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End of the Road For NASA's Mars Rover?
An anonymous reader writes "NASA celebrated Mars rover Spirit's bountiful, six-year stint on the red planet on Sunday – way longer than its forecast three-month mission. But it all may soon come to an end, stuck as it is in Martian sand."
They're trying to spin the wheels so that the rover digs deeper in the sand, but could adjust solar panels in to better position. It probably couldn't get up from there anymore, but could still remain in operation in the sand pit.
Also, if you're putting a robot on a sand planet, wouldn't it kind of make sense to have some fans to blow off the sand from the solar panels?
But without Spirit, is there really any Opportunity to succeed?
I wish the poster had done a better job summarizing the situation. Spirit is stuck in the sand and can't rock itself free; because it's not moving, sand and dust is collecting on the solar panels; winter is coming on Mars, making the solar energy that much weaker anyway.
But even as cute little rover sits there spinning, its wheels are doing Science, they dug down to a layer with sulfur. Sulfur indicates hydrothermal vents, and hydro is the greek word for water. Woot!
A miracle could happen; a sandstorm could clean off the solar panels, allowing enough energy for a mighty push that could free the machine.
some exoarcheology student in a couple hundred years is going to make the find of his life
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Anytime Spirit/Opportunity are mentioned here, somebody puts in the post that they are amazing, considering they were designed to work for 90 days.
It should noted that they were designed to work no matter what for their initial 90 day mission and that running beyond that was expected.
Of course, running 6+ years is quite an accomplishment.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Does it need continuous power to stay capable of operating? Or could it just wait over winter without power to see if there was a storm that cleaned its solar panels, and continue when more power is available again?
Maybe well get lucky. Maybe it will strike oil. Heh, the scientific community would seriously shit kittens if that ever happened.
Life is not for the lazy.
Clearly the rover isn't making much progress with it's 'dead foot' stuck in the sand, so why can't we cut it off? Yes, I know that wasn't part of the package, but it'd be pretty cool if the Rover could dispatch its lifeless appendage with a saw, or laser, and continue on its merry way. Oh well...
I don't recall the location of the other rover, but can that scoot over to the broke down r.c. car...err rover and help it out? Worst case is that one gets stuck, but at least they won't be lonely then. :)
These things remind me of the little engine that could! Keep on truckin'!!!!
Have you cleared this with Muad'Dib?
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Does it need continuous power to stay capable of operating?
Yes. It requires some nominal amount of power for heating to avoid freezing and damaging components. This is what happened to the Phoenix lander (as anticipated in that case). With the panels covered in dust, plus the additional cold and lack of sunlight during the winter, Spirit is unlikely to survive the winter unless something changes.
The enemies of Democracy are
Cue the media reports of another NASA failure in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 ....
As spectacular as some of its failures have been -- like slamming a probe into Mars because one group failed to convert the units the other group was using -- it's important to recognize that NASA is capable of equally spectacular successes. These rovers have done way more than anyone expected and helped us learn a tremendous amount about Mars. We definitely got more than our money's worth on this project, and the scientists and engineers whose hard work made it happen deserve some serious accolades.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I'd just like to take this opportunity to tip my hat to the folks that designed this rover. It was slated for a 180 day mission, and they just finished up day 2,190. That's some pretty high quality engineering that must have gone into this project, especially when you take into account it's on *another planet*, so no tech to fiddle with something that's just a bit off here or there.
No parts, no cleaning, no help at all. To top that off, it's doing all of this on Mars, which isn't really an electronics friendly environment. It crash landed on another planet from a rocket ship and worked 10x longer than it was supposed to.
Well done.
It needs enough power to at the very least maintain the heating of the components to a level where they will not be compromised. If the rover gets too cold over the winter, the actual materials of the rover could be damaged by the cold temperatures. In theory, it is possible that the rover could recover from a minimal power state if the panels were cleared of dust by a storm or something, but it's not all that likely. Mars is not a very hospitable place to begin with, and is a *very* bad place to run out of gas (proverbially).
