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Long-lived Mars Rovers to Keep on Roving
An anonymous reader writes with a link to a ComputerWorld article about the ongoing saga of the Martian rovers. They've overcome amazing obstacles and they show no signs of shutting down any time soon. "'After more than three and a half years, Spirit and Opportunity are showing some signs of aging, but they are in good health and capable of conducting great science,' John Callas, rover project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a statement. Since landing, the rovers have had to surmount a host of technical issues. Just a few weeks after landing, the Spirit rover had an out-of-memory problem that almost ended its mission before it began, but scientists were able to get the rover back into operation. In April 2004, both needed software updates to correct problems and improve their performance."
should read the story of these two amazing machines. There's a lot that's wrong with NASA but there's so much that's right, too -- and this is proof positive.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
OK.... are we SURE that these things weren't made in Japan?
Cause they're acting more like a Honda than a GM at this point.
How long would a rover that was actually designed to last for three years keep on working?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
in a spectacular fashion. Either extreme, it is rare that a mission is routine.
Oh, if only we could send Karl to join his roving brethren on Mars...
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
We have been seeing articles like this for 3 years now. That is great, the more positive talk about a NASA project the better.
The thing that always seems to be missing is: why did these two robots continue to work so well, and, how do we go about repeating their success?
Mikey
I've always been the kinda guy to fall for the girl dressed like an eskimo.
sheesh.
P.P.S. I'm doing Science and I'm still alive.
Aliens. Their superior Martian technology is the only reasonable explanation for the rover's continued success.
Sigs are for Terrorists.
These are amazing little guys. It's still a shame that we don't more things like this. It's terrible that we spend trillions of dollars to build militarys and almost zero on things like this which expand our knowledge for the betterment of us all. I am sure there would lines around planet of people who would be happy to go on the mission to exchange the parts on these critters. Heck, I am sure there would be a ton of people who would love to go even if there was a 80% chance it would be a one way trip. We can only hope a space race starts with China since we will only spend if it's counter a "threat" to our supremacy.
Which makes maintenance a lot more easier, as you only have to deal with one type of system, one type of hardware, etc. That is only one reason, but it is a big one. When you have to juggle two separate types of hardware configs at this distance, two software setups, it gets a lot more complex.
Simple answer: They must have been designed by the same people who crafted the Iraq war. Both of them have been going since 2003, and show no signs of stopping anytime soon!
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
you are so right, these rovers are a testament to the rover team's diligence and sheer hard work. Think about it, they have sent two rovers to another planet which have had quite a few adventures and advanced mankind's understanding of Mars considerably. What have we done at work today? :-) You know what I mean though?
i'm really surprised we haven't seen advertisements on TV for the companies and subcontractors that helped make all the components.
talk about some serious bragging rights!
Actually, nobody can predict their end. Thermal cycling - repeated cycles of hot and cold - are the most dangerous known problem. It could snap key electronics at any time without any warning. There are known "critical" areas without redundancy.
:-)
Barring that, there are problem joints, motors, and (more) wheels on both probes that could stop working. Those wouldn't necessarily end the mission entirely, but it could greatly limit their science. Spirit already can't climb hills anymore and takes longer to get into position (gee, my wife says the same thing about me
Table-ized A.I.
Ol' Mars Rover, dem Ol' Mars Rovers
They jus' keeps scoopin', surveyin', and a viewin'
They jus' keeps on rollin', keeps on rollin' along
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
How does it recharge? Or is NASA hiding secret Technology which can save everyone from oil!
After so long it looks like it can run on infinite energy or martian oil!
They jus' keeps scoopin',
They don't have scoopers, by the way, at least not in the Viking sense. They take the instruments to the soil instead of bring the soil to the instruments.
However, they can and do use their wheels to dig small trenches in order to analyze deeper soil. They do this by holding 5 wheels mostly still and move the 6th wheel.
It is a remarkably compact yet flexible way to get the most out of existing hardware.
