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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.
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.
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.
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!
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 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.
People are still better judges of opportunity and environment than machines. I do not disagree that unmanned machines can be extremely effective at both ends of the cost spectrum (Mars Rovers, Cassini/Huygens), but the machines have to wait for instructions and we have to wait for data. A human could make snap decisions based on live observation that could yield results the machines are incapable of.
Imagine if sifting through the data of someplace the Mars Rover had been a year and a half ago we discovered something extraordinary that merits further investigation. If the Mars Rover is well on from the site, or perhaps no longer functioning, we would have to send another probe to collect more data. A person might pick up on such a discovery much more quickly.
That said, I acknowledge that we are still in the realm of speculation to some degree as there has been significantly more unmanned planetary research than manned, and it has been quite successful.
Do You Experiment?
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.
Space exploration isn't just about science or nationalism. It's also about humanity and it's desire for exploration. What's the point of learning all about the cosmos unless we can somehow put it to use for humanity? And part of that science is the effect of space travel and other-world habitation on humans. Eventually, humanity will be living out in space, and we will be better and richer for it.
I consider that a fine investment of my tax dollars.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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?
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.