One option being considered is spinning the wheels on one side in the hope of tilting the solar panels to face the winter sun. Even if Spirit never travels again, all is not lost. There is a radio experiment for measuring the wobble of Mars as it spins that requires the rover to stay in one place. The key is surviving the upcoming winter, which may depend on a fortuitous wind blowing accumulated dust off the solar panels.
IIRC they put it in "low power mode" last Martian winter and were pleasantly surprised when it survived, booted up, and restarted communications with Earth again when there was enough sunlight available. The trouble is, this year it's stuck at a less-than-ideal angle for collecting sunlight so there may be less of a chance of a springtime startup unless they can adjust the position, which of course takes, well, power. It's a risk either way. Plus, I think it's just locked up a second wheel, leaving it with 4 of 6.
So we'll see. If it can't move again but gets power, its utility as a science platform is going to be severely impacted. Still, it will be able to collect data and pictures of the changing landscape in its immediate vicinity, and it seems to have gotten stuck in an interesting spot, so there will still be useful data coming out of it.
And since the warranty ran out 5+ years ago, I think even a partly functional stationary science platform is pretty darned impressive.
Even after six years, the simple fact that Mankind has working scientific instruments on Mars gives me a geekgasm all over again.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
I believe it needs a small amount of power to keep the antenna pointed towards us in order to continue to receive commands.
Maybe in the future, we can design solar panels that won't collect dust over time. Or figure out how to turn the radioactive heating units into emergency backup power.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Funny you should use that euphemism. A road would have helped the rover considerably.
It's not over yet for Spirit! Still, should the unfortunate happen, I'll pour out a bottle of Ye Olde Fortran in memoriam.
I bring nothing to the table.
"the lost century: the millennial archive hole"
abstract: paper archives from the 1900s are still useable today, the only barrier being language conventions of that time period. additionally, digital records from the 2100s are usable today, due to mandated standardization of file formats and the prevalence of cheap, eternal nanoholographic storage. however, the 2000s consisted mainly of magnetic and optical storage on flimsy media. additionally, file formats were often proprietary, quirky, and ever changing due to the rapidly evolving nature of digital technology from that early era. if the actual media itself wasn't degraded, the file format itself was usually forgotten in a generation or two. finally, many early groundbreaking sites of the primitive internet are lost to posterity simply because they were designed to be ephemeral and ever changing, and no one thought to take archival snapshots of their content. it didn't seem important at the time. and so, the early decades of the digital age, when many fundamental crucial decisions were made that have defined our culture today, are forever lost to us
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Since he seems to have some time on his hands perhaps an easy solution would be sending Tiger Woods to Mars with a sand wedge?
Today the Council of Elders confirmed the rumours that the sinister blue planet third from our star has waved the white flag of surrender regarding one of its mechanical invaders. K'Breel, Speaker for the Council of Elders, reported the leak of an intelligence report from the blue world:
http://planetary.org/news/2010/1231_Mars_Exploration_Rovers_Update_Spirit.html
Continuing his pronouncement, K'Breel continued: "The trap which we laid for the robotic invader has proven successful; the monstrosity from the blue world now lies half-buried in a Snarpat pit, impaled upon a spire of rock."
"Rejoice, podmates, one invader has been immobilized, and even as I speak to you, our teams are dutifully hunting down the second. It is of identical design as to the first, and we anticipate that it will succumb long before it reaches its destination!"
When a junior analyst suggested that both invaders had already exceeded their designed lifetimes by a factor of ten, and that even the immobilized one was one gust of wind away from being able to return operationally-useful scientific data from its current position for years to come, K'Breel had the analyst's gelsacs placed between the invader's slowly-spinning wheel and the crusty sulfates of Scamander Crater.
...after all (how it has been predicted since the beginning of written history when looking at the intellectual and moral demise of youth, of course)
Or at the least promoters of PHDs will do that. How could one dealing with the above dissertation let it through without mentioning DRM?
One that hath name thou can not otter
It's just pining for the sinuses.
NASA got the little rover stuck on purpose. So they could propose a manned rescue mission.
I dunno what's with the blame game, it's alone on Mars, something was going to go wrong eventually. If the designers had made an improvement that would alleviate THIS problem, something else would be missing making THAT a problem.
