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Mars Rover, Spirit, Turns 4
Brandee07 writes "Designed for a 90 day mission, the Spirit Mars Rover is starting its 4th year of exploration. Spirit's sister-module, Opportunity, will turn four on Jan 25. 'We never thought we'd still be driving these robots all over Mars,' said Mark Lemmon, a planetary scientist at Texas A&M University and member of the rover science team. 'We joked about driving Opportunity into Victoria Crater, but now we're there, and we're looking at doing even more science. Each day they still work is an amazing one.'"
May you have many more!
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
And here's to hoping for another 4 years of trundling along the Martian surface!
It absolutely amazes me how engineers are able to build machines like the Rovers, the Voyager spacecraft, etc. so that they last as long as they do in these incredibly hostile environments.
I'm doing science and I'm still alive!
(Sorry, someone had to!)
They are not trying to save on the shipping cost from country of manufacture to country where it is sold. Shaving just a few ounces off a product can have big savings in overall shipping costs when manufactured in large quantities.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
It's obvious the technicians and scientists responsible for the rovers were interested in only one thing: keeping their jobs (and fame). So, they claimed the mission was only for 90 days, but made the rovers so tough and resilient as to give them (and their creators' careers) indefinite lifespans. Right as NASA is about to cut the budget, there will surely be some major discovery on Mars, and later one of the rovers will get into some difficult situation that will be overcome heroically by staff 10 days shy of being let go.
"Doing science," eh? Just like that Hubble story not too long ago. If these rovers find a comet that contains Atmospherium, it could mean real advances in the field of science.
My grandmother used anecdotal evidence all the time, and she lived to be 120 years old.
Every time I read about these rovers, I'm impressed. How often is something designed and built for a short period of time that last X times longer that it should? (16x for Spirit and Opportunity for those who are counting!) It's usually the total opposite, designing something to last 20 years and it turns out to last far fewer and that's even with regular maintenance. These rovers are on a dusty planet and haven't been worked on by human hands in a long time. These are really triumphs in technology if you ask me. I'm also similarly impressed with something like Voyager 1 which was launched 30+ years ago and is still communicating with Earth, but that's in the vacuum of space and doesn't really have a lot of unknown variables (besides the recent entry into the termination shock region).
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Title: Mars Rover, Spirit, Turns 4
Summary: ""Designed for a 90 day mission, the Spirit Mars Rover is starting its 4th year of exploration"
"Beginning 4th year" is not the same as turning 4.
You start your 2nd year of life when you turn 1.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
some Congresscritter doesn't read this... or they'll slash the project's budget 16.22 times!
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
I'm not dead yet!
I've followed these things from back when they were still called Athena. Yet I still rather believed that when they said they would have a 90 day nominal mission they were purposely underselling them a little. However, when I read Steven Squyres' book Roving Mars a couple months ago and saw how much effort they put into cramming every inch of solar panels they could onto the rover because they were convinced the chances of having accumulated too much dust to continue operations after 3 months were pretty high, it was clear they were genuinely concerned about meeting their mission objectives.
In the end, of course, they landed in good weather, and much of what dust did accumulate was blown clear by dust devils. And of course, the rovers have proven to be fairly robust mechanically, as well.
NASA had clearly stated that they needed 90 days (and a few other milestones) to meet their mission objectives, but they planned from the beginning on them lasting at least a little bit longer because they put so much work into them and the 90 days was based on pessimistic dust estimates. Because of that, they budgeted an optional 90 day mission extension conditionally on them being operational at the end of the first three months. Furthermore, a second extension of 180 days was allowed if they were still in fair shape at that time (fingers crossed). But when they reached 1 year and the rovers were still going strong, they had to get special approval from Congress for funds to continue paying the operations team.
That right there tells you that no one at NASA really believed these things would last more than a year, much less four! If they did, they would have been pushing to keep their job budgeted for longer than 12 months in advance.
and got them to do a repair contract for us. Good timing. Glad the little green guys are there to repair our rover!
Is that a metric 4 or an imperial 4?
Is that in Earth years or Mars years?
It's about time NASA and all other space agencies adopt 10-base time systems.
Or hell even StarDates a la StarTrek.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
They'd better get busy. They've only got a few more years to set up the soundstage for the next scheduled "moon landings" in the 2020s!
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Are those earth years or martial years?
See that "Preview" button?
Well, is there water on Mars or microbes, bacteria, aliens? What have we discovered? Have we learned anything from the rock samples or pictures? Can you give me something that justifies all of this money spent? I like the romantic idea of NASA inspiring young kids to enter the fields of math and sciences just as much as the next person. But, we've spent a lot of money on these missions. Can you justify the money spent by telling me what we've learned? And how what we've learned can improve humanity? Tell me they haven't just been playing in an enormous dust field for 4 yrs. Perhaps, NASA just hasn't provided that great of an avenue to get this information out.
