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Opportunity Rover Reaches Martian Day 4,000 of Its 90-Day Mission
An anonymous reader writes: Let's take a moment to appreciate the incredible engineering, scientific, and planning skill that went into the construction and deployment of the Opportunity rover. It landed on Mars with the goal of surviving 90 sols (Martian days), and it has just logged its 4,000th sol of harvesting valuable data and sending it back to us. The Planetary Society blog has posted a detailed update on Opportunity's status, and its team's plans for the future. The rover's hardware, though incredibly resilient, is wearing down. They reformatted its flash drive to block off a corrupted sector, and that solved some software problems that had cropped up. They're currently trying to figure out why the rover unexpectedly rebooted itself. Those events are incredibly dangerous to the rover's survival, so their highest priority right now is diagnosing that issue.
Fortunately, weather on Mars is good where the rover is, and it's still able to harvest upwards of 500 Watt-hours of energy from its solar panels. Opportunity recently completed a marathon on Mars and took an impressive picture of the Spirit of St. Louis crater, and the rover will soon be on its way to enormous clay deposits that could provide valuable information about where we can look for water when we eventually put people on Mars. As always, you can look through Opportunity's images at the official website.
Fortunately, weather on Mars is good where the rover is, and it's still able to harvest upwards of 500 Watt-hours of energy from its solar panels. Opportunity recently completed a marathon on Mars and took an impressive picture of the Spirit of St. Louis crater, and the rover will soon be on its way to enormous clay deposits that could provide valuable information about where we can look for water when we eventually put people on Mars. As always, you can look through Opportunity's images at the official website.
https://xkcd.com/1504/
Also appropriate: https://www.xkcd.com/695/
Here's proof that we are capable of great civilian technology achievements when we have the will and the desire to invest in science and engineering instead of yet another boondoggle.
Of course it's lasted more than 90 days. That's because Opportunity never landed on Mars. All the images are created in a secret NASA location in Nevada.
Now if you'll excuse me I have to go monitor the Jade Helm Texas takeover.
Proverbs 21:19
https://xkcd.com/1504/
He was a lot nicer to Spirit, which had a similarly impressive run:
https://xkcd.com/695/
yeah, that's probably a good 100 years away, if not 500. Aside from dangers like radiation, nutrition, and other oh-so-subtle big things like gravity -- each of which is likely to kill a human long before they need their first water source -- there are also dangers in the trip itself, like radiation, nutrition, gravity, the vessel, going stir-crazy, and the time itself. Before all of that, there's the money, the interest, and the law. There's the communication delay, the medical equipment that doesn't exist, and the general goodbye-ness of it all. Oh, and then there's the actual "success" part -- ten failures does not a landing make. And finally, and I can't stress this enough we aren't going to mars the day after settling on the moon; and we sure as hell aren't going to mars before settling the moon.
So, figure another twenty years before ten humans live on the moon (the way they do on the space station now). Figure another twenty years before the moon is routinely stable, reliable, and worthwhile. Then figure fifty more years to actually give a damn about mars.
"eventually" appears as the heading on my to-do lists too. There's "now", "today", "tomorrow", "this week", "next week", "this month", "next month", "soon", "later", and "eventually". I think it 25 years I've yet to even start even one task from the "eventually" section.
Technology moves very quickly these days. Humans still don't. How about building a transit system that lets me get from new york to california in under EIGHT HOURS! then you can work on mars.
Pretty sure you are going to need a drink long before low gravity messes with you.
Pretty much all other reasons you list as problems could be applied to a move to Wyoming, but people do that all the time.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
But then I think, no, these are the guys who launched an elderly senator who oversaw their funding into space for totally legitimate scientific inquiry ("providing information on the effects of spaceflight and weightlessness on the elderly")...
(I know, unpopular to criticize NASA here, but just sayin'...)
