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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/
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.
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
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.
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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
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