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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."
I'm making a note here:
HUGE SUCCESS.
And we're stayin' alive, stayin' alive.
Ah, ha, ha, ha,
Stayin' alive.
Stayin' alive.
Ah, ha, ha, ha,
Stayin' alive.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
But I wish they did!
Abe Vigoda has one,why not the mars rovers?
It rains and my stupid car won't start. Their little rover can travel to a different planet, survive the cold, survive dust storms, etc and keep going. Maybe instead of bailing out the "big three", we should dump all that money into NASA to make cars.
I'm willing to risk my safety on a metric to standard conversion problem for a car that will run.
"I'm getting more charged...I think I'll go for a drive..."
Please help metamoderate.
I'm not dead yet.....
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
My understanding: The thing that the designers had decided was that the weight of a dust removal system was not worth removing a scientific instrument to do so, because they had a weight and size budget to deal with. They didn't think there was an effective means to clean the dust to extend the lifetime of the rover vs. less data recovered.
that was supposed to be a <3.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_rover http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_rover and http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/
4c:61:7a:79
I came up with two, and submitted them. several layers of very fine film on the panels, when the panels get to 20% efficiency it would automatically fire up the tiny electric motor that would s-l-o-w-l-y peel off the top layer, halting the peeling process whenever efficiency reached whatever is considered adequate.
The other was a little weirder, and I'm not sure i could explain it without several diagrams.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
that was supposed to be a <3.
Sojourner might still be operating.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
It's doing science and it's still alive.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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I guess it was just a flesh wound.
Why can't they just flip the panels over?
I hate to ask, but is it doing any useful science anymore?
Even if it is still doing the same science year after year it can deliver information on longer term changes in the environment on Mars. A five year perspective is much more than 20 times more valuable than a three month perspective.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Isn't seeing how much longer it will live and the problems it will have just as much science as anything it's doing related to Mars?
Consider that the powers that be decided that the price tag associated with these two gizmos was worth it for the three months worth of science they were going to get out of them. Now that they've lasted roughly 20 times as long that means something went really right, the return on investment is definitely there. But it's just as important to know what they could do better. What are the weaknesses of the system? What systems upheld the best? These systems aren't mass produced like your auto, knowing what is effective and what isn't is just as much science as their original mission. And with the data that we're collecting we're going to make better probes in the future. That's worth the money too.
And yes, I'm sure that they're still doing science based on their original mission too. They have an ability to see things from a point of view we may not see for many more years to come. May as well get what we can while we can.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Can't be, the chances of anything like that coming from Mars are a million to one!
I'm quite sure that about 95% of the cost of the two rovers has been the building and actually launching them all the way to Mars. Now the rovers themselves do not cost extra money, only the salaries of the scientists operating them. Extending the life of these rovers is for sure more cost-effective than sending a new one. Even if the new one comes with upgraded or different instruments.
Why can't they just flip the panels over?
If it's staticly charged, flipping won't have the expected result. Plus flipping requires quite some energy (it has to flip back as well), plus we wouldn't want it to get stuck while it's upside-down, would we?
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
How about the overhead projector roll system. On one edge of the panel, you put a a roll of clear plastic cellophane (or thicker plastic in all likelihood, but you get the idea). On the opposite edge, you attach the cellophane to a take-up roll. You place a track along the other two edges to hold the film against the panel's surface. When things get too dusty, you run the motors and expose a new section of the film.
Better yet, just include a couple of capacitors and a fine wire mesh on the surface of the panel. When it gets too dusty, bring the mesh up to a high voltage and hold it there for a while. Next, charge up the capacitors with a high voltage of the opposite polarity. Suddenly cut power to the mesh and dump the opposite charge into the mesh. The dust should jump off faster than a mortgage broker on the roof of an investment bank the day after Lehman Brothers went belly up.
Too soon?
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Which means it is neither pining for the chasmata nor is it pushing up the regolith...
Ezekiel 23:20
Right, I get that. I just meant, you know. <3, as in an ascii heart.
Looks like a pair of testicles to me...
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Except standard units is another term for US or 'English' units. Your attempt at pedantry fails.
Yes, metric is the accepted international standard. No, what GP referred to was not 'the standard' but what is known as 'standard units'.
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.
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.