Opportunity Rover Reaches Martian Day 4,000 of Its 90-Day Mission 136
An anonymous reader writes: Let's take a moment to appreciate the incredible engineering, scientific, and planning skill that went into the construction and deployment of the Opportunity rover. It landed on Mars with the goal of surviving 90 sols (Martian days), and it has just logged its 4,000th sol of harvesting valuable data and sending it back to us. The Planetary Society blog has posted a detailed update on Opportunity's status, and its team's plans for the future. The rover's hardware, though incredibly resilient, is wearing down. They reformatted its flash drive to block off a corrupted sector, and that solved some software problems that had cropped up. They're currently trying to figure out why the rover unexpectedly rebooted itself. Those events are incredibly dangerous to the rover's survival, so their highest priority right now is diagnosing that issue.
Fortunately, weather on Mars is good where the rover is, and it's still able to harvest upwards of 500 Watt-hours of energy from its solar panels. Opportunity recently completed a marathon on Mars and took an impressive picture of the Spirit of St. Louis crater, and the rover will soon be on its way to enormous clay deposits that could provide valuable information about where we can look for water when we eventually put people on Mars. As always, you can look through Opportunity's images at the official website.
Fortunately, weather on Mars is good where the rover is, and it's still able to harvest upwards of 500 Watt-hours of energy from its solar panels. Opportunity recently completed a marathon on Mars and took an impressive picture of the Spirit of St. Louis crater, and the rover will soon be on its way to enormous clay deposits that could provide valuable information about where we can look for water when we eventually put people on Mars. As always, you can look through Opportunity's images at the official website.
Oblig xkcd (Score:5, Funny)
https://xkcd.com/1504/
Also appropriate: https://www.xkcd.com/695/
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Dear mods. How the HELL is the older one (695) funny?!? It's right up there with Mufasa!
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I concur. My partner wept when I had her read it. She tears up at just the mention of it. I would bet money that she would donate $100 for the mission to bring back the damn robot and then pay for the travel required to welcome it back to Earth in person.
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If everyone in the world donated $100, there still wouldn't be enough money to retrieve it.
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You think that $700 billion dollars wouldn't be enough to return Spirit from Mars? You're completely out of your mind.
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Honestly...probably not. We have the capability to put drop a tiny payload on Mars. Now figure out how to drop a payload with almost the size of the original launcher on mars in a controlled descent. It also has to land perfectly within close range of the rover, be able to re-launch, and probably have to retreive/compartmentalize the rover in order to not damage it during landing. Might as well just do a manned mission to Mars.
We can do good technology when we have the will (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's proof that we are capable of great civilian technology achievements when we have the will and the desire to invest in science and engineering instead of yet another boondoggle.
Re:We can do good technology when we have the will (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes indeed. Opportunity has to stand as one of NASA's greatest post-Apollo accomplishments.
Re:We can do good technology when we have the will (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes indeed. Opportunity has to stand as one of NASA's greatest post-Apollo accomplishments.
... and at a small fraction of the cost of the F-35 that still isn't certified fit for it's purpose.
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Opportunity is very cool and very much outlived its expectations. I would put the Hubble telescope above it in post-Apollo accomplishments just based on the importance of the data obtained from Hubble vs. Opportunity.
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I hope I live long enough to see a manned mission to Mars that finds Opportunity and creates an appropriate monument to the rover and its journey.
Re:We can do good technology when we have the will (Score:4, Funny)
Yes indeed. Opportunity has to stand as one of NASA's greatest post-Apollo accomplishments.
*looks at parent's nick*
Oh, of course you'd say that.
You're probably Opportunity itself posting here.
I'm sure Slashdot user MightyHubble [slashdot.org] would have something to say about that.
--
But in seriousness, I agree with you.
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I'm still waiting to hear how K'Breel spins this.
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I'd rate landing on Mars and then driving about for 10 years to be a higher achievement than landing on the Moon and staying for a few hours.
