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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 more pressing problem isn't that it can't reboot, it's that it won't be able to clean its panels after the storm, and that's assuming it can even do that. Not to mention the drop in efficiency from getting the panels scarred up by abrasive dust.
Godspeed little rover, keep up the fight!
It needs battery to keep the internal components at safe temperature levels. It is not about calling home; it is about not freezing.
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.
...someone needs to loose their engineering degree.
Someone needs to remember this hardware was originally expected to last 90 days. It's been running for over fourteen fucking years.
This would probably be one of those times where you should STFU about failures in engineering and design, as the statistics tend to speak for themselves.
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
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."
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.
someone needs to loose their engineering degree.
I don't know about that but somebody definitely needs to learn to spell "lose".
It's only four letters, FFS.
No sig today...
At the moment the problem is not how much dust will be on the solar panels after the storm. It is that it will lose all power during the storm, the heaters will stop working, and will then be unable to reactivate afterward.
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. This is probably darker than even the heaviest storm clouds on Earth (which only go up to blocking 1/20,000 of the sun light). Thus far the storm has cut off power for six days.
Although the storm also moderates temperature, since it prevents radiation cooling at night, it also means that the day time high temperatures are not reached either, so that the heaters have to be cranked up constantly (though not to the level of coldest night chill), with no power replacing what is being drained from the batteries.
It the batteries drain to the level that they can no longer supply the heaters then whether there is dust on the panels after the storm ends will be moot. Opportunity will be dead.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj