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NASA Mars Rovers Hit 5-Year Anniversary
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sat Jan 03, 2009 12:01 PM
from the exceeding-expectation dept.
from the exceeding-expectation dept.
An anonymous reader writes "NASA's Mars rovers have been on the red planet for five years now. The rovers were originally planned to stay operational on the planet for only 90 days, but it has turned into a much longer mission than anticipated. NASA has put together a video to celebrate the anniversary. The rovers have made important discoveries about wet and violent environments on ancient Mars. They also have returned a quarter-million images, driven more than 21 kilometers (13 miles), climbed a mountain, descended into craters, struggled with sand traps and aging hardware, survived dust storms, and relayed more than 36 gigabytes of data via NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter. To date, the rovers remain operational for new campaigns the team has planned for them."
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Submission: NASA Mars Rovers Hit 5-Year Anniversary by Anonymous Coward
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Five years for 36 gigabytes? (Score:4, Funny)
and relayed more than 36 gigabytes of data via
Seems a little slow. Maybe Obama can extend some broadband lines to Mars and bring them into the 21st century? ;)
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Wrong on several counts. Even treating a modem line as a serial line (which it was), before adding on TCP/IP, the maximum bandwidth supported by the phone system was 56k, due to the bit-robbing scheme used for in-band signaling. In the US, the maximum attainable connection speed was further limited to about 53.3k by FCC limits on the power output of modems. The overhead of PPP, IP, and TCP further subtract from the usable bandwidth.
Re:Five years for 36 gigabytes? (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, that isn't quite true either. If the ISP end of the connection is taking a T1 then one entire channel is reserved for out-of-band signaling, leaving (I think) 23 64 Kbit channels available for modem connections. I remember there were two options available and to make 56Kbit modems work well we had to use the out-of-band signaling option, which reduced the number of phone lines we had on each T1 by one.
Direct T1s quickly became the standard for ISPs starting around 1994 ish, until T3's became cheap in '95 and '96. By 1998 most medium and large ISPs were splitting channels out of fiber directly, or had farmed their physical dialup to third parties which then backhauled them back to the ISP.
Phone companies also played their own games involving far more then an 8Kbit loss, but by the late 90's they could only use those tricks in places where they had insufficient physical copper to meet demand and they couldn't hide the fact that modems simply didn't work well with the line doubler technology they were forced to use in those places.
-Matt
Parent
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typical government project (Score:5, Funny)
Supposed to be finished in 90 days, ends up taking 5 years.
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Re:typical government project (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:typical government project (Score:5, Funny)
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Fascinating (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fascinating (Score:5, Interesting)
A photo from Mars Odyssey (satellite) taking a picture of Mars Phoenix Lander with enough detail to see the parachute shroud lines can be found here [spaceflightnow.com]
Parent
Hear hear! (Score:2)
Just wanted to speak up in agreement with your post. Our robots are taking over the solar system :)
Re:Fascinating (Score:4, Insightful)
Imagine how much more we could have accomplished by using robot probes instead of wasting money on primitive systems like the Space Shuttle. We could send robot after robot after robot and leave the tourists at home for a few decades.
Parent
Re:Fascinating (Score:4, Insightful)
In a way you're right, but it's also a bit like "Well, I haven't actually been to Africa but I saw a documentary on National Geographic. Gee, how much money I saved." I really doubt JFK would have gotten the same effect if he promised to send a lump of electronics to the Moon and back either. Part of the reason Mars is so interesting is exactly because it's fairly Earth-like, and why would we care about that if only robots would ever go there? I can't speak for anyone else but I want humans in space.
I think establishment of a permanent colony outside Earth would be pretty much the greatest achivement in human history ever. For that we need three things:
1) The ability to bring fragile little meatbags from Earth to Mars
2) The ability for fragile little meatbags to survive on Mars
3) The ability to mostly support itself without supplies from Earth
Obviously, we're well short on 3) but certainly we could get some experience on 1) and 2) with a manned Mars mission. A lot fo people seem to think "Well, we did that on the Moon so what's the big deal sending guys to sit in a bunker and eat canned food?" Well we've never done it. Not going to for a while either, it seems. But if we stopped with manned flight, how much would it take to revive it? Like if we wanted to return to the moon we wouldn't break out a few Apollo rockets from storage, we'd have to start over.
