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."

Comments

Surely the easiest thing..

[jo_ham]

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.

Re:Surely the easiest thing..

[khallow]

the easiest thing to do is to send a second robot probe with a tow cable and winch it out.

That's way dumb. Call a local tow operator. Any Earthside tow operator will want to be paid for the mileage. You're paying them to drive 60 million miles each way. At $3 per mile, that's a lot of dough.

The Animal

[HomerJ]

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?!

Damnit Wolowitz

[GiveBenADollar]

"Hey baby wanna drive a car on Mars?" is not an appropriate use of scientific equipment.

Need a better robotic arm

[tomhath]

A decent backhoe operator would be able to get it out

Re:Need a better robotic arm

[mbone]

Yeah, an astronaut in a space suit would be able to free the rover in seconds, and clean its solar panels while he was at it. And, while we are at it, two or three astronauts in space suits could have done their entire multi-year missions in a few weeks in each location. But, since we don't have any astronauts in space suits handy on Mars, we are stuck with trying to wheelie it out.

Re:Where is Opportunity ?

[Spatial]

Opportunity landed on the other side of the planet. Although I don't know where it is right now, it's unlikely to be close given the fairly low speed of the rovers and the scientific value of maximising the survey area.


Also, I'm surprised Slashdot didn't go with Opportunities Dwindling For Mars Spirit Rover.

Punalicious.

Time to say good night.

[jimhill]

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.

Re:Time to say good night.

[PsychoSlashDot]

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.

Re:Time to say good night.

[ratbag]

Their current efforts surely are part of "prepping for the next rover mission"? Anything done on this mission provides data for the next one. Don't switch it off early and waste the opportunity to analyse end-game scenarios.

Re:Time to say good night.

[carvalhao]

Obligatory quote: "Don't anthropomorphize our gadgets, they hate that"

We could have MANY rovers.

[couchslug]

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.

Re:We could have MANY rovers.

[Mitchell314]

Yeah, we could spend more money on oranges by not funding apples. Rovers deal with exploration, and the shuttle was responsible for a bunch of other jobs.

Re:We could have MANY rovers.

[PsychoSlashDot]

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.

You're probably already aware, but all of this exploration comes from public funding, which is tied to public opinion.

Tell me a kid who grows up thinking "some day I'm going to drive a robot on Mars" is going to approve of space-spending in the same degree that a kid who grows up thinking "some day I'm going to mars to drive a robot".

Manned space flight is fantastic. As in the stuff of fantasy. Only it's within our grasp.

What is interesting is that unlike basically every other technology we've invented, space-flight doesn't seem to get cheaper over time. You'd think nearly 40 years after landing on the moon, we'd be able to do it cheaper. Problem is what we're complicating the process, of course. The Apollo capsules were simple machines. Today, we'd load them up with intricate gear and triply-redundant equipment, all of which would require orders of magnitude more testing than the legacy stuff, driving the price astronomically high.

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.

Do it to inspire.

Re:We could have MANY rovers.

[khallow]

I strongly disagree. What is the point of exploring the universe in great detail, if humanity is going to live and die on Earth? Just spend what is necessary in order to figure out external risks like asteroid impacts and save the rest for more advanced navel gazing technologies.

The whole point of human space flight is the assumption that we will be in space sooner or later. Given that it's not that hard to put people in space for a length of time indicates to me that we'll likely have more extensive human presence in a few decades, but that's just IMHO.

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.

I agree with the first sentence. This is the primary reason we'll always have unmanned space exploration. No matter how good we get at using people in space, they can't be everywhere. Distance, if nothing else, will be a barrier between humanity and many of the things we wish to explore - even in the Solar System.

As to your second point, those are not significant demonstrations of remote operation of the kind done by NASA's unmanned program. Humans are still on location to maintain the machines and do other tasks. A Martian analogue would have people going to Mars, but spending most of their time in a central location (say fixing or managing stuff) while robots do the actual physical exploration and other grunt work.

Your comments also bring up one of the problems I have with NASA. What do you think of when you think of NASA's manned space program for the past 30 years? Most likely it is the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station. What do you think of when you consider NASA's unmanned space program? You probably think of the Voyager missions, Hubble Space Telescope, numerous very successful missions to Mars, Cassini and Galileo, etc. With manned space flight, you think of building and maintaining expensive infrastructure. With unmanned space flight, you think of space exploration though by expensive, unique, rock-star-style missions.

The bottom line for me is that manned space flight has little use; unmanned space flight has somewhat greater utility; but neither really are worth the money sunk into them. You can claim that manned missions are inefficient, but I see no evidence of that. What I do see is a vastly unambitious and unsustainable effort to explore space either manned or unmanned. First, to address the unambitious part. Manned space flight has for the past thirty years never gone past LEO. The high point is a $100 billion (or more) space construction project that might end up doing a little space science on the side. This is pathetic.

On the unmanned side, we have a cycle of space science that is so slow that scientists routinely die of old age before a probe is allotted to explore unanswered questions from previous missions. For example, the infamous Viking labeled release experiments won't be duplicated for 35 years (or more) past the time of the original experiment.

Compare this to the Apollo program. In a span of eight years (1961-1968), the US sent 21 space probes to the Moon (I believe 8 of them failed, 6 in the first four years). NASA then sent seven successful manned missions to the Moon (plus Apollo 13 which was a mission failure but passed around the Moon briefly). One merely orbited (Apollo 8), but the other six landed on the Moon (Apollo 11,12,14,15,16,and 17). The last three had manned lunar rovers which traveled at least 25 km. And collectively the missions dropped off a bunch of instruments and returned 380 kg of samples. I think th

Re:We could have MANY rovers.

[Sapphon]

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.

Re:We could have MANY rovers.

[khallow]

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.

Originally meant to last 90 days.

[Spatial]

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

Re:Originally meant to last 90 days.

[chaoticgeek]

The Sunset on Mars picture is stunning. Thanks for the link. Also it is quite a feat of engineering I think too. For them to last this long on another world is amazing.

Re:Where is Opportunity ?

[wooferhound]

Here is the actual Nasa Mars Rover site . . .
http://marsrover.nasa.gov/home/index.html

Re:Where is Opportunity ?

[mister_playboy]

It won't have enough juice to survive the Martian winter. They have to try now while they can.

Re:Where is Opportunity ?

[davester666]

It also keeps them focused on their tasks. If they were together, it's just robot-on-robot sex, 24/7/365...or at least after every sunny day...

Use the arm!

[HeikkiK]

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

Re:Where is Opportunity ?

[petermgreen]

The problem for spirit as I understand it is they really need to be tilted towards the sun (or at minimum be at zero tilt) to maintain survival power levels through the winter and right now they are tilted away from the sun.

normally this would be achieved by driving to a location that is tilted correctly for overwintering but they can't do that if they are stuck.

They are considering digging one side of sprint in further to get a more favourable tilt but if they do that it will almost certainly mean the rover will never move again.

The poor rover

[OpenSourced]

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.