The Rovers That Just Won't Quit 299
smooth wombat writes "Like the Energizer bunny, the two martian rovers just won't quit. Spirit, after climbing to the top of Husband Hill during the past year, spent two months examining rocks at the top of the hill and scientists confirmed that those rocks were similar to rocks found along the side of the hill indicating that Husband Hill is probably the result of an impact crater.
It will take about two months for Spirit to make its way down the hill after which the next target will be a feature called Home Plate located about a half mile away.
Opportunity is exploring the northern rim of Erebus Crater, the largest crater between already-explored Endurance Crater and its next destination, Victoria Crater.
The rovers were only supposed to last three months but have been operating for almost two years. NASA has also released a 360 degree panorama of images taken by Spirit as it explored Gustav Crater."
Larger pictures? (Score:4, Interesting)
One thing no one is really talking about... (Score:3, Interesting)
These things are horribly over-engineered. Not that it is a bad thing they are proving so resilliant, but we're now at 8x the "designed" life span. In my mind, that means they could have probably built it half as robust and still been outstanding pieces of machinery(and alot less expensive).
I know that hindsight is 20/20, and I'm not judging the engineers poorly on this feat(quite the opposite in fact). I just thought someone might want to point that little tid-bit out...
Now, FLAME ON!!
Testament to JPL (Score:5, Interesting)
Good work JPL!
Re:Read this book. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why not more? (Score:3, Interesting)
Instead they came up with the idea that we should switch to manned missions again and it will take 10-20 years.
The robots are already can already do alot of the exploring for us. We should be launching robotic missions to the moons around Jupiter and more robotic missions to Mars, lots of them.
Not one or two every three years, send 10-100 at minimum.
Re:Could be a problem? (Score:3, Interesting)
Voyeger (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:One thing no one is really talking about... (Score:2, Interesting)
Think about it like this. To make a project that is 90% sure to work it costs X dollars. To make the project 99% sure to work it costs 2*X dollars or more! As the levels of redundancy and robustness of the equipment increases the price increasess exponentially. The 99th percent costs more than the 98th percent and so on.
The problem is that most NASA missions go to the 99th percent no matter what. The reality is that sometimes they could do the same mission 10 times over at 90% reliability for less money than doing the mission ones for 99% reliability. So one out of 10 missions would blow up, but 9 out of 10 would rock the house. That's a lot better than the few we have now.
Re:One thing no one is really talking about... (Score:4, Interesting)
For example you don't talk about robustness of a strut, you talk about strength and fatigue. You don't talk about robustness of an robot, you talk about manuverability and degrees of freedom. You don't talk about robustness of a Mars Rover, you talk about sensors, speed, solar panel life, etc.
Now before you poo-poo this, name one parameter that is best described by robustness, rather than an actual engineering term with real units.
(of course we filled the final presentation for that professors course with all forms of the word, including robustitude)
Re:Larger pictures? (Score:1, Interesting)
That one is like the others also available as an uber size version.
contest (Score:2, Interesting)
Take all of the money in the budget for the project, and offer it as a prize to the first person to accomplish all of the goals.
Re:One thing no one is really talking about... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Could be a problem? (Score:5, Interesting)
But perception of "how much we need" is a much thornier problem for the administrator of NASA. Success is always good; few people have any idea how much this costs, and most are sort of resigned to the few bucks per person this mission costs. In return they get to be The Country That Explores The Planets, and people are willing to pay a lot for that kind of pride.
What gets people ticked about the price is failure. It maakes people feel like laughingstocks in front of the world. Few people really understand the science, or benefit directly from what we learn about Mars, but they feel good that it's us who discovered it. They feel like the most advanced country in the world.
So I wouldn't worry about people saying, "Yeah, we know quite enough about Mars." That's a mission people can get behind, as compared to (say) a war costing 1,000 times as much. The war may accomplish more (depending on whom you ask) but Science (with a capital S, the vague and mysterious one, as opposed to the lower-case-s "science" where we actually learn stuff) is always popular. At least when it wins.
maestro (Score:5, Interesting)
If you're on gentoo,
emerge maestro maestro-data
If not, check your distro repos or get it from here [sun.com].
finding same old rocks (Score:3, Interesting)
Ditto for Opportunity. It found those hematite blueberries and sulfur-rich layered rocks in the first crater, then saw them again in the next five craters its visited.
Some of the other things were interesting too- the dust devil movies, eclipses of Martian moons and so on.
Re:All you fans of sterile deserts say WHOOOP!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why not more? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Read this book. (Score:4, Interesting)
In fact, the first day of class, he said that the entire class was "off the record" and I don't think he even wanted the college newspaper students in there. (and i'm only disclosing that above story because it's obviously ok to say now. but... his others stories stay with me!). - All Cornell Ugrads - make sure to take his classes! (and Jim Bell, another AWESOME astro prof - wrote me my recommendation for med school).