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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.'"
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!)
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
It can also have big savings in the cost to launch it into space, and NASA would certainly have shaved anything they could.
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.
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)
Bah! That's just the way space contractors avoid paying big ebay fees on the Rovers. $700 million shipping my ass.
-Dave
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
I think you missed the joke.
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.
- 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.