Oh if only someone had thought to turn the radioactive heating units into emergency backup power! (sarcasm) If only someone had thought to install fans to blow the dust off! (previous poster, more sarcasm.)
It is an incredibly well-designed machine; just like with the human body, everything has a cost. Improving one item means less for the rest.
When I toured JPL it was obvious that the people there have an emotional bond with this little animal robot, its gritty determination, it's spirit of exploration.
Cheers to all those involved. The twin rovers were brilliant!
in the future, no one will know DRM even existed
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"IIRC they put it in "low power mode" last Martian winter and were pleasantly surprised when it survived, booted up, and restarted communications with Earth again when there was enough sunlight available."
Weird.. I dont see why it was a surprise considering that it did science even throughout the winter. It was only put in low power/rest mode for shorter periods of time to ensure that the battery had enough charge. The main problem this year is that the rover is stuck and that the solar panels arent facing the sun directly which will mean even less power and possible not even enough power to keep the heaters running.
Those of us who are interested in Martian climate oscillations hope that they can turn Spirit into a Martian geodetic observatory, to study the rotation of Mars. There hasn't been a good platform for doing this since Viking 1 died some 27 years ago.
As Bill Folkner says : ""Long-term change in the spin direction could tell us about the diameter and density of the planet's core. Short-period changes could tell us whether the core is liquid or solid." There would also be good science in comparing the current rotation rate of Mars with the value determined by Viking; such data would be sensitive to changes in the water and CO2 accumulated at the Polar Caps.
The covering stones of the Pyramids have been used to build other buildings. The Chinese wall has been dismantled for resources as well. Painting have been painted over for the want of a canvas. Tapes for tv-shows have been re-used because tapes were expensive and who cared about another sitcom.
It is nothing new. We learned most of the egyptians from their dump site where they dropped tons of daily, and in their eyes, worthless communication. One accidently saved backup of MySpace will tell future researchers more then museums of our age. It is the data we don't care about that tells the most about us.
Some floppies will survive, purely by accident, and it will be, enough. The holocaust is important for our generation and yet its most influential book, The Diary of Anne Frank, is an accident. You could have all the records of the holocaust in tact, and it still wouldn't speak as loudly. If all the diaries of all the victims still existed, then they would be meaningless, a huge pile of paper nobody would ever bother to read. Precisely because records of the past are rare, we value them. If we knew every move of the roman empire, had it all on paper, what would be there to explore? Proof? How many people study ancient history vs the present? You can get all the records of the current senate of the world most powerful nation... C-span. Nobody is watching.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Terraforming
It worked perfectly in the simulation known as Total Recall
All we need to do now is send in the Governator to activate the reactor and the Spirit will live again
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain
Sooo...how could they know that "file formats were often proprietary, quirky, and ever changing due to the rapidly evolving nature of digital technology from that early era. ... the file format itself was usually forgotten in a generation or two. ... sites of the primitive internet are lost to posterity simply because they were designed to be ephemeral and ever changing"? ;p
One that hath name thou can not otter
Too bad the design didn't include a wind generator...something with hugely oversized blades on a light, expanding tower, to catch the thin air. It would look like a giant palm tree walking across mars.
Even better, how about a rover with a giant sail, rolling across the landscape using spoked free wheels rather than powered ones, or even wide skis.
The silly thing is that the way these missions are designed, it costs NASA a bundle to keep the lights on. Not on the rover of course, but all the telecom equipment and people. If NASA designed a low cost communication system that could support these things for years, then they could just leave the thing operating and hand it over to a secondary investigator or intern to do science with. Or even a class of school kids.
We could have dozens of these things operating on the moon, controlled directly from earth stations, for years at a time.
Erik
There is actually a windshield/glass technology out there now that can prevent (or at least slow) the dust from building up on the glass of the solar panels. Unfortunately it wasn't around when these guys were built, proven, and then shipped off to a strange hostile world where they have run around like little conquering heroes.
These little guys (and by extension their designers, etc...) are a shining examples of going above and beyond the call of duty.
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
..what happens when market forces don't dictate a design to fail by date.