Spirit cannot do this well anymore because of one stuck wheel. However, by dragging it around, it has become a happenstance "auto-trencher" and because of it they've stumbled upon some soil with high salt content underneath the visible layer that many scientists think is an important clue to the continuing water study (although the pieces to the puzzle still have yet to be all fit together). Now they regularly do spectral analysis on the bum-wheel trenches to see what's below the visible layer.
Table-ized A.I.
This demonstrates that the manned exploration part of NASA's budget is a complete waste. If it is even possible using 21st century technology, a manned mission to Mars would cost at a minimum $20B, i suspect more like $100B. For that kind of money, NASA could develop a new generation of robots that could cover more territory and last longer than any humans. If NASA is about nationalism (its original purpose), then fine, waste the money. If NASA is about science, then it should can its manned program.
This project must have had a hundred million managers and task teams!
Seriously!
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
At 3,100 miles, trouble started with strange sounds in the cabin area till I gave up on it. GM, take leaf from the rover engineers, you'll surely benefit.
That is an amazing story. Now, I hope that all filkers will get to work. The first line, of course:
"I've been a Mars Rover for many a year..."
When they're done with the rover projects and they finally die, they should put the team to work on fixing Vista. Then we might actually get somewhere. If they can get a rover out of a crator like a bajillion miles away without being able to see it, they can get us to be able to copy more than 46,000 files or whatever lol.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
A talk being given by one of the geologists (Jim Bell) on the Spirit/Opportunity teams. (He was also selling and signing the book of the same name.) A few little tidbits from the talk...
One of the rovers (Spirit?) has blown a motor on a front wheel. As a result, it's normal mode of travel is now backwards. Also as a result, it tends to drag a groove in the Martian soil. In a recent transit, they were taking photographs of where they'd been and realized that the dragging wheel had exposed a different layer of soil, significantly different from the surface layer. Had the wheel not been dragging, they never would have discovered this.
Choosing a landing site is a tug-of-war between the engineers and geologists. The engineers want to land someplace safe, so they can make it in one piece and functional. The geologists want to land someplace interesting. Usually "interesting" and "safe" are opposites. It's a compromise.
Likewise, choosing what to look at is a compromise between safety and interesting. They've recently taken one of the rovers (Opportunity?) into a crater, realizing that they may not be able to get it out. But they've done all of the doable stuff nearby, the crater is compellingly interesting, and if they don't make it out, it's been a good run, and there's more to do in the crater.
The rovers are really slow. You may hear it, but it doesn't hit home until you've seen a visual demonstration of how slow those things are.
The rovers had been "wintering over," and they were worried about them getting enough sunlight to keep from getting too cold. While the Jim Bell was on the road for this book tour, and before the engagement I was at, they'd reacquired contact.
During the early days of the mission, the scientists were on Martian time, living 27 hour days. After the first few weeks, they settled out procedures and policies to allow them to go back on Earth time.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Because a private company would have sucked their profit out a long time ago and shut the whole thing down before it became interesting or enlightening or even heroic.
When NASA says "90 days" of useful life they really mean they've planned for a full year. They won't look too bad if the spacecraft fails after a couple of months and will be seen as miracle workers when if it does survive a full year. A little spin technique picked up from Cmdr Montgomery Scott, no doubt.
That being said, kudos to the engineers and operators for keeping both of the beasties running for so long. It would have been even better if they had planned for an much extended lifetime for the rover's RAT (Rock Abrasion Tool), as each is only good for a few grinding cycles.
Given the huge costs already sunk for design, fabrication setup, testing, and training, it's obvious to all but NASA that they should have built and launched at least one more pair of rovers, possibly with some minor improvements. Furthermore, with interest in Mars from Europe, Russia, and mainland China, the latter rovers could have been produced and deployed with significant cost sharing by multiple participants.
If you want to know just how amazing these machines are, you *must* read Roving Mars. It is amazing how on several occasions, one person made the difference between utter failure and spectacular success. And often these decisions were against NASA brass, scientist's opinions, and conventional wisdom.
