Mars Rover Ready for Risky Descent into Crater 156
Riding with Robots writes "After months of scoping out the terrain, the robotic geologist Opportunity is ready to drive down into Victoria Crater on the Meridiani Plains of Mars. Mission managers acknowledge the hardy rover may never come back out, but say they think the potential for discovery is worth it. 'The rover has operated more than 12 times longer than its originally intended 90 days. The scientific allure is the chance to examine and investigate the compositions and textures of exposed materials in the crater's depths for clues about ancient, wet environments. As the rover travels farther down the slope, it will be able to examine increasingly older rocks in the exposed walls of the crater. '"
It will make it! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:It will make it! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It will make it! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It will make it! (Score:4, Interesting)
This mission will end in Victoria crater, regardless of how long the rover lasts. The only reason to leave is to test the engineering capabilities of an aging rover to climb back out again.
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~wolf
It's not coming back out. (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:It's not coming back out. (Score:4, Funny)
Red columns of dust, rising up through the air
Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light
My wheels grew heavy and my camera grew dim
I had to stop for the night
(etc.)
Re:It's not coming back out. (Score:4, Funny)
NASA should have added a Confederate flag and a 01 decal. They'd have been able to get out of anywhere.
For all of NASA's problems (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:For all of NASA's problems (Score:5, Funny)
If they had said the rovers would last 20 years upfront, they never would have gotten funding for it.
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Under Promise and Underperform.
The flip side of this is that we have to wonder if there is a downside to the NASA engineers under promising? Is it possible that if they gave a more realistic estimate, better plans for research could have been developed?
Regardless, I say good job NASA!
Re:For all of NASA's problems (Score:5, Insightful)
It's when you say "build us that rover, but after three months it'll have to run on no power" that things get ugly. The solar panels were supposed to get clogged up with dust, and someone really did think it'd go on for many years instead of months they were damn silent about it. It's like thinking you're building a laptop with a battery, only to find out you've got line power. That would throw your estimated operating time off by several orders of magnitude too.
While the idea they said three months to get the funding is entertaining, there's really nothing to suggest that was actually the case. They're scientists doing an experiment, thought they had a limiting factor which was wrong. Now we know that if we go to Mars, we can build solar panels that won't clog and will be a pretty much permanent power source which changes everything. Maybe someone hoped, dreamed or wished for it but I doubt many if any knew and said "hey, let's go wih three months anyway".
Re:For all of NASA's problems (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps a trip into a crater is not the best way to stay in the cleansing winds....
Misdue Credit (Score:2)
I've heard they investigated that possibility but concluded it was not worth the cost. For one, there was no way to test them on real dust to make sure they don't make the problem worse. Second, Many other parts were also limited to 90 days, and in fact somes wheels, joints, and grinding teeth *are* worn out. They just happened to be able to work
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Could they have gathered the materials to make a 3rd rover ?
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Not quite. 'Regular cars' need special air filters, and need them cleaned regularly even then. The US Army has lots of trouble keeping their trucks and tanks going in Iraq.
Sand is abrasive, and the smaller particles get everywhere. The problem is compounded by the temperature s
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You gotta love the creative genius of designing a mission that lasts 20 years and claiming that it will only last 90 days...
If they had said the rovers would last 20 years upfront, they never would have gotten funding for it.
Actually, it's only lasted this long because the little green men come out and fix it when noone's looking.Got more than their money's worth (Score:2)
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John Callas Vid (Score:5, Informative)
JPL produced Video of Project Manager John Callas discussing the entry.
sandy dunes and icy crater (Score:5, Informative)
Old Cars Die Hard (Score:1, Offtopic)
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Not terribly surprising, but... (Score:2)
Looks like Boeing engineers (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/ 27/1723251/ [slashdot.org] sidenote, can someone point out the syntax to do this properly?) could learn a lot from NASA.
Just wondering (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh.. can I play too? (Score:3, Insightful)
Or.. how many Mars rovers could we make if we spent the national health care budget on making them?
As cool as the Mars rovers are, they had enough trouble getting money for a 90 day project, let alone a freakin' armada. To the people who control the bucks, this is just boring geek stuff. At least the shuttle gives them some national heroes to say they support.
