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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."
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.
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)
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.
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?
It already is.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Greatly agreed. Our unmanned program has been such an astounding success.
What I don't get is the benefit of adding a human to these missions. They are ill suited to the environment and require all sorts of extra equipment to keep alive during the voyage and on the planet. Worse, they have to be shipped back to earth intact. Their value is so high that heavy expensive multiply redundant systems have to be built to ensure their safety.
I do get the benefit of having a device that can make decisions without up to two hours lag time, but the investment might be better spent on a bit of navigation software rather than transporting wetware.
-Jon
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.
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.