NASA didn't pick a "primitive system" on purpose, they picked what looked like the best choice at the time. Like pretty much everything else you do of early experimentation it probably wasn't the best one. That's how you learn, how you build better crafts, after all if you can't reasonably keep people healthy and alive in near orbit you sure aren't going to make it out to Mars. How about some experience in orbital construction like the ISS? After all, a Mars launcher might be built in space from modules. In short, what you call "space tourist" is what I call "Our home base on the outskirts of Earth's gravity well." We're going to want people up there if we ever want to get anywhere further.
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Example Of American Can Do Spirit (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Example Of American Can Do Spirit (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a perfect example of the best that America has to offer.
The people who built these rovers were not all "American."
Parent
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The people who built these rovers were not all "American."
Did we coordinate the mission and enable a group of bright people to make something like this happen? Yes, of course we did. That's MORE American (in the real spirit of the Country) than some xenophobic team of wasps who have never stepped foot out of the US doing the work.
Re:Example Of American Can Do Spirit (Score:5, Insightful)
And in fact I think it goes to show we'd achieve a load more if we could unite and combine our strengths, like Voltron, rather than fight each other. Unfortunately that goes against our instinct and a global economy scares to religious freaks who believe that will bring on the end of the world.
Parent
Re:Example Of American Can Do Spirit (Score:5, Funny)
I can't believe you made that Voltron reference.
Parent
Take that flaky humans! (Score:4, Insightful)
5 Years on an other planet, think about it.
Imagine the amount of food, water, O2 and energy that would have been required if they had sent humans instead of machines.
Never mind the fact that they extended the original mission by more than 2000% and the fact that they never needed resupply missions.
When you read the mission reports for the ISS and see that they need a two man crew just to keep stuff from breaking too badly, it's hard to imagine the size of the crew that would be needed for a 5 year mission to Mars.
Yet one of the two (ISS vs Mars rovers), has a budget at least one order of magnitude larger than the other and has yet to produce any real science (unless teeing off a gold plated golf ball from the ISS [latimes.com] is ones idea of science)
Murphy(c)
Re:Take that flaky humans! (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, when compared to humans, it's not that great. A human could've crossed that 12 miles in a day. Humans can scale that "mountain" and the "crater" in a matter of minutes. Basically, a Human team could've done the entire 5 year mission (so far) in less than a couple days. In fact, with a geologist on board, they probably could've done even more science as other opportunites presented themselves.
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Re:Take that flaky humans! (Score:5, Insightful)
How many rovers could you have send to Mars for the price of a human mission? Around a thousand or so I think, puts things into perspective.
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The Mars Exploration Rover mission cost less than $1 billion total. In contemporary dollars the Apollo program cost $150-200 billion (and going to Mars would be WAY tougher than the Moon). Imagine - the price of a human mission we could fill the solar system with squadrons of rovers. The numbers are rough, but they suggest that we can get more science for our buck with robots.
Re:Take that flaky humans! (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps part of the ISS science is figuring out the engineering and logistical problems of how human's can live for extended periods in space, which is a much harder problem. I'd say getting something so big into orbit, operational and supporting an onboard crew for more than 8 years is a significant accomplishment.
Parent
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Since humans could have accomplished what took the rovers five years in a few days, imagine how much more science could have been done with humans on site for five years.
What truly boggles my mind is that people are impressed that a robot has done in five years what a man could do in a day or two.
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People have been talking about manufacturing in orbit for decades. Instead, manufacturing moved to China. The motivation for the move to East Asia mirrors the reason why space manufacturing remains just talk. If you consider the overhead and transportation costs of manufacturing in orbit, it makes unionized factories in the US and Europe look dirt cheap.
Martian moon photos? (Score:2)
Re:Martian moon photos? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, the rovers have photographed both moons [nasa.gov].
Parent
Re:Martian moon photos? (Score:5, Informative)
Excellent link to some of the astronomy Spirit and Opportunity have done. Considering they were designed to be mainly geologists, the rovers have done a decent amount of astronomy (some of it not covered by that page), including observing a Phobos transit [wikipedia.org] and a Deimos transit [wikipedia.org].
We've even imaged the Earth! On sol 63, Spirit took the first picture ever taken of the Earth from the surface of another planet [nasa.gov].
Parent
Yes but (Score:2, Funny)
Yes, but do they run linux?
