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!"

Comments

Re:Working Nights and Weekends

[Sprotch]

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.

These rovers don't last forever.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:How they did it

[Alien Being]

"To simulate martian gravity, which is a third of Earth's, experimenters stripped one of the test rovers of two-thirds of its weight"

That would reduce intertia too, making the simulator easier to move than the one on Mars. I wonder if a better simulation would have been to attach a helium balloon to the CG of the vehicle.

Additional Discussion

[QuantumFTL]

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!

Re:Not screwed up yet?!

[ScottMaxwell]

What I can't understand is, why didn't "management" come in and screw this all up?

:-) 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.