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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.
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.
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.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Actually, I have at least one ex-girlfriend who meets that description as well.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
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.
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.
I can't believe you made that Voltron reference.
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
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
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.
``Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.'' -- Richard Dawkins