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Space

Spirit Rover is One Year Old 347

Posted by CmdrTaco from the happy-birthday-to-you dept.
dolphin558 writes "The little rover that could, did. The Spirit Rover marks its one year aniversary after an expected lifetime of just 3 months. It has traversed more than 2 miles of Martian landscape and sent back thousands of pictures and reams of data. There is no indication that it will die anytime soon as it climbs the Columbia Hills."
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Spirit Rover is One Year Old More

Spirit Rover is One Year Old

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  • maintenance (Score:5, Funny)

    by confusion ( 14388 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @02:48PM (#11247229) Homepage
    It certainly helps when you have friendly Martians maintaining it.

    I'm glad to see that we've gotten our money's worth on this one.

    Jerry
    http://www.syslog.org/ [syslog.org]

    • Re:maintenance (Score:2, Funny)

      by zrk ( 64468 )
      Yeah, I've heard it found the local Mar(s)Bucks, and recently visited a Jiffy Zoob for an oil change...

    • Re:maintenance (Score:5, Funny)

      by Iphtashu Fitz ( 263795 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @03:26PM (#11247607)
      Reminds me of a tv commercial I saw a while ago. I forget what the product was for but the commercial showed a lone scientist sitting in front of a huge video monitor in a NASA-style control room. On the monitor was the rover. The scientest turned his head for a minute and when he looked back at the screen the rover was up on cinder blocks, it's wheels were gone, and it had been vandalized in one or two other ways. Finally, conclusive proof of intelligent(?) life on Mars!

  • Great! Keep the Spacemen at Home (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TychoCelchuuu ( 835690 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @02:51PM (#11247266) Journal
    If the spirit rover can last for a year on Mars, why do we need to send astronauts (naughts?)? Wouldn't the money be better spent on more robots?

    • Re:Great! Keep the Spacemen at Home (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ravenspear ( 756059 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @02:52PM (#11247280)
      why do we need to send astronauts

      Because we can.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re:Great! Keep the Spacemen at Home (Score:4, Insightful)

          by ravenspear ( 756059 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @03:00PM (#11247376)
          I am waiting for a good reason to send man to mars. But so far, we got nothing.

          How about because it is there and we are here, and if we don't find a way off this rock before we turn it into a smoldering pile of nuclear waste our species isn't going to leave behind much of a legacy.
          • Our species is doomed to die, anyway. Perhaps it is better for other civilizations in the universe that we contain our "values" and "explorations" on this pile of crap we call Earth and not infect other worlds with our wisdom.

            • and not infect other worlds with our wisdom. You're thinking backwards. *WE* don't go....we send the "important" people like lawyers and telemarketers first and we'll be along shortly....*cough*
            • Ok, given an infinate universe, which it practically is are you seriously concerned about its abuse. I mean seriously I understand concern with accidently destroying outselves, but accidently destroying astroid 24u2d is like destroying a grain a sand. I just don't see us polluting the entire universe, and if we did, whats the problem, its all matter anyways, throw it into some sun, its gone.
            • Our species is doomed to die, anyway.

              Our species is also the only one we know whom Nature has granted two blessed capacities: the ability to perceive our doom and the ingenuity to avoid it.

              I hope you will forgive some us if we choose to make use of these gifts, instead of nihilisically throwing them back in her face.

              Perhaps it is better for other civilizations in the universe that we contain our "values" and "explorations" on this pile of crap we call Earth and not infect other worlds with our wisdom.
            • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • How about because it is there and we are here, and if we don't find a way off this rock before we turn it into a smoldering pile of nuclear waste our species isn't going to leave behind much of a legacy.

            Before we spent a trillion dollars (conservatively, probably would be more) on colonizing an inhospitable planet, I'd like to see some evidence that getting off earth is the best way to preserve the human species. Couldn't that money be more profitably spent eliminating the rationale for war on Earth?

            I'

        • You are forgetting the thrill of having people triumph over seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Admiral Perry did not throw a camera up to the North Pole. Sir Edmund Hillary did not launch a probe to the top of Mount Everest. Mike Tyson did not resort to using scissors to cut off an ear.

          Next, I suppose that you will want to program some 'bots to defeat HL2 and Doom3, and not even bother to do it yourself.

          Robots definately have their place, no doubt. They should be used a LOT MORE for advanced explorat

    • Re:Great! Keep the Spacemen at Home (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yes, but an astronaut can do in one day the labor this 'bot took a year to do.

      • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @03:00PM (#11247371)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • This was a very basic attempt at a robot. If we redirected the money spent on manned space flight, the space station, and other human-based space flight projects into the robotic missions, you'd see some damn fine robots.

          True. But they would be nowhere near the ability of a few humans on the surface of the planet.

          Take the best robots we have today. Combine all their best features. They still cannot traverse a simple earth desert both quickly and without constant guidance and supervision. The rad

          • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

            by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @03:34PM (#11247685)
            Comment removed based on user account deletion

            • One-way trips? (Score:5, Interesting)

              by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Monday January 03, 2005 @03:46PM (#11247813) Homepage Journal
              Let's say we ship a human to Mars for a 60 day stay. That means we need to ship 14 months of life-support supplies for each human.

              I wonder how much actual training an explorer on Mars would need. What if there was an average Joe who had an inoperable brain tumor or something that was going to kill him in a year's time, but he was otherwise healthy. What if he was a total space geek and would like nothing more than to explore Mars or perhaps build settlements in his final days?

              I don't think the US population would be OK with the idea right away, but I also can't put my finger on a specific moral problem.
            • You can't do that *now* with Spirit, but there is no reason you can't do that now with current robotic technology. There are numerous robots that function semi-autonomously with complex behaviours that could be modified for Mars.

              And the additional complexity required makes these too expensive to debug, and significantly more likely to fail. Further, more time is wasted when the stupid robot gets stuck, or starts drilling an unimportant item and mission control doesn't find out until transmission time.

            • Re:Great! Keep the Spacemen at Home (Score:4, Interesting)

              by NardofDoom ( 821951 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @07:22PM (#11249856)
              The Mars Reference Mission from NASA puts humans on Mars for 1.5 years in equipment that will allow them to explore up to 1,000 km from their home base.

              Second, budget estimates put the cost at around $100 billion for up to five missions. Even assuming a 100% overage, that puts the cost for 7.5 years on Mars at less than the Debacle in Iraq. And we learn about how to survive on another planet and how to travel between them. And we get 4-5 outposts on the Red Planet waiting for a refit to serve for future missions.

        • "Overlapping functions, semi-autonomy, semi-intelligent bots that are able to function together for a common goal. "

          Like getting revenge on those bastards that sent them there?

          I, for one, welcome our future Martian robotic overlords.
        • I have to wonder if adding all that new functionality would be detrimental to future missions. As you said, we aimed very small with this mission, but we got amazing results. As software/hardware people know, adding complication to systems tends to break them or make them more fragile. Would the KISS principle apply in this case?

          (Note, I'm not poo-pooing the notion of adding advanced functions, I just think we need to be cautious... shooting for the moon [pun intended] too quickly might backfire)
    • why do we need to send astronauts
      ------------
      Because humans have all their eggs in one basket. All it takes is one minor disaster to wipe out the entire human race on Earth.

      Then what? We've got no backup.

    • Because like it or not, there is still a certain amount of adverturer left in all of us. We send a man because we are men. Sending a robot does not grant the same level of satisfication and accomplishment. So I say send a man and let him return to Earth with great honor. (..and let that man be ME!)
    • For one thing, humans can carry out many more experiments in much less time. Also, they travel in feet per second, not inches per minute. For another, there isn't a 20 minute delay in communications, and unless the human gets sick or dies, he/she does not run the risk of crashing his/her software/hardware and becoming a useless piece of $1 billion trash. And perhaps the most important is the notion that sending humans to such areas helps to ignite the flames of millions of people, including students, politi
      • For another, there isn't a 20 minute delay in communications,

        Er, regardless if it's a bot or a human, radio signals still only travel so fast. The delay is still there.

        Sorry for nitpicking but everything else sounded good.

        • Sure, but the astronauts will know what to do ahead of time and will be relatively independent, with all experiments planned out ahead of time. New mission information can be transmitted while the astronauts sleep, so the delay doesn't raise its ugly head as much as with robotic missions, which rely on constant monitoring and direction from the Earth.

    • Re:Great! Keep the Spacemen at Home (Score:5, Insightful)

      by stienman ( 51024 ) <adavis&ubasics,com> on Monday January 03, 2005 @03:03PM (#11247401) Homepage Journal
      If the spirit rover can last for a year on Mars, why do we need to send astronauts (naughts?)? Wouldn't the money be better spent on more robots?

