NASA Making Renewed Efforts To Contact Mars Rover Opportunity (spacenews.com)

NASA is making a new, and perhaps final, attempt to restore contact with the Mars rover Opportunity, which has not communicated with the Earth for more than six months. From a report: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced Jan. 25 that it was transmitting a new set of commands to address what it acknowledged are "low-likelihood" events that could have kept the rover from contacting Earth. These new efforts are in addition to the months-long "sweep and beep" campaign of transmitting other commands and listening for a reply from the rover.

The new commands address scenarios where the rover's primary X-band radio has failed or both the primary and backup X-band radios have failed, as well as cases where Opportunity's internal clock has an offset affecting its timing. The commands direct the rover to switch to the backup X-band radio or use its UHF transmitter to contact Earth, as well as resetting its clock. Those scenarios could explain why the rover has failed to contact Earth, but project officials acknowledge that those scenarios are unlikely. "A series of unlikely events would need to have transpired for any one of these faults to occur," JPL noted in the statement about the new campaign.

Comments

It was martians

[The Grim Reefer]

I misaligned my satellite dish the other night. The first program I saw showed Opportunity and these little green guys were messing with it. At the end of the hour they had put new 22 inch rims with spinners and low profile tires, a crazy new stereo with a coupe big ass subwoofers, neon lights on the undercarriage, lambo doors and shag carpet inside. I think it must have been the martian version of pimp my ride.

Even so....What an Achivement!

[bobbied]

Given how long past it's warranty this little rover lasted, what an achievement for JPL.

I hope they can get things working again, but even if the effort fails, this little rover has gone over and above. It's hard to say good bye and we are sad about it, but we all knew this day was coming. Remember what JPL accomplished with these two rovers and revel in that. This isn't a failure, it's but the end a huge success.

Way to go JPL, you really out did all our expectations and have contributed to a volume of scientific observations that will provide invaluable science and research for decades to come, not to mention some really impressive pictures which are very interesting to just look at. Thank You! Job well done.

Re:Even so....What an Achivement!

[Only Time Will Tell]

Agreed, the two rovers were well engineered and survived numerous "near misses" along their way that could have shut them down prematurely. The fact that they lasted so long is a credit to those who worked on it to build in robust systems and backups to handle whatever unpredictability the Martian surface could throw at them. I look forward to the next rover projects and what feats they'll accomplish.

Re:Even so....What an Achivement!

[The Grim Reefer]

Agreed, the two rovers were well engineered and survived numerous "near misses" along their way that could have shut them down prematurely

I'm not disagreeing with the phenomenal engineering, but in hindsight there is no way that anyone would say were at risk of been shutdown prematurely.

Both Spirit and Opportunity landed on Mars in January of 2004 and were each scheduled for 90 (martian) days (92.5 earth days) missions.

Spirit got stuck on May 1, 2009 and remained so until NASA lost contact with it in May of 2011. That amount of time past it's planned mission would have been amazing if it wasn't for Opportunity making it another 7 years. I just checked the Wikipedia page for Opportunity. It went 14 years, 277 days past it's original planned mission.

It's kind of a shame that the Soviet Lunkhod rovers don't get more recognition. Both were launched over thirty years prior to the MER program. One of those rovers remained functional for over 300 days with late 1960's technology.

Still, the rovers didn't come close to the still functioning Voyager 1 and 2 probes in terms of time or distance. They've both been functioning to some degree for over 40 years now.

Re:Silly NASA

[jellomizer]

The problem is NASA did read the Slashdot Comments, they are still trying to get Gentoo Linux to compile.

Re:Opportunity transmitted wrong DNA code

[Megol]

A grue did it.

Re:Gluhwein

[Locke2005]

I know, right? if it was a user-replacable battery we could have... oh, wait...

The Real Reason

[contrains]

They're probably just hesitant to reveal the real story, that Opportunity has simply chosen to stop responding to us. https://xkcd.com/1504/

Redundant redundancy

[Tablizer]

I remember reading that there were known spots on the circuit boards such that if that spot cracked due to the cold, the entire rover would fail.

They were known weak-points which lacked redundancy, but the cost of the avoiding them was considered too high. The rovers have roughly 90% redundancy, but approaching 100% apparently has a steep cost curve.

For example, at some point the redundant systems have to coordinate with each other to make sure both are not trying to do something at the same time, which could waste power or put noise into instrument readings. These coordination points are not easy to also make redundant. You need redundancy handlers to manage the redundancy handlers in almost a fractal way, requiring redundant "turtles all the way down", filling the rover with bunches of circuits.