Slashdot Mirror
Mars Opportunity Rover Is In Danger of Dying From a Dust Storm (engadget.com)
According to NASA, the Mars Opportunity rover is currently trying to survive an intensifying dust storm on the red planet. "The storm's atmospheric opacity -- the veil of dust blowing around, which can blot out sunlight -- is now much worse than a 2007 storm that Opportunity weathered," reports NASA. "The previous storm had an opacity level, or tau, somewhere above 5.5; this new storm had an estimated tau of 10.8 as of Sunday morning." Engadget reports: The storm was first detected on Friday June 1st by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, at which point the rover's team was notified because of the weather event's proximity to Opportunity. The rover uses solar panels, so a dust storm could have an extremely negative impact on Opportunity's power levels and its batteries. By Wednesday June 6th, Opportunity was in minimal operations mode because of sharply decreasing power levels. The brave little rover is continuing to weather the storm; it sent a transmission back to Earth Sunday morning, which is a good sign. It means there's still enough charge left in the batteries to communicate with home, despite the fact that the storm is continuing to worsen.
"The brave little rover": https://xkcd.com/695/
I wonder how long it could last in standby if someone hadn't been foolish enough to force it to waste power phoning home just to say "I'm still here." That single transmission could possibly be what killed it.
I'd also like to note that if Opportunity wasn't designed to power down safely (or recover to a working state if someone were foolish enough to not have it power down before completely running out of power) recharge the batteries when there's enough sunlight, then have Opportunity restart, someone needs to loose their engineering degree.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
Since this article doesn't explain it, an optical depth tau value of 10.8 means approximately 0.002% of the sunlight is reaching the rover, compared to 0.4% for the last storm. It's really, really dark out there.
Precisely.
As far as we know, this is a non-issue and a non-story.
they should build it to look like a GIANT beetle, and build the solar panels like the wings that can fold out when the conditions are good and when not so good fold in and collapse flat with a hard weather-proof outer shell that covers and protects them (like some beetles that can fly)
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Opportunity and Spirit are not fitted with any mechanism to clear their solar panels. Originally, it was assumed that dust on the panels would be what would end the mission. But winds and whirlwinds were found on the planet, these occasionally blew dust from the panels, and the mission was extended.
The pressing problem is that there won't be enough energy to keep the heaters running, the electronics will cool down to -50C, and either the heaters won't turn back on when the sun returns, or, if they do, the electronics won't work when they defrost.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
0.4% of the sunlight wouldn't have be enough to make the solar panels work. So a greater darkness than that doesn't really make any difference. It might as well be pitch black if the intensity is below 1%.
What is important, then, is how long this dust storm will last.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
"The storm's atmospheric opacity -- the veil of dust blowing around, which can blot out sunlight -- is now much worse than a 2007 storm that Opportunity weathered," reports NASA.
The storms are getting worse ... what do you Martian "deniers" say now, eh???
...how many stories have we read about dead rovers that miraculously come back to life after a mysterious "cleaning event"?
But here we are pronouncing the death of a rover due to a dust storm.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
He also finished deploying 750 PCs and 1,500 monitors ahead of schedule, ending his 12-month contract after nine months.
You delusional piece of lard!
I had to redeploy those 750 PCs by myself after paying you to do it. That's why I let you go early so you wouldn't be in the way!
I redeployed everything in 3 months and met the deadline but the money we gave you is a total lost.
You also threw away a bunch of valuable spare parts in your genius closet cleaning and we had to buy new ones, further adding to the bill. You are a disaster.
Fuck you!
We have to do something about climate change, these extreme weather patterns are getting worse all the time.
You also threw away a bunch of valuable spare parts in your genius closet cleaning and we had to buy new ones, further adding to the bill. You are a disaster.
CROFLOL! He most probably ate those spare parts and farted as he was going...
Considering how the two solar powered rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) that touched down in January 2004 were originally only expected to survive for a few months only to have one finally go out in March of 2010 and the second finally in real peril of going out in June of 2018 it shouldn't be too much of a loss for the second one to finally go out. Both of them spectacularly outperformed what was expected of them and it's probably time for the last of them to quit it with the victory laps. Not that Curiosity, their bigger nuclear-powered older bother, isn't doing well for itself either. It touched down in August 2012 and it's too still going despite an originally planned two year mission length. I'm interested to see if it'll last even longer or if the decay of it's Pu238-dioxide power source will be what keeps it from extending it's mission beyond the original goal by as much as Opportunity has.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
Furthermore, most of the power consumed by the radio transmitter actually goes into heat. Out of the 25 watts or so it takes to run the Electra (relay) or the SDST (Direct to Earth), most of that power winds up heating the radio. The solid state power amplifier is about 20% efficient.
Seriously, you have to take those claims of "designed for 90 days of operation" with some big grains of salt.... There's no way they'd spend all the money, time and energy on R&D to get something like this put on Mars, when they REALLY only expected it would be used for a few months.
