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Huge Martian Dust Storm Threatens Rovers
Riding with Robots writes "NASA reports that a severe ongoing dust storm on the Red Planet has blocked 99 percent of the direct sunlight that powers the Opportunity rover. If these conditions persist for too long, it could finally bring an end to the marathon mission of this robot geologist, and perhaps of its partner Spirit as well. 'Before the dust storms began blocking sunlight last month, Opportunity's solar panels had been producing about 700 watt hours of electricity per day, enough to light a 100-watt bulb for seven hours. When dust in the air reduced the panels' daily output to less than 400 watt hours, the rover team suspended driving and most observations, including use of the robotic arm, cameras and spectrometers to study the site where Opportunity is located ... A possible outcome of this storm is that one or both rovers could be damaged permanently or even disabled. Engineers will assess the capability of each rover after the storm clears.'"
Has anyone checked on the Buggalo? This could be another kidnap attempt by the native Martians.
When the storm has settled the dust devils will come to clean the rovers... no worry!
extern warranty;
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Didn't I just read about this recently?
These rovers have lasted something like 15 times their original intended/predicted lifespan.
It's too bad these rovers don't have some sort of wind turbines to be utilized for energy. They could have extended an already impressive run.
Jim
RunFatBoy ( http://www.runfatboy.net/ ) - A workout system for beginners.
Is this related to the dust storm in Arizona? (photo and video) Maybe the giant face of Mars saw Arizona and decided he could out-dust-storm us.
Somewhere between a super nerd and a rock star...
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/0 8/1416233&from=rss
Dog is my co-pilot.
So now I guess we'll be seeing on of those Energizer commercials showing that rabbit strolling by a pile of dead, dust covered rovers, playing that drum.
I saw a show on Spirit and Opportunity's trek a few nights back. Pretty amazing couple of machines. I was very impressed. When they brought up the topic of their panels' susceptibility to dust and dust storms, I was wondering why no one had thought to install a couple of panel sweepers or something (like windshield wipers)?
All in all, these two little guys have done pretty well.
S-
Why don't they have a high tech windshield wiper for the solar panel? Or a transparent window shade that could prevent dust from hitting the solar panel during the storm? Ultra sonic shaker to shake the dust off? There must be a way.
And the brethren went away edified.
The more I learn of Mars, the less I think that any manned mission to the Dust Storm Planet would be anything more than stupid. And probably suicidal.
Luna has it's own dust problems, but no months-long hemisphere-wide storms, and that's a Very Good Thing.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
CmdrTaco doesn't care about dupes ;)
Aw, poor little Rover needs a little snack or some munchies to give him a little pick-me-up! Rover is a very loyal and obedient friend... I think we need to blast a rocket off with a nice care package: send him some chew-toys and other treats.
I can throw as many stones as I wish; my house is made of transparent aluminum.
You see Al Gore is right, now even mars suffers from the global warmings.
What you might not realize, however, is that it's also enough to power a 70-watt bulb for ten hours!
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Nah. Juse needs a little kudzoo to brighten up the place and hold the soil down.
But it would light a nanowatt bulb for seven hundred billion hours -- that's nearly eighty million years! Isn't science amazing?
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
This should tell ppl that if we are going to continue sending new robots AND humans, then we are going to need a real power source. One possibility is geothermal, but that has to be ascertained. About the only real choice is nukes. Afterall, I know that I do not mind risking my life on something like this, but I would want the best chance possible. I would assume that anybody who goes to Mars will want the same.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Like Wargaming?
A) The dust is charged (static electricity). Brushing would just shove it around and scratch the solar panels. So some other means of cleaning them would be required, e.g. charging the solar panels so it repels the charged dust?
B) What good are clean solar panels when the sky is opaque with dust? Needs more nuclear power, which is what the upcoming rover will have.
while true; do eject; eject -t; done
This is not about the build-up on the panels. This is about sand in the air. What the next rover (MSL) would be better with is either full nukes, or having simple nuke heaters onboard combined with solar panels for powering all else.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I hear they are sick of mars anyway.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
Really, it's not fair to blame mediocre writers for writing badly. Ideally, it is the job of the editor to keep crap off the front page. Of course, the quality of the editors/janitors at slashdot needs no more elaboration...
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
The cake is a pie
Considering their history it would be premature to write them off so soon.
When the storm ends and the dust settles and no signal is received from Spirit and Opportunity then, and only then, will I raise a glass in memory of those two incredible machines and the end of their mission.
On a side note has anyone every thought of using Tesla's energy transmitter or other "beamed" energy delivery system (microwave?) to power a planetary probe? Use a big nuke power module, keep it in geostat orbit, or land it with the transmiter, and then drop the rovers down. years of power for the rovers and it could be used by later missions as well.
Now the demons are coming.
You really think you know better than hundreds of the top scientists and engineers in America who have spent their entire lives working in the space industry?
Wow. Okay.
To help you gain a little perspective I'll give you one word to consider: tradeoff.
Here are two more: design parameters.
Now be a good boy and google about the Mars rovers and someone will explain why they built them the way they did, in language you should understand.
It's (Mars) Global Warming out to kill us all!!!!
Run for your lives!
As always, just my $0.02 worth.
...are sensitive to extremes of temperature, and are needed to maintain temperature stability. Frankly I am surprised they have lasted as long as this, given the treatment they are getting.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Ok so you brush off some dust. Then what? The dust in the air is so thick it obscures sunlight. Cleaning the panel will do not good.
