Mars Rovers Threatened By Dust Storms 145
mrcgran writes "Space.com is reporting a new potentially deadly weather condition threatening the Mars rovers: 'The first and largest dusty squall has reduced direct sunlight to Mars' surface by nearly 99 percent, an unprecedented threat for the solar-powered rovers. If the storm keeps up and thickens with even more dust, officials fear the rovers' batteries may empty and silence the robotic explorers forever. "This thing has been breaking records the past few days. The sun is 100 times fainter than normal. We're hoping for a big break in the storm soon, but that's just a hope." '"
Really? (Score:1, Interesting)
that if the batteries completely drain they're lost forever, even if they later recharge again (when the storm has moved on).
Have NASA never heard of boot loaders and non-volatile memory?
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
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Not such a worry (Score:4, Informative)
--
Rent solar power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
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Maybe like Huey or Dewie from Silent Running, Spirit will seek out poor old Louie in the retirement cave and look after him.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Informative)
So, its not that the battery won't come alive again later. Its that the cold will do serious damage to the electronics on board. Without power, there's no way to keep them warm. Nights on mars go well below -25C (in the winter, the southern hemisphere can get as cold as -120C).
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From TFA:
So, its not that the battery won't come alive again later. Its that the cold will do serious damage to the electronics on board. Without power, there's no way to keep them warm. Nights on mars go well below -25C (in the winter, the southern hemisphere can get as cold as -120C).
They could have consulted some overclockers. Those guys push -75C left and right and their components don't break.
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-nB
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure they could have guaranteed that kind of functionality inside of there original 90 day design lifetime. Here we are 3 years later and they're not sure.
I think the designers deserve some credit. If you feel you can do it better I'm sure NASA would appreciate your resume.
RTFA (Score:4, Informative)
From TFA:
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I'm greatly looking forward to seeing your solution for keeping vital components at acceptable temperatures without any power.
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I heard decomposing bull... err... cow manure can keep you warm without much power.
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The rovers will boot but wait for someone to hook up a usb keyboard and press enter.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Funny)
The lameness filter lacks humor.
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It's probably wise not to second-guess engineers who built something that lasted more than ten times longer than anyone expected.
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It's called derating. I'm sure the Mars rovers were designed to last far, far longer than 90 days. They just set the "success" threshold very low given all the unknowns of the trip.
--JoeRe:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
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Might I suggest that the engineers may have insisted very thoroughly to others that they were designing for 90 days, but really they were designing for much longer. Might I suggest this essay: Exaggerate with Extreme Prejudice. [spatula-city.org]
--JoeRe: (Score:2)
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(2) if there is sand on the solar panels, you can't get power to wipe the sand off
(3) the rovers were designed to last 90 days. they have lasted several years.
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--
For some reason there ain't no method to wipe the sand off, apparently that's one reason why they thought they would last only 3 months.
Why no wiper is beyond me though.
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The problem is that the dust on Mars has an electrostatic charge. Wipers would just swish the dust around and scratch the solar cells, but wouldn't be able to remove the dust.
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It'd be sad to see them go offline but they've served their purpose more than once over. In reality it's almost 14 times the intended lifespan.
I'd call that a true engineering success story.
I'm a geek and lack empathy (Score:5, Funny)
Then the storm came for Kingston upon Hull, but I live on a hill on the other side of England and it did not worry me.
Then the storm came for the Mars Rovers, and I was really quite worried about them. What a relief to know that I'm not sociopathic.
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I'm guessing feeling empathy for robots does not help in proving you're not a sociopath. In fact, thinking that having feelings for robots helps may even count against you. Nurse!
Your irony bypass - did it hurt? (Score:2)
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I'M JOKING!
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Great, now we need a lve mars concert (Score:4, Funny)
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Mars Rovers Threatened by Dust Storms (Score:2)
Proud of the rovers and the people behind them (Score:5, Insightful)
To these talented and hard-working engineers, technicians and researchers (and even the JPL PHBs), I salute you.
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Projected lifespan/duration (estimated): 90 days
Actual: 3 years AND COUNTING!!
That is quite the feat, and you guys deserve to frame THAT and hang it on a wall. Well done!
(Also, a poster of a sandstorm hanging nearby, with a couple of darts thrown at it =)
Skillfully MANAGED EXPECTATIONS (Score:2)
NASA has managed the nation's (and the world's) expectations spectacularly. Have they said, we expect these machines to be function for a year, we would've been complaining, after one of the wheels died on one of them.
