Posted on 08/31/2007 7:52:37 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
LOS ANGELES - They're old and dirty, but NASA's Mars rovers are back in the exploration business after enduring a lengthy Red Planet dust bowl that blocked most of the sunlight they need for power.
With skies gradually brightening, the solar-powered rovers Spirit and Opportunity recently resumed driving and other operations that had been suspended during the dust storm.
"The rovers are in good health and in good shape," said John Callas, the rover project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. "Things have improved from the more dire conditions that were existing previously due to the dust storm on Mars."
During the storm, each of the rovers spent a couple of weeks sleeping most of the time.
"They were in sort of a hibernation state where we were only communicating with them every few days," Callas said Friday. "The rovers would only be awake a very short amount of time each day to save power."
The major concern was whether the rovers would have enough energy to keep sensitive electronics at proper temperatures on the frigid planet.
"At the darkest part of the storm, Opportunity had only 128 watt-hours of energy. Today, it has about 350 watt-hours of energy, so almost three times as much now," Callas said. "The most energy that the rovers have ever seen in their 3 1/2 years on Mars is about 900 watt-hours of energy."
The biggest problem left by the storm is dust on the instruments at the end of the rovers' robotic arms, he said. Some has fallen off or been blown off, and there are ways to measure how dust contamination is affecting an instrument, he said.
The longer-term concern is how the rovers, particularly Spirit, will deal with the next Martian winter, when the sun is low and less energy reaches their solar panels.
"The solar arrays are dusty on both rovers, but dustier on Spirit, and they are dustier now than they were exactly one Martian year ago. So if they don't get cleaner and they continue to accumulate dust at the same rate they saw last year, it will be a tough Martian winter for Spirit," Callas said.
The six-wheel rovers have been exploring opposite sides of Mars since landing in early 2004, finding geologic evidence that rocks were altered by flowing water in its ancient past. They have long outlasted their planned three-month missions, surpassing or nearing 1,300 "sols," as Martian days are called.
"These are really very old rovers and their mechanisms are well beyond their design life by many, many factors, so we're fortunate that they're still working, but things could break — important components could break at any moment — but absent that, they're in good shape and we're ready to continue exploration of both sites."
Spirit, studying Mars' Gusev Crater region, will soon drive to a spot that has been named "Home Plate."
Opportunity, in the Meridiani Planum region, has been waiting to enter Victoria Crater, a half-mile-wide hole blasted into the plains by a meteor. The rover will roll to an entry point in coming weeks, Callas said.
lol...
Not to worry.
I sold NASA Martian dust offset credits.
Exploration on the edge of technological ablity will always bring risk. You manage it. You cannot eliminate it. We are doing things for the very first time here.
And the "astronomical investment" is peanuts compared to how government spends your money. Note NASA in the graph below, and remember that JPL and the Mars rover are a fraction of that even.......
I see that NAH has already responded to your budget comment. But I feel the need to address your other comments, they stink of a lack of understanding of exactly what goes into these programs.
The rovers had a 90 day planned lifespan. Which, really when you think of it, is not that long for the investment. What we have gotten out of these rovers is amazing. Like every other mission that humanity has ever launched, there are mounds of data that have been collected but there just isn’t enough manpower to analyze what it means. The biggest problem is if you don’t know what you’re looking for in the data you’ll never find it.
To contradict your statement, the mission managers and Primary Investigators are THRILLED that these rovers just refuse to die. Thinking up new missions on the fly is NO problem, there is enough science to be done that if these rovers lasted 10 years it wouldn’t be long enough. You can’t get a whole lot of more value out of these missions the way they are going.
As far as NASA’s budget...they were asked by the president in 2003 to plan and execute manned Lunar and Martian missions. And then he dropped the ball and refused to give them enough money to carry out that vision. Maybe it was his way of trying to kill NASA. The biggest problem is that your country can not be without human spaceflight capability. Losing that (as you will for about 5 years) will be a MAJOR setback for a country that’s already teetering on the brink of economic ruin.
Granted I think (from an engineering standpoint) the way they’ve gone about manned exploration is completely wrong. They started with a conclusion and then changed the data to make sure that their preferred system was used rather than something that was faster, better, cheaper. But the point is it will get done.
There are Russian robots on Mars??
http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0709/06phoenix/
Mars-bound Phoenix lander checks out gear
NASA/JPL STATUS REPORT
Posted: September 6, 2007
Two crucial tools for a successful landing of America’s latest mission to Mars, the radar and UHF radio on NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander, have passed in-flight checkouts.
The ultra-high-frequency radio won’t be turned on again until landing day, May 25, 2008, when it will relay communications from Phoenix to orbiters already in service around Mars. Since launch on Aug. 4, 2007, and until the day it reaches Mars, Phoenix is communicating directly with Earth via even higher frequency X-band radio, mounted on a part of the spacecraft that will be jettisoned shortly before Phoenix hits the top of the Martian atmosphere.
Not funtioning ones. But they did get there first.
The overview of the Russian launches toward Mars
May 28, 1971 Mars-3 Mars orbiter/lander Orbited Mars; Lander failed upon landing
Aug. 5, 1973 Mars-6 Mars flyby/landing UR-500 Flew by Mars, landed capsule
Numerous later Mars missions planned by the Russians never quite got the funding they needed to fly their proven hardware. Their whole mission budgets were fractions of what NASA spends annually on planetary projects.
Kudos to NASA.
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