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Mars Rover Opportunity Turns 8
New submitter el borak writes
"Never mind all the talk about the revival of the American auto industry. What may be the greatest car the U.S. has ever built is currently a tidy 78 million miles (125m km) away from this world — resting on the edge of Endeavour crater in the southern hemisphere of Mars. It was on January 25, 2004 that the rover Opportunity bounced down on Mars for a mission designed to last a minimum of three months and a maximum of just a year or two."
Moderators, this is off-topic. Slashdot refuses to report a story.
According to Reuters, Apple surpassed Android in marketshare by the end of 2011, confirming earlier reports by both Nielsen and NPD. 150 Android smartphones couldn't beat the iPhone 4S. With 15 million iPads sold last quarter, the tablet market is now larger than the entire desktop PC market.
Who cares? Well, in January 2011, Slashdot triumphantly reported that Android surpassed iOS in marketshare. All year, Android fans cited Android's marketshare as proof that it was taking over the smartphone industry, that the lack of centralized control was superior to the "walled garden", and that Android was "winning".
So what happened when the opposite occurred and Apple reversed Android's marketshare lead by the end of the year? Despite multiple submissions from several users, and news coverage ranging from Arstechnica to CNN, Slashdot refused to publish the story. All the sudden, it wasn't considered newsworthy despite the publication of the other story a year earlier.
This is a Linux advocacy site whose initial userbase was driven by hatred of Windows marketshare. Marketshare is still highly fetishized around here. Anything negative about the marketshare of Linux or platforms based on Linux, gets killed. Slashdot is intentionally not providing you full tech news coverage because it caters to a specific demographic of emotionally-invested users who are more likely to generate repeat page views.
Cars carry human passengers - pretty much the definition of car. This is a rover and not a car.
Can you remember the last piece of technology hardware you had which outlived its warranty? For me, most of that was stuff made in the 80's.
Considerable accomplishment, designing, accumulating all the bits, assembling it, putting it in a rocket, flying it to Mars, landing it and having it muck about in a place without AAA Roadside Service. Well done.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Images from Opportunity show a life form consisting of a scorpion-shaped body, a disc and a 'black flap".
1) IT did not actually put those 78 Million miles on its own hardware, its like if I ship a toyota from japan to virgina, I did not DRIVE it from A to B and I shure as hell would not add the shipping mileage to its odometer
2) Are we really that proud that something we built lasted 8 years? that's like the breaking in period for a diesel Mercedes with far more (actual, not shipping) miles on it
Kudos to the Design team.
well done.
I don't know what you have over there but these engineers deserve to be knighted.
I think it is great that the device was design to last max a year or two, and lasted 8, but on the flipside, this means they aren't really good engineers.
How can I say this?
The estimates were off by 400%~800%!!! Or more!!!
Just because they erred on the side of a good result doesn't mean the estimates are better. It means their methodology is HEAVILY padded, or if we assume +/-400~800%, they were just lucky that it didn't swing the other way. Given Phobos-Grunt, perhaps space engineering margin of error really is +/-400~800%. Although I suspect huge margins of error were thrown about in NASA>
If that's the case, huge design buffers, that means they don't understand the underlying physics/materials engineer, and had to heavily overdesign, which means there is a far more efficient design out there.
I'm not knocking NASA engineers, I'm just exploring how to shave down this margin so that they can make more efficient designs at lower cost that behave as expected.
Building something that behaves as expected is far, far, FAR more important than building something that blows away expectations by orders of magnitude. The former is good engineering, the latter is waste, or worse, dumb luck!
Discuss.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
The impressive aspect is not that it has operated for 8 years, or that it is "beyond its warranty" (which is a misnomer - there was no warranty). What is impressive is that it has operated in a harsh environment for 8 years WITH ZERO MAINTENANCE! None. No one has touched the device in over 8 years now. And it has continued to operate, by radio, despite dust, vibration, heat, cold and radiation beyond what most Earth-bound devices ever experience.
Sure, my car has well over 100K miles on it and is over 12 years old. But it is only operating because I am performing routine maintenance on the car. If I had not maintained the car, it would have stopped working ages ago. The impressive aspect of the Mars rover is that it has survived without anyone needs to tighten a nut, change oil, replace a battery or wheel or any of the routine operations that we have to use for our normal machines to keep them operational.
That must be in dog years.
Bah-dah-bump. Be sure to tip your waitress. Thank you.
Have gnu, will travel.
Obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/695/
Insert signature here...
There's talk of the revival of the American automotive industry?!? Are there more bailouts or something?
NASA deserves little credit for the MER rovers (i.e. Spirt and Opportunity), in fact I suspect that the human-spaceflight ex-pilots at NASA/Houston would prefer to nuke all unmanned mission and dump (waste) all the funding on more manned pork. The MERs are JPL all the way. Do not confuse the money-pit, scientifically-impoverished manned missions of NASA with the low-code (comparatively), successful missions of JPL. Opportunity is one of the most successful missions ever flow, right up there with Voyager and Cassini. Compare that with the Shuttle...
...if they only had included a wind shield wiper on the solar panel...
The Russian Lunokhod explored the moon for five lunar days in 1973. It those days it was driven in real being a little more than a light second from Earth.
I keep hearing about this mission, and I'd like to start a movement that part of the MSR mission will be to retrieve the rover from Mars and bring it back to Earth for evaluation, because I believe that examination of the rover after surviving for so long beyond it's original design lifetime will be very educational.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Within the payload limits, there's no reason not to over-engineer the hell out of a space platform. Value engineering a rover closer to the mission plan would have saved time/money, but would have added to the risks of failure. Utter mission failure is the major cost sink for working in space, so it pays to add sigmas when possible.
The critical variable is the limited number of opportunities for interplanetary launches as a function of time and lining up rockets. NASA could be lofting $1000 Aibos with high gain antennas stuck in their okoles. but, if our little pals don't return any data, you didn't save $300m on the probe, you pissed away $120m on the launch.
Luke, help me take this mask off
The next Mars rover that's nuclear-power will fail due to, 1st, poor coolant (e.g. water, cooler, etc.) for this specific purpose, 2nd failing electronic systems due to the ausence of plumb shield near to the radioactive core.
We've an important question: "how to accomplish the fullfilment of the prophecy when the man/woman abandons the Earth?".
Why to put we in risk our lives when few individuals wanted evilnessly to success their own "evil mission" for their own private interests?.
JCPM: Oh! God mine! I'm here because i was assigned no another place than here, on this planet named "La Tierra".