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."

Comments

Re:Five years for 36 gigabytes?

[Cally]

Most of that's relayed via MRO and Mars Odyssey. As others have remarked elsewhere, the drips and drops of data from MER is lost in the firehose from MRO. (Ever pulled a JP2 of HiRISE data? Those things are VAST. Here's a random example.) Incidentally the IAS quick-viewer is the third useful client-side Java application ever written, according to this book I just made up.

Re:Martian moon photos?

[ceejayoz]

Yes, the rovers have photographed both moons.

Re:Take that flaky humans!

[Rinikusu]

Actually, when compared to humans, it's not that great. A human could've crossed that 12 miles in a day. Humans can scale that "mountain" and the "crater" in a matter of minutes. Basically, a Human team could've done the entire 5 year mission (so far) in less than a couple days. In fact, with a geologist on board, they probably could've done even more science as other opportunites presented themselves.

Re:typical government project

[Concerned Onlooker]

Minor point if you're not all that into it, but I believe the projected mission was 90 Martian days, or sols as they call them. Not Earth days. With a Martian day being about 24 hours, 37 minutes (sidereal) that makes the mission projected length a little over 92 Earth days. So, as I said, it's a minor point. :-)

Re:Five years for 36 gigabytes?

[m.dillon]

Actually, that isn't quite true either. If the ISP end of the connection is taking a T1 then one entire channel is reserved for out-of-band signaling, leaving (I think) 23 64 Kbit channels available for modem connections. I remember there were two options available and to make 56Kbit modems work well we had to use the out-of-band signaling option, which reduced the number of phone lines we had on each T1 by one.

Direct T1s quickly became the standard for ISPs starting around 1994 ish, until T3's became cheap in '95 and '96. By 1998 most medium and large ISPs were splitting channels out of fiber directly, or had farmed their physical dialup to third parties which then backhauled them back to the ISP.

Phone companies also played their own games involving far more then an 8Kbit loss, but by the late 90's they could only use those tricks in places where they had insufficient physical copper to meet demand and they couldn't hide the fact that modems simply didn't work well with the line doubler technology they were forced to use in those places.

-Matt

Re:Martian moon photos?

[ScottMaxwell]

Yes, the rovers have photographed both moons.

Excellent link to some of the astronomy Spirit and Opportunity have done. Considering they were designed to be mainly geologists, the rovers have done a decent amount of astronomy (some of it not covered by that page), including observing a Phobos transit and a Deimos transit.

We've even imaged the Earth! On sol 63, Spirit took the first picture ever taken of the Earth from the surface of another planet.

Re:90 days?

[ScottMaxwell]

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.

A lot of people seem to believe this, but it's really not true. I'm not saying we expected the rovers to drop dead at the stroke of midnight on sol 91, but even the wildest optimists on the project did not openly dare to hope that we'd even double that 90-sol lifetime. (We've just hit twenty times that number, as it happens. Incredible!)

Also note that underestimating surface survival time doesn't significantly reduce costs. Getting through the first 90 sols on Mars cost a little over $800 million. But most of that cost goes into design, development, testing, launch (about $100 million per rover goes to launch costs alone, IIRC), and so on. Operations, by comparison, is cheap: now that they're there, we run the rovers for ~ $20 million per year. If we'd known, for example, that we'd survive a year on the surface, we could have promised NASA four times the science for a ~ 10% cost increase; that would have made the project a better sell, and we'd have been fools not to do it.