Spirit Rover Begins Making Night Sky Observations

Nancy Atkinson writes "Even though the Spirit rover is stuck in loose soil on Mars, she has an overabundance of electrical power due to a wind event that cleaned off her solar panels. While MER scientists and engineers are having the rover take pictures of her surroundings in an effort to figure a way to get her dislodged, there also is enough power (since the rover isn't moving anywhere) to do something extra: keep the rover 'awake' at night and run her heaters so she can take images of the night sky on Mars. 'Certainly, a month or more ago, no one was considering astronomy with the rovers,' said Mark Lemmon, planetary scientist at Texas A&M University and member of the rover team. 'We thought that was done. With the dust cleanings, though, everyone thinks it is better to use the new found energy on night time science than to just burn it with heaters.'"

Comments

Re:why aren't any of the rover pics ever worth a d

[grub]

Then, when they DO image something interesting, like this Martin crinoid, they won't talk about it!

If there really was to be a cover-up, wouldn't it be easier to just not release the smoking gun pictures rather than release and deny?

.

Re:Girl rover

[corsec67]

It is something that you could ride; wouldn't it be better to ride a female? /Going for a strictly funny mod with this comment. //Real reason is probably the same way that ships are referred to using feminine pronouns.

Wind Event?

[Noodlenose]

Is that what we mere mortals call a 'storm'?

Re:Wind Event?

[dotancohen]

Storm implies rain, as other commenters have mentioned. However, this is more than just wind, it is is a phenomenon typical of Mars but rare on Earth: very small tornadoes. The Mars folks call these "dustdevils" as the appear and move similar to Taz. So "wind" is inappropriate, "storm" implies water, and "dustdevil" sounds weird to the layman. "Wind event" suffers none of the drawbacks, and the less-inquiring layman will not ask any more questions.

Amazing Engineering

[deemen]

That this rover landed in 2004 with a planned mission of 90 Martian days and we're now in 2009 still amazes me. To keep these rovers functioning for that long is an engineering triumph. Even with equipment failures, dust storms, broken wheels etc. the engineers at NASA manage to make the best of these rovers and learn more about Mars. If we're lucky, the rovers will still be working when we land there, one day. It's nice to see such human ingenuity.

Re:Amazing Engineering

[Richard_at_work]

The problem is, people will expect this again and again, for the same or less money - when the next 90 day rover is planned, whats its budget going to be set at? The $500m that Spirit and Opportunity cost, or a fraction of that considering how 'overbuilt for the job' these two turned out to be?

The overperforming of this mission could turn out to be a wolf in sheeps clothing. Be wary.

Re:Amazing Engineering

[Matje]

How is this a bad thing? If you can spend less to achieve your objective, why wouldn't you?

Re:Amazing Engineering

[Chris Burke]

I'm wagering that designing a rover that you are certain is capable of running around Mars for 90 days would necessarily entail a degree of engineering that makes it at least theoretically capable of running around Mars for years. Everything that broke and they worked their way out of in the last few years could have happened on day 10. Thus redundancy, back-doors, and clever, robust engineering were the words, even for a short mission.

The 90 day expected life was due to the expectation that the solar panels would get covered in dust, and that the Martian wind would be too slight to blow them off (and various panel cleaning devices were considered and rejected for reasoning as solid as the rest of the rover design). When that assumption was proven false, and the panels were kept clean enough to continue powering the rover, well, then the rover's "expected" life span goes way, way up.

It's not like they said "Oh the mission will only be 90 days, we can design this axle so that it would snap on day 91" or "Hey, the controller code will fail with an out of memory exception on day 100, but we won't fix it or put in a back door to get new code in the rover because who cares if it dies on day 100?"

So, yeah, yay for human ingenuity for sure, but that ingenuity was in there from the start and comparing the result to the 90 day expected life is a little misleading.

Re:nothing wrong with anthropomorphism

[Anonymous Coward]

Or perhaps they are just using the centuries-old nautical convention for giving craft of various kinds the female gender, which likely reached NASA from the navy.

Don't overthink it. Boats have been 'she' for many centuries. It's only meant to engender respect and care.

Amazing what those little rovers can do

[bignetbuy]

Such an amazing project, those little rovers are. With an planned life span of 90 days, they have now been running since...oh...2003? Wonderful work, NASA. Please keep the pictures and the science flowing. Can you imagine how long that data takes to get from Earth to Mars?

Or what about the communication path from the rovers to NASA? They use the Mars Odyssey or Mars Global Surveyor. Check this out. The rovers have a 250kbps link to those satellites. Unreal. Even with the satellite use, the data still takes TEN minutes to get to Earth.

This stuff is awesome. Just awesome.

You posted from "Angstrom Medal" Winner...

[WED Fan]

Good, F%&king god, man. Did you seriously post a link from Richard C. "Art Bell's Best Buddy" Hoagland, "winner" (read: purchaser) of the Angstrom Medal, science "advisor" to Walter Cronkite during the Apollo missions, Mister "Face On Mars", glass tunnels on Mars? Did you seriously post that tripe on this site?

Do you believe:

• Aliens have Elvis?
• Alien craft are in storage in "Area "Boogidy Boogidy" 51"?
• Aliens built the pyramids?
• Atlantis is near Bermuda/Bahamas/Catalina?
• The world will end on December 21, 2012?

You do know that this is /. and not the "News of the World" site, right?

Re:Observe what?

[Stenchwarrior]

From TFA:

described Spirit's astronomy as "stone-knives and bear-skins backyard astronomyâ"but from Mars!"

They may not get much useful information but you have to admit, doing Astronomy from a coffee-table sized robot while it sits stuck in sand on another planet 36 Million miles away IS pretty cool.

Re:Solar Panels

[Ihlosi]

Where's that douche that insisted that solar panels don't need to be cleaned?

Err. The rovers have been running for years now without any extra cleaning. That "douche" was probably more right than even he imagined.

Also, would you like to tack on a few more million dollars to the project to develop a way to clean the solar panels? Add more weight to the whole thing that could be used for extra science, and another gizmo that might fail and disable the rover for good?