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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!"
Now I'll know who to call next time my car gets stuck in the snow this winter.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!!
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.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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
Actually they played the Queen song "I want to break free" and the rover was like totally inspired to break free.
"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.
...to remove a group of 3 martians with dust all over them, high-fiving each other :-)
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.
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!
:-) 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