A more robust system would use a radio isotope heater and not depend on battery power to run heaters. But these were designed to be within a set budget and had a short design lifespan.
I am sure that when humans go to mars a nuclear power plant will go with them to the surface.
If there were a number of small air nozzles directing dust off the panels, a small compressor and air tank could be charged up over several days or even weeks. Time is not a factor so a tiny compressor would suffice. Then wooosh! open the valves and it's done.
Or, this device could have been on the landing platform. After the rover rolls off, a boom extends outwards, a metre or two off the ground. Every couple of months the rover returns to the platform, drives underneath and gets a blast. This would of course mean the rover could never travel too far so perhaps the on-board one would be better.
It took me a few minutes (looking up the length of Mars' day) to guestimate they're getting around 50W from the solar panels when they're in operation, and now they're trying to keep the probe alive on .5W plus whatever's in the batteries. Makes it simple to understand how grave the situation is for our poor, superannuated, underfunded rovers on the surface of Mars.
After all, he's been to Mars a couple times, and his assistance could prove useful in fending off attacks from those damn flying creatures.
a brush takes power, and mass on the ship. they barely squeaked through in the mass issue, and frankly, the panels would never have had to be cleaned during the 90 mission. there was no way an engineer at jpl could have convinced anyone that the brush was worth its weight on board.
also the panels were folded for the entire trip, only unfolding once on mars. the seam might cause some problems for a simple brush, and require some extra machinery (even more mass).
Dust storms?!? Rover sez...
"Rut-roh!"
>It would have cost NASA about ten bucks to include a
>little brush to sweep over the solar panels
Really? Care to show us the details of your analysis?
For a 90-day mission, you get more power and reliability by spending the mass of the cleaning system on just having larger solar panels and letting them get dusty. I guess NASA must have asked a fourth grader, eh?
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
If the sunlight is further cut back for an extended period, the rovers will not be able to generate enough power to keep themselves warm and operate at all, even in a near-dormant state. The rovers use electric heaters to keep some of their vital core electronics from becoming too cold.
Now if reptiles had designed these rovers instead of warm-blooded mammals, they wouldn't have given them this limitation.
Table-ized A.I.
Nasa builds about squat. Private companies on contract to Nasa build all that stuff, and have, for a long long time now. Private business landed us on the moon, the government just adds an additional layer of bureaucracy and legitimacy to it and organized it using money snagged from taxpayers. Now private business actually doing something up there, we have various satellites doing various things, communications, etc..all paid for, all private, it is *routine* now. So there's two examples right there.
As for the tech to get there, it's all regular old aviation corporations that have the tech, so if you want to go, all you need is the $cratch to pay them and you, too, can be in orbit or on the moon anytime you want. It's expensive, but if you can come up with the cash, they can build you a rocket that will get you there and back. I will pull a number out of the ether, but I bet if you had 100 billion dollars as something to start talking with, they'd listen attentively. And nowadays, a dozen billionaires in a space-wanting mode could come up with that sort of extra cash, if they wanted to. One of the big outfits like Boeing would take the job I'd bet, once those sorts of figures were used. In fact, they'd probably love it, less government BS and compromises involved, probably be cheaper than any nasa "one size fits nobody" design like the shuttle is. It would actually be *fun* for them to have a nice project like that where they could actually use engineering removed from politics and the government.
Is there a single person who might be reading a Nasa story who needed that "fact" explained?
Who would operate the brush?
Nyekulturniy... Proudly confusing readers and editors since 1981!
It's hard to believe that air so thin can hold up so much dust.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I guess this means that mankind is now officially more perturbed by climate change on MARS than back here on Planet Earth.
...if the dust storm passes quickly enough, and a side effect is that it actually loosened up dirt and cleaned up the solar panels allowing them close to max capacity again.
:)
Here's to hoping.
News at 11!
...they shouldn't have made the solar panels flat like sand-holding plates -- and perhaps they should have been at an angle so that the sand would slide off...?
.. you would know that dust storms actually remove accumulated dust from the rovers' solar panels. The problem is that it's dark, not that the panels are covered with dust.
The Sojourner rover experienced a steady reduction of power due to accumulated dust, but it didn't operate long enough to have its panels "cleaned" by a dust storm. Until Spirit and Opportunity weathered their significant major storms, it wasn't known whether dust storms would increase or reduce accumulated dust.
I guess the fear is that the batteries will flatten and the rovers will power off. But surely they would have thought to include a provision for bootup-on-power-restore? No? Oops...
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
700 watt hours ~= 2.5 mega-joules; 400 watt hours~= 1.4MJ . I'm not sure when "watt hours" became the standard unit of energy.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Why does Bush have to be included in every article? ...
oh you said Brush...sorry!
This is obviously due to humankind's meddling in the otherwise pristine natural world of Mars! We won't stop until we warm all the planets!
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
so, which components get screwed by missing heat? capacitors? soldering points? processors? afaik mars isnt THAT cold and if it's the soldering points, isnt there a freakin low tech way of soldering it more... solidly?
http://www.planetary.org/news/2007/0720_The_2007_M artian_Dust_Storm_Crisis_for.html mentions that the storm has cleared the solar arrays of dust, so they're perfectly capable of collecting whatever light passes through the current dust. Good summary and up to date.