
The miracle was performed back in the 70s when these craft were built - they certainly engineered them damn tough! Say what you will about how we've lost 2 shuttles, but NASA has shown some huge successes in our robotic craft: Voyager, Pioneer, NEAR, Deep Space 1 and MERs.
A 25 Year Partnership - Voyager and the Deep Space Network
Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM)
Science being performed during VIM
Weekly Status Reports
Neurowiz
Every time they pat themselves on the back for the rovers lasting so long I cringe. It feels like "Your car was warrentied for 36k miles and you're at 80k... High Five!"
Plus, come on, did you have to mention Star Trek?
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)
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!
IIRC, they had expected the solar panels to be covered up, and the climate has been surprisingly helpful in keeping the dust off the panels...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.
They've been recording that stuff for years, man! You could download it all until the RIAA found out... Now you can't get them or "Happy Birthday" anymore. :-(
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?
Don't be a dumbass, grasshopper.
The first flight of the Wright brothers (Orville And Redenbacher, according to Cartman) was less than the wingspan of a modern airliner.
Also remember that the rovers were not doing the Baja rally. They stopped a lot to do actual science and exploration.
--- Ban humanity.
The Beagle 2 [rest in peace] included a microphone.
No, the rover's run VxWorks, which is a closed source, for profit real time OS, which Nasa purchased to run them.
/. as being available just recently.
The propriatory rover code may be OS, I know some of the apollo guidance code was mentioned on
As has been said before, they did their best to make sure the rovers would survive to three months, but the biggest problem they expected in the long term was heat cycling from daytime temperatures to nighttime temperatures slowly cracking and destroying the rovers, which must have happened as a lesser rate than their worse-case estimates.
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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