Mars Rovers' Software Upgraded

cheros writes to note the news that NASA is upgrading the software in the Mars rovers to make them smarter in a number of ways. From the article: "The unexpected longevity of Spirit and Opportunity is giving the space agency a chance to field-test on Mars some new capabilities useful both to these missions and future rovers. Spirit will begin its fourth year on Mars on Jan. 3 (PST); Opportunity on Jan. 24. In addition to their continuing scientific observations, they are now testing four new skills included in revised flight software uploaded to their onboard computers."

Comments

What's a "year"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are they talking about the number of times the Earth has oribted the Sun since the rovers landed, or the number of times Mars orbited the Sun?

dom

Huh?

[Swimport]

Why does Nasa refer to this as "revised flight software" these rovers don't fly. Also this should help the rovers move more autonomously and hopefully a little faster. Spirit is averaging 1 MPY (Mile per Year)

Brings to mind...

[djupedal]

"If it's not broken, boys....."

I guess since the two units are on free time, they figure it is ok to screw them up now.

Re:Brings to mind...

[Anonymous Coward]

> The summary above also uses the words "unexpected longevity", but why didn't anyone expect them to last?

Reverse CYA. If you tell your boss you've built a rover that'll last for 4 years, he'll have to ask his boss for 4 years of funding. Some Congressfuck will shut the programme down before it even gets off the ground.

But if the Congressfuck thinks that $100M will be spent on building and launching the thing, only to have it fail within three months, necessitating another $100M programme next year (with totally different vendors, meaning a different set of palms to be greased), it'll get approved.

Better to build it to last for 4 years, tell the Congressfuck it'll be dead in 90 days, and present the fuckers on the Hill with a fait accompli. You get more science done asking for forgiveness than permission.

P.S. The Grand Canyon is older than 6,000 years. Suck it, Senator.

Re:Brings to mind...

[Tmack]

1. I thought that the super low air density makes it really hard for dust particles to move.
1b. hence, they cannot get off the ground very high, but the air should be more dense at the lower 1 foot.

1foot in altitude will not change the air density significantly, and the martian dust storms can and will throw dust extremely high up in the atmosphere. Density might not be high, but velocity makes up for that. This is evidenced in that dust still collects on the rovers, its just that their panels are higher off the ground than previous landers, which allowed the winds that are faster that high off the ground to blow the dust off their panels. Basically the height of the rovers exceeds the boundary condition for the flow of the wind on the surface.

2. Vertical solar panels can just use a mirror to reflect the above sunlight 45deg towards the panels, also add more mirrors and enhance the power.

Mirrors=more weight, complexity, and another place for dust to collect since they would be more horizontal, and again, you would still need something to move them to track the sun.

Tm

possibly the most most successful mission ever

[wallet55]

This is another milestone in what may turn out to be the most successful space mission ever. After they pulled off two landings, and perhaps right after they they revived one of the rovers from a perpetual reboot error (the ultimate remote bios fix) and before the dust devils cleaned their solar panels, before they unstuck one from a sand dune, and even before the 3 month mission went 3 YEARS, these rovers are showing everyone who is paying attention that the information age driven robotic exploration, moving forward at moores law speed, is the obvious choice over still stuck in the 60's manned space exploration.

Forward error correction

[tepples]

You made what appears to be an attempt at a joke:

Checksum error, this file is corrupt. Please try downloading it again.

Preventing checksum failure in high-latency communication isn't rocket science. You'd be surprised how many errors you can paper over by sending 50 percent more data.

Welcome to the Intarweb!

[maggard]

So why is it easier for you to post your question to /. instead of actually looking it up for yourself? It's not like it's gonna be a hard or obscure topic to quickly find answers to...

Are you AOL-time-traveler-from-'97 somehow unaware of nasa.gov, google.com, or wikipedia.org?

Do you so needy of attention you'll shamelessly ask others to spoonfeed your (presumably) adult self?

Or are you just one of those socially challenged boors who has to interject something, anything, into a thread no matter how inane it is?

For those moderating, this isn't a troll, or flamebait, it's pointing out lazy anti-social all-noise/no-signal garbage and hopefully encouraging the poster to reconsider such junk postings in the future.