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Machinery doesn't need life support. Thats the challenge. Try operating a machine like Opportunity on a planet like Venus or Earth for ten years. That would be very difficult.
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Machinery doesn't need life support. Thats the challenge.
Maybe we should send a comatose guy and a woman in an iron lung up there. For the challenge.
Try operating a machine like Opportunity on a planet like Venus or Earth for ten years. That would be very difficult.
And we could eat a bag of pine cones as well.
The /. groupthink is strongly against manned missi (Score:2)
(manned missions)
Still, I have to point out that this amount of research could have been done by a motorized human in half a day. For a rough estimate, look at the path the rover traveled in these 4000 days:
http://planetary.s3.amazonaws.... [amazonaws.com]
Re:The /. groupthink is strongly against manned mi (Score:5, Insightful)
Still, I have to point out that this amount of research could have been done by a motorized human in half a day. For a rough estimate, look at the path the rover traveled in these 4000 days:
And the entire project with two rovers and five extensions has cost $944 million. The SLS program will cost tens of billions to develop and even then a launch would eat over half the budget, before you actually have any crew capsule, lander, habitat, return craft or scientific equipment. If you really did an apples-to-apples comparison on the same budget, you'd realize we're getting a very good bang for the buck.
Re:The /. groupthink is strongly against manned mi (Score:5, Insightful)
That research could have been collected in a day by a human being, sure.. but not before probably dozens of people died. just trying to get there.
We send probes because they are expendable.
Re:The /. groupthink is strongly against manned mi (Score:4, Funny)
By that logic, we could send half of Washington D.C. up there.
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Other than the fact that doing so would likely violate several intra-galactic treaties, that would be an excellent idea.
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So, instead of years of slow science, we'd have a few decades of prep work, spend a trillion dollars, and then do all the science in half a day. Not sure we would have gained anything.
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Except that they can't... at least not the way that they do it naturally. I recall reading somewhere that mammal reproductivity is quite dependent on the earth's gravity, and attempts have a baby outside of that environment would most likely be fatal for the fetus, assuming that the attempt to become pregnant in the first place did not outright fail.
It's a hoax! (Score:5, Funny)
Of course it's lasted more than 90 days. That's because Opportunity never landed on Mars. All the images are created in a secret NASA location in Nevada.
Now if you'll excuse me I have to go monitor the Jade Helm Texas takeover.
Obligatory xkcd (Score:4, Informative)
https://xkcd.com/1504/ [xkcd.com]
He was a lot nicer to Spirit, which had a similarly impressive run:
https://xkcd.com/695/ [xkcd.com]
...eventually put people on mars...my butt (Score:4, Insightful)
yeah, that's probably a good 100 years away, if not 500. Aside from dangers like radiation, nutrition, and other oh-so-subtle big things like gravity -- each of which is likely to kill a human long before they need their first water source -- there are also dangers in the trip itself, like radiation, nutrition, gravity, the vessel, going stir-crazy, and the time itself. Before all of that, there's the money, the interest, and the law. There's the communication delay, the medical equipment that doesn't exist, and the general goodbye-ness of it all. Oh, and then there's the actual "success" part -- ten failures does not a landing make. And finally, and I can't stress this enough we aren't going to mars the day after settling on the moon; and we sure as hell aren't going to mars before settling the moon.
So, figure another twenty years before ten humans live on the moon (the way they do on the space station now). Figure another twenty years before the moon is routinely stable, reliable, and worthwhile. Then figure fifty more years to actually give a damn about mars.
"eventually" appears as the heading on my to-do lists too. There's "now", "today", "tomorrow", "this week", "next week", "this month", "next month", "soon", "later", and "eventually". I think it 25 years I've yet to even start even one task from the "eventually" section.
Technology moves very quickly these days. Humans still don't. How about building a transit system that lets me get from new york to california in under EIGHT HOURS! then you can work on mars.
I'm so light, I can't go on. Oh wait I can. (Score:5, Insightful)
Pretty sure you are going to need a drink long before low gravity messes with you.