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How many of these probes could we have launched if we spent money making a cheap launch system instead of ICBMs?
You're talking about shifting one from one part of government to a totally different part of government. I'm talking about using money in the SAME BUDGET for different stuff. If you want to use a military analogy, it's do we get more bang for the buck from cruise missiles or more aircraft carriers?
As cool as the Mars rovers are, they had enough trouble getting money for a 90 day project, le
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If NASA was to spend 90% of its budget on unmanned space exploration and 10% on manned space exploration, there would be no astronauts. They wouldn't have enough money for them. Without astronauts, they wouldn't attract as big a budget, because that's what gets the bucks. You're talking as if NASA's budget is mandated somewhere and can never fluxuate. It's not. They have to justify every dollar and Mars rovers just don't cut it.
Re:Oh.. can I play too? (Score:4, Insightful)
They wouldn't have enough money for them. Without astronauts, they wouldn't attract as big a budget, because that's what gets the bucks.
Hmm. I agree and disagree. On the one hand, certainly astronauts help sell NASA to the public, which probably helps keep NASA in the budgetary eye. On the other hand, one of the reasons NASA is so f***ed up is because they are mandated to spend money on various projects in various politician's districts, which is what they truly care about (mmm, love that pork).
So I would say that as long as the sweet, sweet money was being spread around, the politicians would be happy. And if we truly had 1,000 probes constantly sending back neat-o images and data, I bet the sheer volume of discovery would actually exceed the romance of humans in space.
But I admit the point is arguable.
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When is the last time the manned space actually really made you feel inspired? For me, it was the Hubble repair mission. Which says a lot: the last time NASA's manned program made me feel excited was when people were repairing a robot.
And the fact that we're discussing the Mars rovers instead of astronauts says volumes. The only time the manned program generates any press these days is when a shuttle blows up, the spac
Re:Oh.. can I play too? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think people have been more impressed with the Hubble pictures more than anything else from NASA these days. I agree that if they would have blanketed the solar system with probes there would have been a lot more to show in the way of pictures and data and would have gained much more public interest.
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The only time I see pictures of space on tv is when they're talking about out of body experiences.
It pisses me off. I can only imagine how much it pisses off the astronomers.
Re:Oh.. can I play too? (Score:4, Informative)
You really shouldn't put a challenge like this on Slashdot. Wrong audience.
Robert Crippen and John Young - flew the first space shuttle flight, though I believe John Young also flew on both Apollo and Gemini, not sure about Crippen.
Sally Ride - first American woman in space.
Judy Resnick - Hometown (Akron, Ohio) woman killed on Challenger.
Crista McAuliffe - New Hampshire schoolteacher also killed on Challenger.
Shannon Lucid - Spent a looooong time on either Mir or ISS.
"Pinky" Nelson - Prominent role in fixing a satellite, I believe the Solar Max.
Then without knowing the names, we have the Hawaiian astronaut who died on Challenger, and had an Enterprise-D (fictional) shuttle (Okuzu?) named after him. There's also diaper-woman who recently made the news.
I know it's not a very long list, but you did say, "one".
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But ever since the Atlas we've gone beyond the needs for ICBMs.
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I think the general idea, as discussed in documents like this one [dunnspace.com], is that the primary design goal with ICBMs was maximizing the ratio between payload weight and rocket weight/size. This is great for ICBMs, where you want to cram missiles into tiny places, but not so good for space launches, where you should ideally be maximizing the payload/cost ratio.
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None.
The whole "let's put a man on the moon thing"? Yeah, that was just a cover so that a lot of engineers could have free reign to design nuclear warhead delivery systems before the Russians did. For the strategist that were actually controlling the purse strings, the "One giant leap for mankind" was really "One small step for a man, now can we get back to work before the commies kill us all."
W
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The race to put a man on the moon was all about national pride.. countries that were undecided whether they should become communist or not were watching the race and if the US didn't win, they'd go with communism. Well, that's the theory anyway.