If you had a warranty out on the rover it would have died in transit!
I don't understand this article. Can someone make a car analogy for me?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Have you ever landed a dream job with dream pay, only to realize it is just a 3 month contract? What do you do to extend it, and for how long can you do that?
Here are the rules:
1. Dont brake anything you need to do your job.
2. Do everything really slow. And I mean really slow:
-Tell your boss it will take 6 month to make a right turn.
-Be a hero when you are able to do it in 3 months, stop the vehicle, take a lot of pictures, have some discussions, test the right turn in a sandbox, discuss more etc.
3. Never take any risks. Test anything you plan to do in a sandbox again and again. It is actually fun to drive an RC car. If the car is stuck, you are unemployed. To the public, call it mission risk management. To your wife, call it food on the table management.
Have fun
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Has anyone at NASA tried contacting their local truck loving redneck to see if they could get it unstuck? You know, right before abandoning their multi-million dollar rover, just let their local mud loving red neck (with years of experience offroad) go to work and see what they can do. Once the engineers have given up, I can't see the harm, and there's that given chance that they can get it out.
They discovered Greeks on Mars? No wonder Mt. Olympus is there!
I drank what? -- Socrates
“There are levels of survival we are willing to accept.”
"This is the end of the road, Galvatron!"
Fucking Rodimus.
That's Spirit, not Galvatron.
Even with the Matrix you're still a fuckup.
Correct me if I am wrong, I probably am, but I thought there were 2 of these rovers, could the other not lend a hand to get the first out of the mud/sand, or wipe off his panels for him???
We'd just invade. And blame the Martians as the biggest threat to our nation's security....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
What I wonder and nobody has brought up. Why cant it die and come back in the spring? IT should be like any computer/robot and easily recover from a total power failure and restoration.
Why not let it sleep all winter and check in the spring when it may have enough solar-juice to come back online?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I though they did not use electric heaters on the rovers but used radioactive heating and aerogel insulation.. or was that the first little toy rover we sent?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Will the rover come back to earth or will it float off into space?
These rovers are a very mature design that has worked flawlessly. Build and send a dozen of them.
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
Weight. If you use nuclear power source, you've got to bring your fuel with you, where as with solar, the fuel is already packed away safely in the sun; you just need to bring a collector. Mars, unlike the outer planets, is still close enough to the sun that you get a reasonable amount of power from solar cells, if you have enough square footage, so solar wins the power/weight ratio contest. Besides, these things weren't built to survive the winter at all; the design requirements only called for three months.
#include <signature.h>
Does it need continuous power to stay capable of operating?
As has been pointed out elsewhere, yes it does. There's some detail in the Wikipedia article (oddly in the section on dust storms). There's also some nice "footage" of a Martian 'dust devil' - one of which fortuitously cleaned Spirit's solar panels earlier in the mission
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
I though they did not use electric heaters on the rovers but used radioactive heating and aerogel insulation..
You are correct that they do have a radioisotope heater and aerogel insulation, but they do use electrical heating as well to augment the base level created by the radioisotope heater. Without electrical power, it most likely won't have enough heat to survive winter.
The enemies of Democracy are
"The rovers run a VxWorks embedded operating system on a radiation-hardened 20 MHz RAD6000 CPU with 128 MB of DRAM with error detection and correction and 3 MB of EEPROM. Each rover also has 256 MB of flash memory. To survive during all of the various mission phases, the rover's vital instruments must stay within a temperature of 40 C to +40 C (40 F to 104 F). At night the rovers are heated by eight radioisotope heater units (RHU) which each continuously generate 1 W of thermal energy from the decay of radioisotopes, along with electrical heaters that operate only when necessary. A sputtered gold film and a layer of silica aerogel are used for insulation."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Exploration_Rover
-- Terry
I don't know what sort of batteries or energy storage devices are on board, but most of the conventional ones I am aware of (LiIon, LiPoly, NiCad, NiMH, Lead Acid) do not take kindly to a complete discharge. In fact I don't know of a single battery type that can get to 100% discharge and successfully be recharged. Apparently something needs to be there to tell the unit to wake back up, so there needs to be a least a little charge available.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
It isn't a perfect solution for a Martian environment, ie, no rain to help, but it is a step in the right direction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-cleaning_glass
TIC. Definitely one of NASA's top 5 accomplishments.
