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

Working Nights and Weekends

[CrankyFool]

I'm really not trying to be a troll here, but I'm wondering: What was the rush? Sure, this needed to get done, but why the need to work extra-long hours to do it? What would have happened if it took an extra month or two? (I read the article linked to with the text 'engineers were praised' and was not enlightened)

Re:Working Nights and Weekends

[eln]

The Martians who were watching it all unfold were running out of popcorn and getting antsy. It would have been just a matter of time before one of them gave up and just kicked the thing.

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.

Re:Working Nights and Weekends

[mcb]

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.

Re:Working Nights and Weekends

[Garion Maki]

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.

Re:Working Nights and Weekends

[IxianMach]

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.

Re:Working Nights and Weekends

[v1]

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.

Re:Working Nights and Weekends

[AndroidCat]

They should have just dropped another rover at the edge of the sandtrap and carried on. It would have cost them a stroke, but that's not so bad.

Nice work guys.

[Junior J. Junior III]

Now I'll know who to call next time my car gets stuck in the snow this winter.

Re:Nice work guys.

[nick-less]

Now I'll know who to call next time my car gets stuck in the snow this winter.

Good luck, but keep the following in mind before calling this guys:
4 hours after your call you'll be called back an instructed to turn 30
4 hours later you'll be instructed to drive back slowy for 1.5 minutes
[...]

I'd rather wait for Mister Plow instead...

Re:Nice work guys.

[AndroidCat]

No way. They'll just get started and then they'll get all excited because they've dicovered water on the surface. You'll never any work out of them after that.

Cool!

[csharp_wannabe]

To think...being able to wiggle out a remote control vehicle with no one near it...all I can say is Wow!

Reverse!

[Ford Prefect]

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... ;-)

Re:Reverse!

[Anonymous Coward]

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/)

What the article doesn't mention ...

[PxM]

is that they were so busy looking at the rear hazcam that they didn't see the giant water trap right in front of them.

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:These rovers don't last forever.

[Reaperducer]

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.

Not screwed up yet?!

[scovetta]

What I can't understand is, why didn't "management" come in and screw this all up? How could something that was supposed to last only for 90 days last for 18 months? Seems like with most things, if they are supposed to last for 90 days, they MIGHT make it to 93 or 94 days.

My hats off to the engineers. I wish I worked at a place like that.

Re:Not screwed up yet?!

[grozzie2]

You dont understand the concept. The original 90 day estimate of lifetime was solely to keep the total mission budget down to a point it would be 'acceptable'. If they had actually added another 18 months of operations to the original budget, the project never would have got off the ground. Enter some 'creative engineering'.

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.

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.

YEE HAH!

[varebel]

If there was any question about Earthlings being the rednecks of the universe, that image of us rootin' up the martian surface oughta clear it up.

Lock the hubs and put 'er in low lock. YEE HAH!!

Re:What this proves out is..

[Timesprout]

Didn't you hear? They started broadcasting some of Bushes speeches to the Rover. The convulsions it suffered in response to George butchering the English language were enough to dislodge it.

Re:What this proves out is..

[kfg]

I am looking forward to the day when, like on the moon, I see the Stars and Stripes planted in the Martian soil.

As am I, and I'm sure the Indians we hire to put it there will feel a sense of pride in their accomplishment.

KFG

Re:How they did it

[zepmaid]

Actually they played the Queen song "I want to break free" and the rover was like totally inspired to break free.

Re:What this proves out is..

[mbrewthx]

And when they need to put in sleep mode they just bradcast an AL Gore speech..

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.

Rear hazcam image has been photoshopped...

[Peter Simpson]

...to remove a group of 3 martians with dust all over them, high-fiving each other :-)

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:Additional Discussion

[QuantumFTL]

(if we get to sol 1000, just about every piece of ground software will be inoperable)

Hm, why is that? Will their system clock roll over?

Well, most of the software developed at JPL for the mission uses three digits to encode the sol number. Once we are past 999, this software, as written, will cease to function properly. This is something that can be fixed, but I believe it would take a lot of effort. It will be a miracle if we need to do that, but it's possible one of the rovers will still be marginally operational at that point.

Re:What this proves out is..

[Alien Being]

Why would native Americans be proud about planting the Stars and Stripes? Ohhh, never mind.

Re:This is a problem ... sort of

[Bad D.N.A.]

"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.

Music on Rover Team Album Home movies

[HalfWalker]

Hey -

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/me r_main.html

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.

Re:How they did it

[spworley]

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.