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Spirit Outlasts Viking 2 Lander
ScottMaxwell writes "Spirit, the Mars rover designed for a 90-day mission, has now outlasted the Viking 2 lander. Viking 2 survived until its 1281st sol (Martian day); Spirit is now on sol 1282 and counting. Assuming both rovers continue to weather the ongoing dust storms, Spirit's sister, Opportunity, will reach the same age in a few weeks. They aren't breathing down the neck of the all-time record just yet, though — the Viking 1 lander lasted 2245 sols on the surface of Mars; Spirit and Opportunity won't break that record for another 2.7 Earth years."
If I were a space-exploring-robot I'd want a better name:
* Robot
* Gigantor
* Bender
* James Bond
* Borg I
* CowboyNeal
Just because the JPL uses "sol" in their press releases doesn't make it right.
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that needs a big fat asterisk. Seriously, a "90-day mission" and it's still going 3 years later? Something is rotten in Mars.
Say what you want about them, but they sure as hell know how to make a good autonomous vehicle. Anybody want to make a list of things NASA has made recently that didn't last waaay longer than anyone thought?
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Made me wince, then laugh
Yay me!
The names are a lot better than Challenger, which didn't challenge a whole lot.
Immediately following the news release regarding the Mars rovers' longetivity, JPL announced its intention to replicate the rover design as an energy efficient and highly durable automobile. As a result, American, Japanese, American, that one German outfit, and American automobile manufacturers forced the entertainment branch of U-global-S business, the US government, to close JPL, claiming violations of monopoly, unintellectual property, lack of unrenewable energy usage, and for no good reason other than they can, Homeland Insecurity.
/. after watching The Best of Spike Milligan.
The unemployed JPL engineers and scientists then gathered their equipment at the Florida shore and launched a rover-based underwater probe to locate the cause of the Bermuda Triangle. Unfortunately the mission was a failure, as the Bermuda Triangle seems to have disappeared into the Bermuda Triangle. This important failure was discovered by the scientists who noted the rover's failure to fail to return. Hopefully the ex-JPL crew will turn their expertise to neuroscience in order to discover precisely why the previous sentence makes my brain hurt.
Finally, a public service announcement: Friends don't let friends post to
Finally, finally: I have no friends.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
what is really impressive is the fact that these things have been mobile for this long without *any* physical maintainence millions of miles away! and that they are completely solar powered. impressive when you really think about it. It may not have as much shock value as landing on the moon did, but its an impressive accomplishment.
that needs a big fat asterisk. Seriously, a "90-day mission" and it's still going 3 years later? Something is rotten in Mars.
Most thought that dust on the solar panels would end the missions after a few months. Turns out that whirlwinds clean them every now and then. They didn't know such would happen since long-duration solar missions hadn't been done yet.
And mechanics *are* wearing out, it is just that they find workarounds. Spirit drives backward because of a failed wheel, and Oppy holds its elbow in a single place most of the time, using wheels to maneuvor instead of bend the bad elbow. And some if it is probably luck; the electronics could snap at any time due to heat-cold cycles. (Oppy's front wheel is showing signs of wear also.)
It is also true that statistically, once missions get past the early phase, they tend to last well. The failure spots are usually early in most missions if there are failures.
Table-ized A.I.
lost contact with Earth when a bad command [unmannedspaceflight.com] was sent which instructed Viking to point its antenna in a different direction (sort of like typing "shutdown -h now" on the command line of a remote server, there's no recovery short of a house-call).
That seems to happen too often in space flight. Everyone remembers the metric conversion, but there is also the "cook battery" command on a recent Mars orbiter death (fortunately, it lasted almost 10 years before the error), and then the Titan probe receiver didn't get the 2nd-channel "on" command, reducing the imaging coverage. Seems like they need better simulators to catch that kind of stuff. (Although in 1977 that's probably asking too much.)
Table-ized A.I.
The Viking craft weren't rovers. They simply sat where they landed taking readings and running on a nuclear reactor. Not much on them to break. Since they ran off nuclear power dust and winter weren't obstacles to keeping the landers running. I think Viking was transmit only too. No user input to change the mission. The rovers are much more impressive.
There is also the little Pathfinder/Sojourner rover in 1997. It was kind of a test run of rover concepts.
Table-ized A.I.
Russia also had lots of rovers on the Moon and one lander on Venus, which took the only photos we have of the venusian surface, which is kinda muggy, murky, rocky and acidic.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Yeah I just realised that, it's still very impressive they had photos and successful landings of devices on the surface in the 70's - I'm really impressed.
