NASA Mars Rovers Hit 5-Year Anniversary

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."

2nd greatest NASA accomplishment?

[bubbaprog]

I would argue, or at least allow for the argument, that the Mars Rovers have been the second-most successful accomplishment of NASA after Apollo 11.

90 days?

[mosb1000]

I'd like to point out that the engineers designing the rovers probably expected them to last longer than that (though certainly not 5 years). They probably budgeted for 90 days to keep the projected costs down so that NASA would chose the project. They knew that the budget would be extended once the rovers were there.

Cost per MB?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Fascinating

[BZWingZero]

Not only do we have landers, rovers, and satellites around another planet, but we can coordinate them so one of the orbiting satellites can take a picture of a lander as it is landing!

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]

dinosaurs' space program

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine the amount of food, water, O2 and energy that would have been required if they had sent humans instead of machines.

The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right! -- Larry Niven

Personally I think the ISS is a waste of resource. If we're going to spend resources on human exploration lets at least spend it on the moon (and perhaps something at L1).

Anything beyond that should be robotic while we gain experience with people's safety.

Re:Take that flaky humans!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Assuming they weren't on the same orbital trajectory as the Climate Orbiter:

The Mars Climate Orbiter was intended to enter orbit at an altitude of 140â"150 km above Mars. However, a navigation error caused the spacecraft to reach as low as 57 km. The spacecraft was destroyed by atmospheric stresses and friction at this low altitude

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter

Kind of hard to do geological research when you're extra crispy.

I think that's the ultimate (and good) long-term goal, but the first stepping stones is to give up on the ISS and funnel things into human habitation on Luna. Make mistakes three days away instead of six months away.

NASA needs to send Humans now!

[Charbax]

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, in HDTV cause more bandwidth will be available using a bunch of faster satellite links, just that is worth many billions in advertising revenues.

Anyone who doesn't agree with me is a moron.

The unofficial diary of a Mars rover driver

[ScottMaxwell]

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].

Great show on the subject

[bacon volcano]

There is a great show [nationalgeographic.com] on this subject that aired on the National Geographic channel. I highly recommend it to anyone that hasn't been paying much attention to the rovers for the last five years.

A consise article about 5 years of Spirit

[marcel-jan.nl]

The Planetary Society has a very interesting article [planetary.org] about the five years the rover Spirit has been on Mars. And I wrote this one [astrostart.nl] about the Mars rovers in Dutch.

Re:It may not that great

[meringuoid]

As I understood it, the 90-day figure was because dust was expected to accumulate on the solar panels. The rovers should have died from lack of power a long time ago. But, as it turned out, the Martian winds are a little stronger than had been thought, and the dust rather lighter; OK, so the rovers are hardly clean, but enough dust blows away that they're able to keep going.