NASA tells Curiosity: Quit showing off, no 'wheelies' please After 18 months of testing, NASA's pushed a patch to the Mars Curiosity Rover – to extend its wheels' life, and eliminate over-exuberant climbs causing “wheelies”. Written by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Jeff Biesiadecki and Olivier Toupet, the software update went live earlier this month, having been uploaded to the …
Yes, the commute to/from JPL on I-210 is gruesome. There are FIVE lanes on one part, and even with a carpool lane, it is really plugged up for most of the daylight hours. So, yes, the rover can go faster than the commute. And I thought that I-280 here in sillycon valley was terrible, it doesn't even hold a candle to I-210 near Pasadena!
Thankfully the rover doesn't need to worry about traffic and accidents with other vehicles (yet!).
Me? Yes, I driven both of these parking lots freeways.
Based on the latest info I could find, Curiosity has travelled 10.44 miles in 1734 days or an astonishing 2.508650519031142e-4mph!*
That would make for a verrrrrrrrrrrry looooooooooooong film!
* I'll leave it as an exercise for readers to convert this into approved El-Reg units (linguine per fortnight?).
"That would make for a verrrrrrrrrrrry looooooooooooong film!"
On the other hand, it would be a perfect candidate for a "Paint drying" censor-buster sequel...
3 months at most?
Also it goes into the repository in case they ever need such an algorithm again.
JPL scientists have experience of "road conditions" most Americans will never encounter.
IOW like the road conditions on the rest of the planet Earth.
"3 months at most?"
Their? I suspect you're confusing Curiosity with the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. Those two were solar powered and had a 90 day primary mission time. Curiosity is nuclear powered and had a 2 year primary mission time. It's already driven over twice the distance Spirit managed, although Opportunity is still some way ahead and is somehow still going.
Also, it's not "at most". The design lifespan isn't the most they expect to manage, it's, as the name suggests, what they're designed to manage. If the rovers had failed before those 90 days/2 years were up it would have been considered a serious failure.
You're thinking of Opportunity, which landed in 2004 for a nominal 90 sol mission and is still going strong -- well, strong-ish, the Mossbauer is out of radioactivity, several other instruments are dead or limited use. But as long as the cameras keep working, AFAI'm concerned it's invaluable. It's had a couple of near-misses with "descoping", ie abandoning it while it's still working.
The main limiiting factor on MER lifespans was expected to be dust accumulating on the solar panels. Curiosity is powered by an RTG with a nominal lifepsan of ten years. The wheels were /not/ expected to be an issue.
Just goes to show how even bit of engineering that you'd think would be trivial to perfect on earth can be caught out by unexpected assumptions about the environment (in this case, the simple failure to test drive the wheels over rocks that don't sink into the sand because they're part of the bedrock, and a failure to imagine the consequences of a a few hundred kg of mass applying to a very small area of the wheel via a hard, pointy rock.
Still, I'm sure building pizza joints and manufacturing cryogenic methane from thin -- very, very thin -- air will be no problem at all, and the chance of an overlooked and leading to everyone dying of hunger / thirst / asphyxiation / depression caused by living in permanent twilight at -40 degC . Right, kids??
You're right I am, and yes I am aware that JPL tend to be quite conservative on the life expectancy of their probes.
Anything that helps maintain control of something around a metric tonne of Mars rover is a very good idea.
In somewhat related news, the mention above of Opportunity sent me to Google to see what the little dood was up to. Not only is it in the 14th year of activity on Mars, the mission page had a link to this story: Why No One Under 20 Has Experienced a Day Without NASA at Mars.
In the 20 years since Pathfinder's touchdown, eight other NASA landers and orbiters have arrived successfully, and not a day has passed without the United States having at least one active robot on Mars or in orbit around Mars.
That's pretty impressive, while also making me feel old. I remember hearing about the Mars missions in the mid-90s while in school and thinking how awesome it would be to see close-up pictures that weren't from before I was born. And now 20 years later, there are two rovers trundling around Mars, including one that has exceeded its primary mission almost 54 times over and another that shoots lasers, plus India has its own orbiter around Mars. And in general spaceflight over those 20 years: the ISS was launched, expanded, and still kicking; the shuttle program went through a rough retirement; and (evil?) genius Elon Musk has not only started resupply missions, but seems to have cracked the whole reusable rocket thing in a way that 20 years ago would have seemed impossible. SpaceX might even be on the verge of manned missions to ISS. Oh, and NASA is finally getting somewhere on their next-gen rockets and capsules, including the Orion test flight in 2014.
People talk about how we went to the moon with Apollo 11 in '69, and then started the shuttle launches in '81, but did nothing after that. And the '80s and mid-90's were kind of a lull... but it's becoming clear that the science wasn't standing still, even if it looked that way. With more resources, I'm sure there could have been less of a gap between the first shuttle launch and the next space era of the ISS, Mars exploration, and private spaceflight, but I'm still not sure we'd have humans on Mars yet, given how little we know about the radiation risk and the material sciences needed to shield people on the way and once they get there. Plus... there's been so much cool science with the space-based telescopes lately and Earth-based sensors, you start to realize just how little we know about anything.
While I certainly don't wish to belittle our Martian achievements, I need to say that neither robotic exploration of another planet nor a select few doing science in earth orbit do all that much to tickle my space-bone. Elon gets a pass for doing some genuinely awesome stuff, but for the record I otherwise stand by my original "and then we did nothing much ever since" view.
"and then we did nothing much ever since"
Every time I contemplate that humans are currently limited to Earth (ISS at a mere 400Km high still counts as 'on Earth' to me), but (semi)intelligent machines are exploring every nook of the solar system, and beyond, the X-files theme starts playing in my head.
Eric Olson - hell of a way to really make an old fart feel REALLY old. Reading you writing about "hearing about Mars missions while in school" just makes me wonder what it will be in the perspective of I remember when "sputnik" was a brand new never heard of name.
Possibly the only real regret of old age that is so lost on youth is what we will not get to see & experience in the coming decades. My grandfather lived from Wright Bros to "man on the moon" - time that included horror and devastation along with some really great leaps in data acquisition - I won't say knowledge because at this point I am not sure from all the mistaken conclusions of various "scientific experts" over the decades that anyone really has KNOWLEDGE.
It is great to see the seeds that we sowed so long ago still growing because the intellect that thought about what might be possible took the chance to build a better mousetrap.
plus India has its own orbiter around Mars.
Don't forget Europe!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Express << check out the on-board webcam!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExoMars_Trace_Gas_Orbiter
and so on and so forth. Yeah Schiaparelli made a smoking crater on Mars, but everyone who's tried does that sooner or later. As Elon Musk's victims customers will find out the hard way.
Highly irritating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1s5Y3t7CI8
If there are cats on Mars they almost certainly have access to Earthly internet, it would explain why there are more pics of cats than there are cats on Earth.
Plus of course; “Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.”
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