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Mars Rover, Spirit, Turns 4
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri Jan 04, 2008 03:49 PM
from the bouncing-happily-among-the-rocks dept.
from the bouncing-happily-among-the-rocks dept.
Brandee07 writes "Designed for a 90 day mission, the Spirit Mars Rover is starting its 4th year of exploration. Spirit's sister-module, Opportunity, will turn four on Jan 25. 'We never thought we'd still be driving these robots all over Mars,' said Mark Lemmon, a planetary scientist at Texas A&M University and member of the rover science team. 'We joked about driving Opportunity into Victoria Crater, but now we're there, and we're looking at doing even more science. Each day they still work is an amazing one.'"
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Opportunity Takes a Dip Into Victoria Crater 79 comments
Muad'Dave writes "From the NASA News Release 'Today, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity entered Victoria Crater for the first time. It radioed home information via a relay by NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter, reporting its activities for the day. Opportunity drove far enough in — about four meters (13 feet) — to get all six wheels past the crater rim. Then it backed uphill for about three meters (10 feet). The driving commands for the day included a precaution for the rover to stop driving if its wheels were slipping more than 40 percent. Slippage exceeded that amount on the last step of the drive, so Opportunity stopped with its front pair of wheels still inside the crater.' This marks the beginning of perhaps the greatest 'Opportunity' for new discoveries on Mars."
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Possibility of Life On Mars Looking More Remote 169 comments
Riding with Robots writes "The never-say-die robotic geologist Opportunity continues its extended explorations in Victoria Crater on Mars. The latest findings from the mission suggest that while plenty of water did exist in this location, it was so salty that life would have a very hard time gaining a foothold. 'Not all water is fit to drink,' said Andrew Knoll, a member of the rover science team. 'At first, we focused on acidity, because the environment would have been very acidic. Now, we also appreciate the high salinity of the water when it left behind the minerals Opportunity found. This tightens the noose on the possibility of life.'"
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Well, happy birthday. (Score:3)
Happy Birthday! (Score:5, Insightful)
It absolutely amazes me how engineers are able to build machines like the Rovers, the Voyager spacecraft, etc. so that they last as long as they do in these incredibly hostile environments.
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Shipping cost (Score:2)
Re:Shipping cost (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Shipping cost (Score:5, Funny)
Bah! That's just the way space contractors avoid paying big ebay fees on the Rovers. $700 million shipping my ass.
Parent
Re:Happy Birthday! (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
(Sorry, someone had to!)
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It's doing science and It's still alive.
It feels fantastic and It's still alive.
While you're dying It'll be still alive.
And when you're dead It'll be still alive.
Amazing feats of engineering (Score:5, Interesting)
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Something like a subway train is an example of modern equipment that lasts for ages -- from what I see, they don't really break down, they just get sold to North Korea or somewhere and newer, fancier models brought in.
The rover is still very impressive!
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It often is because it is price to durability trade off.
A good example is an old Compaq we have at our office. It is an old PII that went from a workstation to a test database server. The test worked so well that we are still using it as a database server. We often toss old IBMs when they are just too slow to use for anything but they are still working just fine and dandy.
Some consumer stu
Error (Score:5, Informative)
Summary: ""Designed for a 90 day mission, the Spirit Mars Rover is starting its 4th year of exploration"
"Beginning 4th year" is not the same as turning 4.
You start your 2nd year of life when you turn 1.
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Re:Error (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Error (Score:4, Informative)
From TFA: Spirit's start as a Martian was 2004-01-04, Opportunity's 2004-01-25
It's 2008 now, so either you've actually been living in your house for more than 3.5 a (you may be pleased to know that I have no idea if that's true), or your recollection is wrong.
Parent
Hurray! (Score:5, Interesting)
In the end, of course, they landed in good weather, and much of what dust did accumulate was blown clear by dust devils. And of course, the rovers have proven to be fairly robust mechanically, as well.
