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NASA Mars Rover Spots Its Ultimate Destination
coondoggie writes "It has been years in the making but NASA said its Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has captured a new view of the rim of the planet's Endeavour crater, perhaps the rover's ultimate destination. The Mars rover set out for Endeavour in September 2008 after spending two years exploring the Victoria crater. NASA says Endeavour is 13 miles across, some 25 times wider than Victoria crater, and could offer scientists more insight into the red planet's makeup."
It still amazes me how long these rovers have lasted. hopefully it makes it to the crater, and lasts for a long time once it gets there.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
FREE MARS!
" and could offer scientists more insight into the red planet's make-up"
Mars: the rouge planet!
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
This is exciting. The knowledge contained within this crater will feed millions and advance the knowledge nessesary for the survival of the Human Race by many years, and reveal the secrets of oil spill clean up as an added bonus!
Um, not exactly. Though the discoveries made there could free the minds of millions of people and entice some of the brightest people on the planet to focus their talents on space sciences. Surely that has some value, too.
I wonder what alternates to solar panels they've considered. Seems like a satellite could collect solar energy 24.6583 by 7 and beam it to the rover(s) using microwave or something. And the rover could carry less equipment, not have to worry about dust so much, and operate around the clock.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
K'breel, speaker for the Council, emphasized that the site for the final battle was well-defended:
"Gentle citizens, it has been years since the twin mechanized monsters touched down on our sweet red soil, but the Council is pleased to report that the last remaining mobile invader from the blue planet has been sighted by sentries approaching the rim of End-Devaur crater. The invader set out for End-Devaur last summer after spending a year at Victory Hole; Planetary Land Defense Forces have pinpointed the invader's location to a point in the trackless wastes at least half a year's journey from End-Devaur."
"The enemy's slow progress across the wastelands leaves us with ample time to amass an overwhelming counterforce, and at last we shall see this campaign through to its end. Rejoice! Within half a revolution around our star, this monstrosity from the blue world shall find its ultimate destination!"
When a junior reporter mentioned the persistent rumor that the invader was merely a scientific probe operating at least order of magnitude past its design lifespan, K'Breel raised a spirited toast "to an opportunity for victory!", and devoured the ends of the reporter's gelsacs.
The requirements were for 90 days at a time when we wanted to send up many such vehicles and robots knowing they were cheap and we would lose some.
These little guys have lasted far too long, demonstrating the folks at JPL were not able to meet the requirements the taxpayers gave them.
Far better engineering would have had these things come in at 40% of the cost and had them die on day 97. Then we could have flown more and more of them.
I hope the guys who managed this fiasco were suitably fired before they had a chance to screw the taxpayer and the space program over again.
if they found life, numbnuts.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Except the majority of the cost is fixed in the rockets to escape Earth and the spacecraft to reach mars, so a longer lasting robot is always better so long as it remains a minority of the cost of the exploration system.
In case anyone hasn't seen it, although featuring Spirit not Opportunity, still applies: http://xkcd.com/695/
There are still some people who believe that human achievement is a zero-sum game. Idiots, we call them.
if they found life, numbnuts.
The remains of a sperm whale and a bowl of petunias in the bottom of Endeavor crater would certainly create some interest.
But the long drives by Opportunity have actually been pretty interesting. It has found several meteors. It has also been able to study an increasingly wide area of mars. A long baseline helps a lot in science and I suspect data from Opportunity will be used decades into the future.
Also if not life, then maybe evidence of life elsewhere. A squatter probe (like phoenix and the vikings) would last longer on mars than on Earth.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
It will cause deformations to the underlying rock strata, but that strata will still be visible and measurable. At the Haughton Impact crater in northern Canada, the cliffs that make up the crater rim maintain their structure. The material that was ejected has wound up as big breccia hills within the crater, and was also distributed around outside the crater.
Also, most of the hydrological (and dare I say hydrodynamical?) features actually come up after the impact, and can tell you a lot about the underlying mineralogy. As the heat from the impact dissipates, it heats water, which dissolves some minerals, which then bubble up to the surface. These hydro-thermal events that occur after the impact is also where you can best expect to find microbial life. In effect, you have all the needed ingredients for life present in a hydrothermal vent... warm, running water and associated minerals.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Wow, I bet you're the guy who makes laptops fail two days after the three-year warranty ends.
I am all in favour of careful engineering. Designing things to fail is extremely antisocial.
Far better engineering would have had these things come in at 40% of the cost and had them die on day 97. Then we could have flown more and more of them.
Ah, what a fanciful imagination you have of how engineering works.
Where engineers can guarantee operation in a highly variable, largely unknown environment for X days, yet also nail tolerances so tightly they can predict parts will fail in 1.1X days. And save lots of money in the process, somehow. Even though relative to your own imaginary number the rovers we actually got cost 2.5x, yet lasted more than 25x.
The rovers were engineered as robustly as possible within the weight budget, simply to ensure that they would work at all on the surface of Mars, and therefore had the potential to last for a very long time. This is obviously a win if you think the goal was to have the maximum number of operational rovers on Mars at any given time. But the reason they haven't launched more has nothing to do with rover cost. It's because they don't have the budget to expand operations to cover more; NASA is already busy with this already vastly expanded mission.
The only reason a 90 day mission plan came up was because that was their very rough estimate of how long the solar panels could supply sufficient power before they became too covered in dust. They had always hoped they could continue the mission past that and had contingency plans for the operations budget to that effect, and were very pleasantly surprised that their assumptions were wrong. When the Martian wind turned out to be much stronger than expected, enough to blow dust off of the rovers' solar panels, that constraint on the rovers' life span was removed and their robust engineering could pay off.