Oh jeez.. (Score:5, Funny)
Oh jeez... investigating and exploring the depths of ancient, wet environments?... This sounds like some kind of MILF joke gone wrong... *cringes*
I'd hit it (Score:4, Funny)
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How long would it take? (Score:3, Interesting)
I ask, because I've seen a lot of planning going on in terms of living on Mars, but I can't help wonder, "Why all this planning and scheming, when we haven't even had concrete, indisputable evidence that Mars can sustain life, much less had someone actually get there?"
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Re:How long would it take? (Score:5, Funny)
Geeks have enough issues with social acceptance to begin with. We don't need your help.
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It's actually pretty hard to debunk these claims without ridiculing them, because they are so poorly informed. You want "serious debunking"? Okay, I'll try.
Just as an example, the article about the "blueberries" doesn't make any sense, because it is founded on the mistaken impression that geologists think concretions form as isolated
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Since the Rover, which has a lot of very sensitive electronics, doesn't show any signs of failing, I'd say that this seems unlikely.
Role of individuals' risk in decisionmaking (Score:2)
People involved in high-risk ventures of this sort do so completely voluntarily. When an individual is willing to risk their life for an accomplishment -- be it scaling a mountain or conducting research in a hazardous environment -- what right do the rest of us have to tell them that this is morally wrong? The m
Rover life... (Score:3, Insightful)
So, it's a pre-DRM rover, then? It certainly wasn't built by HP's printer division.
Re:Rover life... (Score:4, Insightful)
I've hit them with hammers, dropped them, kicked them, used them as doorstops, and they don't quit printing. Just keep them happy with toner and paper.
We believe we killed one once. It was locked in the back of our campus transport vehicle, and some kids with nothing better to do stole it, torched it and left it on railroad tracks to get hit.
When we got the smoldering wreckage back, the LJII was in the middle of what used to be the cargo cab. It was black.
If you dropped it on a piece of paper, you'd be hard pressed to prove that it wasn't still putting toner on the page.
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I still see the occasional HP LJ III.
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Or a LaserJet 4. My company just took one out of service that had printed 1.5 million pages. The only reason we even got rid of it was the printing speed.
A moment of reflection... (Score:5, Insightful)
Reading story after story about the various space exploration projects and we can get a little desensitized to the pure 'awesomeness' of the kinds of things our space exploration agencies are doing. So a moment to just consider this achievement is warrented I think.
How great would it be to have a go at driving that thing?
Re:A moment of reflection... (Score:4, Interesting)
Voyager 2 weekly reports (from 1995 to 2007, not sure where the 1977 to 1995 ones are) available:
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/weekly-report
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That's even more cool.
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our ability to OBSERVE the mac
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the machine still moves 4 minutes later, not at the exact moment we issue the command even though according to your logic the machine being 4 minutes in the future would mean it would move at the exact moment the engineers issued the command.
I don't know who's logic you're using, but it certainly aint mine.
our ability to OBSERVE the machine is delayed by 4 minutes, this however does mean it's 4 minutes ahead in time.
hehe.. you say that like it is two different things. It isn't. Something that is 4 light minutes away is exactly the same as something that is 4 minutes into the future, or, I suppose 4 minutes into the past. People just have different concepts because we're not used to thinking about relativistically significant distances.
When you observe the rovers, you're looking into the past. When you signal them, you're communicating into the futu
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not possible, since the future does not exist. the reason being, that the moment you think or do something it moves from the present to the past at the speed of light. therefore the present only exists as a single point in time moving forward at 299 792 458 m/s and leaving everything in the past. At no point does anything spend anytime in the future tense.
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Your thinking is outdated.
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I'd be curious to learn where you got the misconception of "4 minutes on average".
It's nonsense, of course.
The minimum distange between the earth and mars is on average ~78 million km (a shade more or less per orbit but no more than a percent or so different). That's your 4(point three) minutes right there. Most of the time, mars is farther away from us, yielding an average that is considerably longer than 4 minutes.
The maximum distance (when mars is behind the sun as seen from us) is about ~378 milli
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If it was a game, the latency would be around 600000. That's some bad lag.
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I remember hearing that the scientists driving the rover had to live on martian time. Since the rovers were solar powered they could only go during the martian daytime, which doesn't always coincide with the earth daytime (I believe it's a few hours longer, but I may be wrong). The result was scientists who were sometimes wide awake and working at 4AM, but sleeping at 2PM. They had to be careful to stay indoors if they knew it was dark outside,
Good for rover (Score:5, Funny)
Love her or hate her,
Waited for someone to come.