Pretty much all other reasons you list as problems could be applied to a move to Wyoming, but people do that all the time.
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wyoming has radiation? communication delays? nothing to see, or to do? No medical equipment?
You're pretty sure about gravity not messing with you? It takes three days to die of thirst. It takes a week to die of thirst given one extra bottle of water from the transport ship. I don't know what that gravity would do to your digestive systems.
But isn't that the point? "Pretty sure" just ain't sure enough.
Oh yeah, and the effects of the gravity can guarantee your death immediately, even if you won't actua
More than you know (Score:3)
wyoming has radiation?
Hell yes! Have you measured background radiation in the rockies?
communication delays?
Ever tried to maintain cell signal on the way to Yellowstone?
nothing to see, or to do?
Once you've seen Frontier Days once...
No medical equipment?
I go up there all the time with no medical equipment.
I don't know what that gravity would do to your digestive systems.
That's why every astronaut has died immediately after return from space with even less gravity...
I have to break character here and say - yo
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How about building a transit system that lets me get from new york to california in under EIGHT HOURS!
We've had that since the 50s...
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Why don't you try it, then tell me how long it takes. Remember, cradle to grave. Door to door. Not take-off to landing. Not plane door. Not airport door. House door to house door. Did you drive to the airport? Did you walk through three miles of airport hallways? Security line? Wait to taxi? Did you get there early so you wouldn't be late? Did you spend extra time packing into smaller luggage?
Right now, this instant, as you read this, if you were to stand up from whereever you are sitting and wa
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I'm not saying we have it now, but in the 50s, all the way up to the 70s, before security theater, it could be trivially done. Up until just a few years ago we could cross the Atlantic in 3 hours. We even had the ability to travel to the moon and back, but in the words of the famous inspector, "Not anymore"
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I'd forgotten about the infinite nuclear energy. That's going to be my new example. Especially because we very much could have infinite nuclear energy, except for about six dozen cultural issues, legal issues, and our all-time-favourite deterant of civilization advancement: perceived property values.
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stand up right now, and be 3'000 miles away within 8 hours. You can't do it. You don't live in the airport. The plane doesn't leave right now. There's a line. There're about three miles of airport hallway. The taxi isn't at your door yet. You haven't packed. You haven't gone through security. You don't have your ticket. The plane is sold out. You live thirty minutes away from the airport. The airplane doesn't take off from the gate. It's also not the next plane to take the runway.
Stop making sh
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I can understand why you say we won't colonize Mars the way we don't colonize Antarctica, but going there? We've already had people travel through the vacuum of space exposed to cosmic rays to land on a barren rock and take off again. The latest estimates is that a Mars round trip will give you about 5% lifetime risk of dying from cancer, it's far from a deadly dose. We've had people living in zero-g for 437 days straight, we have people isolated in Antarctica for several months of solid darkness and cold.
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we have not had people travel through space -- i.e. to the moon or to orbit. No human has gotten up and gone.
What we've had is about thirty thousand humans get up, to send five humans. Much like your arm is attached to your body, those astronauts are attached to the space program, and hence to the ground.
Your hand can move around seemingly freely around your body, but only within the range of your arm. Sending your hand even thirty feet from your body is a much more difficult task.
That's what I'm saying
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How many tries did it take to get to antarctica -- which I think is a really great example. So is everest. Congrats, after many attempts, someone got there. Who's gone back to build a house? Do you want to go build one?
Good point, but certainly with antarctica if there were large quantities of (say) oil available, then you would certainly have people living there for a few months at a time on a shift basis. Although you'd have to be insane to want to live there permanently, like the Mars wannabe colonists signing up for their one way tickets.
Re:...eventually put people on mars...my butt (Score:4, Informative)
How about building a transit system that lets me get from new york to california in under EIGHT HOURS! then you can work on mars.
LAX -> EWR
Flight Time: 4 hours, 47 minutes
Gate To Gate: 5 hours, 14 minutes.
