NASA To Try Powering Mars Rover "Spirit" Out of Sand Trap

coondoggie writes "NASA's long-running Mars rover Spirit is stuck in a sand trap — a situation the space agency would like to fix. Yesterday NASA said it will begin what it called the long process of extricating Spirit by sending commands that could free the rover. Spirit has been stuck in a place NASA calls 'Troy' since April 23, when the rover's wheels broke through a crust on the surface that was covering bright-toned, slippery sand underneath. After a few drive attempts to get Spirit out in the subsequent days, it began sinking deeper in the sand trap. Driving was suspended to allow time for tests and reviews of possible escape strategies, NASA stated."

Comments

Oh no

[MichaelSmith]

Methinks it is time for somebody to get out and push.

Re:Oh no

[The_mad_linguist]

Maybe they should switch to a ten iron instead. That should work.

Re:Oh no

[mrsurb]

They should just call for a mulligan... no wait, that's for water traps like on the moon.

Re:Oh no

[martin-boundary]

Or they could just try plan B: take all the hard drives, erase the surveillance tapes, wipe the fingerprints off everything and run.

It's a conspiracy!

[lordmatrix]

Since the Mars rover is not really on Mars, but on a secret location on Earth, perhaps they could just use the "hand of god" to give it a little help :)

Re:It's a conspiracy!

[hazee]

I fail to see why it takes Diego Maradona to free the rover, wherever it is.

AAA's new market

[Dayofswords]

Mars is the new frontier for the AAA people to explore.

Up next:OnStar

NASA Quality & Space Commercialization

[slifox]

It seems like future rovers should have instrumentation to sense the composition of the ground they are about to tread over, as well as extra limbs that can be used to repair the rover (even just a brush to clean the solar panels) or assist its movement (grappling hook?)

Say what you will about NASA's large budgets or sometimes questionable research efforts... when put to the task, they can produce some remarkable feats of engineering

The longevity of the Mars rovers never ceases to amaze me. Just the fact that we are controlling robots we landed on Mars is cool enough, but that they lasted 22 times longer than their intended 90-day lifetime in the harsh Mars environment, is truly an example of quality engineering.

Of course, their over-engineering of human risk-related matters leaves something to be desired. Anyone exploring uncharted territories has to accept the risks involved, including the possibility of a one way trip. Is that really such a bad thing though? There are plenty of risk-takers who thrive on this, and plenty of them would love to make history as part of the first colonization team on the moon (for example).

Instead of focusing resources on ensuring safe return, we should spend those resources on setting up permanent, sustainable facilities on the moon, so that we can slowly reduce our need to continually send materials. Is shipping miniature mining and production robot/facility to the moon that unimaginable? Once you can harvest and produce key materials on the moon, the task of setting up long-term human habitats becomes at least slightly easier.

I really hope the commercialization of space travel is the catalyst needed to accelerate the development of space colonization, and I hope that the excessive human-risk aversion policies that arguably held NASA back are not forced upon the participating private companies of the new space era.

On yet another mildly-unrelated note:
I'd love to see more development on the Launch Loop concept, which seems WAY more feasible than the space elevators... no science/technology breakthroughs are required, just a lot of energy and money ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop

Re:NASA Quality & Space Commercialization

[barzok]

The panel-clearing brush was considered. Then discarded. They didn't intend for the rovers to last more than 90 days, and determined there wouldn't be a significant dust build-up in that time, so they used the weight & space for items more valuable to the mission.

Re:NASA Quality & Space Commercialization

[jdigriz]

Guys, the 90-day planned lifespan of the rovers was pure politics. Congress wouldn't have gone for, "Yeah, we're gonna need funding for the next 5 years." if told so up-front. At the same time, it wouldn't have made sense to allocate that money from the beginning since there was a non-zero chance that the rovers might auger in, like the Mars Polar Lander did, and that none of that funding for surface ops would be needed after all. So they built the rovers, said "Well, if we get 90 days out of them, we can declare Mission Accomplished." and went with it. Since they were solar-powered there's no particular reason that they would last only that long. 90 days was a classic case of "underpromise and overdeliver." If there had been some sort of catastrophic design flaw and they failed after only 30 days they could have claimed to have succeeded with 1/3 of the mission objectives, etc.

