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Mars Lander Faces Slow Death
Riding with Robots writes "It's the beginning of the end for the Phoenix Mars Lander. As winter approaches in the Martian arctic, NASA says it's in a 'race against time and the elements' in its efforts to prolong the robotic spacecraft's life. Starting today, mission managers will begin to gradually shut the lander's systems down, hoping to conserve dwindling solar power and thereby extend the remaining systems' useful life. 'Originally scheduled to last 90 days, Phoenix has completed a fifth month of exploration in the Martian arctic. As expected, with the Martian northern hemisphere shifting from summer to fall, the lander is generating less power due to shorter days and fewer hours of sunlight reaching its solar panels. At the same time, the spacecraft requires more power to run several survival heaters that allow it to operate even as temperatures decline.'"
Honestly, as an Australian, it's great to see NASA in the news for something which can't be summarised as: "It blew up".
Needs more funding IMHO.
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
Ever since the two loses in 2000, NASA has had amazing success with Mars. We now have a fleet of spacecraft orbiting and on the surface of Mars. But the biggest kudos have to go to an all-around amazing guy, and my favorite professor during my undergrad education, Steve Squyres, who's "90 day" rovers are now toddlers on Mars.
So honest question for all you rocket scientists out there: Why are heaters needed? Which parts of the spacecraft (electronics?) need to be above a certain temperature to operate? Is it possible to let the lander "freeze" and then revive it, or if not what components are sensitive to this?
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
...can we then assume that since something _died_ on Mars that there was once something _living_ on Mars?
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
The Mars lander is dying.
Their they're doing there hair.
here's what I do not understand.
so no sunlight = no power. the lander dies.
but in the next season, assuming it has not been buried in dust it will then get power again from the solar array, so what then? surely some basic SW should be functional as the power rises over a certain point. and it does not need a huge amount of power to transmit basic telemetry like temperature, light, perhaps the odd photo in low res broadcast at low power.
with all the research and development that went into the thing, I do not see why one season should kill it.
however, I recognize I am not an expert and the people who write the articles presumably are, so what have I missed?
corrosion in the environment?
batteries that cannot survive being fully discharged?
lander cannot run on solar alone?
anyhow, kudos to NASA for lasting well beyond the tables life span in the first place.
It has a "pyrotechnic initiation unit"? What is that used for? Were they planning some fireworks to celebrate? Do Martians like fireworks? :)
I, for one, mourn our dead robotic overloads.
If only they sent a few baby capsules up there to supply it with the 25,000 btu's of body heat and 120 volts of power per unit.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
the native martians will appear and take it into their homes for the winter and nurse it back to health...
Should be enough to get going. No boobytraps there. I promise.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Why the hell aren't we putting nuclear batteries on these things?
Presumably they'd send the human with more than a 2kg box of supplies.
I hate printers.
Maybe it's not the right place to post this:
But I remember i was pretty excited in the days after the probe landed, checking the website everyday to see the news. I still check it once in a while.
But what was the major finding finally ?
I know they were not expectig to find life. But any indirect evidence of it would have been cool. They did find water ice, (and found it many times apparently ;-)
just a bit disappointed I guess
Sorry, it has Ubuntu inside.
Remember the story a little while back about them making some sort of discovery that they had to go to the President for before releasing to the public? Did we ever find out what that was..?
...Who licked the red off your candy this morning? Geez...
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
Uranus
Look at *your* handle. "Anonymous Coward"... sounds about right.
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
Look at your handle...
My time machine worked! It's the 1990's again!
The game.
All in all, a phenomenal success!
"And we stopped being a "colony" as of Federation... 1901"
Australia is part of the Federation?
Cool
Do they have Warp Drive?
Given that it isn't atall mobile.
I record my sleeptalking
Uranus
thread drifting from space probles to anal probles, huh?
Actually, throwing money at an organization that is being forced to make loads of budget cuts would solve their main problem.
That would be me. I loves me some sweets.
Stupidity only gets you so far, then you've gotta try
I wonder, if this is a temporary thing, where once the season passes, and comes back to summer on mars, that they will be able to restart the drone and continue....I would venture to say , for the amount we paid for that dang thing, the least the could have done is put a system hibernation mode...
Obama could make it run for another year.
Wouldn't those same concerns apply to the venerable rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, which were able to "come back up" after multiple Martian winters, even though their design life was only 90 days? They make it look easy. Unless you have specific reasons to be more pessimistic about Phoenix, don't count it out.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Spirit and Opportunity are both close enough to the equator to get solar power every day. Phoenix is north of the arctic circle and will go without any power at all for most of an Earth year.
Phoenix will freeze stone cold dead, but the rovers always have power for their heaters.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Very well.
The war in Iraq has cost America, at the time of writing, approximately 566 billion dollars.
The entire Apollo project, $25.4 Billion in 1969 dollars (or approximately $135 Billion in 2005 dollars.) Sources = (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program, http://www.nationalpriorities.org/costofwar_home)
So what I'm saying is, for the cost of the War in Iraq, America could have over four complete moon programs. Not moon missions, mind, four complete *programs*- built entirely from scratch.
Let's say NASA take one moon mission to *actually* return to the moon properly- with return trips, flybys, dozens of manned and unmanned missions, reuse of the hardware for other projects, etc. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apollo_missions for what this one single "mission" is buying, and remember that still leaves three whole other missions and change to do other things.
Let's spend two missions on doing all of the above, but for Mars. That means multiple manned missions, return journeys, the works. Give Mars the full lunar "One small step for man" treatment and assume it costs twice as much (and takes a lot longer).
We still have one mission left. Let's do something crazy with it- and I'm open to suggestions here. Permanent lunar settlement? Completely and utterly explore our planet's oceans (which we know less about than space, BTW...)? Solar-system wide Internet? (Aliens need lolcats too..) ... the possibilities here are truly staggering. And don't forget your change.
This is what I meant by more funding. I mean to say that NASA, which has endured endless budget cuts since the 60's (which, I'll concede, have forged a more efficient government agency), deserves far, far, far more of America's money. America's money which is being horrifically misspent.
Essentially, what I'm trying to say is... yes, it's inefficient. Horribly so. So? Throw money at it. I'll say it again- THROW MONEY AT IT. The capslock shows I'm serious. NASA is one of the few (read- the only) organisation I'll say this about, but... throw money at it. Seriously. For the cost of the Iraq war, we could have had so much.
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
Must...find....water!
Why does it have 'emergency heaters'? This is a device expected to last 90 days during the warm season (as far as I can tell, it landed late spring/early summer). It was made, supposedly, on a 'shoestring' budget. Heaters would substantially increase the cost while likely decreasing the longevity of the lander due to increased battery drain; for a 90 day mission, this doesn't seem acceptable to me.
With this news, I have to wonder if the Mars landers weren't initially intended to last much, much longer than the advertised 90 days. And I do mean "advertised": the "longer than planned for" lifespan of these probes has been nothing but a windfall for NASA in terms of public goodwill for their endeavors. (It's not really 'wasting' money if they can push the budget of a project so far beyond what was planned for, is it?)
The presence of heaters tells me that a design goal was to have these probes run into the cold season. The fact that they didn't both last that long tells me that they potentially screwed up but due to their Scotty Guestimates, it looks good.
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