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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.
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!
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
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 !
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!"
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
...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.
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.