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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."
Admit it, you're getting misty.
considering the track record of failed missions.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
Not bad for a mission that cost less than $500 million. Fast, cheap, and still lasts a long time. Too bad they don't have nuclear power plants, as they'd be getting more work done faster.
Biggest success since the Moon landing. It proves NASA can still excell they just need to dump some baggage like the shuttle and get back to what they do best, space exploration. I'd love to see them release a disk of all the Mars images. I'd pay good money for a full set of images especially if they included a set of the aerial shots. It could help open up the research to people that don't have direct access. 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. I know it's been started but there's a massive number of images availible. Better to have a few million eyes searching them than a few hundred.
Can we say it is due to the usual x10 engineering safety margin?
90 sol * 10 -> 900. Sort of close to 1000%.
The engineers would have looked at MTBF (mean time between failures) of the components and probably designed for at least a 99% survivability to 90 sol. This might factor down to a 90% survivability to 900 sol depending on the failure curves for the parts. So the the probability of two surviving that long would be 0.9 * 0.9 = 0.81 or 81% chance.
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!
So when did the Rovers pick up a Soul Cube?
Not bad for what was slated to be a "90 Sol" mission."
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
Since Vista has been RTM, I declare the Rovers winners!
It was always a tossup between a Rover death or Vista release,
but Microsoft went into hurry-up mode.
The really tough feat will be if the Rovers survive until
Vista is no longer supported.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Because martians don't speak english.
I see nothing wrong with five meals a day
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!
Why not day^M verses day^E for us.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
I just hope they never have probes on Mars and Venus at the same time because calling both types of day 'sol' will be confusing (though admittedly Venus is a little different). The length of the Martian day is a property of Mars, not of the Sun. It should have a name that reflects it's Martianness.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
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...
Rollin', rollin', rollin' ?Rollin', rollin', rollin' ?Rollin', rollin', rollin' ?Rollin', rollin', rollin' ?Mars-Ride! ??Rollin', rollin', rollin' ?Though the water's frozen ?Keep them rovers rollin' ?Mars-Ride! ?Dust and wind and weather ?Hell-bent for leather ?Wishin' my pal was by my side. ?All the things I'm missin', ?History is waitin', ?Waiting at the end of our ride ??CHORUS ?Move 'em on, head 'em up ?Head 'em up, move 'em on ?Move 'em on, head 'em up ?Mars-Ride ?RAT 'em out, RAT 'em in, ?RAT 'em in, RAT 'em out, ?Count 'em up, Sort 'em out ?Mars-Ride! ??Keep movin', movin', movin' ?Though they're agin' ?Keep them rovers movin' ?Mars-Ride! ?Don't try to understand 'em ?Just RAT, photo, and sand 'em ?Soon we'll be living high and wide. ?My CPUs calculatin' ?History will be waitin', ?Be waitin' at the end of our ride. ??Mars-Ride! ?Mars-Ride! ?
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
are those metric Sols or Imperial Sols ;-)
Anyway, congratulations NASA !
They did not use the Sol naming system for us (the public) they use it for their own internal scheduling. Probably for both personel and onboard events. It is a simple one sylible word that is hard to confuse with anything else.
Maybe this /. story could do with 4 or 5 less FAs. Everyone knows that us /.ers have the sterotype of having too busy a social life to read through this many articles :)
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
I think it's to differentiate from Earth days easily in case there'd be any ambiguity or reason for confusion without having to type "Martian day" until their fingers bleed.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
How about talking in the context of Earth Days, Martian Days, Venusian Days, etc? I think its pretty understandable, moreso if the wikipedia pages ever turn up ;-)
What could possibly hurt the security of the American people more than giving our own government the ability to hide its
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.
> Not bad for what was slated to be a '90 Sol'
They intentionally underestimate the operational duration of the equipment to continually "WOW" the public. "Undercommit, overdeliver."
Something Engineers need to do to when scheduling their projects.
