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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 think...being able to wiggle out a remote control vehicle with no one near it...all I can say is Wow!
"C++ is to C as Lung Cancer is to Lung"
I bet there's some scientists who'll be wanting the rover to reverse back a bit - it looks like they've dug the deepest trench yet on Mars, and I wouldn't be surprised if they've already done risk assesments regarding getting the rover to peer in with its instruments... ;-)
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Since Mars has a different length day than Earth (40 minutes longer), the engineers are sometimes working very odd hours (since the rover is only active during daylight on Mars).
Aside from that I imagine they wanted to get it out as soon as possible since they have no idea how long its batteries will last, and it can't do any work while it's stuck. Perhaps they spent the off hours doing simulations and tests to figure out how to get it out.
well, considering they are already running the rovers in extra mission time, the sooner they got them free, the more time was left between getting free and the batery etc. giving their last bit of juice (and the rover dying).
:)
so if the batery would last another 6 months and they spend 3 months getting free, that's only 3 months left to explore.
if they got free in 1 month however (by working overtime), then they would have 5 months to explore...
if I had to choose, I would know what to pick
btw, I think they've got a team manning the earth side of the rover mission 24/7 anyway, so beter let them work on getting the rover free than letting them just sit there spinning the camera around to take pictures.
All indicators show that the human race is selectively breeding itself for stupidity.
Some of us can not stop trying to solve a problem once started. There are still those that live to work and find a 24hr day and long weeks to be a joy when it pays off. The guys and gals doing the rover work seem to be of this type. They are the real heroes of our time....they make the suits and pols look like the fakers they really are. 24hr days are good for the soul.
Why have we been wasting time with rockets when there's a (semi solid) interplanetary sandtrap we could travel on. Not to mention that it can not be that far when they managed to hit a golfball over it in one shot. Afterall the summary said that they scored an interplanetary hole-in-one.
Look a monkey!
Every day the rovers are sitting on Mars their solar panels are degrading, getting covered with dust, parts are being caked with sand and grit, radioactive materials used to keep bearing grease soft are decaying, battery capacity is dropping. They have a very limited lifespan, but thanks to Nasa's over-engineering in the extreme, they are both still functional, long beyond their minimum expected lifespan.
For how long is anyone's guess. The rovers may only have a month of time left to live. Who knows what's just over the next dune to check out. To waste the rover's last hours just because a few people will have to work a little O.T. is, well... wasting a valuable Opportunity.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
As others have already noted, the rovers are operating well past their mission time and could fail at any minute. There is an unknown quantity of time left to have the rover do whatever science it can.
Also, it costs a great deal of money to keep a mission like this going. The longer the rover is playing in the sand without doing anything of value, the more money is wasted. NASA's budget is thin enough as it is. I guess they could always abandon that particular rover, but I don't think anyone wants that.
Rechargeable batteries cease to work
No, they're supposed to work forever. Or at least that's what my lawyer said when he filed a lawsuit over my nearly four-year-old iPod. It must be true.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
Seriously, no nation should be able to claim an entire planet as their territory just because they were the first to land a person on that planet.
Start by factoring a worst case scenario for all the components on the rover, and come up with an expected mission time of 180 days (assuming a successful landing). Sprinkle in a safety factor of 2, and you have a 'design mission' of 90 days. Plan all budgets going forward with a '90 days on planet' segment for the mission, keeping budget numbers as small as possible, ie easier to get approved, and the likelihood of a 'successful mission' as high as possible.
After a successful landing, and the rovers run around for most of the 90 days, you come to the 'amazing' conclusion that they are still going strong, and could well do so for a long time yet. Re-do all mission life calculations, but, factor in some best case scenarios for component life, rather than worst case, and remove you fudge factor of 2, and voila, you come to the conclusion rovers can easily go another year, maybe longer. Now you go back to the budget folks, and present it as 'ok, we spent 150 million getting these things onto mars, we only need another 10 million to run them for another year after a hugely successful primary mission'.
From a budget point of view, it becomes a no brainer, for a mere 10 million more, you can triple or quadruple the science value of the original 150 million investment, whereas the whole project could well have been scrapped if the 10 million more was factored in from the get go.
Management played the game exceptionally well on this one, they back end loaded the budget with 'extras' that end up impossible to be declined after the rovers actually ended up on planet, and survived the first 90 days of 'primary mission'. They knew this was the plan already prior to launch, but, by back end loading the budget, they kept the initial approval numbers a lot smaller (easier), and left the long running mission plans to be bonus, ie only presented up the food chain after the rovers survived the first 90 days, and then validated the 'real scenarios' for actual expected mission life.
The real problem they have now, rovers are going strong even after the real planned life, and now they are in an ongoing game of keeping budget topped up. From this point forward, it's still going to be a no brainer though, with all the space hype focussing on mars talk, topping the budget for the rovers is the cheapest publicity that can be bought today, and it'll continue to help deflect criticism away from _other programs_ that soak up billions, and possibly even help justify the sacrifice of those programs since mars is now the focus of all the forward looking hype.
There are some politicians that are hoping and dreaming the 2 rovers can go for another year plus, because, it'll give them a wonderful chance to do some funds diversions. You can bet your last dollar that there are plans afoot in washington to divert more funds to the rover operations, and use that as the excuse to claim not enough funding left to service hubble. It'll be a political coup, but it'll only work if the rovers are still roaming mars when hubble service mission gets to a 'now or never' state.
If he's your lawyer, how come he's getting millions of dollars and you're getting a coupon for more defective parts?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
No, actually, you're wrong. Intertia is a function of ONLY mass. (gravity is not used in intertia calculation) A bowling ball hitting you going 20kph on the moon or the earth would do the same ammount damage. however a feather hitting you at 20kph vs a bowling ball at 20kph the Bowling ball would do a hell of a lot more damage. (Damage could be construde as applying an acceleration to you)
"Consider Voyager. Still costing the taxpayers money after all these years. If you threaten to turn it off; you could hear the anguished screams all the way to the edge of the solar system."
What a fArking troll. The absolute pittance that the Voyager program costs (a few million a year) is so far below the background it's not worth discussing, no wonder it was posted AC. One debate on the floor costs more than an entire years worth of funding. Just cancel the debate and boom... Voyager is free for the year.
"Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations"
That depends on which part(s) fail. Loosing the radio(s) or solar panel(s) would be a disaster that cannot be worked around.
Losing a drive motor might not be too big a deal - if there is one working on the other wheels. They just have to be more careful because less wheels would spin next time the terrain is touch. (I'm not sure how the rover is designed, but I would suspect that there is more than one motor, instead of a complex transmission, or 1 wheel drive)
There are many lesser failures that can be lived with. There are a number of experiments that it can run, if something needed for one experiment fails, the rest can still work just fine.
The intertia (momentum) of the rover is effectively 0. It's moving at a speed of centimeters per day. A triple-mass rover would indeed have triple inertia, but 0*3 still equals 0.