Does it need continuous power to stay capable of operating?
Yes. It requires some nominal amount of power for heating to avoid freezing and damaging components. This is what happened to the Phoenix lander (as anticipated in that case). With the panels covered in dust, plus the additional cold and lack of sunlight during the winter, Spirit is unlikely to survive the winter unless something changes.
Couldn't they have programmed some kind of self-cleaning cycle so these robots can fix themselves after sandstorms? The mission cost of a few extra actuators and a bottle of Windex seems pretty minimal versus robot death because of a particularly nasty storm.
Tthe OS reboots periodically if there's no communication to ensure that it doesn't hang because of the OS. It's a hardware watchdog, which is NOT shut down when the rover is put to sleep, so it will wake periodically over the winter, try to establish communications, ask for a software update (if any), and then go back to sleep. Given that the original mission anticipated a 90 life expectancy, expect these reboots to be relatively frequent.
http://www.flightsoftware.org/files/FSW08_Deliman.pdf
-- Terry
In retrospect, counting on the rovers landing near some homeless Martians who would insist on cleaning the solar panels every time the rovers stopped may not have been the best plan.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Couldn't they have programmed some kind of self-cleaning cycle so these robots can fix themselves after sandstorms? The mission cost of a few extra actuators and a bottle of Windex seems pretty minimal versus robot death because of a particularly nasty storm.
Well, NASA considered that themselves, and their cost-benefit analysis said it wasn't worth it.
And that was back before they knew that the Martian wind would blow strongly enough to do a decent job of cleaning the panels on its own, and thus had estimated that in 90 days the panels would be covered in too much dust for the rover to operate.
"A few extra actuators and a bottle of Windex", snarkiness aside, is easier to say than to actually engineer without compromising other parts of the mission.
And now that we know that the Martian wind does blow, and as a result the rovers lasted for a good six years, then I have to say with hindsight that neglecting any sort of cleaning mechanism and the associated weight cost was unequivocally the correct choice.
The enemies of Democracy are
Well, NASA didn't expect them to last this long, so they long ago ran out of spare change.
As much as I love them and the science they are providing, part of me wishes they would die. This would help us focus on building the next generation rovers / science platforms that have more capability and can traverse farther (or can be made cheaply so many could be sent instead of having them travel so far) and possibly multi use on different planets. Would they work on the moon? Europa?, etc.
"A few extra actuators and a bottle of Windex", snarkiness aside
Lighten up. It was a joke. On the other hand, if I had suggested adding an extra roll of duct tape to the mission payload, that would have been a clue that I was making a serious suggestion because duct tape can solve any problem.
I really wonder if the Rock Abrasion Tool (RAT) arm (the grinder arm) is strong enough to help Spirit move away from its sand trap... Christos/Greece
Yeah I knew the suggestion was a joke, but I was responding to the not-necessarily-joking sentiment behind it of why not have a method of cleaning the panels. And not in a particularly dark manner I thought.
The enemies of Democracy are
Indeed. I wonder if the parent posters can think of any Earth-bound machines that operated to good capacity with no mechanical service in six years. They were designed well enough.
Yeah, I guess I know what you mean. I'm also prone to taking wildly off-the-wall suggestions seriously as a thought exercise... but your error was bringing the conclusion back to a serious and scientifically correct conclusion.
See the other responder to my Windex post who commented about NASA's false assumption that there would be homeless Martians lining up to clean off the instruments every time it stopped. That's the right way to respond to serious-sounding-but-idiotic suggestions in a science forum... with an even more absurd follow-up.
Nonetheless, I thank you (sincerely, not snarkily) for your serious scientific observations. :)
Actually, many at l-mart are hoping that Phoenix survived in various levels. We will not know for a bit, but......
If it works for Phoenix, then it MIGHT just work for Spirit.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Spirit is stuck in the sand and can't rock itself free; because it's not moving, sand and dust is collecting on the solar panels; winter is coming on Mars, making the solar energy that much weaker anyway.