The initial Mars Rover mission cost less than a billion dollars, compared with $130 billion to put astronauts in the International Space Station near earth to little purpose, and a similar 12-digit price tag for the shuttle.
So why do politicians and NASA spend 100x to put a human in the tin can? Besides the self-perpetuating vast sums of money involved, I think they're old and out-of-touch. They have a romantic attachment to manned space flight, while everyone under 40 finds it completely natural to project a presence miles away while sitting at the controls in a dark room.
Is there a politician saying "Elect me and I pledge to abandon manned exploration to focus instead on landing autonomous craft on every planet in the solar system. Let commercial ventures and other countries fight for 300th person in Earth orbit and second place on the moon. We'll go new places cheaper faster and better."
?
=S
Hey NASA, aparently you hired a company or companies who are very good at what they do, building things. PLEASE contract with them again.
Congratulations dudes! Once again American know how and ingenuity prove to be the inspiration and foundation of hope for the entire human species in space. God bless America.
I get first dibs on lurking around Delta Labs with a machine gun when we build our outposts on Mars.
[root@spirit ~]# uptime
15:27:50 up 1460 days, 3:53, 1 user, load average: 0.43, 0.58, 0.61
It must run Linux...
See subject line.
Hot diggety-dawg! Have I ever gotten my money's worth!
How far are they from each other? If they've lasted 4 years on their own, imagine if each one could use that robot arm to brush the sand off the other's solar cells? We could call it the reach around effect.
It's a great achievement. Three cheers for the people running the program.
Why say, "all over Mars"? That's not really true at all.
I hope lightbulb manufacturers everywhere loose sleep over this.
not!
but still amazing that opportunity may witness an asteroid impact "nearby".
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/TECH/space/12/21/mars.asteroid.ap/index.html
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/31/1435223
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.
What a bunch of overdesigned cr$p ;-)
Man. Go back to your heroin.
Your ad could be here!
Don't listen to GP. See Subject.
Your ad could be here!
Remember when man landed on the moon and it went so extremely well that we extended the mission by years?
Oh, that was mars... humans can't do that!
Fact: Bush has been hurting NASA and science and one of the tricks has been curtailing NASA's earth and planetary science and even TRASHING a completed satellite for global warming work the second he stepped in office the other trick has been the Mars.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
i was reading a book on the history of the space program, and the first probe we sent out to neptune, was originally slated to only go as far as saturn, but they worked it so it would be launched on the right date, so that it would be on the correct course, that when they got it to saturn, they could say, "hey, we can slingshot this thing around and go see the next planet, won't cost hardly anything more" and so on and so forth until it got all the way to neptune. build for the grand tour, on the quick look budget, and launch accordingly.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Fantastic response. (And awesome UID.)
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
The obvious solution is to send expendable humans to Mars and other Solar System targets. That way you can save the horrendous recovery costs AND get the romantic manned spaceflight angle, get some science in before supplies run out, and then have a tragiheroic ending which will surely capture the imagination of the masses.
For the good of humanity!
I am a bit surprised that they didn't just rig some wipers up for the solar panels! They clearly overengineered the rovers for the initially expected mission duration - why didn't they add a small, simple way for themselves to dust themselves off and keep the power coming?
It's okay. It's absolutely fabulous having Spirit and Opportunity there, let alone still working at all.
... would keep the next batch of intrepid robots doing science for at least a decade. I'm not going to try to patent the idea because it would fail the obviousness test.
Well the giant untouched crystals of iron there kind of prove to me there's no intelligent life there... unless maybe iron is toxic to them. But WTF is in that giant crater? It looks like a fungus.
"could be accomplished by humans in a few hours." for 1000 time the resource price tag (dev. and money), and an infinity time the human life risk (rover human risk=0, and can be repeated, and nothing stop us sending 6 more rover. Or for the same price tag as the human mission, 600 more rover. Now your few hours don't look so good, aren't they ?). Human use food. Rover solar panel. Rover can stay weeks, month and apparently years. Furthermore , even if we can organize an expedition to mars (I am still doubtful on that) in many many years, the rover are there NOW. And I can easily imagine rover like vehicle surviving a few day, a few week, or at worst a few hours on the surface of other planetoid in our system. I can imagine that in MY lifetime. Not so for human, on say, europa, or even let us dream, pluto.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
You, sir, need to grow a sense of humor.
What year did they become sentient?
If some major mechanical failure turned it into a stationary weather-station vehicle, rather like Viking, it could conceivably last another five years - until the batteries finally lose capacity.
I find this a bit unlikely because it would have to face the winter sun in order to get enough power not to have its electronics crack from the cold. If it has ANY ability to scoot in order to tilt toward sun, then it would probably still be dragged around to do science. Its not likely to break in a favorable sun position if its doing any real science at the time of failure because most science targets are randomly oriented. If it became completely immobile in the middle of a science target, it will not likely last another winter short of the unlikely chance of breaking at a good sun angle. Thus, its move or die. Then again, those rovers continue to surprise us.
Table-ized A.I.