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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."
It's called "managing expectations". Someone at NASA decided, "Let's tell everyone we're only expecting it to last 90 days. If the thing craps out, no one will have expected it to last longer. If it lasts longer, we'll be praised by all the geeks on /."
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
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?
It would be nice if the remote software were able to reject commands deemed likely to cause mission failure.
Or perhaps something like what they did to the display resolution dialogs after a while... Ie if communication is lost after a command for X time units, undo the command.
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
If you really want to pick nits... Challenger didn't fail, the shit to which it was strapped failed.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
Then why don't just they say 'Mars days', or even 'suns', so everyone knows what they're talking about?
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
or even 'suns',
What exactly do you think that "sol" means?