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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."
Good list, but I'd add a couple more:
* V'ger
* Nomad
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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Challenger
Columbia
ROMANES EUNT DOMUS
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 /."
Got me on Challenger, but Columbia, no. The shuttles were all designed with a 10-year lifespan in mind - they have more than outlasted that expectation
"In God we trust, all others we monitor." -- Unofficial NSA motto
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
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.
In the ST:TNG episode Relics, Scotty criticized Geordie for giving Picard accurate repair time estimates.
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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.
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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?
The difference being that mission parts that are replaced in the orbiter's downtime are not what have an impact on the operational lifespan of the vehicle. The platform's non-replaceable parts were meant to last ten years--the time on Earth is much harder on them than a high operational tempo.
Each orbiter was only meant to last, structurally, for ten years. The number of missions it flew is largely a separate issue, given that much of the vehicle is replaced after each mission. Time was and always has been the enemy.
On the contrary - the hardware may eventually perish, but the Spirit will live on forever.
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!
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
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
They're hanging out with the flying cars, of course.
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...
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.
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