That might be the length of time they NEEDED to complete the original planned research project, so in a worst-case scenario, NASA doesn't have to say they failed. But I'm quite certain this thing was engineered with the hopes it would run for years and years -- as it has done.
...The story reports an optical depth of the dust storm of tau=10.8. This is astoundingly dark. The transmittance of light through the atmosphere is 1/e^tau so that only 1/50,000 (0.002%) of the sunlight is getting through! It is effectively perpetual night there right now....
Note that the e^1/tau factor is for direct beam. What this means is that almost all of the light that gets through to the surface is scattered light.
The tau for a rainy day for earth is very high too. It doesn't mean that the surface is completely dark, it just means that the light that does get through has scattered many times-- you can't see the disk of the sun, but some light does reach the surface.
10.8 is a record for the highest tau measured from the surface of Mars, though.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
what the fuck is the point of this article
"in danger"?
Slow fucking news day?
How about you just fucking let us know the outcome when it happens?
Y'know, WHEN THERE IS FUCKING NEWS.
I'm sure one of the dust devils will come along and clean the panels.
This location, on the rim of Endeavour crater, has been pretty windy. So if the rover calls home after the dust storm, there's a pretty good chance that the winds will clean the panels.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
My solar panels generate power under a full moon. Every little bit helps.
Enough to detect, maybe.
Enough to charge a battery, no.
The full moon isn't bright enough. The full moon gives 400,000 times less light than the sun.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I think you're abusing the word "expected".
There was a high-likelihood failure mode (involving dust accumulation) which was baked into the mission parameters, whose budgetary concerns centered around achieving a minimum sufficient return on investment (the worst outcome of all in space exploration is no learning).
But if you'd asked anyone involved with a clue, they'd have said that the uncertainty around the dust accumulation model was high, and that most of the engineering had been done to a standard where a decade of nearly fault-free operation would be considered normal (otherwise the sum of parts wouldn't outlast xmas morning).
In NASA planning culture, the word "unexpected" doesn't convey the sad punter baggage you're implying out of context. In NASA planning culture, foreseeable adverse events get all the hasty index cards. They don't tend to invest up front in thick mission planning binders for unexpected (meaning: pleasant surprise) thin-atmosphere windfall. NASA doesn't plan for the worst, and hope for the best. 99% of the time, NASA plans for the worst, and then re-plans for the worst.
And then when the day comes and there's an eerie adversity absence, and everyone is standing around with not much to do and a blank look, it's not so much a mental surprise (unexpected) as an emotional shock.
Dance with the one that brung ya is strangely discomfiting on emotional terms when the one that brung ya is total institutional paranoia, with thick binders devoted to taking a single careful step.
Unexpected dance floor vacancy rate? Hardly at all.
If I remember correctly, one such sandstorm also _cleaned_ the solar panels in the past.
Seriously, you have to take those claims of "designed for 90 days of operation" with some big grains of salt....
Good point. I didn't see the project requirements. My guess is the actual requirement was something like "99% chance of operating for at least 90 days." It wasn't "10% chance of operating 90 days." That's a pretty big difference. I might be able to build the latter. I have no chance on the former.
There was a book or movie about this. We need to ship Opportunity some potatoes and duct tape, something like that.
It isn't trolls. It is creimer talking to himself 75% of the time.
If NASA was like really smart,they could have equipped the rover with flashlights that would shine on the solar panels when the sun is obscured by a dust storm. Problem solved! But noooo, NASA is of course full of liberal elitists who just use equations to explain why something cannot get done!
There's no way they'd spend all the money, time and energy on R&D to get something like this put on Mars, when they REALLY only expected it would be used for a few months.
Why not? The first month of operation was likely the most insightful and it did most everything it was going to do and flexed all of it's scientific equipment. It got pictures, dug a trench, analyzed the air, and did spectrometry. It also traveled to a location with hematite, which geologists were eager to study. That's all in month 1.
Given a set of tools, there's only so much science you can do. Rovers can move around and use the same tools and more locations, which is awesome, but eventually there will be diminishing returns on variance in what those tools find. There's bound to be some long-term studies, like comparing the seasonal changes in the findings. And more refined models of daily temperatures.
It's not like we're getting 2x the scientific insight if it lasts another 15 years.
15 YEARS into its 90 DAY mission.
IthinkitcanIthinkitcanIthinkitcan.
Its time to take a BIG LOOK at changing Mars. These crazy dust storms are due to the wobbly axis of Mars. In order to fix this wobble and give Mars a more stable climate (like Earth) , you're going to have to apply Dr Robyn Canyup's "ONE MOON THEORY". We are going to have to push both of Mars' moons together to form one big supermoon (just like Earth) The single gravity pull from one bigger satilite will eventually pull that axis nice and tight. No more wobble. This may take 500 - several thousand years, but its worth it !