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NASA Mars Rover Spirit May Move Forward By Spinning Its Wheels
coondoggie writes "As NASA celebrates its Mars rover Spirit's sixth anniversary exploring the red planet, it is hunting for a way to keep the machine, which is mired in a sand trap, alive to see a seventh year. On its Web site, the space agency this week noted there may indeed be such an option. That option would be spinning the wheels on the north side of Spirit, letting it dig in deeper in the Martian sand but at the same time improving the tilt of the rover's solar panels toward the Sun."
That ranks up there with "People kept alive by breathing."
Floor it!
Somehow I have a bad feeling that while allowing the rover to remain operational for a bit longer, it will also ironically become stuck in the hole it dug.
attachment so it can dig itself out.
You know what the solution to this problem is? Send more rovers. Lots more. If we had a spare rover near Spirit, we could probably have it roll over and give Spirit a tow...
Ya gotta pin it to win it!
it will be nice when we can but a nautical rover in that liquid methane ocean...and not have to pay engineers to kludge their way out every hole, sandy spot, or dusty place. Also be cool if it could use the methane as a fuel source.
THL phish sticks
The rover was designed for a 90 day mission. If it made it to Mars operational, and was capable of operating for 90 (martian) days, the mission was a success. Here we are, years later and it is still working. It isn't as though this is a panic "Oh no we have to save the mission!" kind of thing. Rather, this is another step to see how long they can extend a tremendously successful mission. Even if the rover dies tomorrow, it will have far surpassed any expectations set for it.
Also of note is that Opportunity, the other of the two rovers launched, is currently trucking along towards a crater they want to look at.
Honestly.
come on! just rock the rover back and forth!
or get out and push.
Because it was the first thing I wanted to know, Spirit's twin Opportunity is still going strong and puttering around a rock called Marqeutte Island. So regardless of how Spirit pans out, there's a really good shot at seeing year 8 of the Mars Rover 90 day mission.
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status_opportunity.html
7 years ago we put together a robot designed to survive a journey off of our own planet (secured to a fireball), through the vacuum of space (oxygen-breathing life need not apply), land on another planet (falling from miles above the surface) about which little is known (and nothing about the proper tire to use in a martian dust-pit). This tiny robot was hoped to survive for 90 days. It has survived for more than 2,500 days. This tiny moment of reflection brought to you by the You Really Are Alive In A Great Period of History Foundation.
Time to smoke some tires.
The other rover needs a winch like any respectable Range Rover would have. Sounds like a cheap fly-by-night sort of budget operation...Oh wait, it was.
Sheldon
The rovers need a better arm. They should be capable of pushing themselves out of the dust or out of a rolled-over state with one arm. Some of the lunar rover designs have featured wheeled legs, each of which can articulate and also work as an arm (with the wheel twisted aside). If you had 6 articulated legs in a rover, the failure of 2 of them might be tolerable.
Bruce Perens.
Every update on that page gives the Rover's daily power generation in watt-hours. Its plummeting. I found that a fascinating insight into the seasons on an alien planet.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
--Greg
Can someone in the know indicate if/why it can not rock itself out. About 4 times/year I have to rock my car out of street parking, if I left it out and it snows 10cm.
You would need to be able to load code to do the rock locally, and a 3d accerometer to decide when to change direction, or floor the drive as you came out.
I was thinking that a thin but flexible robotic arm would have 3 uses: 1) Moving rocks to study what's beneath, 2) Digging out stuck wheels, and 3) cleaning off solar panels with a little brush.
Table-ized A.I.
all we have to do is send someone to pull it out of the sand trap.
IT'S NOT THAT COMPLICATED!
just digging out this baby alone involves so much work...including engaging tons of experts and running countless simulations...and we still haven't figured out, nor are we confident enough of moving it. this is a far cry from star trek...where Picard just has to ask Commander Data to theorize and reverse polarity and stuffs...and the world is saved.