In fact, I have to admit that once the book gets to the point where the Rovers actually land, it gets a little less exciting. The excitement is all in the planning/construction stages, and how it almost didn't work (even though you know it does in the end, it's still exciting). Like, a month before launch, they realize that the parachute doesn't work, or that Opportunity shorted out. Very exciting stuff.
As in, Microsoft Vista is not even nomimal.
Until Vista End-Of-Life. Which will be before the rovers die.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
I guess they get their wheels from the same people making those crappy casters for shopping carts all over the world.
Ocean is land, covered with water.
I'm sure the DVD has some advantages in showing the personal aspects, but I was probably equally moved by the book, which I'd bet went into more technical detail (I haven't seen the DVD) and is still very personal. Much of it is Dr. Squyres' personal notes from when the mission was developing and unfolding. It was obviously quite the emotional roller coaster for the mission team.
Unfortunately, the saga cuts off two years ago. Those robotic drama queens kept writing the story long after the book ends.
A little known fact I learned from the book is that the subcontractor that built the rock abrasion tool is located in New York, within sight of the World Trade Center. They were in the middle of design on September 11, 2001. The covers on the rock abrasion tools were commemoratively made from pieces of aluminum recovered from the towers and painstakingly pounded and machined flat by the mechanics, then adorned with an American flag.
"Just a few weeks after landing, the Spirit rover had an out-of-memory problem that almost ended its mission before it began"
Huwha?
Think about all the stuff we don't know about every other planet out there - we can figure out the mass from watching things orbit it, and we can figure out the composition of the surface... but what about two inches down?
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Of course manned exploration is not a waste. How long do you think we can chew up our own natural resources before we look around us and see the deser and the sea, and that's it! It's also a duty and an obligation to our specie. We are just taking baby steps. We don't know how to do it yet, that's all. The robotic spacecraft lead the way in showing landing sites, resources, really ancient histories and our possible future
With regard to the MERS, do you really think they are only running only on solar arrays? We haven't been doing that for ages. Solar arrays are good to a point, but then other forms of internal propulsion must be used.
If i move my Windows computer to Mars, can i get a software update that does that?
Seriously, this got modded up? Really?
A private company would kept them going to milk as much value out of the rovers as possible and to raise their chances of winning the bid for the next project.
If you mean commercialization as in "Let's disband NASA and wait for private enterprise" then yes. If you mean as in "Let NASA push the frontiers, but try to make commercial ventures follow" then I disagree. Even though the government doesn't need to have a direct profit, there's very rarely money to do something just for the hell of it. Most of the time, it's to generate new technlogy, improve education or knowledge in a science, create a better understanding of our own culture or history and so on. Sure the Apollo program did a lot to improve ground-based science and technology, but I imagine over time it'll be less and less relevant to surface-dwellers and only relevant to space travel. If we can't find ways to make it profitable, if space travel is a constant money sink forever then it will be nothing more than the odd scientific expedition. So I'd say it's very important, but you can't put the cart in front of the horse - there must be something commercializable to begin with.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Space exploration would then have to tow the mark vis a vis an acceptable ROI. What is a good ROI for the Hubble or sending satellites to comets? I'm guessing it's zero. Unless you're talking about geomapping, climate studies, telecommunications, all that near earth stuff, the 'return' on space is nil. And I don't have a problem with either accepting that it's nil, or giving up on it because it's nil. Let's just be clear that's what our intentions are. BTW I am firmly convinced that when the Shuttle program finally closes down and the Indians and Chinese have done their nationalistic things with manned orbits, it will signal the end of manned spaceflight for the remainder of the 21st century. Because the return on that investment is almost nil.
Wish these guys made cars.
Cart
The ultimate decision wo disband depends on whether NASA can afford the cost of operation and space communications compared to the new results. I remember arguments to abandom Voayager, Magellan, and Galileo - each which triple beyond their plans but with decreasing returns. I presume 2008 Phoenix Lander and 2009 Large Rover may pressure NASA to cut the current two rovers.