NASA had clearly stated that they needed 90 days (and a few other milestones) to meet their mission objectives, but they planned from the beginning on them lasting at least a little bit longer because they put so much work into them and the 90 days was based on pessimistic dust estimates. Because of that, they budgeted an optional 90 day mission extension conditionally on them being operational at the end of the first three months. Furthermore, a second extension of 180 days was allowed if they were still in fair shape at that time (fingers crossed). But when they reached 1 year and the rovers were still going strong, they had to get special approval from Congress for funds to continue paying the operations team.
That right there tells you that no one at NASA really believed these things would last more than a year, much less four! If they did, they would have been pushing to keep their job budgeted for longer than 12 months in advance.
Non-relative time measurment please. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's about time NASA and all other space agencies adopt 10-base time systems.
Or hell even StarDates a la StarTrek.
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why not tell Louis Armstrong to his face (Score:2, Funny)
- RG>
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Re:why not tell Louis Armstrong to his face (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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Pwned.
Which years? (Score:2)
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Lets use these guys again! (Score:2, Interesting)
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Beer Crater: http://www.google.com/mars/#lon=-63.984375&q=beer [google.com]
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and unlike most everything on Earth.
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manned exploration is the boondoggle (Score:5, Insightful)
So why do politicians and NASA spend 100x to put a human in the tin can? Besides the self-perpetuating vast sums of money involved, I think they're old and out-of-touch. They have a romantic attachment to manned space flight, while everyone under 40 finds it completely natural to project a presence miles away while sitting at the controls in a dark room.
Is there a politician saying "Elect me and I pledge to abandon manned exploration to focus instead on landing autonomous craft on every planet in the solar system. Let commercial ventures and other countries fight for 300th person in Earth orbit and second place on the moon. We'll go new places cheaper faster and better."
?
Parent
Re:manned exploration is the boondoggle (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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Re:manned exploration is the boondoggle (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, the Universe has no other purpose than to provide me entertainment. Luckily, even the doubters like you help it succeed admirably.
"If there's anything more important than my ego
around, I want it caught and shot now."
- Zaphod Beeblebrox
Parent
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Thanks for making my point. We have made it to Mars. Spirit and Opportunity are up there right now, doing our bidding. If you don't find that more inspirational than pipeline robots, you need to turn in your geek card ;-) I'm not disparaging the romance of humans on Mars, but robots throughout the solar system for 5% the cost is cheaper faster better.
(Indeed I anthropomorphize the hell out of the little guys. I love it,
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"They have a romantic attachment to manned space flight, while everyone under 40 finds it completely natural to project a presence miles away while sitting at the controls in a dark room."
You're going to get awfully bored "sitting at the controls in a dark room" and "projecting your presence" if we go much further than Mars. Between 6 and 40 minutes for each signal exchange to Mars is a bit of a wait. Want to try Saturn? Or Neptune?
I guess us silly old over-40's have a lot to learn from you young ge
Remember the moon landing? (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, that was mars... humans can't do that!
Fact: Bush has been hurting NASA and science and one of the tricks has been curtailing NASA's earth and planetary science and even TRASHING a completed satellite for global warming work the second he stepped in office the other trick has been the Mars.
Re:manned exploration is the boondoggle (Score:5, Interesting)
In 4 years, Spirit has driven a total of 4.6 miles, while Opportunity has gone 7.2 miles.
On Apollo 17, two astronauts on a manned rover went 12.5 miles, in a single drive, in a single day.
When they came back to Earth, they brought 243 pounds of rock and soil from the lunar surface along with them.
Spirit and Opportunity are a phenomenal achievement, and the men and women who created them should be justifiably proud of all they've accomplished. But it's sobering to realize that much of what the rovers have done in the past four years could be accomplished by humans in a few hours.
