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Options Dwindling For Mars Spirit Rover
coondoggie writes "NASA says it is narrowing a short list of things its scientists can do to extricate its stuck Mars Spirit rover. They are exploring a couple remaining options, such as driving backwards and using Spirit's robotic arm to sculpt the ground directly in front of the left-front wheel, the only working wheel the arm can reach. The amount of energy that Spirit harvests each day, however, is declining, as autumn days shorten on southern Mars. 'At the current rate of dust accumulation, solar arrays at zero tilt would provide barely enough energy to run the survival heaters through the Mars winter solstice.' NASA is currently analyzing results of a Jan. 13th attempt to move the spacecraft that involved a very slow rotation of the wheels. Earlier drives in the past two weeks using wheel wiggles and slow wheel rotation produced negligible progress toward extricating Spirit, NASA stated."
If they had the Martians number they could just call them and ask them for help. NASA, you proud fools!
What's the big deal?
Or has Hauser been recalled from Mars?
Is just to fly some guys up there with shovels. It can't be that badly stuck. Maybe do some science after they dig it out.
This problem was solved in the 80's with The Animal: The Animal
Spirit Rover engineers should have played with more 80's toys. Can anything stop...THE ANIMAL?!
"Hey baby wanna drive a car on Mars?" is not an appropriate use of scientific equipment.
How far away is the other rover, Opportunity ?
Maybe it could grab this one and they could both get out together? Or both get stuck together one of the two!
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
A decent backhoe operator would be able to get it out
We have a tendency to anthropomorphize our gadgets, especially gadgets that move around and do stuff. How many times have we read about "the plucky rover" or "the rover that wouldn't quit" or "the rover that slept with my now-ex-girlfriend, the whore" ?
They're machines. They were designed to do a job for a specific period of time with the expectation that we'd continue to use them until they finally broke down. Spirit has pretty much broken down. It's been a great run and we've gotten a shit-ton of data from it, but it's time to hit the Off switch and release the staff to other projects ... like prepping for the next rover mission.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
We could have MANY rovers instead of wasting money on the Shuttle. The hurry to get men in space without exploring it first or developing robotic tech we absolutely require anyway bleeds vital resources from unmanned programs whose missions can last for years.
The purpose of manned missions is essentially to have a man on the spot to run machines, not very different from having an engineer run a steam locomotive. We should not want this awkward and archaic way of doing business. Manned exploration is a hangover from when the loss of ships and men was literally trivial so plenty of them could be expended. Sailing ships routinely vanished without trace. Ships were cheap, rockets are not.
There will always be a barrier between man and off-world external environments, he will always have to interact through that barrier, so it makes sense to perfect systems that will do this remotely. We are already working toward that goal on Terra, where we prefer to send machines to mine the earth, explore the depths of the sea, disrupt IEDs, and so forth. It is a natural progression to do this in the utterly hostile environment of space.
Send the tourists at leisure and after technology is vastly more advanced. No need to put the cart before the horse.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
We need a Mars Geodetic Observatory - and Bill Folkner and the celestial mechanics guys at JPL have dibs on Spirit if it can't be freed.
All we need is a dust-devil a year !
They're now on day 2,200 or thereabouts. Now that's engineering. Even if they fail now, the rovers have been an incredible success.
Some beautiful pictures too:
Sunset on Mars
Dust Devil passing by
Our very own pale blue dot, as seen from Mars
A nickel-iron meteorite sitting on the surface
It has got the Spirit, but it doesn't have the Opportunity.
If only NASA paid their parking tickets sooner, Spirit would not have been booted
Ask the martians for help.
That's an option, of course, but I fail to see how it would help the rover.
Whenever your vehicle stuck in the sand:
1. Get out of the vehicle
2. Release about 25% to 50% of the air from tires
3. Get into the vehicle
4. Slowly ride out of the sand trap
5. Pressurize tires again to normal pressure
Those guys in nasa must be really stupid
Get the suspension tuning at the East LA garage for our next rovers - it's only a short drive from JPL at Pasadena. Get a package deal with a sound system.
Have they considered all possibilities using the arm to help the situation in addition the showeling?
* Put the arm down to the ground and use it to move the rover at the same time when spinning the wheels
* has the arm enough power to lift or tilt the rover?
* use the arm to change the center of mass before spinning wheels
* use the arm to put rocks under the wheels
What's the status on this rover? Is it OK?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Even if things are stuck and rover is done, its been a helluva ride. These robots were expected to last what, 4 months, and its been what, 6 years? Thats 24x the bang for the buck! 24 times as much joy as expected. 24 times as much information. We've never explored another planet that much before! Pictures, tracks in the sand, sunrise, sunset, water samples, soil samples... Someone somewhere will ask "was it really worth it?" Hell yes! Its one thing to point a telescope at a planet and say "Um, yeah, looks kinda round and reddish and stuff". But to say "We analyzed this and that and this is what it looks like on the ground, and what the day is like and the soil and the ice and the temperature. Its suddenly not just a footnote, its a chapter. The folk who designed the rovers, they deserve the Energizer Bunny Award! Version 2.0 of these robots will be killer. They really need a robotics engineering center of excellence to take what they learned from the current set of probes, and incorporate everything into the new models.
Methinks a decompiler would be a more viable option. Some people do indeed take their NDAs way too seriously!
No ways would the rovers have sex, they are related to each other... oh they were created in the south of the USA, never mind.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
What a boring world you must life in.
But you are also plain wrong, even now the rovers are doing science, and the experience learned from this will help better design the next mission. The cost of keeping this going is neglible, just the cost of sending a signal and a small staff, on the NASA's budget it is tiny. Oh we could also give the couple of million to the banks so they can give themselves even bigger bonusses, but some people would call that silly.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
---
Space Craft Feed @ Feed Distiller
There's always been the military high ground aspect to the "civilian" space program. They can't ignore it. Sputnik was a HUGE kick in the pants to the US. That just can't be overstated. Official governmental involvement with space in general terms won't end, although a lot of it might disappear into the black budget (and a lot is probably there as well, right now). Manned or unmanned, it's the high ground, and any superpower knows this. They have and will continue to throw any number of civilian oriented scientific endeavors at the situation, but in the background, is always the "high ground" aspect.
It's just me or does everybody find this a terribly sad story? The robot, trapped in the sands of an alien planet, its solar cells slowly depleting, far from any possible help. Waiting for the instructions that it hopes will liberate it, but the instructions fail, and they come ever less often now. The sun rises a bit less every day, and the shadows are ever longer...
I cannot avoid it, it feels like a Ray Bradbury story or perhaps like Flowers for Algernon. Sad.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Would it be possible to upload a program that gives the wheels and the robotic arm short command pulses in alternating directions, at a resonant frequency tuned by the extension of the arm, to rock the rover loose in one direction or the other? Is that what the "wheel wiggles" mentioned are? Was the arm being swung in sync with these wiggles?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Had they been using wide rollers instead wheels, they'd never have had this problem in the first place.
Ha Ha Ha! LOL Town!
...now the Martians are gonna slap NASA with a parking ticket.
Table-ized A.I.
remaining options, such as driving backwards
Get stuck, go back.
Has the option of going backwards not been tried yet? Or is it stuck on the infinite loop of options - let's try this, nope doesn't work, how about going backwards? Nope. Let's try that. Uh uh. Did we try going backwards? Try it now.
Somehow nature has avoided evolving animals to have wheels. Maybe the next rover should have legs?
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.