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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."
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
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?
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.
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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.
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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.
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?
As I understand it, there are no "stuck" feet. The rover simply doesn't have the traction (perhaps combined with low motive power) to leave this area of sand.
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."
Funny you should use that euphemism. A road would have helped the rover considerably.
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?
Air pressure averages about 1% of Earth's. There simply isn't enough atmosphere to justify a fan or the power it would draw.
"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
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.
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.
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.
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"
"wouldn't it kind of make sense to have some fans to blow off the sand from the solar panels?"
It was only expected to go 90 days, and not expected to suffer much dust or winter over.
Another in the long line of 'why didn't they'. As in:
"Why didn't they build these things to last 6 years?" Answer: They weren't expected to.
"Why didn't they think of this or that?" Answer: The mission requirements did not include that.
"Why did they do this or that?" Answer: They exercised their best judgement at the time. So far, so good.
What part of exceeding your expectations by 24 times are you complaining about? Your GF expected a 1.0+ct diamond, and she got a 24-ct one? She complains it's VSS-1? That it's heavy? That it catches on her clothes? That it blinds people on the street?
And does she ask you how much you paid for it, and you end up telling her the truth, you paid for a 1/4 ct brilliant, and wow, 6 years later ya got this...
Again, no complaints about the Rovers. Spectacular performance. And NASA is scouting around for the next robotic mission. Ask some of these guys for ideas, anyone?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
“There are levels of survival we are willing to accept.”
Two cans of computer duster in quick draw holsters. DUH!
This is not rocket science here...... Oh wait....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
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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
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
It seems to me that the simplest solution would be to send a manned mission and have the astronauts follow the rovers around with a rag and a bottle of windex.
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
"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.
There's a 1928 Duesenberg that has never had any maintenance whaever, not even an oil change, and it's still working. However, it has a flat tire and can't get to the gas station and it's almost out of gas.
Except it's on Mars.
Free Martian Whores!
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