      The robots cannot make decisions on the fly, other than extremely simple obstacle avoidance. When a decision is to be made, the robot talks to us, we think about it, and then command the robot. This takes a huge amount of time.

      An astronaut can walk faster than these robots can move. Put a moon rovor type vehicle up there with a few astronauts and you can do as much exploration in a day as the Spirit and Opportunity have done their entire existance.

      Plus, we can, there are those who want to, and there are those willing to pay for it. Who are you to tell them to stop? So far this mission has cost you less than $10 of your taxes. I fully support the government using taxes to perform such missions, and apparently a majority of Americans feel similarily.

      -Adam

      • Accounting still favors robots over humans (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @04:14PM (#11248040) Journal
        The robots cannot make decisions on the fly, other than extremely simple obstacle avoidance.

        For the same cost as astronauts, we can have 20 or more robots with higher bandwidth at 20 different locations. And, they can stay there a long time, unlike astronauts (unless we build a very expensive base). The Tortus wins this race in the end.

        An astronaut can walk faster than these robots can move.

        20 robots over 4 years are going to do more science than a couple of humans can in a month. And, cover a wider variety of territory.

        a few astronauts and you can do as much exploration in a day as the Spirit and Opportunity have done their entire existance.

        I don't know about that. Some of those spectrometer readings take several hours to perform even if a human is there. With more money, some of that would happen a lot faster. But power on Mars is going to cost money regardless of whether it is produced for humans or robots.

        Further, the rover operators have been very cautious. If they were less cautious, then more can happen in a day. We just may have to live with losing say 3 out of 20 robots to "go for it".

        What would really be helpful is sample returns enabled by robots. The problem is the potential biological contamination. But this issue if faced by both scenarios.

        And, Spirit and Opportunity are still mostly low-end robots. With more funding, fancier ones can be built, and still be much cheaper than humans. Here is a summary of ways to beef them up:

        * More bandwidth to Earth
        * More power (either bigger panels or "nuke" packs)
        * More instruments
        * Take more risk
        * Improve auto-guidence (more R&D)
        * Sample returns
        * Multiple "arms"

        I am sorry, but the accounting favors robots. They can cover more territory per dollar.
        • For the same cost as astronauts, we can have 20 or more robots with higher
          bandwidth at 20 different locations. And, they can stay there a long time,
          unlike astronauts (unless we build a very expensive base). The Tortus wins
          this race in the end.

          You assume a "big expensive base". Yet it has been shown that this is not
          needed. Robots have other shortcomings I'll deal with below. But one to
          address here is cost.Robots are very task oriented. If you discover something
          unexpected, or think of something you didn't s
      • If the spirit rover can last for a year on Mars, why do we need to send astronauts (naughts?)? Wouldn't the money be better spent on more robots?

        The robots cannot make decisions on the fly, other than extremely simple obstacle avoidance.

        Currently.

        When a decision is to be made, the robot talks to us, we think about it, and then command the robot. This takes a huge amount of time.

        Currently.

        An astronaut can walk faster than these robots can move.

        Compared to our current state of the art.

        I'm

      • Yes, a human can make on-the-fly decisions faster than a robot.

        So?

        You could launch 50-500 (depending on your cost estimates) robotic mars missions for the cost of one manned mission, each exploring a different aspect of the planet. Pardon me if I think "better on the fly decision making" isn't worth 49-199 missions.

        Have you seen the sort of things that the Mars Science Laboratory alone is going to be able to do? The bloody thing will be taking core samples and burning coatings off rocks for spectral an

    • Re:Great! Keep the Spacemen at Home (Score:5, Insightful)

      by pthisis ( 27352 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @03:07PM (#11247445) Homepage Journal
      If the spirit rover can last for a year on Mars, why do we need to send astronauts (naughts?)?

      Not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
      • You know, chances are he didn't even know just how hard it was going to be when he made that call, but we responded anyway. Those were the days when we did things because we felt the need to do them. Sure, there were political motivations, but they were ones people could understand.

        Yeah, I know, there were a lot of bad parts that get washed over in the romantic review of "the good times," but when you listen to John Young [npr.org] talk about where we should be versus where we are, it makes you wonder if we'll ev

    • Not only because "we can," but because of the possibilities...

