
Cleaning Crew
'Tis a pity that NASA couldn't have equipped Curiosity to be able to perform maintenance on Opportunity (and perhaps Spirit as well) to prolong its mission.
Mean time between failure wonks take note: The Opportunity rover launched in 2003 and expected to survive 90 days on Mars today racks up nine years of continuous operations on the red planet. That's 3195 days longer than first planned. Opportunity was hauled into orbit by a Delta II rocket on July 7th, 2003. A little over six …
Not sure if this was meant in jest, but:
* Spirit and Opportunity are on opposite sides of Mars so are thousands of miles apart - you couldn't do both
* Why send a new probe to the same place as an old one to clean it up? That would be a bit redundant surely?
* Even if you did, the odds of landing sufficiently near an existing probe would be fairly low, since they would want to ensure that any new probe did not have a risk of landing on the old one (and breaking both) or damaging it with the rocket blast/debris on landing so would choose an expected landing radius far away anyway
Yes indeed, but what happens when our Mars based Von Neumann machines become sentient and form some sort of robo-society (most likely a cult based around a laser wielding Curiosity descendent)? Probably the story will start something like this...
"No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenthtwenty-first century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his not mortal like his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise...... "
"The Janitor on Mars" by Martin Amis... it has nothing to do with cleaning rovers.
(it's concerned with a Mars-based AI left behind by the planets long-dead inhabitants, whose only purpose is to heap scorn and insult on humanity, for shits and giggles- juxtaposed against the observations of a non-functioning paedophile in a boys home. )
Makes a refreshing contrast to enigmatic and decidedly silent black monoliths.
I am feeling emotional just like those house wives who just abruptly extends her arm to clean with their duster... come on for Christ sake (proof Muslims resprect christ) .... you have 3 rovers roaming up there... no matter how far apart.. cant u just plan an intercepting route at any point in future !?! couldnt 3rd rover bring few Li batteries with it !?! isnt battery replacement mechanism on those rovers slideable !?! cant any instrument on any of three can clean other's pannels !?! couldnt skycrane be made more useful instead of using it for stupid apple iMovie like aerobatics upon releasing lowering cables. couldnt this skycrane but used to utilize last remaining thrust to reach as close as possible to older rovers !?! cant you ferry supplies with super small capsules to save cost no matter for university competitions sake!?! The Mars orbitor circling over them as holy spirit ... cant it parachute supplies reaching through and docking with small capsules slingshot from earth !?! cant Beagle2 be dragged out in sunshine, i know it wll hummiliate brits...
No...
Something in which so much human skill and effort is invested ought to elicit an emotional response. That "little Rover" took more effort than building a cathedral. It is what it represents that matters.
It would be nice to think that one day, long after I'm dead, it will be in a museum somewhere. On Earth, even on Mars.
"It would be nice to think that one day, long after I'm dead, it will be in a museum somewhere. On Earth, even on Mars."
I had a similar thought a while back. Once we get silly speed space travel like warp drives and such, I bet one of the first things we do is recover the Voyager probes in an hour long round trip and put them in a museum. At least, I hope we do.
Made me sad, I know I'm not losing it but I'm a parent now and lot older and softer ;-)
(I had a twang of regret leaving a snowman I built for my 3yr old in a park, next time it'll be built on my garden)
Anon, so you don't poke too much fun at me and so that my work colleagues don't find out I'm not that mean or strict in reality.
Who could be hard-hearted enough to downvote that particular xkcd ?
Where is the massive redundancy and overdesign?
Given the limitations of rocketry, anything that makes it to Mars is likely to suffer from neither of those things.
Good design is expensive for a one off, true, but I have a picture of Curiosity on my desktop and I can't see any obvious redundancy. Unless you would have gone with three wheels and hoped there weren't any adverse inclines.
No. Designed and built to last a *minimum* of 90 days. Let's say you want the system as a whole to have a 95% chance of still working as designed at the end of that time. That means that each component has to have more like a 99% chance of still working at the end of 90 days. Which gives a *mean* lifetime (for an individual component) measured in years. Which is what we are seeing.
That means that each component has to have more like a 99% chance of still working at the end of 90 days.
This is an interesting outlook. On the other hand, I dated an aerospace engineering major in college. She was not required to take the statistics course that the other engineering majors were. When I asked her about it, she replied that they were discouraged from designing systems that would lead to a certain percentage of aircraft from falling out of the sky.
For any space mission, you have to design your components to survive between 2-5 times the minimum required lifetime (depends on the component and the degree of confidence, etc.). So even if you took the Rovers design life as 5 x 90 days, your still looking at the design having survived more than 7 times the maximum life it was tested to. If that isnt something to be impressed by, I dont know what is!
>If that isnt something to be impressed by, I dont know what is!
Well, not to be snarky (not at iglethal either) - in my opinion, it has to do with generations, i guess.
A lot of the replies to similar stories is along the lines of 'my smartphone has more processing power than this, and is waaay cheaper'.
With everything being dumbed down so much (national news on ABC a couple days back - "incredulity that an urang-utan was able to use an iPad to play a game and watch a video" - so goes both for the iPad and the fact that this is news...) - there's not a lot of thinking happening as to the 'how was it possible it lasted this long?'.
grumble, grumble...
Earth Spaceport - a joint NASA/ESA crew returned from Mars today to a hero's welcome - but not so much for their own exploits as for what they brought back. NASA probe Opportunity, "the little rover that could" which operated for approximately 40x its intended lifespan before finally succumbing to the harsh Martian environment, was found during surface preparation for an expansion of Mars Colony I. The team of scientists and engineers were so overjoyed that they voluntarily left some of their personal cargo behind on Mars so that they would have the space and weight capacity to bring back the intrepid robot explorer of yesteryear. At a news conference shortly after the discovery, US President <name> announced a new wing of the Smithsonian Institute's Air and Space Museum to be built specifically Opportunity and similar robotic probes throughout history.
You may recall that Opportunity's twin, Spirit, was discovered eleven months ago by the previous Martian expeditionary team. NASA is currently designing a monument to mark the spot where Spirit became stuck and eventually "died." Spirit itself now sits in a place of honor in the center of the Martian colony.