Before it's all over,
Rover comes over,
And crawls right into her bum.
Expected to die before Vista release (Score:1, Troll)
How I read it... (Score:1)
My rover will most probably not operate more than 12 times longer than its originally intended though...
Opportunity. (Score:2)
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Easy places for daily pictures and news (Score:2)
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No More Solar Panels! (Score:1)
The RTG powered Cassini probe is doing a bang up job orbiting Saturn, and future Martian robots should, too. Enough mamby-pamby exploration with under powered exploration u
The next rover will have that (Score:2)
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Cassini doesn't have to lug around the weight of an RTG on the surface of a planet.
russian lunar rovers had nuke batteries (Score:2)
Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
So if it survives to crawl back out again... (Score:3, Insightful)
R.O.V.E.R. (Score:2)
Pants. (Score:2)
the solar panels won't get enough light (Score:2)
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We use our experience on Earth to form a hypothesis about similar features on another planet.
Every week that goes by, our probes and telescopes bring more unexpected observations. Our theories of the universe are constantly changing. Objects that we thought were completely different increasingly appear to have similar characteristics.
We form a hypothesis but we can't support or deny it unt
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Wow. You are really really fixated on electricity. Electricity and water have totally different signatures. I would be interested to hear a rational explanatio
Impacts... (Score:1, Informative)
comet [wikipedia.org] that hit Jupiter. A little closer to home, the moon [nasa.gov] is regularly hit by objects. So yes there is a reasonable basis for thinking that planets get hit by hard objects.
I submit that the mars meteorite [wikipedia.org] would probably be a better line of argument to use for your hypothesis.
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I'm not alleging that collisions do not occur. I'm alleging that we do not understand what happens when collisions occur between two solid bodies. The Deep Impact Mission demonstrated *two* flashes of light. Why is that? It's a *very* important question.
Why do craters sometimes appear to be the result of rilles, and rilles sometimes appear to be actually chains of craters? These are supposed to be two *completely* diff
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Why do many asteroid craters have flat bottoms? I understand that there are theories regarding this (melted bottoms), but have we observed flat bottomed craters from our own nuclear explosion tests? No, I don't think so ...
Why do many craters have central peaks? Oftentimes, if not always, the stratigraphy of the land surrounding the crater is preserved within these central peaks. Isn't that a bit unusual?
'
You don't really need to set off a nuclear bomb to simulate a meteor impact. Scale experiments using materials that behave like metallic or chondritic meteors and planetary surfaces can and have been used to observe patterns in crater formation. Computer modeling is also no doubt useful.
As for specifics . . .
You said yourself one way that a flat-bottomed crater can form. The conversion of kinetic energy to thermal energy on impact could melt the planetary or meteor surface, causing material to
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Actually, that is not true. I read about Electric Universe "theory" quite some time ago when you had brought it up before. It sounds very interesting, however, there was not much science there. It is all "scientists are wrong because of..."
EU would be much more interesting if it was more than idle speculation. As it is, I lump it in with Intelligent Design and other crackp
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strike
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strike
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OK smart guy, let's work this out from an engineering point of view - after all, the engineers have to build the things.
You: I want to build a Mars probe, looking for things we don't understand and don't expect.
Engineer: What kind of sensor platform do you want? Visible light? UV? IR? Radio? Gravitational waves? Do you want to pick stuff up and look at
Re:These missions seem pre-scripted (Score:4, Interesting)
The landed weight is 348 kg. It's mission is not to "explore strange new worlds and go boldly where no man has gone before..." it is [nasa.gov]:
Very limited, very specific. Hopefully one of the first Mars landers, not the last. It took some five years (IIRC) to go from that paragraph to the actual spacecraft. During that time there were innumerable meetings / arguments / pointed emails about what scientific packages would fly on the landers. Some of those decisions were likely pretty prosaic - It might simply have been that they actually had some or all of the technology in a package that could be built and tested in the time frame and budget allotted.
You somehow manage to find some deep, dark defects in the soul of NASA in a pretty mundane engineering exercise.
You should get out more often.
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