The Rovers That Just Won't Quit

smooth wombat writes "Like the Energizer bunny, the two martian rovers just won't quit. Spirit, after climbing to the top of Husband Hill during the past year, spent two months examining rocks at the top of the hill and scientists confirmed that those rocks were similar to rocks found along the side of the hill indicating that Husband Hill is probably the result of an impact crater. It will take about two months for Spirit to make its way down the hill after which the next target will be a feature called Home Plate located about a half mile away. Opportunity is exploring the northern rim of Erebus Crater, the largest crater between already-explored Endurance Crater and its next destination, Victoria Crater. The rovers were only supposed to last three months but have been operating for almost two years. NASA has also released a 360 degree panorama of images taken by Spirit as it explored Gustav Crater."

Comments

Larger pictures?

[fak3r]

Does anyone have a link to LARGER pictures of what the rovers are seeing? The linked to 360 view [http://origin.mars5.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/press/sp irit/20051021a/site_A114_880_navcam_360_cyl-A627R1 _br.jpg%5D is cool, but too small for details. Looking for a nice one to span two monitors for a nice desktop. I remember some of the first shots showing the side of the landing craft, some tire tracks and such were just amazing.

Re:Larger pictures?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, and as a tip... Of those, the Opportunity heat shield impact site they drove to is among the nicest IMO.
That one is like the others also available as an uber size version.

One thing no one is really talking about...

[hcob$]

While it's outstanding that these things are running so well for so long, it's amuzing that people haven't thought of this from an engineer's perspective.

These things are horribly over-engineered. Not that it is a bad thing they are proving so resilliant, but we're now at 8x the "designed" life span. In my mind, that means they could have probably built it half as robust and still been outstanding pieces of machinery(and alot less expensive).

I know that hindsight is 20/20, and I'm not judging the engineers poorly on this feat(quite the opposite in fact). I just thought someone might want to point that little tid-bit out...

Now, FLAME ON!!

Re:One thing no one is really talking about...

[Apreche]

This is true, and so is the parent post. I can't really speak for this particular project, which is actually cheaper than most NASA stuff, but most other NASA missions are over engineered and too expensive.

Think about it like this. To make a project that is 90% sure to work it costs X dollars. To make the project 99% sure to work it costs 2*X dollars or more! As the levels of redundancy and robustness of the equipment increases the price increasess exponentially. The 99th percent costs more than the 98th percent and so on.

The problem is that most NASA missions go to the 99th percent no matter what. The reality is that sometimes they could do the same mission 10 times over at 90% reliability for less money than doing the mission ones for 99% reliability. So one out of 10 missions would blow up, but 9 out of 10 would rock the house. That's a lot better than the few we have now.

Re:One thing no one is really talking about...

[AndersOSU]

One of my Mech Eng profs liked to tell us that robustness is marketing-speak, it has no real meaning to engineers.

For example you don't talk about robustness of a strut, you talk about strength and fatigue. You don't talk about robustness of an robot, you talk about manuverability and degrees of freedom. You don't talk about robustness of a Mars Rover, you talk about sensors, speed, solar panel life, etc.

Now before you poo-poo this, name one parameter that is best described by robustness, rather than an actual engineering term with real units.

(of course we filled the final presentation for that professors course with all forms of the word, including robustitude)

Re:One thing no one is really talking about...

[hador_nyc]

I think it's good when we engineers overdesign stuff. Take the Brooklyn Bridge for example. It was designed and built before car traffic existed. The steel in the cables is only 1/2 as strong as it was supposed to be, and it's still like 4 times strong than it needs to be with modern car and truck traffic! Quite a feat!

Testament to JPL

[Sierpinski]

I think this is a testament to the folks at the JPL. Those rovers have lasted way longer than anyone expected, and probably hoped. In the early stages of the project, I heard a lot of criticism from the standard armchair astronauts saying about how they could get so much more done if they didn't go 'so damn slow' all the time. I've read about times where haste would have probably halted the program in its steps, like when there was concern about traversing the side wall of a crater, worried that the rover would tip. Its a testament to their planning, skill in design and execution of their plan, and of their patience in their procedures.

Good work JPL!

Re:Read this book.

[bartash]

The reviews at Amazon USA seem to suggest that the book only covers getting to Mars, not the actual operation of the Rovers. Is this true? Did it spoil the book for you?

Re:Why not more?

[mbrod]

This is the same question I keep asking since the rovers success. I would have thought with the plans they had, you could mass produce them and save a lot on costs. Then send an army of them to mars or the moon. Students at various universities and even amateur scientists could help with planning or requests for various places to search.

