Mars Rover "Spirit" In Danger 222
Riding with Robots writes "Just days after announcing that the Mars Phoenix Lander has met its icy demise, NASA reports that a dust storm has left the rover Spirit on the edge of power failure. During one recent Martian day, the robotic geologist's solar array produced only 89 watt hours of energy, the lowest output by either rover in their nearly five years on Mars. Mission managers are taking steps to protect the hardy, battle-worn spacecraft, but the agency describes Spirit's status as 'vulnerable.'"
Re:It's been a good run (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It's been a good run (Score:3, Informative)
The timing has a real Obama's-grandmother vibe, you know?
Did Obama's grandmother have wheels? If so, they'd have called her a wagon.
Re:Mars Rovers, Landers, and Orbiters (Score:3, Informative)
Phoenix is not a rover.
Re:Winter? (Score:4, Informative)
Or is Spirit near the equator / other hemisphere? I know the Phoenix shutdown is at least partly due to seasonal changes
Much closer to equator with a combination of winter (expected), dust storm (happens) and wear (by now) ganging up on it but it's in a "survivable" range. Phoenix was sent to the arctic region and never expected to survive winter AFAIK.
Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:4, Informative)
This was thought about, and discarded. While on the surface it seems like a good idea, in actuality it's incredibly difficult to implement, since the dust on Mar's is so 'sticky' - from what I've read elsewhere, the electrostatic charge of the dust on Mars is very high, and any attempt to scrape it off the solar panels would just move it around, not really remove it.
Besides, with a two month life expectancy, I think it was determined that they wouldn't need to remove any dust from the solar panels since the rovers would have long since died...
Re:Wipers (Score:3, Informative)
Why didn't NASA include a device similar to windshield wipers on the solar panels? It seems that they knew mars was dusty, and it would be a simple thing to add (I'd imagine).
You'd be wrong. You can find the details in the hundreds of posts on the subject over the last years, in short they figured more scientific equipment would be more valuable.
Re:Wipers (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:5, Informative)
NASA probably thought of that, but the issue is how practical any wiper system would be. Unlike automobile wipers, there's no air or water supply to remove the dust. Adding a system to compress air would have added unacceptable weight to the rover and every little bit counts (even if would work reliably under Mars conditions). A water system would have been out of the question. A waterless/airless system then depends on the material you would use. Such a material would have be softer than the panels or they would damage them; however, a softer material (rubber, polypropylene, polyethylene) probably would not survive the extreme conditions of Mars.
And that's just the survivability aspects. Now factoring the usability aspects: Some sort of arm would have to be long enough to reach all the panels. None of the rovers arms can extend that far so they would have to have been modified. This might add weight and complexity.
Probably the biggest reason why NASA didn't put one in was the rovers were designed for 90 sol missions. Having them last 5 years is a bonus. Along the way, the Rover team has dealt with the problems that have come with extending the mission beyond the original parameters: wheels no longer work, tools no longer function, dust storms limit power usage, etc. This is one issue that they knew would eventually cause the rovers to cease functioning after a few years.
Re:Winter? (Score:5, Informative)
Time of year plays into it, certainly; this would be less worrisome at the height of summer. But it's not quite the dead of winter, either (solstice was something like 150 sols ago), so it could be worse.
Spirit is a little farther from the equator than her twin sister, Opportunity, so winters hit her somewhat harder than they hit Opportunity anyway. (Phoenix is at something like 60 degrees N latitude -- much farther than either rover.) On top of that, she was pretty well dust-covered already, thanks to a previous dust storm and the regular old ongoing dust-deposition process -- dust was blocking about 70% of the light hitting her solar arrays before this storm hit.
It's possible for this to turn out to be good news. Dust storms are caused by (and, in a classic feedback loop, cause) high winds, so it's possible that the winds will actually clean Spirit off and she'll end up better than she was before. Keep your fingers crossed.
Re:Mars Rovers, Landers, and Orbiters (Score:1, Informative)
Putting it in perspective. (Score:5, Informative)
The Planetary Society blog has a composite picture [planetary.org] of Spirit from two years ago and today which shows starkly just how much dust has accumulated.
Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:3, Informative)
If the batteries are completely drained, Spirit will probably never run again. Both rovers need a certain amount of power to run their heaters. The heaters keep the sensitive electronics from freezing. The loss of power means that the loss of the electronics. During the previous dust storm, the rovers were put into power save mode to outlast the storms. It worked last time but this time they may not survive.
Not to be pedantic but... (Score:5, Informative)
The two rovers were not designed to work for 90 days.
They were guaranteed to work for 90 days.
The various components were designed to work no matter what they experienced for 90 days on the Martian surface.
I suspect that they were designed for the worst possible set of circumstances for 90 days which has allowed them to operate for the much longer time in the actual environment which is more benign than the worst case scenario.
Regardless of the semantics of the 90 days, the time the two robots have been operating is still an amazing achievement and everybody involved should be very proud.
myke
Re:Winter? (Score:3, Informative)
I guess there's still the issue of whether the batteries will fail to operate if they get too cold....
Yes, that's exactly the problem, and not just for the batteries. The rovers and landers need power just to heat themselves so that their components don't get damaged by the cold. In TFA they even say they've already started sacrificing parts of Spirit to conserve power:
"Mission controllers are commanding Spirit to turn off some heaters, including one that protects a science instrument, the miniature thermal emission spectrometer, and take other measures to reduce energy consumption."
Re:Not to be pedantic but... (Score:5, Informative)
After talking about wipers, blowers, vibrators, etc. they concluded the best course of action was to just size the panels to produce the minimum required amount of electricity for operations after 90 days of worst-case dust accumulation. An added bonus of this approach was plenty of power to play around with early in the mission (and part of why they've done so well now). Accomplishing this ended up being a huge problem, however, and I think the power team spent weeks trying to figure out a geometery that would provide the needed amount of surface area, but not get in the way of all the other parts while folding down small enough to fit inside the tetrahedral lander platform. They finally got a break when they figured out a set of winglet-like tabs that unfolded from the back of an already folded section of panel.
The result didn't just solve the problem, it looked freaking awesome. Earlier renders of the rovers had them being nearly square or hexagon shaped, as opposed to the swept-back fighter wing look [seds.org] they have as built. Heck, Steve Jobs is probably even jealous of how sexy the MER's look, and they aren't even trying.
Re:Pedantic griping on the units (Score:5, Informative)
Which is why they are using Watt-hours, which are a unit of energy equal to 3600 joules (1 Joule=1 Watt-second).
Re:Those Martians are crafty (Score:2, Informative)
Nasa got 17.138 Billion dollars in 2007
The US military got 527.660 Billion dollars
10 Billion dollars is spent on iraq each month
Pick a fucking better target to aim at