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Mars Rovers Threatened By Dust Storms
mrcgran writes "Space.com is reporting a new potentially deadly weather condition threatening the Mars rovers: 'The first and largest dusty squall has reduced direct sunlight to Mars' surface by nearly 99 percent, an unprecedented threat for the solar-powered rovers. If the storm keeps up and thickens with even more dust, officials fear the rovers' batteries may empty and silence the robotic explorers forever. "This thing has been breaking records the past few days. The sun is 100 times fainter than normal. We're hoping for a big break in the storm soon, but that's just a hope." '"
They have. The problem is that the batteries also are providing power for heaters to keep the rover warm during the night. They probably won't (especially the batteries) survive a deep-freeze to -40C, so when sun starts shining again there may be too many things broken to start the rover up again.
Then the storm came for Kingston upon Hull, but I live on a hill on the other side of England and it did not worry me.
Then the storm came for the Mars Rovers, and I was really quite worried about them. What a relief to know that I'm not sociopathic.
Pining for the fjords
I'm sure they could have guaranteed that kind of functionality inside of there original 90 day design lifetime. Here we are 3 years later and they're not sure.
I think the designers deserve some credit. If you feel you can do it better I'm sure NASA would appreciate your resume.
This signature would be better if I was creative.
As someone who actually builds things for extreme environments (including Mars), I call BS. Soldering is potentially MUCH more reliable than wirewrap, it's all in the design. Not to mention there are some size and mass restrictions on something that has to be sent to Mars by rocket. You were, perhaps, thinking of wirewrapping the thousands of pins on a multihundred pin FPGA? Oh yes, that wirewrap socket for the part doesn't exist.
But there are a host of other issues. What about glassification temperatures? What about various polymers needed?
There are Radioactive Heating Units (RHUs) to keep the Warm Electronics Box, er, Warm, but there are things on the rovers that aren't in the WEB (wheels, pan cam mast, Xband antenna gimbal) that aren't RHU compatible.
Ultimately, it comes down to cost. How much is Congress willing to spend? Are they willing to 10 billion instead of 1 billion to send a couple rovers to mars? At some point, someone has to say, here's our design life, here's our mission environmental requirements (typical flight hardware would be -55 to +65C), and design accordingly. It's a judgement call, and the folks making that call DO have experience from the 60s and 70s (sometimes to their detriment.. it's hard to get new technology inserted)