Re:NASA Quality & Space Commercialization

[Anonymous Coward]

While that may be true, nonetheless 5 years of operation on Mars is damn impressive.
"Underpromise" or not, they certainly overdelivered

Re:NASA Quality & Space Commercialization

[AikonMGB]

The problem isn't politics, it's requirements. In order meet a requirement like mission length, you have to show that the system will be X% capable of operating for the desired life span (where X is defined by your customer). To show that a system is capable of surviving 90 days on Mars is likely multiple orders of magnitude cheaper than to show that a system is capable of surviving 5 years. Right off the bat, you would need

• increased solar panel area to deal with end-of-life conditions, both cell degradation and environmental effects;
• more, bigger batteries to ensure that they can maintain sufficient charge after 5 years;
• more expensive electronic components that can handle higher radiation doses, and more electronic redundancy to protect against single-event faults;
• redundancy of moving parts critical to the mission (e.g. wheel motors); and,
• as you mentioned, ground operations, both personnel, equipment, and antenna time.

This is just what I thought of in the 60 s it took me to write this post -- I'm sure there are many more factors anyone could dig up. The point is that aiming for 5 years, even with intent of only operating it for 90 days, would drive the cost up prohibitively.

Aikon-

It's in a sand trap?

[maxwell demon]

It's not just trapped in the sand? So we finally have proof there's intelligent life on Mars, which builds traps!

mars rover blog..

[Frogg]

here's a link to a blog by someone on the mars rover team, Mars and Me

i've been following it for a while now - it's truly fascinating

Use the arm ?

[smoker2]

I wonder if they've thought of using the robotic arm, either to dig away some of the sand obstructing the wheels or to support the rover while they try to move it. I know from driving 360 excavators that your arm can be most useful in that respect, especially if you move the arm backwards at the same time as pushing down and driving. Maybe the arm's not strong enough, or the rover can't operate its wheels and the arm at the same time, but surely that's just programming. An alternative is to pick up small stones and place them by the wheels to get some traction. There is a more complete pictorial record here.

Re:Use the arm ?

[ScottMaxwell]

Using the arm to help isn't completely off the table, but pretty close, largely for reasons you conjectured about in your post. First, we can't actually push while driving, because the motor controllers are shared between the arm and the wheels -- you can run one or the other, but not both at once.

We could, potentially, push down with the arm to lift Spirit slightly, then run the wheels. But Spirit's just not strong enough to make much difference. :-) In the best case, we can push down with maybe 70N of force, and that's if we had a hard surface to push on. (But if we had a hard surface to push on, we probably wouldn't be mired in this stuff in the first place.) For comparison, you'd need to apply ~ 650N to completely lift Spirit, so the arm can apply only about 1/10 of the needed force. As you can see, she wasn't designed to do one-handed push-ups. :-)

Further, doing so would pose a high risk of damage to the arm itself, and since four of Spirit's science instruments -- about 2/3 of the total science payload -- live on the end of that arm, the potential downsides are quite significant.

In addition, it's not completely clear that pushing down with the arm to partially lift Spirit would actually help: one effect of that would be to reduce the traction on the wheels, and not having enough traction is one of our big problems here.

Resculpting the terrain is a less unlikely scenario, but something we're keeping in our back pocket for now. There are few suitable rocks within reach, we've never tried it and (again) would risk damaging the arm by doing so, and on top of all that we don't even know if it would actually help, since the rocks might simply slip quickly under the wheels without moving us forward much. Even so, if things get desperate enough, we might possibly try that one.

The soil we're stuck in is very weird, and has some counterintuitive properties. It doesn't work like dirt or mud. We mixed up a batch of simulant to drive our test rover in, and while there are known differences between the simulant and the real soil, the experience of working with the simulant is quite illuminating. The stuff feels like flour and flows like water: run your hand through it, and it flows away from you like water does, it just stops moving sooner. Weird, weird stuff.

Re:Use the arm ?

[ScottMaxwell]

It's equal parts -- can't remember if that's by weight or by volume, but I think it's by volume -- of Lincoln 60 fire clay and food-grade diatomaceous earth. (FGDE is normally used for, among other things, de-worming horses and killing centipedes. I tasted it. Bleah.)

One entertaining afternoon a few months back, when we were testing out different mixes, fellow rover driver Paolo Bellutta and simulant designer Kim Lichtenberg (the mix is called "KimSim" :-) and I drove out to a local ranch, picked up a huge bag of food-grade diatomaceous earth, and drove back to Lab. Later, I was up to my elbows hand-mixing a batch of the stuff in a wheelbarrow. Ah, the things I get paid to do!

Overly ambitious

[SEWilco]

That's how a rover which was designed to be cheap and lightweight would have become a multiton semi-mobile laboratory. Adding on accessories and desirable features, then stronger equipment to carry it all, is how much larger and more expensive space probes are created. Problems with such designs caused smaller and simpler designs to be favored. But... why aren't there six more of these things wandering around by now?