With the progress they have made in the past weeks, and the problems that they had with the broken wheels (two wheels seems not be 'broken' by now), and the fact that the rover is still sinking deeper and deeper, I think I would stop the extraction process and go for getting Spirit survive the winter. It is a pitty for all the energy they invested in trying to find a safe extraction path with a spare rover here on earth, but maybe it is time to expect that the Spirit rover is stuck forever.
That would cost something on the order of a few million dollars. You have to design the arm, build the arm, test the arm, and then fly the arm into space. Every kilogram of mass adds something on the order of HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of dollars to launch costs.
And then it also has to run off of the solar panels, draining more power. There really isn't anything to justify the cost of it. The rovers have already lasted a hell of a lot longer than they should have without any arm. Moving rocks isn't going to do you any good, the landscape is a lot more barren than it is here on earth. You could achieve the same results by studying the top of the rock, or just digging down a little bit by spinning the wheels or something. You'd only get different results if you drill down several meters, and that takes more than a robotic arm.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
I would be thrilled to have robotic probes beaming back four-year-delayed updates from Alpha Centauri, since that is the only option that seems even remotely realistic. It's the travel time to the stars that is the problem, not the delay in your transmissions once you're there.
Even if we could accelerate a spacecraft to an insanely fast 0.1c (at present the fastest we've managed is 0.00025c), it would take almost half a century to reach our closest neighbor (assuming it wasn't destroyed by interstellar dust at that speed). Given our fragile construction, intensive life-support requirements, and short life-spans, it's difficult to see how such a manned mission could be attempted successfully.
I love Star Trek too, but until we develop warp drive, it's safe to say the best hope of reaching the stars is by robot.
Procrastination Man strikes again!
When you have an entire team of scientists having prolonged discussions about the best solution to such a simple problem as getting a small vehicle out of a sand trap, you know your methods are pretty limited.
If we had people on Mars, problems like these would be trivial to solve. The human body is a tremendously versatile instrument and you don't fully appreciate it until you try to do things with robots - especially if those robots are located several light minutes away. Sending humans to Mars would simplify exploration by leaps and bounds. All that has been discovered so far in 35 years of probe landings could probably be done in a few days with astronauts present.
This should be a lesson on how not to design a Rover. Getting out of a sand trap isn't hard if you think about it beforehand and plan accordingly. We knew Mars was sandy before we sent them there. Some sort of jacking mechanism that moves the wheels out of the holes they're in, or wheels on articulated arms that can be moved one at a time out of holes. Even bigger wheels would have made getting trapped in the first place less likely.
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I think they are kind of clutching at straws now.
I wish them the very best but I think I'd start taking bets on them not getting this puppy out of the sand (even if they do, how do they know it's not thicker 5' away?)
RIP little dude.
It doesn't have to be a big arm. It could be long and thin. And it only uses power when it's needed, such as digging the wheels out or cleaning the solar panels. It's not like the x-ray spectrometer that runs and runs when used.
Table-ized A.I.
Everyone who has a comment on how the Rovers should have been designed differenty;
Everyone who has a comment on how the teams should have better ways to deal with this problem;
Everyone who has a comment on how the mission could have gone better;
Everyone who has a comment on how there must be a better way;
Shup Up. Now.
The 90-day mission is looing forward to its 8th YEAR. We have received data several orders of magnitude greater than hoped for. We've travelled much, much more than thought possible for thse Rovers. We've also learned a great deal about how to conduct robotic missions on other planets or moons in the solar system. We have gotten nothing short of a scientific miracle in the volume of information, learning opportunity, and pure information.
The teams running this show have done stellar work, overcoming incredible obstacles. Amazing work.
And your ideas about solving the current problem? As if it hasn't already been thought of, considered, even tried out in simulation.
Read a bit of the blogs from the teams. They are pretty damned incredible.
Me? I got no idea how to get it out of the sand. Tilting and waiting out the winter is a good plan, rather than taking chances when the Rovers are actually doing pretty well otherwise.
Honestly. This mission is delivering value way beyond expectations. I got no complaint.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Correction: I believe the winter sun faces north, not south. Thus, spinning the north-side wheels will dig in the north side of the rover deeper, making the panels face slightly north instead of straight-up.