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Sorry pal, but it's illegal to pitch a tent at the gate. Besides, my television won't be very watchable with all of those big terminal windows, and I like my privacy too much given all the people.
So, for us normal humans with a 3'000 square-foot house about 30 minutes away from the terminal:
we pack into small luggage
we call the taxi
we wait for the taxi
we ride the taxi
we get to the airport early, so as to not get there late
we wait in line
we check in
we check our luggage
we walk through about three miles of ai
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So you expect someone to invent something that can travel half the speed of sound as the crow flies that you can just hop in to at a moments notice?
Buy a Lockheed AH-56A, it'll get you 1200 miles with a cruise speed of 225mph.
There's also the V-22 Osprey with a 1000 mile range, a little bit faster at 277mph.
Those two vehicles are about half way there. with in-air refueling, you could probably do it in 12 - 15 hours
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I'm using the cross-country inconvenience to support my argument that mars ain't the next step any time soon. Nothing more.
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You're creating hypothetical situation you think there is no solution to.
You could also own your own runway and a private jet. That would get you to any other airport in the world within 8,000 miles in 10 hours.
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...and you think that means we'll have people living on mars within 50 years?
If we want it; Yes. (Score:2)
With continued Apollo-era funding, we'd have done it in the '80s. Few engineering challenges involved that aren't really just legwork.
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so your answer would be "no", and you agree with me completely. Humans won't be living on mars within the next 50 years, which is consistent with the interest thus-far. Thanks for your support.
Good to hear, (Score:2)
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The only reason why Humans have not been on Mars is that we can't find a really good reason to do it.
Well yes, that is kind of the issue.
People generally mumble something about mining He3 at this point.
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I did not once mention Mars.
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you just listed more than 7 hours. And you're upset with my 8 hours?
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If you meant it couldn't be done in 7 hours, you would have said. Moving the goal posts after the fact is useless at best, cheating at worst. Either way, it lets us know you're an idiot.
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8 hours sounds about the minimum to me, and certainly not 5.
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Sorry if you've never had money or have been in a position with money to pay for that
Thanks for slipping in the essential information that you're rich, it makes all the difference when talking about flight times.
Twat.
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500 years? We didn't have Newtonian physics 500 years ago. Electricity and magnetism were understood about as well as a modern 5-year-old understands them. Phenomena that seem similarly mysterious now (gravity, entanglement) will probably be exploitable in 500 years much like electricity is today. 100 years ago, many physicists doubted that rockets or any form of propulsive movement was possible in a vacuum. Just 60 years ago, we hadn't sent anything into orbit, at all.
There are no technical problems preclu
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100 years ago, many physicists doubted that rockets or any form of propulsive movement was possible in a vacuum.
A century ago, ish, the New York Times didn't thin propulsion in a vacuum was possible. Physicists on the other hand were already writing books and giving lectures on the possibilities and lot of pioneering work related to rockets hand already been done decades before that.
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I live in Canada. My government's actually really quite fantastic. But yeah, we do pay taxes don't we. But we also have no actual problems.
Although, while we're on the topic, most of the wonderful fun-driving roads in the U.S. were built as a make-work project back when there were no jobs and the government just paid people to build roads from nowhere to nowhere. That sounds pretty socialist to me.
In any event, there are school shootings and riots in the streets on a monthly basis. That's just embarass
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But The People as a whole gained from the improved transportation infrastructure. Not sure what gain for my tax dollars when it goes to paying someone not to work instead...
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But The People as a whole gained from the improved transportation infrastructure. Not sure what gain for my tax dollars when it goes to paying someone not to work instead...
It prevents them from starting a revolution and taking your bread off you rather than starving?
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But then I think, no, these are the guys who launched an elderly senator who oversaw their funding into space for totally legitimate scientific inquiry ("providing information on the effects of spaceflight and weightlessness on the elderly [wikipedia.org]")...
(I know, unpopular to criticize NASA here, but just sayin'...)
