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NASA's Mars Rover Opportunity Concludes a 15-Year Mission (nytimes.com)
For more than 14 years, the Opportunity rover crawled up and down craters, snapped pictures of a strange landscape and revealed surprising glimpses into the distant past of Mars. On Wednesday, NASA announced that Opportunity, the longest-lived robot ever sent from Earth to the surface of another planet, is dead. The New York Times: "It is therefore that I am standing here with a deep sense of appreciation and gratitude that I declare the Opportunity mission is complete," said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's associate administrator for science. That ends a mission of unexpected endurance: it was designed to last only three months. Opportunity provided scientists a close-up view of Mars that they had never seen: finely layered rocks that preserved ripples of flowing water several billion years ago, a prerequisite for life.
The steady stream of photographs and data from Opportunity -- as well as its twin, Spirit, which survived until 2010 -- also brought Mars closer to people on Earth. Because the rovers continued so much longer than expected, NASA has now had a continuous robotic presence on Mars for more than 15 years. That streak seems likely to continue for many more years. A larger, more capable rover, Curiosity, arrived in 2012, and NASA is planning to launch another in 2020. Live telecast here.
The steady stream of photographs and data from Opportunity -- as well as its twin, Spirit, which survived until 2010 -- also brought Mars closer to people on Earth. Because the rovers continued so much longer than expected, NASA has now had a continuous robotic presence on Mars for more than 15 years. That streak seems likely to continue for many more years. A larger, more capable rover, Curiosity, arrived in 2012, and NASA is planning to launch another in 2020. Live telecast here.
Great job by everybody involved - I'm sure if it wasn't for the big dust storm, it would still be working and sending back new discoveries.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Obligatory xkcd about its twin: Spirit. We learned a lot from these machines. I hope Matt Damon can one day use one of them to phone home.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
Pining for the fjords.
Have gnu, will travel.
NASA tried to use the last bit of energy in the Opportunity's batteries to gently knock the rover into a nearby rock to attempt to knock loose some of the dust on the solar panels that was limiting the solar charging. It worked a little bit, and they were going to try it again for more improvement, but they were unable to, because Opportunity knocks but once.
I have been a space exploration fan since I was a little kid. Don't quite remember the moon landing, since I was only a couple months old. The Spirit/Opportunity pair truly represent the pinnacle of what a dedicated group of creative, well funded scientists and engineers can accomplish.
The extreme resilience and flexibility of the platform, the brilliant schemes the team devised to cope with aging subsystems, and the sheer amount of scientific exploration accomplished on a system with such a small and conservative mission plan.
Definitely my personal favorite technical project of all time. There are milestones in every scientific genre, and this was truly a milestone. The team redefined with very definition of remote mechanical exploration and every rover mankind has sent since has built on the foundation of these two.
I don't mean in any way to diminish the accomplishments of stationary exploration landers like the Vikings, or to demean the early rovers like the Russina Lunokhod rovers (which were truly envelope pushing machines) but the Mars Exploration Rovers demonstrated functional autonomy and extreme robust mechanical miniaturization that really made them the first of their kind.
"Proximity to wonder has blunted our perception and appreciation of it" --Tim Hartnell in 'Exploring ARTIFICIAL INTELLI
which where rich in emotion but rather poor in science for the money.
An this would wrong. We got back a shit load of science for the investment in the apollo program. There is the technical knowledge. Advancements in rockets. We learned how to dock in space. How to land spaceships on another planet.
From the samples returned from the moon. We learned the age of the moon, and therefor the earth. We learned the origin earth and the moon system. We learned that the moon is moving away from the earth and about 1cm a year, which cause drag on the earth, which is the reason the day is getting longer. We learned that the moon might be a incredible source of energy.
And so on and on. In just raw science the program leading up to apollo and apollo itself might just be the best investment we ever made in the space program.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
OTOH, this project was expected to last 3 months, not 14ish years, so I don't think much of anything was wasted.
I'm not sure why this post made me think of this series of books by Alastair Reynolds, Poseidon's Children. One of the subplots is after decades of sending smarter an smarter robots to Mars. At one point the robots said "fuck it" and calmed Mars as their own.
The books are good reads but honestly after reading the books I was more interested in the story of the robots on Mars than the main plot.
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I'm kind of surprised this XKCD panel hasn't been posted yet: https://xkcd.com/1504/
The science for the on-planet stuff is in no way worth the price. That's OK though. You clearly don't understand the percentage of people who went into STEM fields because of inspiration from space programs.
That would be me! In grade school during the Apollo Program, I was incredibly inspired. I set my path and stuck with it. I love the robotic science as a machine person, but the Gemini missions, and especially the Apollo 8 and 11 missions - I still get goosebumps and reinvigorated and inspired all over again when I get the opportunity to see what we've done and what we are doing.
Just this past weekend I visited Kennedy Space Center again. The Atlantis Exhibit left me speechless - again. Walking the building with the restored Saturn 5 beautiful monster horizontally mounted just above your head is about as goosebumpy an event as you are going to get - again. Nothing like seeing a real F-1 engine.
The IMAX theater had a movie, "A Beautiful Planet" narrated by Jennifer Lawrence. 3D movie of the earth from the ISS. The show stealer is Samantha Cristoforetti, an Italian Astronaut that does quite the job to be adroit, an excellent narrator herself, inspiring, and pretty adorable at the same time.
And the Bus tours take a different route each time depending on what is going on. This time we went up to Pad 39A - that launch pad . And I'm once again speechless. The place that had to be 3 miles away from the control center because that magnificent monster candle would have the destructive potential of a small atomic bomb if the unthinkable happen, so they figured 3 miles should be survivable if it went sour.
But it didn't, never had a loss. it was a good monster.
Okay, so there we have it. Inspiration in spades. The thrill never grows old. Now how about the humans in space haters give us their similar inspirational story.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Early this evening, the Council of Elders announced a planetary day of mourning and magnanimity.
K'Nord, Speaker for the Council, spoke thusly:
"Citizens and Podmates, the Council is pleased to announce that after seven and a half full years -- the longest campaign in the history of the Martian Defense Force -- the diabolical mechanized adversary from the blue world has been defeated. Our defense forces, counted in the billions, have finally surrounded and denied the invader the light and warmth it needs to survive. The blueworlders have acknowledged defeat and ceased contact. Ths invasion, at least on this front, is now over.
Let us raise our glasses to mourn the lost gelsacs of at least half our press corps, some of whose entire careers have been dedicated to coverage of this conflict -- and in a spirit of magnanimity in victory, we -- the victors of the Conflict at Endeavour Crater -- must also raise our glasses in awe and respect of our longest-lived and most challenging foe."
Shortly thereafter, a wizened old retired Councilmember, his gelsacs having long ago been ceremonially ground into a fine tartare and shared amongst the Council, wiped a perchlorate tear from his eye: "Well-done, blueworlders. Well-done."
I really don't see why we even have the debate. To me there is room and reasons for both maned and bot. We get more bang for buck with bots on narrow focused missions. But on a general mission we get a lot more data from human scientist that are actually there on the ground. That is because a human can make and adjust plans on the fly.
Lets do a example out of a story I once read. If opportunity had rolled up on a patch of land and found a set of tracks, how far could opportunity follow those tracks? A human team could do so immediately.
I don't count the danger in sending humans to mars, or anywhere in space. They are volunteers, they know the danger and choose to go anyway.
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