Table-ized A.I.
[NASA is] hunting for a way to keep the machine, which is mired in a sand trap, alive to see a seventh year.
Ah. The real reason for Tiger Woods' leave-of-absence.
--
Toro
Wow, really? Most people I talk to disagree, or have different views of the future.
Obviously, predicting the future is impossible, however, there's a few basic ideas :
1. It isn't impossible to recreate human intelligence using electronic circuitry, and it'll happen sooner or later. A recent developement is a PhD researcher noticed how the human brain is extremely noisy and neurons are actually fairly flakey and inconsistent, and he built a brain simulator using ASICs that is about 10,000 times more power efficient than current supercomputers. While the human brain has some incredibly complex structures, we can cheat in a lot of ways (our AIs will have MUCH better hardware and cleaner data input for one), and we think nature designed the whole thing completely blind.
2. Once it becomes clear that it IS possible to create AI, the forces pushing humans to develop it would be unstoppable. No law or U.N. resolution could stop the developement : any nation or group that had a working AI would also possess a weapon that would make nukes look like firecrackers. (because a working AI with good hardware would be able to run at around 10 million times the thinking speed of human beings, able to create new tech or weapons or control robots or hack into human programmed computers with ease)
3. Such AIs will need resources. Unless they have technology different from what we can imagine, they'll need to use solid matter in their nanomachines (well, very large machines that are built atom by atom). The energy to power all these state changes will mostly come from the sun. While it's possible that they could kill us to free up the matter in our bodies and biosphere, I have to hope that beings vastly smarter than us will have enough compassion or curiosity to preserve the race of primates that created them, as well as the rest of the biosphere. (the reason we'd be in rotating space habitats is that is a LOT more mass efficient than leaving the earth intact).
You have a point that this might only last for a while. Unless FTL communication is possible, there won't ever be an interstellar empire or network of AI civilizations. Matter here at Sol will always be limited resource, and the AIs might scan our brains and compact us down to thumbnail sized scraps of molecular circuitry or something in order to save on mass. (followed by data compression...no need to keep billions of human personalities up and running when they could sorta almagate us into a virtual museum exhibit of just a few 'everyman' human personalities)
I have a feeling if NASA had direct and immediate view and control of the rover they could easily free it from the sand.
They could do this by rocking it back and forth, by shifting from forward to reverse rapidly until it rocked from it's hole.
Sort of like finding the resonant frequency of a stop sign for example, by shaking it.
I'm sure they could find the math to support this, although it would likely be extremely complex, and need to factor in the mass of the vehicle, gravity, weight and depth of the sand, atmospheric density, engagement time of the driven wheels switched from forward to reverse, etc.
Controlling something on planet Mars, from planet Earth, with it's delay of radio waves, among numerous other things is a staggeringly complex and impressive feat.
Send the other one over to push or tow it out !!
The best tried and true design with wheels for traveling, plus be able to pull or push yourself out if stuck, without getting out of the cab or needing outside assistance, plus do all sorts of useful work, is the backhoe with front end loader and levelers.
I bet if Nasa contracted some radio shack RC toy company, told them to build a super little backhoe design, it would work really well on martian terrain, and come in cheap. You can roll or "walk" with one of them.
I do like that idea of the convertible folding wheels though, go from all rolling to all insect type walking. That "bigdog" pack robot walks pretty good. This is one of the dang coolest machines ever built:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2bExqhhWRI#
When it comes to not getting stuck in the first place though, over moderate terrain, like you see in most of the mars pics..tracks. I think using wheels there where they knew it was really dusty was a mistake.
Major obstacles terrain, lotsa boulders and so on to go over and around, something like that bigdog bot. I watched some linemen who had to get a heavy cable, seems it was a phone cable but don't remember now, through really rough steep mountainous terrain up in Vermont. They used a huge Belgian draft horse. Had to snake around trees and over rocks and all sorts of nasty stuff, no way with any machinery. That was a super point A to B "machine", that horse took off with that cable attached to a giant spool on the truck and just walked away with it like nuthin' and pulled it out, like half a mile or something.