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Mars Rover Breaks Free
QuantumFTL writes "According to an MSNBC story Opportunity, the same rover that scored an interplanetary hole-in-one, has broken free of an interplanetary sand trap. The MER science operations mailing list was abuzz this morning with the news, as soon as the first rear hazcam image indicating success came down. Engineers were praised for working long nights and weekends to make this extrication possible. Good job, NASA!"
To simulate martian gravity, which is a third of Earth's, experimenters stripped one of the test rovers of two-thirds of its weight
Soon, the Opportunity team was ready for action. On May 11, Pasadena commanded the rover to straighten its wheels. Two days later, Pasadena ordered those wheels to rotate 2.5 times, or about 80 inches.
Since then, Opportunity has moved forward an average of 0.5% of the total distance that its wheels have rotated. That comes to 1.1 feet ahead out of 213 feet spun.
The rover is now long past its theoretical life span, any other part my fail, and that would be the end of it. One failure is hard to fix or work around, two is nearly impossible.
Rechargeable batteries cease to work. Solar panels get scratched and clogged by sand. Sand gets into the parts and joints. Did I mention this thing is basically sitting in a big pile of sand? Okay. Now did I mention that Mars, as a planet, is prone to really nasty windstorms?
Every second that passes is one second closer to the point at which this rover simply ceases to function. Until that point comes, we want to get absolutely as much use out of it as possible.
Well, they certainly think about it:
So what comes next? The first thing we're going to do is simply take a very hard look at the stuff we were stuck in. Much of the worst terrain was under the belly of the rover through all of this, down where we couldn't see it. From our new position, everything that was under us for all those weeks is now visible. So we're going to take a little while just to look at where we were. We may also turn to take a look at our tracks (or trenches, or whatever you want to call them) with some of the instruments on the arm. But we'll see about that one... we'll only do it if we're convinced it's safe.
(from http://athena1.cornell.edu/news/mubss/)
There's some good discussion about this going on in #space at irc.freenode.org, I'd recommend it to anyone who is interested in the topic. Also we've been talking about software issues affecting the rover (if we get to sol 1000, just about every piece of ground software will be inoperable). It's a cool place, check it out.
Cheers,
Justin Wick
P.S. First accepted story! w00t!
Hey -
:
e r_main.html
On the Nasa Home Movies page, there is a very nice photo montage called
"Rover Team Album" 2:49 at 11meg
It has some very cool electronica music to go with it. I've been searching, but can't find any indication as to exactly what the music is.
Anyone have any ideas ?
You can get to it from here
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/m
Select the "One Year on Mars" (View Flash Feature) link at the right, then choose "Home Movies" from the set of image links in the popup window.
94TT
"Every day the rovers are sitting on Mars their solar panels are degrading"
Didn't they find out that the solar windstorms blow the sand off of them and keep them clean?
"radioactive materials used to keep bearing grease soft are decaying"
iirc they're using radium 226 which has a half life of about 1590 years.
I understand the point of your post, but these points for why it will fail are probably two unlikley points of failure.
:-) Well, as an engineer, I'm the natural enemy of management, so it pains me to admit this. But honestly, the management for this mission has been simply exceptional, and that's a largely uncredited reason for our success.
Remember the Spirit Anomaly, where we lost contact for a while, a couple of weeks after landing? For all we knew at the time, we'd lost the rover. Pete Theisinger and Richard Cook, who were then the project manager and deputy project manager, went down to the press conference alone, so that (a) the engineering team could work on the damn problem without being distracted by the press, and (b) only their faces were associated with the problem. When things were going well, they brought engineers and scientists to the press conference (and let them do most of the talking). When things went wrong, they took the heat.
The tradition continues with our current project manager, Jim Erickson. To take a recent example, Jim went down to the testbed to help shovel the dirt for the special "sandbox" we had to set up to figure out how to extract ourselves from this dune. (Jim's the guy squatting on the far left of this image. That wasn't one of the days he was digging.)
They couldn't have done it without us. But I have to say, we couldn't have done it without them, either.
``Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.'' -- Richard Dawkins