NASA Making Renewed Efforts To Contact Mars Rover Opportunity (spacenews.com) 70
NASA is making a new, and perhaps final, attempt to restore contact with the Mars rover Opportunity, which has not communicated with the Earth for more than six months. From a report: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced Jan. 25 that it was transmitting a new set of commands to address what it acknowledged are "low-likelihood" events that could have kept the rover from contacting Earth. These new efforts are in addition to the months-long "sweep and beep" campaign of transmitting other commands and listening for a reply from the rover.
The new commands address scenarios where the rover's primary X-band radio has failed or both the primary and backup X-band radios have failed, as well as cases where Opportunity's internal clock has an offset affecting its timing. The commands direct the rover to switch to the backup X-band radio or use its UHF transmitter to contact Earth, as well as resetting its clock. Those scenarios could explain why the rover has failed to contact Earth, but project officials acknowledge that those scenarios are unlikely. "A series of unlikely events would need to have transpired for any one of these faults to occur," JPL noted in the statement about the new campaign.
The new commands address scenarios where the rover's primary X-band radio has failed or both the primary and backup X-band radios have failed, as well as cases where Opportunity's internal clock has an offset affecting its timing. The commands direct the rover to switch to the backup X-band radio or use its UHF transmitter to contact Earth, as well as resetting its clock. Those scenarios could explain why the rover has failed to contact Earth, but project officials acknowledge that those scenarios are unlikely. "A series of unlikely events would need to have transpired for any one of these faults to occur," JPL noted in the statement about the new campaign.
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It was martians (Score:2)
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Is there a decent online English-to/from-Jive translator? (They don't call it "jive" anymore, but the alternatives are arguably not PC.)
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Or an election.
Silly NASA (Score:1)
Re:Silly NASA (Score:4, Funny)
The problem is NASA did read the Slashdot Comments, they are still trying to get Gentoo Linux to compile.
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Perhaps you should write to your Congressman about funding NASA to fulfill your fantasies.
Congress Critters will happily support funding for fantasies . . . as long as it results in government spending in their state.
Unfortunately, asteroids and Mars don't have any representatives in Congress. Thus, no NASA funding for mining asteroids or building Mars colonies.
Back on topic, didn't Musk land a Tesla on Mars? Maybe he could program that to look for the Rover?
You have Too Limited A View (Score:2)
Jobs in their state is good, jobs for their relatives is better, non profits they can be on the board of and get paid for doing nothing DOUBLE PLUS GOOD
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Sounds familiar:
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A grue did it.
Even so....What an Achivement! (Score:5, Insightful)
Given how long past it's warranty this little rover lasted, what an achievement for JPL.
I hope they can get things working again, but even if the effort fails, this little rover has gone over and above. It's hard to say good bye and we are sad about it, but we all knew this day was coming. Remember what JPL accomplished with these two rovers and revel in that. This isn't a failure, it's but the end a huge success.
Way to go JPL, you really out did all our expectations and have contributed to a volume of scientific observations that will provide invaluable science and research for decades to come, not to mention some really impressive pictures which are very interesting to just look at. Thank You! Job well done.
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Agreed, the two rovers were well engineered and survived numerous "near misses" along their way that could have shut them down prematurely
I'm not disagreeing with the phenomenal engineering, but in hindsight there is no way that anyone would say were at risk of been shutdown prematurely.
Both Spirit and Opportunity landed on Mars in January of 2004 and were each scheduled for 90 (martian) days (92.5 earth days) missions.
Spirit got stuck on May 1, 2009 and remained so until NASA lost contact with it in May of 2011. That amount of time past it's planned mission would have been amazing if it wasn't for Opportunity making it another 7 years. I
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I forgot about the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes. Pioneer 10 launched in 1972 and remained functional until 2003. Pioneer 11 was launched in 1973 and was functional until 1995.
Hubble has been kicking since 1990, and Mars Odyssey since 2001, I wish NASA made consumer electronics and home appliances. ;-)
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It's incredibly impressive, but it's sad that we don't get any closure on whether it was old age or the extremely strong dust storm that killed it. Like could this have happened the first year or was it just the straw that broke the camel's back. It would have been a lot easier to make multi-year plans for solar powered rovers with confidence, though I suppose with Curiosity and Mars 2020 both going for RTGs that might not be such a big deal. I would think solar is still the better choice for any permanent
Gluhwein (Score:2)
This is what you get for gluing in the battery.
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Hey if you can use Hubble to justify the Space Shuttle I'm sure we can use the SLS to go to Mars to replace a battery. If it's not swept under a big fucking rug in the meantime.
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Is a "Gluein Award" like a Darwin Award for devices?
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Just like me trying to get back with my ex... (Score:2)
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Well its pretty damn hard for a robot to phone home with no electricity.
One of the possibilities is the rover's solar panels got covered in dust and isn't getting enough power to do anything. It's also possible during the Martian winter the batteries depleted so deeply that pretty much everything froze solid.
Redundant redundancy (Score:2)
I remember reading that there were known spots on the circuit boards such that if that spot cracked due to the cold, the entire rover would fail.
They were known weak-points which lacked redundancy, but the cost of the avoiding them was considered too high. The rovers have roughly 90% redundancy, but approaching 100% apparently has a steep cost curve.
For example, at some point the redundant systems have to coordinate with each other to make sure both are not trying to do something at the same time, which cou
The Real Reason (Score:2)
They're probably just hesitant to reveal the real story, that Opportunity has simply chosen to stop responding to us. https://xkcd.com/1504/ [xkcd.com]
Question (Score:2)
I have a question for anyone who has read more about survivable systems than I have.
Does it make sense to design a remotely operated system to attempt to reestablish communication on its own if its primary communication channel is disrupted? Specifically, to do things like what Opportunity is being commanded to do manually, such as trying to use a backup radio, switching to a different frequency radio, and resetting its clock. These seem like the sorts of things that should be automated. It should be rat
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How would it know its primary communication channel(s) is disrupted? You'd have to have a receiver active at the same time to verify, which could complicate the logic and drain power. You want the recovery system to have relatively simple logic so that bugs or broken sensors inside of itself don't become a problem.
And if you depend on a timer to tell you it's been "too long" since you received communication, you have the similar problem of knowing if the clock is bad.
The recovery system has to consider the
ntpd sync time is glacial (Score:2)
They forgot to run ntpdate first on startup?