Parent
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Not really, once you consider that the cost to put a couple of humans on Mars would be anywhere from ten to a hundred times what it cost to put Spirit and Opportunity there. And the risk would be much greater -- it's a lot harder to get a human to Mars alive than it is to get a machine to Mars intact, so even if we did spend ten times as much, it's probably more than ten
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Re:So what have we learned? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're confusing data collection with theorizing. What we've "learned" is gigabytes of photographs, measurements, and so forth, which will, in the coming years, be used to sort through the various theories about the formation and evolution of Mars, and (more indirectly) about the possibility of life on it.
It seems likely there is something missing in your understanding of how science works, because you seem under the impression that we come up with theories and then we go do an experiment that confirms them, and if it does, that's successful science.
Doesn't work that way. What we do is go out and collect oodles of data, pretty much anything we can measure, regardless of whether or not it is relevant to anyone's pet pre-existing speculations. Then we sit down and try to explain all this data, correlate it with other data, et cetera. That's when the theories get formed, and shot down. It is, generally speaking, just a total waste of time to theorize when you have no data. That's religion, or politics, or some such non-scientific endeavor. In science we collect data first, and then we theorize, because only then can our theories acquire the solid backing of empirical fact and become actually useful. You have, in essence, imagined that the theoretical cart comes before the empirical horse.
Can you give me something that justifies all of this money spent?
Of course not. You can only do that yourself, and if you've already looked into what the rovers are doing and concluded it doesn't suit your philosophical goals, then that's that. Why would you even want a meme transplant from someone else that would make you feel differently about the money spent?
But it doesn't matter. The way it works is, we all get to decide for ourselves whether we like government money spent this way -- for whatever reason, e.g. because we think knowing how Mars formed is nifty, because we like seeing photos from the ground from Mars, because of your and NASA's 'inspiring the kids' hooey, or just because it keeps government cash from otherwise being thrown down the rathole of futile social engineering or bureaucrat full-employment programs. Then we tally up the votes. If there are more of us who think the money is well spent, it gets spent, whatever you folks on the losing side think.
As it is, those of us who like rovers poking around on Mars have more votes than those of you who don't. I can easily see why you would want to convince us that it's money wasted, so some of us might change our minds and you might become the new majority. But why would you imagine any of us in the majority would want to waste our time trying to convince you to change your mind? Who cares whether you do or not?
Parent
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You're confusing data collection with theorizing. What we've "learned" is gigabytes of photographs, measurements, and so forth, which will, in the coming years, be used to sort through the various theories about the formation and evolution of Mars, and (more indirectly) about the possibility of life on it.
As a matter of fact, several major discoveries and have been made by the rovers. Silica Valley, Tyrone, blueberries, festoon cross-bedding, 3D bedform cross-sections at Victoria Crater, the first ever surface-based observations of a global dust storm, of high atmospheric clouds, first meteorites on the surface of another planet, movies of dust devils, oh the list just goes on and on...
Re:So what have we learned? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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Well, is there water on Mars or microbes, bacteria, aliens? What have we discovered? Have we learned anything from the rock samples or pictures? Can you give me something that justifies all of this money spent?
Well, golly gee, if only there were some way to answer your questions! Perhaps some sort of searchable index of information on web pages... [google.co.uk]
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We've studied the geological history of Mars in detail that was utterly impossible via any other means short of landing actual people there. This hints at the similarities and differences between Mars and Earth and may hel
Re:So what have we learned? (Score:5, Interesting)
- Learned how to land missions on mars.
- Learned how to make a moving piece of equipment work on mars for at least 5 years.
- Have learned a bit about the weather conditions there, in particular, depending only on solar may be a big mistake. We have seen a massive storm move in and almsot kill the vehicles. Likewise, have an idea of the extremes there.
- Have learned a bit about the physical make up of the planet. In particular, lots of minerals that many thoerized would not be there, but are.
And that was ust a quick list. Here is more [space.com] Yes, all in all, these 2 were WELL worth their money. If you want the info, there is still a load of it that has not been looked it closely enough. Please, have at it.Parent
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