Instead they came up with the idea that we should switch to manned missions again and it will take 10-20 years.

The robots are already can already do alot of the exploring for us. We should be launching robotic missions to the moons around Jupiter and more robotic missions to Mars, lots of them.

Not one or two every three years, send 10-100 at minimum.

Re:Could be a problem?

[Iriel]

To address your second point, I have to wonder if this could actually help funding. "Well I wasn't going to pay for a moving camera that would die in three months, but two years on the other hand..." Then the problem could go back to your first point: it could cut off funding if the next mission doesn't live up to expectations.

Voyeger

[WindBourne]

I know that you are being funny, but this is the same work as Voyeger. Basically, they tell the politicians that the mission will last a short time, so that they appear to be relatively low-cost missions and that all objectives were met. Now, it appears as though these are wildly successful so the pols keep the money coming. smart engineers, dumb pols.

contest

[Alphons Clenin]

I wonder how much better a job would have been done if something like this were handled "x prize" style.

Take all of the money in the budget for the project, and offer it as a prize to the first person to accomplish all of the goals.

Re:Could be a problem?

[jfengel]

It definitely puts pressure on future mission designers to manage expectations as carefully as the rover mission designers. Fortunately, as long as the technology keeps improving, they'll continue to get better.

But perception of "how much we need" is a much thornier problem for the administrator of NASA. Success is always good; few people have any idea how much this costs, and most are sort of resigned to the few bucks per person this mission costs. In return they get to be The Country That Explores The Planets, and people are willing to pay a lot for that kind of pride.

What gets people ticked about the price is failure. It maakes people feel like laughingstocks in front of the world. Few people really understand the science, or benefit directly from what we learn about Mars, but they feel good that it's us who discovered it. They feel like the most advanced country in the world.

So I wouldn't worry about people saying, "Yeah, we know quite enough about Mars." That's a mission people can get behind, as compared to (say) a war costing 1,000 times as much. The war may accomplish more (depending on whom you ask) but Science (with a capital S, the vague and mysterious one, as opposed to the lower-case-s "science" where we actually learn stuff) is always popular. At least when it wins.

maestro

[VStrider]

I just found out about maestro(Google cache) It's basically the software NASA uses to control the rovers and process their datasets. Looks quite interesting. I'm getting the datasets as I type this.(200MB)

If you're on gentoo,
emerge maestro maestro-data
If not, check your distro repos or get it from here.

finding same old rocks

[peter303]

The first year was kind of exciting beacuase everything they were finding was new. However Spirit is pretty much just seeing the same slightly altered basalt rocks on Sol 600 as it was on Sol 10, 100, 200, 300, 400 and 500.
Ditto for Opportunity. It found those hematite blueberries and sulfur-rich layered rocks in the first crater, then saw them again in the next five craters its visited.

Some of the other things were interesting too- the dust devil movies, eclipses of Martian moons and so on.

Re:All you fans of sterile deserts say WHOOOP!!!

[Sparr0]

Never is such a strong word. I am 20 years old. I expect a corporation to put a geological research team on Mars before I am 40. I expect a colony (of a country that doesn't exist today) there before I am 60. And I expect to visit there before I am 80, even if it costs my life savings and 15 months on a slow transfer orbit.

Re:Why not more?

[NatteringNabob]

When the boss(es) tell you to piss away all your money on a PR, corporate welfare (aka contributions), and jobs (aka votes) project instead of science, that's what you do. NASA doesn't have any choice in the matter. I suspect a lot of people at NASA would rather do science, but it really isn't up to them.

Re:Read this book.

[BTWR]

Dr. Squyres was a professor of mine at Cornell. He was one of the best professors/teachers i have EVER had. I have rarely, if ever, seen someone infuse so much enthusiasm into a class. He'd tell us all of these "secret stories" from Cold War NASA, and I remember him coming 15 minutes late to class one afternoon after he had literally landing in the local airport from NASA, when he told us about how the Rovers had JUST been funded. It was so awesome hearing his enthusiasm about Spirit and Opportunity's 3-month mission prospects (of course then, the rovers were unnamed). He had told us about this about 3 days before NASA announced a press release.

In fact, the first day of class, he said that the entire class was "off the record" and I don't think he even wanted the college newspaper students in there. (and i'm only disclosing that above story because it's obviously ok to say now. but... his others stories stay with me!). - All Cornell Ugrads - make sure to take his classes! (and Jim Bell, another AWESOME astro prof - wrote me my recommendation for med school).