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