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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.'"
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.
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.
Hey NASA, aparently you hired a company or companies who are very good at what they do, building things. PLEASE contract with them again.
That'll be the day when Congress actually slashes a budget...
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.
- Learned how to land missions on mars.
- Learned how to make a moving piece of equipment work on mars for at least 5 years.
- Have learned a bit about the weather conditions there, in particular, depending only on solar may be a big mistake. We have seen a massive storm move in and almsot kill the vehicles. Likewise, have an idea of the extremes there.
- Have learned a bit about the physical make up of the planet. In particular, lots of minerals that many thoerized would not be there, but are.
And that was ust a quick list. Here is more Yes, all in all, these 2 were WELL worth their money. If you want the info, there is still a load of it that has not been looked it closely enough. Please, have at it.I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
In 4 years, Spirit has driven a total of 4.6 miles, while Opportunity has gone 7.2 miles.
On Apollo 17, two astronauts on a manned rover went 12.5 miles, in a single drive, in a single day.
When they came back to Earth, they brought 243 pounds of rock and soil from the lunar surface along with them.
Spirit and Opportunity are a phenomenal achievement, and the men and women who created them should be justifiably proud of all they've accomplished. But it's sobering to realize that much of what the rovers have done in the past four years could be accomplished by humans in a few hours.
Not really, once you consider that the cost to put a couple of humans on Mars would be anywhere from ten to a hundred times what it cost to put Spirit and Opportunity there. And the risk would be much greater -- it's a lot harder to get a human to Mars alive than it is to get a machine to Mars intact, so even if we did spend ten times as much, it's probably more than ten times as likely they'd die on the way, on site, or on the way back.
Plus, getting back from Mars is harder than getting back from the Moon; Mars has twice the escape velocity of the Moon (and less than half the escape velocity of the Earth; Earth is 11.19 km/s, Mars is 5.03 km/s, Moon is 2.38 km/s) so whatever rocket/lander the astronauts would have, would need a lot more fuel than Eagle (for example).
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased