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Mars Rovers Celebrate Their 1000th Sol On Mars
Cherita Chen writes, "Yesterday NASA, Cornell University, and the USGS celebrated the Mars Exploration Rovers' 1000th Sol on the Red Planet. The first rover to land, Spirit, reached the 1000 Sol mark a few weeks ago while the planet was in Solar conjunction. 'Opportunity,' Spirit's twin, and the second lander to make the bounce to Mars, celebrated the milestone yesterday while sitting atop Victoria Crater on the other side of Mars. Both Rovers are still operational (though Spirit is limping) and are sending back valuable data. Not bad for what was slated to be a '90 Sol' mission."
considering the track record of failed missions.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
From TFA, "A sol is a Martian day, which lasts 24 hours, 39 minutes, 35 seconds."
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
First the sensible robot, now mars rovers surviving, even without one wheel!
What a happy day for me, eheheh.
Mission planners have to be concerned with issues regarding solar days on the planet being explored and solar days on Earth.
Using the same term for both would only lead to confusion, hence the use of different terms is very important. This is especially true on Mars, where the "sol" is very close to one Earth day long and it wouldn't necessarily be clear from context which was meant.
There are many examples of NASA/JPL using unnecessary jargon, but this isn't one of them.
the nasa HiRSE team is releasing full resolution images from the new orbiter as they are processed. its fantastic! their site seems to be down at the moment but it has the pictures, and a sofar interesting blog from some of the image processing team http://hiroc.lpl.arizona.edu/
I've mentioned this on /. before. I used to work on MER (one of the devs of Science Activity Planner/Maestro, as featured on /.), and while lasting longer than 90 sols was not considered completely ridiculous, lasting over 1000 sols (with both rovers!!!) definitely was. Our directory structure contained a 3-digit sol number, and a lot of calculations were carried out using only the first 999 sols, including some code I wrote (knowing this to be the case).
Luckily the Operational Softare System team had plenty of time to work this issue, and it even fascilitated the introduction of newer, more capable software into the mission, as if we were already changing everything, why not ad some great stuff. I wish everyone on MER great success with the next 1000 sols!
Take a look around: Interactive version of the McMurdo Panorama
The moderator who called parent off-topic obviously didn't RTFA. C'mon, guys, pay attention before you mod...
A lot of things have been found just from Google earth. I'd really love to see a similar thing done with all the mars images.
http://www.google.com/mars/
If you'd like to track the (global) location and the time of the Mars rovers, or the time for any location on Mars, you can do so on your Palm Pilot with MarsClock, written 100% (coded, compiled, debuged) on my Palm with OnBoardC.
Space and Computers.
The predictions was probably made as some sort of "average", but the odds it'd last exactly 90 days was slim. I'd say the odds of not landing properly at all, or immobilized shortly sfter landing was fairly significant. It's like a computer surviving burn-in or a person surviving infant mortality (though they are much lower in recent year), then they're likely to live significantly well past average. Plus some luck with whirlwinds clearing the solar panels, I guess.
Indeed. I've read somewhere that statistically once a probe survives the initial part of the mission, its survivability tends to be long. Stuff tends to fail on first use if its gonna fail, but once after that it seems have pretty good chances.
Table-ized A.I.