Ed Barbar, President and General Manager, Furnit USA
This is why English has the option of including adjectives. The phrase "martian day" is a perfectly understandable alternative to the what-the-hell-does-it-mean "sol". Furthermore, given the fact that the unit "sol" is different lengths on different planets, and we'll have to specify "Venusian sol" when a long-term lander makes it to the surface of Venus, it's completely redundant.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Johnny 5 is alive!
...Spirit's attitude improved:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/54360
Seriously, the last message that it sent ('OVERPRICED SPACE-ROOMBA AWAITING MORE BULLSHIT ORDERS') was really uncalled for.
Part of the reason for their durability is a response to the "metric conversion" orbiter failure and the Mars Polar Lander crash. NASA was embarassed up the wazoo and made extra sure it wouldn't happen with the next batch. A 3rd failure in less than a decade and many heads would be rolling. Thus, much of the rover success is due to (healthy?) paranoia.
On a side note, I think they are being too cautious with Opportunity right now. They should send it into the crater *now* rather than search for the best entrance. It is living on borrowed time and could croak any minute. There are multiple non-reduntant systems in the probe that could potentially take it out in one fell swoop.
Table-ized A.I.
You mean like:
using namespace Mars {
"On the fifth day of their missions the Shock and Awe probes on Mars are doing fine. Shock is current exploring the northern polar cap and Awe is..."
}
using namespace Venus {
"As we approach half way through Harsh Questioning's first day on Venus it has just circled successfully around a pool of molten lead..."
}
Yeah, that might work.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
'Opportunity,' Spirit's twin, and the second lander to make the bounce to Mars,
Actually it was the 3rd. The 1997 Sojourner rover also used air bags (but bundled with lander station).
Table-ized A.I.
I'm going off some several-years-old memories, but I seem to recall it being a rad-hardened, somewhat modified version of a 601 PPC chip similar to the ones used in the early PPC Macs running at 25ish mhz. Doesn't take much processor power to navigate Mars :)
A guy I know is fond of asking, if the rovers have lasted this long, aren't they over engineered?
That is, the engineers obviously went way beyond the spec if the things are still working 10x longer than they should have.
the wisdon of Scotty's words
^^^^^^^^^
And in the wisdom of Krusty the Clown's words.... Awwwwww Crap!!!
running Windows. No way they'd be at 1000 sols without a BSOD.
I read the synopsis and all I could think of was 'Victoria's Secret Crater'.
Not even having an S.O. seems to help....
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Harsh Questioning sounds like a name Alastair Reynolds might give to a Conjoiner warship.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
This mission could be considered a failure as well. NASA completely and utterly failed in their estimation of how long these things would be operational. Now, it appears that this is a good thing, but it could very well have resulted in much waste. Suppose that some mission critical element such as communication channels had been designed with 90 sols in mind, and no more than 90 sols. Everything else would still work, but if you can't talk to the bot, it don't work. Or suppose that NASA had not been prepared to continue accumulating data after 90 sols. In that case, we'd still be able to send the bots around and have them do and examine things, but the data would be lost. Ok, disk space is cheap, so that scenario is a little far fetched. However, my point still stands. NASA should be doing a better job of evaluating the duration of its missions. Random variation, yes. This much random variation, I'm sufficiently skeptical that I will point the finger and call it failure.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
A Lockheed-Martin R6000, evidently. 120MB ram, 256MB flash. Perhaps this? According to that page, it was about 60mhz, if I'm reading correctly.
You all have Oo.o and Firefox, so get World Wind.
I was thinking more of Iain Banks. Must be a Scottish thing.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Before people start correcting me: I just checked, Reynolds isn't actually Scottish though he studied in Scotland.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
with so few things to do... the probe is beginning to do weird things.
Why can't
i presume they use the term sol because its easier to have a distinct one word term for the "mars day" as apposed to the earth day.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I just hope they never have probes on Mars and Venus at the same time because calling both types of day 'sol' will be confusing
not really, the teams controlling the probes will likely be pretty independent of each other.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register