Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
It can also have big savings in the cost to launch it into space, and NASA would certainly have shaved anything they could.
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)
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
What have we discovered? Have we learned anything from the rock samples or pictures?
You're confusing data collection with theorizing. What we've "learned" is gigabytes of photographs, measurements, and so forth, which will, in the coming years, be used to sort through the various theories about the formation and evolution of Mars, and (more indirectly) about the possibility of life on it.
It seems likely there is something missing in your understanding of how science works, because you seem under the impression that we come up with theories and then we go do an experiment that confirms them, and if it does, that's successful science.
Doesn't work that way. What we do is go out and collect oodles of data, pretty much anything we can measure, regardless of whether or not it is relevant to anyone's pet pre-existing speculations. Then we sit down and try to explain all this data, correlate it with other data, et cetera. That's when the theories get formed, and shot down. It is, generally speaking, just a total waste of time to theorize when you have no data. That's religion, or politics, or some such non-scientific endeavor. In science we collect data first, and then we theorize, because only then can our theories acquire the solid backing of empirical fact and become actually useful. You have, in essence, imagined that the theoretical cart comes before the empirical horse.
Can you give me something that justifies all of this money spent?
Of course not. You can only do that yourself, and if you've already looked into what the rovers are doing and concluded it doesn't suit your philosophical goals, then that's that. Why would you even want a meme transplant from someone else that would make you feel differently about the money spent?
But it doesn't matter. The way it works is, we all get to decide for ourselves whether we like government money spent this way -- for whatever reason, e.g. because we think knowing how Mars formed is nifty, because we like seeing photos from the ground from Mars, because of your and NASA's 'inspiring the kids' hooey, or just because it keeps government cash from otherwise being thrown down the rathole of futile social engineering or bureaucrat full-employment programs. Then we tally up the votes. If there are more of us who think the money is well spent, it gets spent, whatever you folks on the losing side think.
As it is, those of us who like rovers poking around on Mars have more votes than those of you who don't. I can easily see why you would want to convince us that it's money wasted, so some of us might change our minds and you might become the new majority. But why would you imagine any of us in the majority would want to waste our time trying to convince you to change your mind? Who cares whether you do or not?
You're so right. I mean the $800 million spent on the rovers could have funded almost 3 entire days of the war in Iraq. And look at all of the scientific data we've gotten out of that. Right?
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
Most of the data NASA has gained helps out NASA. There is very little of it that is useful in the public's eyes. For instance, wind patterns, weather changes, and soil solidity don't give the public much information. On the other hand, those things allow NASA to plan out future missions better. They have the ability to take soil samples but they obviously haven't gotten any ground shattering information yet as otherwise we would have heard something. The big thing we get out of this is that instead of sending off a new probe every year for $1B or more, we spend on the order of a few million and pay people's salaries. There is one other HUGE benefit NASA gets from the rover missions. Publicity. The longer those things work, the better NASA looks. They are showing the public that they are capable of building good equipment. Every time they build a probe and it accidentally smashes into something or they build a telescope and the lenses are out of focus, it makes NASA look bad. With the rovers working so well, they can make other mistakes in the background and say, "Well those rovers are still running." Then when they think they've reached the limits of the rovers or the rovers finally do die, they can come back to the public and say, "Can we have lots of money to build replacements?" The public will say, "You built those last ones so well, we'll expect the same from these next ones." Whether NASA comes through again when that time comes is a toss up.
"t works if you pay! Modern consumer equipment is designed to fail (at least, according to engineers at my university)." :)
It often is because it is price to durability trade off.
A good example is an old Compaq we have at our office. It is an old PII that went from a workstation to a test database server. The test worked so well that we are still using it as a database server. We often toss old IBMs when they are just too slow to use for anything but they are still working just fine and dandy.
Some consumer stuff we have bought for desktops dies way before it is too slow.
Frankly since most people throw out PCs when they get too slow from spyware instead of fixing them I would say a lot of PCs are over built
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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
Well obviously congress doesn't hesitate to decrease NASA's budget... Now the day the defense budget gets slashed, well that's when I bust out the champagne!
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.