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

Fascinating

[JackassJedi]

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.

Re:Fascinating

[couchslug]

Imagine how much more we could have accomplished by using robot probes instead of wasting money on primitive systems like the Space Shuttle. We could send robot after robot after robot and leave the tourists at home for a few decades.

Re:Fascinating

[Kjella]

In a way you're right, but it's also a bit like "Well, I haven't actually been to Africa but I saw a documentary on National Geographic. Gee, how much money I saved." I really doubt JFK would have gotten the same effect if he promised to send a lump of electronics to the Moon and back either. Part of the reason Mars is so interesting is exactly because it's fairly Earth-like, and why would we care about that if only robots would ever go there? I can't speak for anyone else but I want humans in space.

I think establishment of a permanent colony outside Earth would be pretty much the greatest achivement in human history ever. For that we need three things:
1) The ability to bring fragile little meatbags from Earth to Mars
2) The ability for fragile little meatbags to survive on Mars
3) The ability to mostly support itself without supplies from Earth

Obviously, we're well short on 3) but certainly we could get some experience on 1) and 2) with a manned Mars mission. A lot fo people seem to think "Well, we did that on the Moon so what's the big deal sending guys to sit in a bunker and eat canned food?" Well we've never done it. Not going to for a while either, it seems. But if we stopped with manned flight, how much would it take to revive it? Like if we wanted to return to the moon we wouldn't break out a few Apollo rockets from storage, we'd have to start over.

NASA didn't pick a "primitive system" on purpose, they picked what looked like the best choice at the time. Like pretty much everything else you do of early experimentation it probably wasn't the best one. That's how you learn, how you build better crafts, after all if you can't reasonably keep people healthy and alive in near orbit you sure aren't going to make it out to Mars. How about some experience in orbital construction like the ISS? After all, a Mars launcher might be built in space from modules. In short, what you call "space tourist" is what I call "Our home base on the outskirts of Earth's gravity well." We're going to want people up there if we ever want to get anywhere further.

Re:Example Of American Can Do Spirit

[Forty Two Tenfold]

This is a perfect example of the best that America has to offer.

The people who built these rovers were not all "American."

Take that flaky humans!

[Murphy(c)]

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)

Re:Take that flaky humans!

[daigu]

Perhaps part of the ISS science is figuring out the engineering and logistical problems of how human's can live for extended periods in space, which is a much harder problem. I'd say getting something so big into orbit, operational and supporting an onboard crew for more than 8 years is a significant accomplishment.

Re:Take that flaky humans!

[grumbel]

How many rovers could you have send to Mars for the price of a human mission? Around a thousand or so I think, puts things into perspective.

Re:Cost per MB?

[dotancohen]

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.

Re:Best damn dime NASA ever spent.

[jcaplan]

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

Re:Example Of American Can Do Spirit

[thetoadwarrior]

As an American I am proud of what we've done but I'm also proud of the work the non-Americans have done to help us achieve what we wanted.

And in fact I think it goes to show we'd achieve a load more if we could unite and combine our strengths, like Voltron, rather than fight each other. Unfortunately that goes against our instinct and a global economy scares to religious freaks who believe that will bring on the end of the world.