      // Begin "sci-fi" rhetoric

      Not only can a human perform much better than these little robots in terms of daily productivity, risk of being stuck on a small rock, etc, but further testing and development of manned missions could lead to larger "stations" on the lunar/martian surface, in which long, complex, and detailed experiments can be performed. Not only would we have humans performing these experiments, but in the actual lunar/martian envi
    • Two miles in one year. Sending people (with rovers) would allow for that much exploration in a day (Earth/Mars day whatever). People can simply move around and sample at a far increased rate that our current level of automated technology.
    • Okay people, repeat after me:

      "Space Exploration is not about Science, it is about Exploration."

      If we are going to apply a cost benefit analysis to space exploration, NASA should close shop and the money spent elsewhere, robots or no robots. The whole "scientific research" angle has always been a fig leaf for the real reasons for the space programs - national prestige (politicians), playing with cool toys (engineers), and, hokey as it sounds, "going where no man has gone before" i.e. exploration (astronau
    • Yes, the rover can last for a year on mars...and we all cheer, and say "hooray for unmanned missions."

      And then we can sit back and wonder how long it would have taken a guy, even in a space suit - hell, even a slashdot geek in a space suit, and we're not the most in-shape bunch, I warrant - to cover two miles, taking samples all the way. I'd guess a lot less than a year.

      And that's not even taking into account 1/3 our gravity!

  • Surely somethings must be about done for now. Tires on a car don't last a year on a smooth road for example. Did Nasa have anything prepared (like the tires are good for X miles or the cameras are good for Y shots), for this kind of thing?
    • Tires are good for a LOT more than 1 year if you only drive 300m per month... Plus there is less gravity, so even less strain on the tires.
      They should be the very last thing of the rover to fail.
    • Tires don't last a year!?!? You must be driving like a bat out of hell! I've had the same tires on my car for at least 2 years now and they still have plenty of tread left on them with plenty of city and highway miles.
    • I dare say if you drove less than two miles in a year, your tires would be just fine. Don't be in such a hurry to post that you don't read even the SYNOPSIS of the article.
    • Except cars on a tire in one year travel over MUCH MORE road and experience much more wear due to a lot of factors, so you can't compare them. Everything was made to last as long as possible and the proposed "lifetime" was only due to estimates regarding the diminishing of solar power due to dust collecting and blocking sunlight. However, friendly martians have been keeping it clean, thus the extended lifetime of the rovers.

    • Re:Tires? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ravenspear ( 756059 )
      Tires on a car don't last a year on a smooth road for example.

      Tires can last much longer than a year. I know people who have had the same set for three years.

      But relating to why the tires on the rovers last (and will continue to), it has to do with friction. Tires on car get very hot when driving at highway speeds, and abrasion occurs (when small pieces of it comes off and stick to the road). The rovers tires move at such slow speeds that the heat generated by friction is negligible and abrasion force
    • I imagine that the real wear is going to come from the repeated charge/discharge cycling of the batteries and the exposure to solar radiation. The unit hasn't really gone that far to wear out tires, and I think the uplink speed limits how fast pictures can be taken, saving wear on the ccd and flash memory.

      Jerry
      http://www.syslog.org/ [syslog.org]

    • Sure they do (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The rover just dont drive like you.

    • Re:Tires? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by wronski ( 821189 )
      I think the main impediment is the degradation of the solar panels. They generate less and less power, and eventualy there is not enough juice to run the rover. NASA shut down some non-essential instruments to lower the energy requirements some months ago. The tires should be ok, given the speed these things are driven ;-).

      The Voyagers had a similar problem with their thermonuclear batteries; it got to a point where they were generating less than 100 Watts (I think), and the JPL guys were (and are) doing

      • Re:Tires? (Score:4, Informative)

        by Zarhan ( 415465 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @03:22PM (#11247571)
        I think the main impediment is the degradation of the solar panels. They generate less and less power, and eventualy there is not enough juice to run the rover.

        The solar panels are getting cleaned [slashdot.org] for some reason, at least for opportunity. Anyway, Martian winter is now behind and they are heading into spring.

        The Voyagers had a similar problem with their thermonuclear batteries; it got to a point where they were generating less than 100 Watts (I think), and the JPL guys were (and are) doing miracles to keep the craft functional.