Can't they just call MAA (Martian Automobile Association)?
Where I was coming from is that other people are seriously suggesting some kind of panel-cleaning device -- which on its face isn't ridiculous, though the occasional suggestion that NASA never even thought of it kinda is. So I took your comment as giving a humorous specific example of the serious general concept. I've been known to mix humor and seriousness myself from time to time (though never before driving or operating heavy machinery).
Humor for its own sake is cool too. :)
The enemies of Democracy are
Oh good point. I'd forgotten that the chance for Phoenix to rise from its ashes so to speak hadn't come to pass yet. Sorry for prematurely assuming its demise. Here's hoping, then!
The enemies of Democracy are
That would be a great thing to have happen. Petroleum is an eventual byproduct of the decomposition and compression of organic material. It would be one bit more of evidence towards at least past life on Mars.
Well, they do have a program in Phoenix to call home if comm awakens again. Hopefully, it will. While all builders have a certain level that they go to, nearly all build to far far higher specs. There are a number of engineers/builders at l-mart who think that a number of the sub-systems will work again. The big issue will be, will comm and power work? If not, then all is lost. Personally, I will be surprised if the batteries stood up. I do know that some of those board prototypes were subjected to solid CO2 (dry ice) on the side just to see what would happen. Some survived, some did not. So, it will depend on who made the joints and how alert were they.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I am old and have nothing to lose. Send me up there and I will pick it up and move it to a better place. At that time it can take pictures of me passing away in total bliss.
I wonder what the creationist community would be shitting in that case :)
Well, in addition to square footage, you need a way to keep the panels clean. The reason Spirit and Opportunity weren't expected to survive the winter is because they didn't have a way to keep the solar panels clean over winter, and, therefore, were expected to run out of power and lose instruments. However, what happened was that the wind on Mars cleaned the solar panels naturally. This natural cleaning, combined with some smart positioning by NASA engineers allowed the rovers to gather enough sunlight during the Martian winter to keep the heaters running.
This year Spirit is mired in sand. This means that NASA no longer has the ability to position it in a way to keep capturing sunlight during the winter. Therefore, it is not at all clear whether it will have enough power to keep its heaters running.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
The problem is that actuators and Windex add a fair amount of weight. Remember, the big design constraint here was the airbag landing system. In order for an airbag landing to work, the rovers had to be fairly light. There's also the fact that you need to keep the actuators clean as well - how are you going to do that? What happens when the actuators themselves get cold and jam up? Also, it might not be a wise idea to try to clean the solar panels on your own - what happens if you end up scratching the panels, because Martian dust is much more sharp-edged than Earth dust?
For all these reasons (plus probably a few more that I haven't thought of) NASA decided against having any sort of cleaning system on the rovers.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
What I wonder and nobody has brought up. Why cant it die and come back in the spring? IT should be like any computer/robot and easily recover from a total power failure and restoration.
Why not let it sleep all winter and check in the spring when it may have enough solar-juice to come back online?
The core system/batteries need to be kept above a minimum temperature to prevent their destruction due to thermo-mechanical contraction. This requires that the system remain active to a limited degree so that the temperature may be managed. This also requires a minimal power budget. If the panel angle is too far off and/or there is too much dust on the panels, it may not be possible to prevent the system from "freezing to death."
At very low temperatures some semiconductor materials do not behave as expected. This can cause mis-operation and either hard or soft failure of active components.
It may be possible that enough of the components would survive a prolonged out of spec. thermal excursion, but the odds do not favor it. Semiconductor components, by their nature, are dissimilar metal and glass structures there's only so far they can be cooled before they mechanically fail due to internal mechanical stress. This also applies to macro-structures like joints and electrical connectors, lubricants, plastics, and insulation materials. Micro-fractures in semi-conductors leads to their failure to operate when they warm back up. Rivets pop.
Insulators crack. Support structures deform and break themselves or other components.
There's also only so far you can design in thermal relief before you compromise mechanical stability at nominal operating conditions.
Just pay for a hooker.
I wonder what the creationist community would be shitting in that case :)
Bibles.