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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."
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.
Not only do we have landers, rovers, and satellites around another planet, but we can coordinate them so one of the orbiting satellites can take a picture of a lander as it is landing!
A photo from Mars Odyssey (satellite) taking a picture of Mars Phoenix Lander with enough detail to see the parachute shroud lines can be found here
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.
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
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.
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.