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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 were not all "American."
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
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)
Yes, but do they run linux?
Yes, the rovers have photographed both moons.
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.
Sounds like NASA sent them to New Orleans, not Mars.
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
Not to mention they leak all over the place and constantly want to make more of themselves
Monstar L
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.
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?
That's puppeteer talk right there
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
I can't believe you made that Voltron reference.
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
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.
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.
``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.
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.