2nd greatest NASA accomplishment? (Score:4, Interesting)
90 days? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:90 days? (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of people seem to believe this, but it's really not true. I'm not saying we expected the rovers to drop dead at the stroke of midnight on sol 91, but even the wildest optimists on the project did not openly dare to hope that we'd even double that 90-sol lifetime. (We've just hit twenty times that number, as it happens. Incredible!)
Also note that underestimating surface survival time doesn't significantly reduce costs. Getting through the first 90 sols on Mars cost a little over $800 million. But most of that cost goes into design, development, testing, launch (about $100 million per rover goes to launch costs alone, IIRC), and so on. Operations, by comparison, is cheap: now that they're there, we run the rovers for ~ $20 million per year. If we'd known, for example, that we'd survive a year on the surface, we could have promised NASA four times the science for a ~ 10% cost increase; that would have made the project a better sell, and we'd have been fools not to do it.
Parent
Wet and Violent? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Wet and Violent? (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, I have at least one ex-girlfriend who meets that description as well.
Parent
Yay!!! (Score:2)
High Philbogg or something (Score:3, Funny)
There used to be a guy who wrote stories about how the Martians were interacting with the rover in comments every time a Rover story came up on Slashdot.
Whatever happened to that guy? Where's he at?
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NASA needs to send Humans now! (Score:2, Interesting)
NASA can send Humans to Mars right now, or start working on it now with full NASA manned budget on that instead of ISS and the Space Shuttle, and we could have the first Humans on Mars within 4 years from now. It will cost less than $30 billion to send 24 astronauts on 4 spaceships to Mars, with 4 earth-return spaceships sent there at the same time for the trip home. 6 months travel to go, 1 and a half years spent on Mars and 6 months for the return trip. It'd be a 2.5 year at least live Mars reality show,
The unofficial diary of a Mars rover driver (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm one of MER's rover drivers; I've been on the project from the start. Which has been considerably longer than five years, as development started about 3.5 years before landing, so MER has been the focus of my life for nearly a decade now. I co-wrote the software (RSVP) we use to drive the rovers, and I've been using that software to drive Spirit and Opportunity ever since.
As a contribution to MER's five-year anniversary celebration, I'm blogging my personal mission notes from the early days of the mission. They'll be posted in "real time" -- roughly one update per day, five years after the fact -- at http://marsandme.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]. First update will be tonight around 18:30 (Pacific time).
Be prepared to stick with it; it's a little slow for the first few days. And be aware that it's a personal activity, not a JPL-sponsored activity, so I occasionally swear and stuff. But if you're a fan of the rovers, it will, I hope, give you a new insight into what it's been like to be a small part of an historic adventure.
Ah, and for twitterati: you can follow the official MER feed at http://twitter.com/MarsRovers [twitter.com]; you can follow me at http://twitter.com/marsroverdriver [twitter.com].
Wonderful (Score:3, Insightful)
Great show on the subject (Score:3, Interesting)
A consise article about 5 years of Spirit (Score:3, Interesting)
Spirit in Sorry Shape (Score:3, Insightful)
I've been reading about Spirit of late, and it seems like its last days are near. It's so dusty that it can probably only do decent roving in the summer, and will also not have enough power to survive the winter.
It's busted wheel makes it difficult to find and move to a solar-panel-friendly high-tilt area that is near exploration areas. Thus, if it wonders off too far, it cannot get back to a safe spot fast enough to survive the cold or surprise dust storms, which block light. It almost hit the limit during a recent dust storm about 2 months ago.
They may just send it off to explore and say, "screw the winter and dust storms; if it ends it ends." This probably depends on whether they can find good targets without going far.
It could get lucky and get another whirlwind cleaning, though. These things have 9 lives, I swear.
Re:Cost per MB? (Score:5, Insightful)
How much more data does the lander need to send before the total mission cost is cheaper on a per MB basis than sending txt messages to your BFF?
It already is.
Parent
Re:Best damn dime NASA ever spent. (Score:4, Insightful)
What I don't get is the benefit of adding a human to these missions. They are ill suited to the environment and require all sorts of extra equipment to keep alive during the voyage and on the planet. Worse, they have to be shipped back to earth intact. Their value is so high that heavy expensive multiply redundant systems have to be built to ensure their safety.
I do get the benefit of having a device that can make decisions without up to two hours lag time, but the investment might be better spent on a bit of navigation software rather than transporting wetware.
-Jon
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Re:Best damn dime NASA ever spent. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Best damn dime NASA ever spent. (Score:4, Funny)
That's puppeteer talk right there
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