        The voyagers are doing just fine [nasa.gov]. Note the report date. And the output is near 300W. Maybe you confused it with Pioneer 10 [nasa.gov]?

      • Re:Tires? (Score:2, Informative)

        by Neurowiz ( 18899 )
        JPL guys were (and are) doing miracles to keep the craft functional.

        JPL is not performing a great deal of real-time operational control over the Voyager craft. They are more monitoring what is left of the various experiments and power levels.

        The miracle was performed back in the 70s when these craft were built - they certainly engineered them damn tough! Say what you will about how we've lost 2 shuttles, but NASA has shown some huge successes in our robotic craft: Voyager, Pioneer, NEAR, Deep Space 1 an

      • Re:Tires? - Moderate to non-factual? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Neurowiz ( 18899 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @03:44PM (#11247789)
        This post should be moderated non-factual.

        The solar panels are not "degrading" as much as their ability to collect solar energy is being limited by dust covering them and the winter season. Now that Martian winter is over for both Rovers, they are going to see increased power. Interestingly, and noted elsewhere, Opportunity is seeing up to "landing day" power levels, due perhaps to some Martian dust devils "cleaning" the panels.

        JPL instituted energy conservation measures - no instruments were permanently "shut down" - all of the instruments on both MERs are functioning. Opportunity is put into a "Deep Sleep" which does temporarily shut off all instrumentation, but they are brought back online. This was done not for the winterization of the rovers, but in answer to a problem Opportunity had with one of it's heaters for an instrument.

        The confusion in this post with Voyager/Pioneer has already been noted.

    • three bad wheels (Score:3, Interesting)

      by peter303 ( 12292 )
      I think the motor died on one of the 12 wheels, so Spirit has been driving backwards for several months. Brakes are bad on two other wheels. I hear the rovers may be able to traverse flat ground with only three functional wheels apiece. And they could still return some results immobile.

  • Hmm.... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 03, 2005 @02:53PM (#11247288)
    This looks familiar. Oh wait, it was posted here [slashdot.org] earlier.
  • I've seen this many times, where NASA projects grossly live past their expected lifetimes. It's more of a PR stunt, to say that the rovers lived much longer than anybody had ever hoped, and had the rovers failed after 2 months, I'm sure a lot of people would be upset.

    • Re:E(X) = 3 months... really? (Score:5, Informative)

      by matt_martin ( 159394 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @03:20PM (#11247552) Homepage Journal
      Its just the way engineering for reliability works.
      To GUARANTEE with any certainty that something will last for 3 months, you have to build it with a much longer expected lifetime. You'll probably get "lucky" and it will work much longer (10x is not unrealistic).

      FWIW: Thats hypothetically why they can push the Enterprise to 110% and not instantly explode ...
    • An astute observation, that people would be upset if the project only fulfilled 2/3 of its planned mission. Likewise, there's the inverse reaction to the project doing much better than expected.
    • The Venus Magellan radar mapper was designed nominally for one complete mapping cycle, but survived fve before NASA cut funds. Galileo went nearly triple its two year lifetime. Both were almost out of orientation propellant and some instruments had failed. Saturn Cassini is designed for four years and 86 moon flybys, but could go ten years or more. It costs a good amount of money for ground crews to operate the probes and space network capacity. Eventually you want the people to move on to the next probe, w

  • Only one *Earth* year (Score:5, Informative)

    by saddino ( 183491 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @02:55PM (#11247308)
    But given that it's on Mars (686.98 Earth days to complete one solar revolution), its actual Martian anniversary will come November 19th, 2005.
    • Given that it's lasted this long and is in almost perfect working order I see no reason why we won't be celebrating a martian one year anniversary in November.

      The viking landers each lasted well over 1,000 days (but ran on nuclear power).

    • Re:Only one *Earth* year (Score:5, Funny)

      by dj245 ( 732906 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @03:01PM (#11247379)
      But given that it's on Mars (686.98 Earth days to complete one solar revolution), its actual Martian anniversary will come November 19th, 2005.

      Its now a child of both planets, and just like the child of divorced parents, it has to celebrate all the holidays everywhere.

      • Does that mean they get twice as many Christmas presents?

        Or is the non-custodial planet going to be spoiling the rovers rotten while poor poor Mars complains that Earth doesn't send enough support money to pay for Christmas?