Assuming I counted correctly, there have only been 5 successful landers/rovers (Viking 1 and 2, Mars Pathfinder, Opportunity, and Spirit) and 1 partial success (Mars 6). Check the page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mars. There were a lot more missions to Mars than I realized, most of them failures. Going to Mars is hard, which makes the success of Opportunity and Spirit even more amazing. It would be a mistake for us to get cocky and think we've got this mastered, just because our couple missions went really well.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And yet, it's a bit sad to think that, since the 70's, all we've managed to do is land a couple more landers on mars.
:(
20, almost 30 years of no significant space achievements.
Oh sure, there's a couple of impressive things that have been done with probes. Crashing them into asteroids, flinging them out towards Pluto, but where are the asteroid mines and space colonies, the moonbases and He3 refining facilities, or even an interstellar probe to the nearest star system?
I think Viking was transmit only too.
I don't think this is the case. After all, they had to survey the surface to decide where to sample the soil from for the soil and life tests. They had the sampler arm turn over a small rock to get soil from underneath it. They had computers in them, just not very powerful ones.
The rovers are much more impressive.
But the Vikings were first. I remember when the paper came in the morning with images of rocks and dunes and a light-colored sky (artist depictions showed it dark, not knowing about air dust), it was totally amazing for a boy my age. The Vikings also did 3 life-detection tests, which the rovers are not capable of. (The results were inconclusive.)
Table-ized A.I.
in 1962 Canada launched Alouette 1 into orbit. It had a one year design lifespan. After running for ten years, the satellite was deliberately shut down. It is still in orbit and can be re-activated by sending the correct wakeup signal.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Maybe Spirit will break Barry Bonds' record also. That cheatin' druggie deserves to be whipped by a robot.
Table-ized A.I.
don't think this is the case. After all, they had to survey the surface to decide where to sample the soil from for the soil and life tests. They had the sampler arm turn over a small rock to get soil from underneath it. They had computers in them, just not very powerful ones.
That is the case. As a matter of fact, what finally did Viking 1 in was a bad command issued to the lander's computers that caused it to point its antenna away from Earth.
Venus has always scared the crap out of me.
muggy, murky, rocky and acidic
It was faked on a soundstage in New Jersey.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
We are missing one big thing. Motivation. There is no Cold War anymore, and no need to prove ourselves. Thus interest in space exploration is down. Sad, but true. No good things come out of normal situations, there needs to be some bad before there is some good.
622677120
I think you might be misreading old promises from World of Disney as actual predictions.
Space is a hard engineering problem, and its expensive as well. We're only 50 years into this; we're doing well. How long did it take Greek Triremes to develop into something capable of crossing an ocean?
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Kudos to everyone who has worked so hard to keep the rovers roving.
c oncerns.htmll _hspd12.html
I just want to draw attention to the submitter's link:
http://www.hspd12jpl.org/
There's a situation brewing where JPL employees (who are employed by Caltech, not the federal government) will be fired if they do not submit to unprecedented invasions of their privacy. Some other relevant links:
http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2007/08/hspd12_
http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2007/05/nasa_jp
http://www.editthis.info/jpl_rebadging/Main_Page
Yes, but if that wiki entry is right, a 70+% success rate from NASA is astoundingly good IMHO.
They're hanging out with the flying cars, of course.
So, what you're saying is, we need to convince the government that Al Qaeda has some terrorist training camps out in the asteroid belt? :^)
-Mike
I'm sorry; I don't know what I was thinking!
Yeah no kidding. Theres a very high failure rate for just sending satellites to orbit the damn thing, something like 80% if my memory serves me. It's not exactly a guaranteed investment, thats for sure.
Since the early 70s we (NASA, its partners, and American industry) have accomplished such more than a few minor feats:
- The Shuttle program has logged almost 9 times the spaceflight of the Apollo+Skylab program
- The Shuttle program has averaged more than twice the flight rate of Apollo+Skylab
- The ISS joint-venture will triple the flight time of Shuttle by the time the station is closed in 2016, so that's approx 27-fold over Apollo+Skylab
- We since launched robotic missions to every planet (including Pluto) in the Solar System
- We have revolutionized our understanding of the cosmos using orbital telescopes (3 out of 4 Great Observatories launched by Shuttle)
- Private industry has demonstrated reusable suborbital flight with surprisingly good economics
I really hope you were joking when you asked "where are the interstellar probes." The fact is, we have made significant progress in spaceflight these last 20-30 years but those accomplishments have been overshadowed due to irrational expectations such as your own. It is inconceivable that we could have gone from Apollo to Lunar colonization, Mars missions, space industry, etc without further maturation of spaceflight technology. And as a stepping stone, the Shuttle/ISS have given us tremendous experience and capability that we did not have post-Apollo.
