Mars Rover Opportunity Working Free

VernonNemitz writes "As previously reported, the Mars rover Opportunity ran into more sand (or finer material) than it was designed to handle. While initial attempts to escape may not have accomplished much, the most recent efforts seem to imply that the plucky machine is going to succeed at getting away."

Comments

That's nice

[chris09876]

I guess moving 7.4 centimetres is better than nothing :) It's good they didn't give up on the rover... I'd like to say they've really gotten their moneys worth with these guys, but it's hard to measure the economic payback of the whole "mars exploration" thing... it's more of a long-term investment.

Kudos to NASA and team!

[guyfromindia]

This is great news... The rovers have been going on WAAY beyond their intended lifespan... Maybe we all can learn from the excellent design/descipline that the Engineers used to create these wonders!

Re:Kudos to NASA and team!

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree as well. They said the same thing about Voyager 2. And it is still running and moving on. Cheers to NASA.

Re:Kudos to NASA and team!

[vsprintf]

Step 2: Tell everyone that you've created a good product with an intended lifespan of 3 months

There is a real difference between the official, designed lifespan and the expected (or hoped for) lifespan. The widget is truly supposed to function for the official lifespan in order to fulfill the main mission objectives. If it doesn't, it fails the mission. After that time, the mission is a success, no matter how you look at it, and the secondary objectives, extra telemetry, whatever, are gravy as long as NASA is willing to fund the continuing mission operations.

We have satellites that are way (a decade or more) beyond their designed lifespan, and running out of fuel. It's a good thing they have lasted as long as they have, since certain administrations are more interested in diverting funds to proposed missions that generate headlines instead of missions that provide us with information we need daily about our own planet. Now, big business is asking for a law that will prevent government agencies from allowing the public to access weather data that the taxpaying public paid for because businesses could make more profit by reselling the data. Sometimes I wanna barf.

Good Job

[AT-SkyWalker]

When this first happened I remember I read somewhere that the NASA engineers outlined their trouble shooting approach by indicating that they will try to duplicate the situation here on earth and will study every maneuver before performing anything on the real thing on Mars so they won't have to resort to forceful trial and error maneuvering

This is a shinning example that meticulous work and systematic thinking eventually gets the job done, even if it sounds boring and even if a "quick fix" seems really sexy

Good Job NASA.

The Little Rover That Could...

[RuneB]

It is interesting that these rovers have exceeded all initial expectations. Every once in a while, something happens to one of the rovers that people say will make it unusable, and the rover has overcome whatever problem occurred and continue onward. I wonder how much of this is just because of good engineering by all the people involved in making the rovers, and how much of it is just plain luck.

Eventually of course, something will happen to make a rover unusable, but it is interesting that the rovers have lasted this long.

Hackneyed

[Skiron]

It is a terrible shame when quite unbelievable stuff goes on, and is treated as mundane.

To me, being born before the space race, man on the moon etc., this is still fascinating. Why current the current generation is interested in the slightest, I don't know.

What all these guys are doing was totally unthinkable 20 years ago.

Lets hope we will get another 20 years when the next generation filter through.

Re:Hackneyed

[Anonymous Coward]

It tells us quite a lot of things actually. Just getting stuck in the sand dune is educational, since we now have data on tire design and traction from the rover wheel design and experiments.

The tires currently on your car would probably never get out of a sand drift. Maybe in a few years people can develop tread designs that not only cut through water puddles but through sand dunes.

Re:Yea, more money wasted.

[susano_otter]

So you say.

You may disagree with how the government spends your money, but at least NASA has to work for its pay.

This differs greatly from welfare, where you get paid for not working.

Wake me up when welfare recipients contribute half the science NASA does.

Re:make robots very flexible

[jd]

Doubling the components more than doubles the probability of a fault developing, so that's really a Bad Idea, although it sounds good at first. What would be better would be a way for system components to repair themselves (therefore making spare parts unnecessary), and for components to be over spec by enough of a margin that potential situations are within the design tolerences, rather than so close to the limits.

Re:Monster Garage - Red Thunder

[richyoung]

Sounds like the John Varley novel "Red Thunder", in which a magic power source removes any weight concerns WRT spaceflight payloads, and the first people on Mars are able to take along an actual hopped-up pickup truck to cruise around the dunes of mars.

Re:make robots very flexible

[jd]

Yes, fault tolerence through that kind of redundancy (similar to a scheme Sir Clive Sinclair proposed, about 20 years ago) would certainly improve reliability. As demonstrated by Sir Clive, such a design is practical and workable, and I would agree with you that using it would produce a more flexible, more reliable device.

Sir Clive's "Great Idea" was to use wafer-scale integration to produce massive redundancy of any given electronic component, and then use filesystem/networking techniques for marking bad regions and routing round them. What you'd end up with is a chip that could take massive punishment and survive physical destruction of even large portions of the surface.

That would cover electronic systems, and mechanical systems could be duplicated with some sort of tie-in. For example, if joint A on robot arm A fails, and arm B is physically linked, then you can use joint A on arm B as a stand-by.

If, then, joint B on arm B failed, you could still use joint B on arm A, for the same reason, giving you fail-over at the component level, not the device level.

That would be something that NASA should definitely explore, and schemes like it, as ways to improve the flexibility and durability of the hardware it launches.