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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."
It just seem so to you, because you hear only of the spectacular missions. Routine missions aren't really interesting news.
You have to admit that over these three years it hasn't been very many scientific accomplishments they didn't do in the first three months
I think its too early to say that. They still don't know when the water was there, how long, and how much. That's gonna take a lot of time-consuming study of a lot of details. Scientists are still discovering new things in Viking data.
Now we know you can keep continous solar power working on Mars, and that'll be the expectation from now on.
The whirlwind effect is kind of hit and miss, though. A device that depends on solar power may have many months of down-time if a whirlwind fails to show up. And as we've learned, big dust storms risk freezing the electronics to death. Thus, solar is still risky.
I figure they're already using pretty much the best they got.
I've heard there are known spots that lack redundancy on the rovers. A more expensive mission could potentially have more areas of redundancy.
Table-ized A.I.