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Spirit Stuck In Soft Soil On Mars
cheros writes "NASA reports that the Spirit Mars lander is presently stuck in soft soil. The lander's wheels are halfway sunk into the soil and they are planning simulation tests to see if they can get it out again. I hope they can get it out of there because it's picking up enough new energy to operate; however, it only has 5 wheels left to get around on — one of the wheels hasn't been working for years. Fingers crossed."
Yes.
same as your 20 minutes waiting is cheaper than buying you a new laptop with Usb 2.0 high speed ports.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
In an era where time is the devil and speed is God, it's interesting and heart warming to see that there is actually an engineering job where you can spend weeks looking at the dust under your feet, comtemplate your (modest) goals (another 100 feet, yeah!) and then very, very slowly take you next step. And if a dust storm comes along, just wait for the next breeze to gently brush the dust of your panels and let the sunshine in. Envious. Quite envious.
It's great to see that the rovers have lived on for so long, even if they are showing some wear-n-tear, but given the circumstances, they're clearly well built and I'd buy a used one off ebay any day (uh, shipper pays postage).
I'm curious though, in a totally non-judgmental way, about the cost of the program in general; they expected the rovers to last, what, 90 days? So presumably someone budgeted so many resources here on Earth for people, etc., for that length of time. Since the rovers have been doing such a great job of defying expectations, what kind of effect does that have on the budget for the program; is it sufficiently small enough that it just gets lost in the wash?
Also, since their plans were presumably all built for a 90-day time frame, how do they determine what to do now? Do they take requests from PhD candidates and researchers from around the world?
Does anyone know if managing the twins is still cheaper than sending a new rover?
Sending a new rover for what? There is a new rover on the way, but that does not make Spirit and Opportunity any less valuable. Even getting stuck in soft soil is doing science: the things that the scientists learn from the experience (what soft soil looks like when you approach it, what techniques to use to get out, how to built a rover that can handle it) will be useful.
And don't forget, turning up this soft soil may reveal something important. Many of Spirit's discoveries were because of soil turned over due to her stuck wheel.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I don't know that I have ever met a native New Englander that has any idea how to drive (especially in the snow)! At least nowhere near Boston.
Don't be so quick to judge. If the GP is a highly paid professional, his time actually might worth more than a modern netbook.
Same story with the rovers. That was a legit question.
I think you're not understanding things. People don't want to drive or are worried about being able to buy during/after a storm as someone mentioned earlier.
The problem isn't that people are buying 10x more milk, it's that 10x more people came into the store. Or whatever the multiple is.
When there's a storm more people will go shopping in the day before the storm than after the storm. The market gets products delivered daily and sells it slowly throughout the week but when there's a rush to get emergency provisions, they get more people into the store than a usual day because people plan on not shopping for the next few days.
Dual Opteron < $600
Beer and TP.
In Wisconsin when there is a severe snowstorm predicted, those two sell out.
Milk is nice, but the beer and TP will help you weather the storm.
When Bush suggested launching new missions to the moon and mars, the NASA estimate for the entire effort came out to $120 billion. The Mars Rover missions cost something like a billion each. That means that for the price of 120 remote missions we can afford to launch two manned missions - one to the moon, and one to mars. Following missions would be significantly cheaper, since the initial R&D and infrastructure costs would have already been covered.
Even if they only stayed there for a couple days the astronauts could gather more data than a dozen rover missions, AND they could bring back samples for earth-side analysis - something which is essentially impossible with probes.
Doing something for years and years is only an accomplishment when there isn't a faster way of doing it. If you spend years manually calculating the value of Pi to the Nth digit and someone comes along with a computer and replicates the same feat in half a second, does that mean that his achievement was somehow inferior to yours because it took less time?
Human missions don't need to "achieve years of operation on Mars" in order to justify the expense. A couple days of human time on mars will achieve FAR more than your "years of operation" via rover.
Really?
How did we get to the moon? By building better telescopes and studying it in detail from the ground? Or by developing rockets?
The only things we need to know in order to create settlements on Mars and the Moon is:
1. How to get there.
2. How to take our environment with us.
3. What hazards to expect during the journey and after arrival.
Gaining more knowledge about our destinations is a great idea, but it does nothing to actually get us there. At best it gives us a better understanding of what to pack before we leave - at worst it provides no relevant insights.
Waiting for the funding, mainly.
The only drawback is that politicians don't want to authorize the necessary funding when it's much simpler to just toss NASA a bit of spare cash every now and then, and pretend that it's being well spent.
You're arguing that manned Mars missions haven't accomplished anything, so we shouldn't fund manned missions. The reason they haven't accomplished anything is because we haven't funded any. That's a circular argument. If you do not fund a line of research, you cannot use the the lack of results as a reason for not funding it. Otherwise we could have used the same "logic" to refuse funding for remote missions in the first place, or for any space exploration whatsoever. Using that argument, we would have simply said "nobody has ever launched anything into space, therefore we shouldn't bother funding rocket research, and should make better telescopes instead". NASA would have, quite literally, never gotten off the ground.