But by starting with the lowest bearable duration (90 days), and by continuing to remind us of it, they collect nothing but praise. Nobody is asking, why was the "designed for period" so low? — b
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The problem is that they expected the solar panels to fail due to excessive dust collection, blocking the light, and they had found no eco
Lunokhods roved on the moon for more than 90 days (Score:4, Informative)
Lunokhod-2 [wikipedia.org] lasted for four months and explored 37 km in 1973.
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Quite right too (Score:2)
The really depressing thing is the bar experts already posting on this topic as to how, if only they were in charge of the program, they would have had backup systems for this and harder environmental standards for that, as
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Agreed, but the shame of it is that Oppotunity was just about to enter into Victoria Crater, five times larger than any previous (deep) crater its invesitigated. Victoria is possibly one of the most important geological features yet encountered on Mars. Bigger craters generally mean layers from further in the past. The Opportunity team had just been ha
Circadas (Score:1)
TODO list for the next mars rover: (Score:2)
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1. Check logic
2. Check you're not logged in
Idiocy in action (Score:3, Informative)
1) The wind from the storm has (once again) actually CLEARED the panels of dust.
2) The problem is that the storm is cutting out the sunlight used to charge the rovers. what would your "wipers" do, reach into the upper atmosphere and clear it out? Or perhaps they should have added an arm to hold a flashlight pointed at the solar panels. Genius!
Theo Jansen's Wind-bots (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/350/ [ecogeek.org]
( Saw them on digg:
http://digg.com/gadgets/Amazing_wind_powered_robo
)
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Soldering is Bullshit (Score:1, Interesting)
How do you think monitoring equipment at the poles works for months on end at -40C to -60C?
I'll tell you one thing; it doesn't work by heating the damn enclosure
This and the dumb "90 days expected lifetime" of the original mission is caused by the continual dumbing-down of NASA and other vital research institutions by civilian academics who don't have the hardcore aerospace/mi
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it owes you nothing (Score:4, Informative)
Size is also important. Wire wrap boxes are usually very large by comparison with a soldered PCB, especially where there are dense electronics. These rovers probably have several surface mount ICs on them, and you can't wire wrap that.
Also, correct me if I'm wrong here, but the longer the connecting traces/wires are, the more likely they are to be hit by EMI etc? So longer runs of wire, in addition to adding weight and bulk, could also invite unwanted and potentially damaging inducted power.
It appears they made all the right choices with the amount of information they had to go on and the design goals they had to meet. I can't think of any other possible way to explain the level of their success as discussed by numerous previous posts.
iirc, the rovers were scheduled for three months, and that's before ANY winters. The thing was designed to work for less than 1/2 yr, in the summer, but they engineered it with the "possibility" of surviving a winter or two. How may winters have they made it through so far? If it finally breaks, think of it like your car lasting you 40 years before you have to replace it. It owes you nothing, be happy for what you got, it's more than you deserved.
Re:Soldering is Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
But there are a host of other issues. What about glassification temperatures? What about various polymers needed?
There are Radioactive Heating Units (RHUs) to keep the Warm Electronics Box, er, Warm, but there are things on the rovers that aren't in the WEB (wheels, pan cam mast, Xband antenna gimbal) that aren't RHU compatible.
Ultimately, it comes down to cost. How much is Congress willing to spend? Are they willing to 10 billion instead of 1 billion to send a couple rovers to mars? At some point, someone has to say, here's our design life, here's our mission environmental requirements (typical flight hardware would be -55 to +65C), and design accordingly. It's a judgement call, and the folks making that call DO have experience from the 60s and 70s (sometimes to their detriment.. it's hard to get new technology inserted)
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This and the dumb "90 days expected lifetime" of the original mission is caused by the continual dumbing-down of NASA and other vital research institutions by civilian academics who don't have the hardcore aerospace/military experience of the deep-space engineers of the 60/70's.
In other words you have no idea how much work something like this takes do you?
90 days was the minimum they needed it to survive to provide enough science to justify the cost. Look at the failures of NASA missions throughout the decades due to the simple harshness of space to see why they didn't want to commit to anything more than necessary.
This thing is first of all orders of magnitude more complex in both design, goals and components than what was done in the 70s and has a smaller budget. Let's see what
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One thing to keep in mind is that on Mars where the rovers are, the tempurature swings from say 25c to -120c. It is the *swings* back and forth that are the biggest risk to electronics, not the cold itself. Thus, Earth pole solutions may not apply. Tempurate cycling (swings) is what cracks rocks.
