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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."
A decent backhoe operator would be able to get it out
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
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.
I hear the point you're trying to make, but it's not as black & white as you paint it to be. The real-world costs of getting a new rover to Mars is very high. The cost of paying a team of appropriately trained specialists for a few days or even weeks to potentially extend the useful lifespan of the existing rover is much lower. You and I aren't qualified to know the statistical odds of success, or the relative costs associated. Your words "it's time" are words we have no business speaking at this time.
"Oh no... he found the
There is a logical contradiction in your argument: if the funding is tied to the public opinion, then reducing expenditures on safety directly reduces the chances of future funding – the Challenger and Columbia disasters did a lot of damage to the public image of space flight.
Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem.
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.
My advice? Stop worrying so much about safety. There are plenty of qualified volunteers who would leap at a chance of making it alive. Simplify the gear, spend the money on the actual sensor and science packages, and get some boots back on the moon, and then Mars.
I don't think there's that much to gain by cutting back on safety. Some mission profiles like one-way trips to the Moon or Mars can take advantage of lower safety requirements (here, the safety compromise is not returning the astronaut), but for most of them, if you're compromising on safety, you're compromising on reliability and the success of the mission. If you look at the parts of NASA that emphasize safety, the real problem is too much safety/risk adverseness, but rather "not invented here". For example, the claim that Ares I is more reliable than the EELVs is used as an excuse to build another NASA rocket. There's no indication that the safety estimates made in the Ares decision (coming out of the ESAS, Exploration Systems Architecture Study) are accurate or even sincere. For example, the Shuttle's SRB (Solid Rocket Booster) is estimated to have a launch failure rate of 1 in 3,700 even though its historical record is much worse than that (by more than a factor of ten).
Simply a preference for small payloads over large (eg, launching small payloads frequently rather than large payloads infrequently) would make for more reliable and cheaper launch systems. You'd get both better safety and lower costs.