Mars Rover Stuck in a Dune

Bamfarooni writes "The NASA Mars rover Opportunity has gotten stuck in a dune, buried up to the hubs of the wheels. While they haven't given up yet, it doesn't look good for the little guy who's now 359 days into the extended mission." From the article: "The Mars machinery had been cruising southward across the open parking lot-like landscape of Meridiani Planum, full of larger and larger ripples of soil. Opportunity has been en route to its next stopover, Erebus crater, nestled inside an even larger crater known as Terra Nova."

Comments

Summary is a little too sensational

[calibanDNS]

From TFA: Rover operators are optimistic they can extricate the robot from its jam, having gotten dug in before. and said Steve Squyres, lead scientist on the Mars Exploration Rover effort at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. "We are very optimistic that we'll be able to get out of here, but we're really going to take our time doing it."

I'd hardly interpret that as "it doesn't look good for the little guy".

That sucks, but they got their money's worth

[stlhawkeye]

NASA has definitely gotten their money's worth out of these two golf carts. These missions have exceded their design specifications by like 500% or something. Weren't they meant for a 90-day mission? We're going on over a year. That's nuts.

As much as my Nerd Gene wants a manned mission to Mars, it's hard to argue with the scientific value of (relatively) cheap missions like this. NASA shifted in the late 90's to a series of relatively inexpensive probes with a narrow purpose (as opposed to the Voyager-class missions). These probes make sense. For one, there's less financial damage if one fails or is destroyed. And two, they can be put together, tested, and launched more cheaply and more quickly.

And we're getting some excellent science from them. The Mars rovers were an hour-by-hour news story, then a day-by-day news story, there was a lot of public interest in them during those first few days. These kinds of missions are, I think, more crucial to human space exploration than launching a dude to Mars.

There's some things you must have people in space to accomplish, but we've got a lot to learn yet through frugal unmanned space exploration and I hate to see so much of NASA's focus being shifted towards manned operations. Honestly, I hate to see NASA continuing to be involved in the production and operational side of space exploration. I think NASA should be reformulated as a primarily science and research-oriented organization and launch operations should be almost entirely privatized. NASA does too many things and most of it not that well, and none of it efficiently.

Images

[Maddog Batty]

The rover is driving backwards so there is more to see in the front view than there is in the back view

I hope they get it out...

Re:Don't give up, NASA!

[nharmon]

Actually you may be more right than you realize. Those with four-wheel-drive vehicles (that actually leave the pavement) know that sometimes after getting stuck, you can move the steering wheel from side to side as a way of trying to gain traction from the sides of the rut you're in.

Perhaps NASA could learn a thing or two from rednecks in 4x4 pickup trucks? *smile*

Re:More info

[Cyclotron_Boy]

Actually, this shot from the Mars Rover site shows the front wheels pretty well buried and covered with caked-on soil.

Re:More info

[Chokai]

In order to even the wear on the drive motors on the rovers SteveS and crew have been alternating between driving forward and backwards.

Re:Demolition derby

[Idarubicin]

I know the parent poster is kidding, but for those who are wondering...

Under near-ideal conditions, the rovers could crawl a hundred meters (three hundred or so feet) per day.

The two rovers are on roughly opposite sides of the planet, which has a diameter of nearly seven thousand kilometers. To bring the other rover around--assuming you could drive in a straight line and there were no obstacles or technical problems--would take two or three hundred years.

Re:It's easy!

[Ced_Ex]

Letting the air out isn't urban legend. The purpose of letting *some* air out is to give the tire greater surface area to get grip. You're not deflating the tire completely, just taking out about 10-15lbs psi. Read it here.

Also, the floor mats do work, those people you see obviously don't know what they are doing with the floormats if they are ejecting them into the air. Don't floor it when you shove the mats under! You're suppose to just crawl it out using the floormats for grip instead of loose sand, or ice.