The greatest tragedy of all is that after debugging the Shuttle fleet of so many design issues, we are just going to retire them as soon as possible. If we were to build a new fleet of orbiters from scratch, we could implement a myriad of design improvements that would greatly lower cost and improve safety. Instead we're going to go pander to the "exploration" crowd...
Lisa Nowak?
If you needed more evidence to support the fact that Slashdot tags are worthless, unfunny, manipulated by editors, and clearly not reflective user input, just look at the fantastically retarded tags attached to this story:
theydomakethemliketheyusedto, gogogadgetlander
What exactly is the criteria for tags getting on the front page? Are you seriously saying that several Slashdot users all came up with these tags at the same time? That is clearly either evidence of editorial manipulation, or that cyanide pills need to be handed at the next nerd convention.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
They weren't nuclear reactors. They were RTGs. There was no reaction, they were powered by the heat produced by radioactive material.
We haven't sent any missions to Uranus and Neptune since the 70s. It's just that the probes that were launched in the 70s took until the 80s to actually get there. And none of them were there for a long-term science mission á la Galileo or Cassini.
muggy, murky, rocky and acidic
It was faked on a soundstage in New Jersey.
Don't you mean it was just New Jersey
Have it go through a drug test and then we'll see how valid its 'streak' holds up.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
Actually, they've had _eight_ landers on Venus that survived touchdown, four of which transmitted images. The first lander to surivive, Venera 7 in 1970, was the first spacecraft to transmit data from the surface of another planet.
It is hard to compare achievements that took place on different planets, since the conditions could be very different. While it is clear that the modern US Mars rovers can indeed live up to the fame of Russian lunar rovers (although it took US quite some time and US rovers will aleways be seen as that "we can do it too" kind of thing), the Russian Venus landers sill remain unsurpassed.
Too true. I'm now honestly expecting it to take at another hundred years or more before we have a permanent, self sustaining (almost) presence on another planet -- Mars. Yeah, we might send someone there, to visit, in my lifetime. The point was it has to be self sustaining. At that, I expect there will still be some things that have to be shipped from Earth, items which require some industrial capacity and difficult to obtain resources. It's a very hard problem which few people appreciate.
Travelling to another star, long long LONG time from now. Assuming we don't kill ourselves off.
And they've slowed it down since then to check against digging oneself into a sand dune as they did for six weeks two years ago.
37 kilometers in eleven months in 1973. ABout three times further than Opportunity. Since computers werent that great in those days, it was operated in real time with two-second delay controller. Mars can have time lag up to 30 minutes.
The 2008 lander left earth Aug 3 for a polar region landing May 25, 2008. Surpisingly it is still solar powered, though the solar intensity is much low at that latitude. It doesnt move, but digs deep into the permafrost. It is a replacement for craft that crashed due to the meter-feet mixup.
The 2009 rover is nuclear powered. Its the size of a minivan and considered too large for solar power. Its also too large for an airbag landing like the last three rovers, so it has retro rockets.
But missions to Uranus and Neptune did happen... regardless of when they did happen.
The technical difficulties of trying to get to those two planets in particular is enough of a challenge that even getting there in the first place was a huge accomplishment at the time... and the fact that the U.S. Congress has cut NASA funding so significantly that it is currently impossible with the current NASA budget, unless you cut manned spaceflight entirely, to organize and set up any kind of major Voyager/Cassini/Galileo type of mission. Congressional support simply isn't there.
And for those blind sighted types who push for the elimination of manned spaceflight in favor of robotic missions, I would like to point out that by cutting the manned spaceflight missions, that is all you would accomplish. Congress simply will not expand robotic missions unless a manned mission requirement is pushing the hard-core need to send more robotic missions "out there". Manned spaceflight drives robotic missions.... in terms of congressional funding, not the other way around. Eliminating manned spaceflight would eliminate all government spending on spaceflight of any kind.
Sorry, but the when was very important. The circumstances that allowed Voyager 2 to travel to Uranus and Neptune only happen once every 176 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_Grand_Tour
The mission extension to the two outer planets only took place because of a lucky coincidence.