  • slashnot (Score:3, Informative)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @02:58PM (#11247350) Homepage Journal
    It now seems obvious that Slashdot "authors" (story submission moderators) don't read Slashdot. Maybe they're on to something...
  • One thought that has crossed my mind- Did NASA build the rovers knowing that they would last much longer than three months, and claim the three month life span to save face in case something went wrong? I know that we have the mysterious cleaning element on Oppertunity, but Spirit is holding up pretty well on it's own, too.
    • It would only make sense. Imagine the embarrassment if they said they had a life of one year but died after nine months. Even given the harsh conditions, it's unimaginable that something that expensive and specialized could only last three months. An R/C car with solar panel and big batteries could probably do better! ;)

    • Everything to do with space is grossly overengineered. You need a system that does something important, so you put in three. You need it to survive for 3 months, so you build it for 12. There are so many unknowns, and such a high price of failure, that anything less than a massive margin for error is silly.

  • Well done USA (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bushboy ( 112290 ) <lttc@lefthandedmonkeys.org> on Monday January 03, 2005 @03:09PM (#11247460) Homepage
    This is something that the USA just does so much better than anything else - well done guys.

  • 9 months over your estimate? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Valar ( 167606 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @03:17PM (#11247533)
    Someone must be held accountable! In order to maintain the proud, bureaucratic tradition of post-apollo NASA we must fire the engineers responsible. Do you have any idea how many man hours have been wasted trying to operate a rover that should have been dead months ago?
  • Does it worry anyone that the guys at NASA grossly miscalculated the life of the bot? Was this done to save face if it screwed up, because this margin of error, and if you look at it as it is, it's pretty embarrassing. I mean great that its still going, but what pencil pusher calculated the battery/recharge time or batt life and came to the conclusion that it will probably last 3 months?

  • Beats the shit out of my Mitsubishi Galant (Score:5, Funny)

    by gelfling ( 6534 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @03:29PM (#11247641) Homepage Journal
    In terms of years operating and miles run. Whatever these people did, we need to bottle it, pronto.
  • The Spirit Rover marks its one year aniversary ... It has traversed more than 2 miles of Martian landscape and sent back thousands of pictures and reams of data.

    Two miles in only a year? Wow, at this rate it'll only take a few hundred thousand years to explore all of the Martian surface! Yay rovers!

    It's hard to take the "we don't need to send humans to Mars, we can explore with rovers" crowd seriously when our best and brightest rover covers only two miles of ground in an entire year.
    • It's hard to take the "we don't need to send humans to Mars, we can explore with rovers" crowd seriously when our best and brightest rover covers only two miles of ground in an entire year.

      Don't be a dumbass, grasshopper.

      The first flight of the Wright brothers (Orville And Redenbacher, according to Cartman) was less than the wingspan of a modern airliner.

      Also remember that the rovers were not doing the Baja rally. They stopped a lot to do actual science and exploration.

  • Are either of these intrepid little bots in an area even remotely near Odyssey or Beagle? It'd be kinda nice to see what happened to them.

  • Actually only 1/2 year (Score:3, Insightful)

    by scharkalvin ( 72228 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @03:52PM (#11247871) Homepage
    Well the rovers have been on Mars for one EARTH year, but not quite yet 1/2 a MARTIAN year. Mars DOES have seasons, so if the rovers landed in the summer, it's now winter there. If they make it a full Martian year, that would really be something!

  • Overengineered or Lucky (Score:4, Interesting)

    by RosenSama ( 836736 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @04:14PM (#11248041)
    So when the specs say 3 months and it lasts 1 year, are we just getting lucky on MTBF? Is it that anything designed to reliably travel all the way to Mars and then run unmaintained for 3 months has just got a good chance of quadrupling the design lifetime? Or are we wasting money and resources overengineering things way past spec because we had the budget to do so?
    • Most design documents for space projects say that increased funding simply decreases the risk, because you can buy more of each part and test more to destruction to see the exact limits of your hardware. I believe the rock abrasion tool was tested to destruction dozens of times by honeywell before the current ones were put on the rovers pre-launch, and so they have a very good idea of exactly what it can do. It also means that there's less risk of pushing the hardware too far and breaking something. They
  • This article marks its one day aniversary after an expected lifetime of just 3 hours. In honor of its important anniversary and the shortness of notice in the Slashdot editors' minds, here's [slashdot.org] the original link for this blast from the past!

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