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NASA Mars Rovers Hit 5-Year Anniversary
An anonymous reader writes "NASA's Mars rovers have been on the red planet for five years now. The rovers were originally planned to stay operational on the planet for only 90 days, but it has turned into a much longer mission than anticipated. NASA has put together a video to celebrate the anniversary. The rovers have made important discoveries about wet and violent environments on ancient Mars. They also have returned a quarter-million images, driven more than 21 kilometers (13 miles), climbed a mountain, descended into craters, struggled with sand traps and aging hardware, survived dust storms, and relayed more than 36 gigabytes of data via NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter. To date, the rovers remain operational for new campaigns the team has planned for them."
and relayed more than 36 gigabytes of data via
Seems a little slow. Maybe Obama can extend some broadband lines to Mars and bring them into the 21st century? ;)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Supposed to be finished in 90 days, ends up taking 5 years.
It's still so unbelievable to me that we actually have a satellite and stationary vehicles on another planet and are using them to do stuff there. If you really think about this for a moment in terms of what has to be accomplished for this to work it's just mind-blowing.
Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
This is a perfect example of the best that America has to offer. The people who built these rovers obviously knew they only needed to last 90 days yet obviously they built them to last as long as possible. This makes me proud to be a member of the most advanced country on earth, even setting aside the misguided leadership we've endured for 8 years and are about to be liberated from.
I thought they were using a variant of VXWorks, not Linux?
I kid, I kid...
And where their future dimes should go. We should have rovers, or rover like things, on every planetoid in the solar system.
Gathering data, testing propulsion systems and gathering the hard data that we need to know about the universe outside our blue marble.
I know maned exploration is popular on Slashdot, but I'd scrap it all to focus on things like this.
That rover is just as a great spokesman as an astronaut - it's cheaper, and it does more science.
Meanwhile the manned proponents should remember that space ship Earth is hurtling thru space faster than we could ever go, it's comfortable, sustainable, and lightyears beyond anything we could build to emulate her.
We already have the most fantastic ship -- let's focus on taking care of her -- before deciding to ditch it for some pie in the sky space opera.
5 Years on an other planet, think about it.
Imagine the amount of food, water, O2 and energy that would have been required if they had sent humans instead of machines.
Never mind the fact that they extended the original mission by more than 2000% and the fact that they never needed resupply missions.
When you read the mission reports for the ISS and see that they need a two man crew just to keep stuff from breaking too badly, it's hard to imagine the size of the crew that would be needed for a 5 year mission to Mars.
Yet one of the two (ISS vs Mars rovers), has a budget at least one order of magnitude larger than the other and has yet to produce any real science (unless teeing off a gold plated golf ball from the ISS is ones idea of science)
Murphy(c)
Does anyone know if the rover cameras can look upward? Could they see Phobos or Deimos clearly from the surface? Or is the atmosphere too dusty? That would be a pretty cool photo. According to "Shawn Of The Dead," dogs can't look up. 'Rover' might have a problem then.
You never expect irony, do you?
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so thats to scale?
Yes, but do they run linux?
I would argue, or at least allow for the argument, that the Mars Rovers have been the second-most successful accomplishment of NASA after Apollo 11.
I'd like to point out that the engineers designing the rovers probably expected them to last longer than that (though certainly not 5 years). They probably budgeted for 90 days to keep the projected costs down so that NASA would chose the project. They knew that the budget would be extended once the rovers were there.
How much more data does the lander need to send before the total mission cost is cheaper on a per MB basis than sending txt messages to your BFF?
They should aim at making them even more resistant to the current and know issues ;)
The value of this should be pressed to the bean counters. They will ultimately expound at length on how it could have been cheaper and better to only get the 3 months worth of value expected. But at the same time, spending what they did and getting 20 times as much value for the money makes the mission far more worth while, and shows the true value of those who designed the hardware. Kudos to those who did. Getting a car to go 2 million miles instead of 100,000 (without service) is not a feat many can accomplish. Basically what it means is that everyone got everything right. Very very right. Engineering was outstanding, execution perfect. Kudos.
Sounds like NASA sent them to New Orleans, not Mars.
Now, if NASA could just get their shit together regarding putting actual PEOPLE in space again...
Imagine the amount of food, water, O2 and energy that would have been required if they had sent humans instead of machines.
The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right! -- Larry Niven
Personally I think the ISS is a waste of resource. If we're going to spend resources on human exploration lets at least spend it on the moon (and perhaps something at L1).
Anything beyond that should be robotic while we gain experience with people's safety.
Just wanted to speak up in agreement with your post. Our robots are taking over the solar system :)
There used to be a guy who wrote stories about how the Martians were interacting with the rover in comments every time a Rover story came up on Slashdot.
Whatever happened to that guy? Where's he at?
...we'd have an industry creating products of such jaw-dropping reliability it would almost beggar logic. ...If only.