Why do you think this wasn't legitimate research? Space travel may become common in the near(ish) future for citizens, and this is the sort of thing we need to know before we get there. With all the focus on civilian space tourists coming from other space programs, it's probably a good idea for this research to be done by a group who's in it for the science, not the money. Besides, it's not like it was really just "some elderly Senator" like you're implying - it was John Glenn, one of the very first astrona
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If the boss has proved previously that they can do the work, and then actually does some work on the trip then they are not a tourist are they? There were less than a dozen other people on the planet that could even be considered for the project at the time. Would you still be making a big deal of it if Dr Aldrin went instead?
Design Life is not Expected Life (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean with all the technical miracles NASA pulled off on that mission, they somehow managed to underestimate the longevity of the mission by 45x.
To be fair, 90 days was not, in fact, the estimated lifetime of the mission. It was the design specification of the mission. That is, each of the subsystems was designed with the specification "design a system that will operate for a minimum of 90 (Martian) days, even under worst-case conditions."
Think of it as a 90-day warranty-- after 90 days, it wasn't expected to be dead, it was just out of warranty.
(and note that since the engineering specification was validated by testing the subsystems to either three times design life, or testing to design life under three-sigma worst-case conditions, it would have been very difficult to design for 4000 days...)
Sols? (Score:2)
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Perhaps sol is short for Solar Day?
Simply to avoid confusion. (Score:3)
So they coined a new word to use for a Martian Day, and stuck to it.
For other planets, I expect that the same term will be used. 'Day' for time on Earth, 'Sol' for time on the planet. That said, we don't have all that many things that would have usable 'Sols'. Mercury's days last for months, Venus' day las
mission fucking accomplished! (Score:2)
It landed on Mars with the goal of surviving 90 sols (Martian days), and it has just logged its 4,000th
Good job soldier - and NASA engineers.
I hereby nominate ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I hereby nominate the Mars Rovers for any and all honors which can be shoehorned into being something we can assign to them.
And kudos to the people who built it and kept it going.
Fourty-five times planned mission length is pretty damned awesome!!
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Or it was an intentionally lowball estimate of feasible mission duration so everyone involved looks good.
Mars is a cool, dry place; electronics and machinery love cool dry places. Drop a mobile surveyor on Venus and have it trundle around for 4000 days and I'll be considerably more impressed.
Re:I hereby nominate ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Bah! For a cheaper, faster, better mission with a modest initial budget it's been an amazing success. NASA put two functioning units on Mars for not all that much money (in relative terms) .. around $820 million dollars [wikipedia.org] for the initial 90 days. Compared to military and other expenses ... that's chump change.
The on-board computers are tiny by most standards:
Operating from -40C to +40C is absolutely not a "cool dry place"; it's a hostile environment. Did we mention the dust storms? And the radiation?
We're talking about something which had to travel millions of miles, not miss the planet, not get destroyed on landing, and which has been there for 11 years and is still (to some degree) an operational unit. It's sibling keeled over five years ago.
You go ahead and wait for something else to be impressed with, me, I'll be impressed right now.
Because there simply isn't another thing which has ever existed which humans have made which has operated and traveled on the surface of another planet for anywhere near as long as this thing has.
Opportunity needs to be recognized as an absolutely amazing achievement, because it absolutely is.
Re:why so long (Score:4, Interesting)
It's kind of interesting.
One of the big reasons that they thought it would be limited to 90 days is that the solar panels get covered in dust, and as that happens the amount of energy collected diminishes. They figured in about 90 days, based on previous missions to Mars, they'd be out of juice.
And...for the first 50 days or so, it was going that way. And then, a whirlwind came by, and scrubbed the rover clean. This has happened many many times since. An unexpected good fortune.
500 watt-hours ... per day or what? (Score:3)
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Or it can harvest at least 500 Wh more before the panels stop working. That's the most accurate reading of the statement.
At least they referred to Watt-hours as energy. I guess that's an improvement over normal science reporting.
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You'll never achieve your big goals with an attitude like that.
I disagree, it will just take longer.
