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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.
I'm going to make a dumb dumb post but I thought I'd share it with you all.
I had no idea we had landers on mars before!
I knew we had one which failed a couple of years before spirit and oppourtunity arrived.
I thought the current 2 were the ONLY 2, I'm shocked, impressed and actually ever so slightly less impressed at the current models now, I thought they were marvels of engineering (and they are) but the fact it was done in the 70's, wow amazing.
Don't flame, I had no idea, wouldn't be surprised if others thought the current 2 were the only 2 also.
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.
locating #GNAA, Reaper nor do the
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Isn't it amazing....we can build rovers on a shoe string budget (compaired to the shuttle & ISS) but the shuttle can't take off in rain, foam strikes can destroy it. Maybe they should cut the shuttle budget, and make these idiots think outside the box on how to do with less. Kudos to the NASA department that came up with the rovers. Personally, with robotics increasing in their ability to do their jobs, I'd prefer to spend the money on rovers than to spend it on sending men to mars.
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
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
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.
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.
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.