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NASA can send Humans to Mars right now, or start working on it now with full NASA manned budget on that instead of ISS and the Space Shuttle, and we could have the first Humans on Mars within 4 years from now. It will cost less than $30 billion to send 24 astronauts on 4 spaceships to Mars, with 4 earth-return spaceships sent there at the same time for the trip home. 6 months travel to go, 1 and a half years spent on Mars and 6 months for the return trip. It'd be a 2.5 year at least live Mars reality show, in HDTV cause more bandwidth will be available using a bunch of faster satellite links, just that is worth many billions in advertising revenues.
Anyone who doesn't agree with me is a moron.
"relayed more than 36 gigabytes of data via NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter."
Sounds like a good start as a bittorrent node. :-)
But the rovers were super cheap. $500 million only. A Human Mission to Mars is about $30 billion. That's 50 times cheaper then the Financial bail-out. It's about the same price as supposedly "saving" the big auto-makers. It's 50 times cheaper then the War in Iraq.
We cannot afford not to send Humans on Mars.
Exactly, if you want to discover fossils or signs of previous life on Mars, if you want to find water and other minerals, ONLY Humans on Mars can find it and prove it.
Try finding anything on earth with a bunch of automated robots, it's impossible. A robot can't even drive a car down a road without crashing it much less even taking out the rubbish. How do you expect to discover anything close to what Humans can using robots and artificial intelligence (since there is a 10+ minute light distance delay).
Also the Humans to Mars program is going to cost 5 times cheaper then the Apollo mission at least. Cause we already have most of the technology right now. Only thing needed is to prepare a heavy lift booster in collaboration with the Russians, who already have one that is nearly available which they used not too long ago.
I'm one of MER's rover drivers; I've been on the project from the start. Which has been considerably longer than five years, as development started about 3.5 years before landing, so MER has been the focus of my life for nearly a decade now. I co-wrote the software (RSVP) we use to drive the rovers, and I've been using that software to drive Spirit and Opportunity ever since.
As a contribution to MER's five-year anniversary celebration, I'm blogging my personal mission notes from the early days of the mission. They'll be posted in "real time" -- roughly one update per day, five years after the fact -- at http://marsandme.blogspot.com/. First update will be tonight around 18:30 (Pacific time).
Be prepared to stick with it; it's a little slow for the first few days. And be aware that it's a personal activity, not a JPL-sponsored activity, so I occasionally swear and stuff. But if you're a fan of the rovers, it will, I hope, give you a new insight into what it's been like to be a small part of an historic adventure.
Ah, and for twitterati: you can follow the official MER feed at http://twitter.com/MarsRovers; you can follow me at http://twitter.com/marsroverdriver.
``Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.'' -- Richard Dawkins
And absolutely beautiful. In the current times we are all living in, Spirit and Opportunity remind us of what mankind can acheive, when we put our mind to it, and also how lucky we can be, unexpectedly.
On his IPhone it is.
This message is a potential instance of steganography on Slashdot. Why is there an H3 in the word 'down'? Why the ill grammar and meaningless (to us) message? Such messages must be considered potential secret communications and analyzed.
There is a great show on this subject that aired on the National Geographic channel. I highly recommend it to anyone that hasn't been paying much attention to the rovers for the last five years.
The Planetary Society has a very interesting article about the five years the rover Spirit has been on Mars. And I wrote this one about the Mars rovers in Dutch.
I've gotten my money's worth.
(Note to the typical Slashdot reader, a "taxpayer" is someone who has a "job." Go upstairs and ask your parents what those mean.)
As I understood it, the 90-day figure was because dust was expected to accumulate on the solar panels. The rovers should have died from lack of power a long time ago. But, as it turned out, the Martian winds are a little stronger than had been thought, and the dust rather lighter; OK, so the rovers are hardly clean, but enough dust blows away that they're able to keep going.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I've been reading about Spirit of late, and it seems like its last days are near. It's so dusty that it can probably only do decent roving in the summer, and will also not have enough power to survive the winter.
It's busted wheel makes it difficult to find and move to a solar-panel-friendly high-tilt area that is near exploration areas. Thus, if it wonders off too far, it cannot get back to a safe spot fast enough to survive the cold or surprise dust storms, which block light. It almost hit the limit during a recent dust storm about 2 months ago.
They may just send it off to explore and say, "screw the winter and dust storms; if it ends it ends." This probably depends on whether they can find good targets without going far.
It could get lucky and get another whirlwind cleaning, though. These things have 9 lives, I swear.
Table-ized A.I.
So, the NASA management played it safe and shot for a very low goal. And it looks like the /. community fell for an old trick of the communist countries.
More likely NASA figured that, given the hundreds of millions being spent on the mission, the 90 day life figure had better be certain out to a six sigma probability. So its an old trick of the capitalists instead.
Have gnu, will travel.
The rovers have not yet found the flag left behind by Neil Armstrong on Apollo 11
Please read carefully. No where did I say Americans, as in people. Rather, I referred to the "attitude" the American Spirit, which are attitudes that can and are adopted by people from international countries who move the the United States AND ASSIMILATE HERE. So, a Russian software developer from the small Russian town of Kolpino could come here and exhibit the "American Can Do Spirit". In fact, living as I do in Brighton Beach, I daily see examples of ethnic Russians doing exactly that, having their own business empires in Brooklyn.