Executive summary: The only serious mistake made in the planning, research and design of the rover mission was in predicting a short lifespan for the rovers, and that mistake turned out to be in the mission's and the taxpayer's favor.
The enemies of Democracy are
These rovers are great, and there's no denying the incredible engineering and workmanship that went into them. However, given the speed they are capable of traveling and the limited equipment they have on board, I can't help thinking that all the science they've accomplished over these many years could have been done in about 3 days by an actual human. A human can walk much faster than these rovers can travel, and a human is capable of interpreting data without having to wait 30 minutes each way for communications from the Earth.
The robots may be much cheaper, but a human on the surface of the planet would be much more efficient.
The GP is not making an argument for careful engineering, he's making an argument for risky cutting edge engineering.
He's not saying YOUR laptop should fail after the three day warranty, because that's not the requirements or what a consumer wants from a laptop.
He's saying a 90 day lifetime rover should die on day 100 having a 10 day safety margin and not a six year safety margin.
At the time, the spirit (so to speak) was for faster, better, cheaper. But we didn't get faster or cheaper from rover, we got better, just as usual.
The reward for dying on day 100 after a successful mission would have been to launch more rover and more rovers.
The punishment for lasting six years is that we've sent no more rovers up there. And the next rover is not the size of a toaster or trashcan, it's the size of an SUV and will be canceled.
Instead of grabbing the public's attention with a series of rovers, we've bored the public to death with the same version of Johnny 5 rolling around not doing much of anything as far as the public can tell for six years.
Grandparent is right, these things were way overbuilt.
Go to Metor Crater in Arizona and take the tour.
The impactor buries itself in the ground. then explodes. The explosion peals back the layers and stacks them upside down outside the crater like a shattered layer cake. They are easier to get to on the outside. That is why all the Apollo astronauts came to the crater to study geology.
Go here read the geology section
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Crater
cool stuff
Ah, what a fanciful imagination you have of how engineering works.
While I don't agree with his supposition, He's not that far off the mark. In manufacturing, if the expected life is 1 year (with a warranty period of 90 days), and if a $10 part will last, literally forever while a $2 part will last for 1 year of continuous use... You choose the $2 part.
Funny how you should mention equipment, when a manned mission would have to carry huge, huge amounts of equipment to make sure said squishy little thing doesn't die on the way there from temperature, radiation, lack of air, water or food. Same goes for heat shields, parachutes and thrusters to not get killed during landing - landing like the rovers would leave them a bloody smear. Again all the environmental requirements applies on the planet, you'd need a huge solar panel just to keep the habitat at a survivable temperature. Most likely their operational reach is limited by getting home by nightfall when it's -80C (-110F) at best. Never mind that they probably want a way to return home that'll take even more room for a launch vehicle. In short, the whole expedition is huge long before you have the tiniest bit of scientific equipment.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Don't you hate it when /. posts are linked to blog sites instead of the home page, anyway post your links below
Home Page
http://marsrover.nasa.gov/spotlight/20100430a.html
Images
http://marsrover.nasa.gov/gallery/press/opportunity/20100430a.html
Actually, we would call those "eastern cultures". Only America, with its history of expansion and "go West, young man" thinks of life as growing the pie. The culture I've lived in for the past seven years does not have that idea at all - overcrowding within a confined space has a bad effect on a culture, making the zero-sum game the only way to live life. "If you win, then necessarily I must lose." This sort of thinking is pervasive and destructive. People will screw you over for no reason, none, other than they feel that there is no such thing as a win-win situation.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Yes because those savings will really start to add up as we mass produce rovers.
In all of my life, I am not sure I have ever read a more cynical post than you just wrote.
...or are all successes just failures waiting to happen???
You sir, are the very definition of a crab in a barrel. Do you know what happens to crabs in a barrel when one of them tries to escape? The others pull him back down into the barrel.
Instead of celebrating the overwhelming success of the program, you denigrate it by saying it was too successful. Making something fail because of some artificial time horizon is just....well...stupid. My god man, don't you have ANY pride in success?
The GP is not making an argument for careful engineering, he's making an argument for risky cutting edge engineering.
He's not saying YOUR laptop should fail after the three day warranty, because that's not the requirements or what a consumer wants from a laptop.
He's saying a 90 day lifetime rover should die on day 100 having a 10 day safety margin and not a six year safety margin.
At the time, the spirit (so to speak) was for faster, better, cheaper. But we didn't get faster or cheaper from rover, we got better, just as usual.
The reward for dying on day 100 after a successful mission would have been to launch more rover and more rovers.
The punishment for lasting six years is that we've sent no more rovers up there. And the next rover is not the size of a toaster or trashcan, it's the size of an SUV and will be canceled.
Instead of grabbing the public's attention with a series of rovers, we've bored the public to death with the same version of Johnny 5 rolling around not doing much of anything as far as the public can tell for six years.
Grandparent is right, these things were way overbuilt.
Except that the two scenarios aren't mutually exclusive- we should have continued to send more robots over there while having the robots last longer than we ever expected.
Grandparent is right, these things were way overbuilt.
Grandparent needs to read more and I think you do too.
Launch Successes (s) and Failures (f), 1957–1999
With about a 6%-7% chance of failure of not even making it to the planet, you want to make as few launches as possible and get the most out of each.
Then you have everything that could go wrong during landing. e.g. Beagle 2 and the crater it left in the martian soil.
Yep, thank God NASA is run by actual rocket scientists rather than internet experts.
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull