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New Mars Rover Rolls For the First Time
wooferhound writes "Like proud parents savoring their baby's very first steps, mission team members gathered in a gallery above a clean room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to watch the Mars Curiosity rover roll for the first time. Engineers and technicians wore bunny suits while guiding Curiosity through its first steps, or more precisely, its first roll on the clean room floor. The rover moved forward and backward about 1 meter (3.3 feet). Mars Science Laboratory (aka Curiosity) is scheduled to launch in fall 2011 and land on the Red Planet in August 2012. Curiosity is the largest rover ever sent to Mars. It will carry 10 instruments that will help search an intriguing region of the Red Planet for two things: environments where life might have existed, and the capacity of those environments to preserve evidence of past life."
I've always wondered why the rovers aren't designed with bigger wheels and bubble-ish tires (not saying they have to be inflated) like on a truck outfitted for work in a swamp. Every time we read that one of the existing rovers got stuck and the folks at JPL were working on getting it unstuck, I'd think the same thing.
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I think you don't quite understand the utter, sheer enormity of a project like sending a probe to another planet, let alone an autonomous rover to land on the surface. As you yourself admit, this thing is going to travel hundreds of millions of kilometres through space, burn through an atmosphere, land on the surface of a planet and -hopefully- roll away into the sunset. NASA can't test it enough IMHO. This machine needs to have triple redundancies built in - it will need them. Watch the video: this thing is going to explore the surface of another planet. Who is going to fix it, if it breaks?
There's no thing like overweaning care when it comes to real, actual space exploration. If you don't take care, you can see a rover worth a few hundred million dollars burn up in an atmosphere or worse: just sitting there like a lame duck because someone thought it'd be a waste of time to take the appropriate care.
No you're thinking of an incident from the viking mission where the opposite happened.
Viking video images were miscalibrated to display the sky as blue.
But there is always a calibration target on the lander with known colors that is used for proper calibration.
Disappointment ensued when it was corrected as per the know target and the sky was pink.
Hope they fix the dust collecting on the solar panels issue. Something as simple as compressed air blowing on the panels would do the trick. Since there is a thin atmosphere on Mars, they could just have a little compressor pump the Martian air instead of an air or CO2 canister.
Yes, it's nuclear powered... problem solved :)
I know it costs roughly $80,000 to land an object on the moon, Mars must be a bit more.
Lets say a Hum-V was built that runs perfectly on 100% solar power and weighs about the same as a standard Hum-V, we know it would cost roughly $480,000,000 to lift that Hum-V to the moon. Hard to see how that would be any cheaper...
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Ah sorry, amend my previous figure of $80,000 above to $80,000/pound..
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
Ah sorry, amend my previous figure...to $80,000/pound.
Dang, I knew the dollar was down against the pound, but that's just ridiculous.
Because it would still cost about as much to get each one to Mars- probably a lot more, as you'd need multiple launch vehicles unless you make them really tiny and not very capable. Also, the smaller and cheaper you make 'em, the less science each can do. The multi-probe way might be the way to go if you're just rolling around looking for sites that may have had water present in the past, but what do you do when you discover an interesting spot? With the big probe, you crank up the arm with rock grinder, scintilation spectrometer and microsope to go check it out; things I doubt you'd find in "little" probes.
How many kilograms was the baguette that shut down your LHC?
Ribbit.
And everytime I see a post like this I think of The Ariane 5 Flight 501 failure (integer overflow error, LOL!) and ask myself will they step into the 20th century and ever put someone on the moon?
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Though a vehicle may be designed to work in 0.38 earth gravity, that doesn't mean it will collapse or otherwise not work in standard earth conditions. Most often the structural driver for spacecraft, rovers, etc is the launch vehicle environment. Curiosity will be going up on an Atlas V, which will subject the rover to 5-6 G and a strenuous acoustic, shock, and vibration environment. In addition to the launch loads, it also has to survive the sky-crane landing on the surface of Mars. So it really isn't too surprising that it can support its own weight on earth.
I understand it fine. Which is why I don't understand why the thing isn't made so bulletproof that you could test the wheels with the entire crew jumping up and down on top of the rover.
Because then it'd be far too heavy.
There are more consequences of weight than just having to have a (super-linearly) larger rocket, though that is a significant issue given NASA's budget and not something that can be ignored even if it were the only issue.
The MSL is already so heavy that they can't use the simple airbag landing method they used for Spirit and Opportunity. Instead, they're having to use a pretty crazy method of dangling the rover by a cable from a rocket-propelled landing platform.
Increase the weight significantly, and that method becomes much harder if not impossible. It's a square-cube problem. The strength of the rover's structure goes up as the cross-sectional area, but the mass -- and thus the force experienced on landing for a given velocity -- goes up as the volume. In a very real sense, your heavier rover is actually weaker when it comes to this aspect of the mission. Which means you need much larger rockets that are simultaneously much more precise in absolute terms, and thus vastly more precise in percentage terms.
I don't know what related industry you work in, but if weight isn't a dominant issue then it's really not that closely related to space travel.
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