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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."
It would have to be quite powerful, as as far as I understand, that dust (or the rover, I forget which at the moment) has a fantastic static charge to it, so it requires a potent wind to remove it, which they've been getting on a fortunately regular basis for the past few years.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
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!
Just to give some sense of the scale of the problem:
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA03272 http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA10128 - dirty solar panels.
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.