Re:No, wirewrap is Bullshit (Score:3, Interesting)
When dip IC's ruled the roost wirewrap was king. Today, surface mount ic's are king
and pc boards rule.
Also as circuit speeds went up, wirewrap stopped working. With clock speeds under 5 mhz, the long leads of wire wrapped construction with signals running parallel worked well enough. With today's 100mhz+ clocks wirewrap would have fatal crosstalk. Back in the 80's a company I worked for tried to wirewrap a cpu prototyp
good run (Score:3, Insightful)
"Deadly" (Score:2)
"Deathly" (Score:2)
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Must be the native Martians at work (Score:2)
Fry: Hm.
Zapp:
Leela: What about the Great Stone Ass of Mars?
Zapp: Well, yeah, but it's way over on the other side of the planet.
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$5 says... (Score:1, Funny)
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You have talking money? That's pretty cool.
Rovers still functioning normal !? (Score:4, Informative)
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My understanding is that they are just sitting in place, monitoring the weather. If they move around too much, then they may not have enough power to heat the internals during the cold desert nights, risking electronics cracking due to thermal cycling (extreme tempurates). Thus, the less they do at day, the more power they have left at night for heating.
McKay is optimistic the rovers will survive (Score:2)
Suspicious timing. (Score:3, Funny)
Why not nuclear and/or wind power? (Score:2, Interesting)
Also not knowing how much wind is actually whipping up the frothy dust, how big would a set of cups or blades on the ends of a stick need to be to generate power for the same purpose (if not nuclear). Granted one couldn't always count on there being
Re:Why not nuclear and/or wind power? (Score:4, Informative)
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That's not a reactor --- that's an RTG, which is an entirely different kind of beast. RTGs are purely passive devices, just small lumps of plutonium that get warm and generate electricity via thermocouples. They're physically small, cheap, low-powered, simple, reliable, incredibly tough, and are ideal for this kind of mission. Fission reactors are none of the above.
RTGs are the devices t
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I've heard they've been rethinking that. Due to the success of the current rovers, the next rover may be hybrid solar and nuclear. Protesters tend to complain a lot about nuclear cells being launched because a launch failure could contaminate residential areas. Thus, there is some pressure to switch to s
Luck (Score:4, Insightful)
The current rover design can't be used when investigating Mars outside equatorial regions, either.
It's been a great run for both rovers, and it's great to see them provide atmospheric data on opacity of the atmosphere (tau) -- measuring that which may ultimately kill them.
The Matrix had another power source... (Score:1)
Maybe NASA should watch "The Matrix"...
As Morpheus explains to Neo, there was a catastrophic war between the humans and the machines, after the humans had produced AI, a sentient robot that spawned a race of its own. It isn't known now who started the war, but it did follow a long period of machine exploitation by humans. What is known is that it was the humans who "scorched the sky", blocking out the sun's rays, in an attempt at machine genocide--since the machines needed solar power to survive. In respo
RTG's? (Score:1)
Correct me if I'm wrong... (Score:1)
A couple weeks ago, there was an article about how they were trying to drive the rover into a crater that they thought it wouldn't be able to get out of. If they haven't changed their minds, this seems to be along the lines of what NASA wants.
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Batteries aren't a source of power, they just store it. Looks like they need x watts else the rovers will die. If the batteries can hold y watt-hours, then the rover will die after y/x hours. Increase y and you increase y/x, but you don't make it go away
Re:Wind turbines? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Does the dust fly by itself ?
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Smart-arse.
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Whatever you may think now I'm pretty sure the problem isn't "bad design". At this point "good design" is rather apparent.
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1. How much is your "other power source" going to weigh?
2. How much is your "other power source" going to cost?
3. Does your "other" power source comply with international environmental/space regulations?
4. How many failure modes does your "other" power source have?
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It seems that they already had designed for several days of reserve power (a.k.a survival mode). The dust event threatens to exceed that amount, which could spell doom for the rovers. It is in no way forgone that it WILL exceed that amount, or even that the rovers will fail to restart after the event, however the latter is likely to follow if the former occurs.
If your plan makes the
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--
Solar power on the go: Get a free move: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html [blogspot.com]
You posted in the wrong thread! (Score:2, Funny)
Tinfoil hats and all.
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Considering the fact that the rovers have far outlived their design life - wipers don't seem to be essential, do they?
Wipers (and the motor to run them) add mass, the motor requires energy, circuitry, etc. Just another component that can fail. And a non essential one at that, apparently.