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Mars Rover Spirit Still Alive
Toren Altair writes with this excerpt from a story at The Space Fellowship: "NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit communicated via the Mars Odyssey orbiter today right at the time when ground controllers had told it to, prompting shouts of 'She's talking!' among the rover team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 'This means Spirit has not gone into a fault condition and is still being controlled by sequences we send from the ground,' said John Callas of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., project manager for Spirit and its twin, Opportunity."
Wouldn't sixteenth century technology like a simple bellows with a directable nozzle fix this problem? It doesn't have to be a very powerful or strong bellows, just something good enough to help displace the worst of the dust and fines buildup...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
that was supposed to be a <3.
Sojourner might still be operating.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I hate to ask, but is it doing any useful science anymore?
We already know the "three month" mission has stretched to 5 years, so I assume the budget has stretched too.
If it is still doing something useful, fine, but if money is being spent just to see how much longer it will "live", it doesn't sound cost effective.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I could have sworn they got in trouble for doing that because while they are tapping, the onstar system is unable to alert authorities to an emergency by its regular, intended, means.
Meaning it can't dial out 911 or whatever if you have a normal emergency, not that the cops listening in couldn't respond.
During the Lunokhod Programme in the late 60's and early 70's, the two rovers traveled a combined distance of 47kms on the moon! Actually I think one of the rovers still holds the record for the longest traveled distance on any extra-terrestrial planet. And that's in the 70s!
silarulz!
We're all going to need some counselling. Seriously - this little "lander that can" has outperformed expectations to such a massive degree. Spirit/Opportunity models might well end up taking a place next to the Darth Spuds on geek desks across the world...
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
I realy like the word Imperial better. Including the hillarious "Imperial Metric" where the nuts and bolts are the usual old fractions of inch but are marked in mm.
The goal of the mars rovers is of course first most to collect data from marse but just as important is learning from this mission how to plan future missions.
It seems that some people at NASA greatly over-estimated the harshness of the mars landscape. Some basic equipment that could have been installed to prolong the live of the rovers wasn't, because they wouldn't last long enough to make use of for instance solar cell cleaners. But the rovers did last, their wheels did not break off (or at when it happened wasn't the mission killer it was feared to be).
Future mars missions can learn from this, not just in the design phase (build in more redundancy and self-repair facilities) but in the operation as it shows that if you can actually land a vehicle it can be kept going for far longer. Perhaps make use of this in advance by giving options for joint missions with other rovers that might land later?
Now that everyone knows two small rovers designed for just 3 months can survive for this long, perhaps it is worthwhile for the next mission to go for an even longer duration and perhaps end up with a vehicle going for a decade, and because it has a long live expectancy build in, perhaps be build to travel further (the rovers only covered a few miles because they were never expected to life long enough to travel further but now that they can life long enough to travel further they could have been designed to travel further)
Space exploration is not just about finding data from space, it is about finding out what works and what doesn't. The rovers worked, that is important data. See the next rover being send, bigger, and with its own power supply that is hopefully going to last for longer without the rover constantly being depended on the sun allowing it to travel continounsly. The new rover is a combo of the old and the new. From that mission data the next rover will be developed. Maybe bigger, maybe smaller, all depends on what is learned next. To builders, the soil data is just so much gobbligook. The mission data, now that gives engineers/designers whatever a major hardon.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Seems like the next step might be a charging / cleaning / maintenance station and a group of rovers. Maybe the station itself is a rolling rover. It would just creep along in a straight(ish) line and a series of rovers would scout the surrounding area, returning to the station for a dusting off and quick recharge periodically. Kind of like the Roomba vacuum that returns to a charging station automatically.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Am I the only one who gets a little misty-eyed when I think about these little guys?
I grew up with the space program; we watched the Challenger explode live on television in the 3rd grade. Space, and space exploration, have always been (to me) man's greatest hope and frontier.
I realize they're mechanical objects, just as I realize that Voyager is just a satellite and the ISS is basically a double-wide in space. These things still represent the future of our species and life as we know it. Every time I hear that the rovers are still going, almost 5 years on now, I can't but think of what we can do *right* when we put our minds - and money - to it.
Some day, in the hopefully not-too-distant future, we'll be able to retrieve these guys. My earnest hope is that they're split up - one returned to Earth to the Smithsonian, and one enshrined forever in a monument on Mars itself. Sort of a new version of the Resolute desks, only this time bridging dreams instead of cultures.