Spirit Marks One Martian Year

hrayr writes to tell us NASA is reporting that Spirit, their proclaimed "wonder child", sent to explore Mars has just wrapped up its first Martian year, equivalent to two Earth years. Originally designed to only last 90 days the small six wheeled machine has lasted far beyond the original scope to bring us immense amounts of data and some 70,000 images. There is still great hope that this data, and more to come will bring us one step closer to Mars habitation.

Comments

Why Mars?

[n0dalus]

More importantly, hopefully this data will bring us one step closer to habitating Earth effectively.

Re:Why Mars?

[Markus Registrada]

Yes. Jesus, what a dump. You wouldn't bid a nickel an acre for a place like that if it was right off a major freeway, and actually had air besides.

Asteroids, particularly the ones (almost) sharing Earth's orbit, might be useful someday, and be worth visiting on that account. That is, if we don't blow ourselves up, or poison ourselves to death, or wipe out our biosphere first. There's nothing like starving in the dark with your hair and teeth falling out to make you lose interest in the finer points of space exploration.

Powered by...

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux :-) http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7570

Cool...

[Mad_Rain]

Now comes the cultural aspect of Spirit's research on Mars: Do the Martians bake it a birthday cake? Or do they now call it an adult and let it drive the family UFO?

Question:

[imstanny]

Why would it only last 90 days? I dont have expertise in battery power, but I figured that since it has solar panels it can recharge its batteries. Having said that, I would imagine the battery would last longer than 90 days. So what's the dilly?

Re:Question:

[xenocide2]

Because its made of several parts intended for space grade usage and cost millions of dollars. Nobody wants to face owing the space research center their money back because their part failed first, so they set a number as a minimum. Clearly they aimed too low, although I've heard unfounded assertions that the 90 day target was because it was easier to budget the manpower that way.

Re:Question:

[Mr2cents]

It's just the warranty, or mission success criterium. If you look at the specs, there isn't a single part of the rovers with such a limited lifetime. For example, the batteries have a 1000 cycle lifetime. The big problem is that there were many unknowns. Landing on mars is a tricky business, two out of three missions failing. They sent two rovers to maximize the chance of at least one of them reaching the surface intact. Further bad luck (a global dust storm, or landing in the middle of a nasty dune field of for example), could further have limited the mission lifetime. And they really needed succes, so they set the goals to "realistic" levels. (Or put another way, they over-designed the robots).

But once they had the two rovers safely on the ground, you could already tell they were going to outlast the warranty. Why even try to reach the Columbia Hills if the rover is near the end of it's lifespan?

I still remember a comment by Steve Squyres not that far in the mission stating that the rovers could still be be going "next summer". He wasn't specific (on purpose, I guess), but I think he didn't mean the next earth summer (a few months), but the next martian summer (it was still autumn on mars back then, so that's more than an earth-year).

Re:Question:

[surfdaddy]

Well, once you get through the tough problem of actually landing on the planet, you face a host of unknowns:

- the temperature is extremely cold, and thermal stresses could crack electronic solder joints and/or ruin components

- the batteries find it tough going at low temperatures

- the silicon solar cells degrade over time, losing efficiency

- an unknown amount of dust collects on the cells, how much and how long can you drive it? One of the surprises is that there are "dust devils" on Mars; some of these have actualy blown over the rovers and cleaned much dust off the solar cells! See the link for an amazing time-lapse movie of such winds caught by the rover cameras!

http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/me r_main.html

Bottom line: when you have thousands of parts in a harsh environment, you just don't know. They built them tough but light, and thought they had a good chance of exceeding 90 days. Thankfully, luck has been on JPL's side, and they're still going! What a success story.

At almost the same time the rovers landed, a European probe was also to land. It was never heard from again, and presumably crashed.

Re:Question:

[iamlucky13]

In addition to what other people have said: because the Sojourner rover lasted about 90 days before it collected too much dust and couldn't operate. It was only expected to last something like 2 weeks, at which time the batteries ran out and it had to trickle charge from it's undersized solar panel. I'm sure experience from the Viking missions and the Pathfinder lander was also used in setting the mission-success criteria.

Re:Question:

[DerekLyons]

Why would it only last 90 days? I dont have expertise in battery power, but I figured that since it has solar panels it can recharge its batteries. Having said that, I would imagine the battery would last longer than 90 days.,

It's the solar panels that were expected to be the maint limiting factor. It was thought that they would get covered with dust and thus be unable to recharge the battery sufficiently as the insolation decreased during the Martian winter. This didn't happen.

Well done NASA

[Dr. Eggman]

It is nice to see successes of NASA for a change. Hopefully, NASA's just in a slump now and we'll see more grand successes like the Mars rovers. First thing is first, lets bridge the shuttle gap with a Soyuz (spelling?) like craft for the purpose of moving materials and people to the space station so we can get that finished. Then, while thats happening they need keep working on designs for longer range reusable veichles like a hybrid between the Apollo setup and the shuttle so we can start working on reaching Mars and maybe hitting the moon again. I think there is still alot of geologic information we can gleen from the moon, especially if we can just drill down a little further. Along with the reusable "mothership" like craft should be smaller, cheaper one time delivery units assembled onsite at the spacestation using materials shipped up in small quantities with other cargo/passengers to the space station. These would be to drop off equipment need for experiments and studies on the moon/mars. But, I'm sure NASA knows what they're doing and I have no doubt they'll accomplish their goals.

Re:Well done NASA

[iamlucky13]

Actually, NASA is hardly in a slump. They've shown a pretty good unmanned mission success over the last 4-5 years. The last major failure was the Mars Polar Lander, which was lost in 1999. Then of course there was the Genesis mission that failed to deploy it's parachute after successfully capturing solar wind particles. The sample was tainted, but not considered completely lost. In the meantime, they've launched the Spitzer, Cassini has arrived on station, Deep Impact smacked a comet, Voyager reached the termination shock, Galileo finished an excellent tour of Jupiter, Stardust is on it's way back to earth with a comet sample, Odyssey is orbiting Mars as planned, and the Reconnaissance Orbiter is halfway there. If you consider the past record, or even the trials of other nations (ESA losing the Beagle amd part of the data from Hguyens, Japan having trouble with Hayabusa and losing their Martian probe, Russia in the doldrums of a limited budget), the success rate lately has been outstanding. I hope this is a sign that we're finally getting the hang of it.

Re:Not to be a cynic

[exi1ed0ne]

Aside from all the hard science things we've learned that may not be immediatly exploitable, we now know there is water. At an insane cost per pound to throw stuff out the gravity well, any resources you don't have to take with you reduce the mission scopr a lot. Think about it - extra fuel to boost the water, extra fuel to boost the extra fuel, ad nausium.

I've read (too lazy to find a link) they've even figured out how to make fuel for the return flight from elements the atmosphere. That's some amazing stuff. Six months there, six months back, and a year on the planet is the minimum time a human mission would need to make the trip worthwhile. If we don't find resources there, then the mission would be one way or no way.

Geologic knowledge about what resources there present and how easy it will be to extract them is essential to the sucess of a human mission. Right now that knowledge can only be retained from robot explorers. It's limited, but they answer one question: What do we need for humand to be sucessful there?