Why are we listening to Carmack? Thresh took his Ferrari in a game Carmack designed.
Shut up. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you designed something to last for 90 days and it lasts for 4000 you've over-engineered the solution. Time and money could clearly have been saved in the development and construction of the rover.
Just shut up.
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I think if you are going to spend the time and money to sending something in to SPACE and the to land on another PLANET, a little over engineering goes a long way...
You think Scottie was some kind of genius? It was just that the Enterprise was over engineered (and like any engineer he was loath to go beyond spec)... and it only had a 5 year mission!
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If you designed something to last for 90 days and it lasts for 4000 you've over-engineered the solution. Time and money could clearly have been saved in the development and construction of the rover.
Now in this case, the fact that it has lasted far beyond its intended life has been a positive think. However, in much of the other work NASA does it is simply wasting money. NASA has a problem delivering projects on budget because it's focusing too much on reliability and safety and trying too hard to account for every eventuality. They're also too scared of failure and bad press.
Should they have spent time and energy making it last less long? You have no idea why it's lasted as long as it has. You have no idea if it was over-engineered, or just built well with the most appropriate components and technologies available. Millions of dollars were spent just to get the rover to Mars. If it failed do to being under-engineered, THAT would be a complete waste. Seriously, explain to me what parts should be engineered to fail in exactly 90 days? How much time should be spent creating s
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John Carmack's a smart guy, way smarter than I am. Of course his rocket company failed. He was building small sounding rockets and he failed. There's nothing wrong with failing, that's part of life. On the other hand SpaceX is succeeding. ...
To clarify on this, one of the reasons Armadillo Aerospace was put into hibernation was because it took risks it could not afford. And one crash and a hard landing later they had to close down. I feel bad for Armadillo and Carmack and I wish Slashdot allowed editing of posts since my real target was the AC that assumes to know that Opportunity was over engineered, rather than just being well built and frankly a bit lucky.
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There's nothing wrong with failing, that's part of life.
Speak for yourself: the only thing I fail at is failing, where I fail spectacularly to fail.
Or something.
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If you've only got one shot at launching a vehicle on a 40 million km journey, you should over-engineer it. You don't know what's going to be the weakest point.
It took 253 days just to get Opportunity to Mars, who want's to trial-and-error something that takes so long?
Also, since the solar panels don't have wind-screen wipers, if they happen to get some bad luck with the weather, the estimated rate of dust accumulation will end the mission in 90 days.
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If you designed something to last for 90 days and it lasts for 4000 you've over-engineered the solution.
When your workshop is 140 million miles away, that's probably a good idea.
Hmm (Score:5, Funny)
Personally I think a Martian has taken a liking to it and repairs it while it's sleeping.
Could be shutdown soon (Score:2)
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I have read stories that NASA considers to shutdown this rover mission due to budget cuts and priorities.
No. It's too popular, like Hubble--Congress won't let them shut it down even if the cuts are big enough that they should. They'll keep at least a skeleton crew on it as long as it's running.
They may make noise about shutting it down to try to keep from getting a budget cut, but they're highly unlikely to shut it down.
Even more surprising given how big it is (Score:1)
I was kind of shocked when they were showing off a copy of it that UW Engineering had at UW Discovery Days a couple of weekends ago.
It's even smaller than a battery powered Formula 1 electric car.
Little in the middle but it's got much track.
0.5 pirate-ninjas (Score:2)
Impressive power generation.
It spotted something! (Score:2)
The unexpected reboot is clearly because it spotted something it shouldn't have. Can't let any photos of [elided] reach Earth. Can you imagine what would happen!?
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The unexpected reboot is clearly because it spotted something it shouldn't have. Can't let any photos of [elided] reach Earth. Can you imagine what would happen!?
It probably spotted a door onto the set in Area 51 where it's going round in circles.
turning off Opportunity in White House 2016 budget (Score:2)
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Water on Mars would make it more habitable than California.
Sure, once they get the atmosphere pumps working Total Recall style.