Why do you think this wasn't legitimate research? Space travel may become common in the near(ish) future for citizens, and this is the sort of thing we need to know before we get there. With all the focus on civilian space tourists coming from other space programs, it's probably a good idea for this research to be done by a group who's in it for the science, not the money. Besides, it's not like it was really just "some elderly Senator" like you're implying - it was John Glenn, one of the very first astronauts. This is someone they sent up in his prime, and spent years testing. This is exactly the sort of subject who does make it legitimate research - someone they have large amounts of medical data on both Earthside and in space from before they were considered "elderly". This gives valuable data points at different points in his life. This is exactly the type of research science NASA is supposed to be doing.
It landed on Mars with the goal of surviving 90 sols (Martian days), and it has just logged its 4,000th
Good job soldier - and NASA engineers.
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
I hereby nominate the Mars Rovers for any and all honors which can be shoehorned into being something we can assign to them.
And kudos to the people who built it and kept it going.
Fourty-five times planned mission length is pretty damned awesome!!
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Still, I have to point out that this amount of research could have been done by a motorized human in half a day. For a rough estimate, look at the path the rover traveled in these 4000 days:
And the entire project with two rovers and five extensions has cost $944 million. The SLS program will cost tens of billions to develop and even then a launch would eat over half the budget, before you actually have any crew capsule, lander, habitat, return craft or scientific equipment. If you really did an apples-to-apples comparison on the same budget, you'd realize we're getting a very good bang for the buck.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I mean with all the technical miracles NASA pulled off on that mission, they somehow managed to underestimate the longevity of the mission by 45x.
To be fair, 90 days was not, in fact, the estimated lifetime of the mission. It was the design specification of the mission. That is, each of the subsystems was designed with the specification "design a system that will operate for a minimum of 90 (Martian) days, even under worst-case conditions."
Think of it as a 90-day warranty-- after 90 days, it wasn't expected to be dead, it was just out of warranty.
(and note that since the engineering specification was validated by testing the subsystems to either three times design life, or testing to design life under three-sigma worst-case conditions, it would have been very difficult to design for 4000 days...)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Watt-hour is a unit of energy, not power, so the information doesn't make a sense. Maybe the author wanted to say "rover can get up to 500 watts out of his solar panels" or "It can get 500 watt-hours of energy per day"?
That research could have been collected in a day by a human being, sure.. but not before probably dozens of people died. just trying to get there.
We send probes because they are expendable.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It's kind of interesting.
One of the big reasons that they thought it would be limited to 90 days is that the solar panels get covered in dust, and as that happens the amount of energy collected diminishes. They figured in about 90 days, based on previous missions to Mars, they'd be out of juice.
And...for the first 50 days or so, it was going that way. And then, a whirlwind came by, and scrubbed the rover clean. This has happened many many times since. An unexpected good fortune.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Personally I think a Martian has taken a liking to it and repairs it while it's sleeping.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
If you designed something to last for 90 days and it lasts for 4000 you've over-engineered the solution. Time and money could clearly have been saved in the development and construction of the rover.
Just shut up.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
By that logic, we could send half of Washington D.C. up there.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Except that they can't... at least not the way that they do it naturally. I recall reading somewhere that mammal reproductivity is quite dependent on the earth's gravity, and attempts have a baby outside of that environment would most likely be fatal for the fetus, assuming that the attempt to become pregnant in the first place did not outright fail.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
wyoming has radiation?
Hell yes! Have you measured background radiation in the rockies?
communication delays?
Ever tried to maintain cell signal on the way to Yellowstone?
nothing to see, or to do?
Once you've seen Frontier Days once...
No medical equipment?
I go up there all the time with no medical equipment.
I don't know what that gravity would do to your digestive systems.
That's why every astronaut has died immediately after return from space with even less gravity...
I have to break character here and say - you are SUCH a retard. That's enough fun for me. You may carry on if you wish.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If they called it a 'day', they wouldn't have known if it was an Earth day or a Mars day. If they relied on calling them 'Mars Day' or 'Earth Day', soon someone would have forgotten to maintain the prefix.
So they coined a new word to use for a Martian Day, and stuck to it.
For other planets, I expect that the same term will be used. 'Day' for time on Earth, 'Sol' for time on the planet. That said, we don't have all that many things that would have usable 'Sols'. Mercury's days last for months, Venus' day last for longer than its year. Maybe probes on minor planets, which look like they have days around 8 hours long.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp