Comments on: Opportunity's Next Adventure: The Big Drive

By: john

john — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 07:39:16 +0000

Opportunity the little marsrover that did. It still does. keep up the good work.

By: RetardedFishFrog

RetardedFishFrog — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 00:44:40 +0000

Luckily the Martian wind erodes the wind blown soil into a relatively benign dust. If the rovers were on the Moon, then the sharp, jagged regolith would have killed them long ago.

By: Jahmin

Jahmin — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 22:33:19 +0000

@GregG, I believe the rovers can't move for a few months each year due to winter. And maybe they can't be run on too many consecutive days (could lead to excessive wear of the mechanical parts…)

By: njacres

njacres — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 19:17:10 +0000

Aaaarrghh!! I meant weeks! Duh Oh!!!!!!

By: njacres

njacres — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 19:16:44 +0000

@GregG, Looks like your math is good. Nancy may have slipped from days to months, as 112 months would be just over 2 years……….maybe?

By: billymac

billymac — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:12:33 +0000

it'd be nice to see if they can set a few distance records with the autonomous driving and improved maps. We don't have to stop at *every* cobble, do we?

By: GregG

GregG — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 16:18:28 +0000

7 miles = 12320 yards… at 110 yards a day – the rover could make the journey in 112 days – not 2 years

…or am I missing something?

By: TD

TD — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 10:52:50 +0000

I'm still a big fan of the Rovers. The discovery of "blueberries" by Opportunity was fantastic….and it's still not known if there are any biological relationships there (are they life? do they serve as a home for microbial life, like other rocks? were they formed in part by a biological action?). I think there's some historic interest as well (do "bleuberries get covered by dust, then uncovered by winds, and so contribue to the seasonal "wave of darkening" seen by Slipher, Kuiper, and many other great astronomers?) I hope the rovers last long enough to make more great discoveries.

By: stargazerdude22

stargazerdude22 — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 10:16:18 +0000

I agree with Chris Coles (I think it would have to be a hot air vs. helium balloon), and while were at it, equip the thing with a small back-up nuke battery and a wiper or compressed gas blaster to keep the solar panels clean.

By: Chris Coles

Chris Coles — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 09:01:53 +0000

What this story tells us is that we have to adjust our thinking as we get more experience of using these small rovers. One thought that has come to mind is, in the future, is it at all possible to include a stored balloon, tether and a capsule of compressed helium so that, when we get to one of these long treks, instead of wasting two years travel, we just deploy the balloon and let the surface wind take us there?

We could also add a small camera to the top of the tether and take images of the surface as we travel along and again, before we release the tether, take a good look at the surrounding terrain where we have landed.?

By: Jorge

Jorge — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 02:55:14 +0000

Heh… I did try to find out how far from the equator they were, in the rovers website, but somehow didn't find that piece of info. And now I had this brilliant, unheard of, idea of checking… wikipedia. Dumb-a-dumb-idiboo.

And there it is. Opportunity landed at 1.94Â° S, Spirit at 14.5718Â° S.

Indeed a bit of a difference. I guess that plus the wheel (a dragging wheel should require more energy to move around), plus, maybe, more dust on the solar cells (is there? I think I saw that info in the Planetary society site a while back, but it seems to be down again… ah, but then I found out in the rovers' website that Opportunity's energy input is currently more than twice Spirit's, so Spirit is bound to be dustier), all combined may be enough of an explanation. Home Plate surely doesn't seem to be interesting enough to justify in itself that lengthy stay.

By: Don Alexander

Don Alexander — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 01:50:02 +0000

@Jorge: It is the energy levels. Try to find out how far away from the equator Spirit is, and how far away Opportunity is.

Well, this picture leads me to post the adage:

"There is always a bigger crater."

Remember when the orbit pictures showed Victoria as being this humongous blasted pit of exposed rock layers that totally put Endurance to shame?

And now you have this behemoth.

But it looks kind of like a comparison between Meteor Crater in Arizona and typical large, old craters on Earth, like the Noerdlinger Ries in southern Germany. Endeavour may not show much of an interesting view from an ill-defined rim…

By: Jorge

Jorge — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 01:11:56 +0000

Yes, Nancy, but still… For the past year or so, Opportunity explored Victoria crater, went perhaps a quarter way around it, started to go inside, retreated after the arm glitch, in sum, walked around. Spirit, on the other hand, just stayed in the same place, shooting some pictures from time to time, and hasn't left the Home Plate region for about two (Earth) years. In fact, most of the 7km it travelled so far (against Oppy's 12) were travelled in the beginning of the mission. Two of our years is about one martian year, including both summer and winter, and also includes a number of months before the dust storm they both went through. So surely this hasn't just to do with energy levels? This is what puzzles me. If not the wheel, what's keeping it there?

By: Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 00:49:14 +0000

Jorge-
Plainly put, Spirit doesn't have the energy to do anything else but sit right now. During the winter months it needed 90 watt hours of power to run the heater to keep it warm, and there wasn't much more than that available from the solar panels. Now the panels are generating about 250 watt hours, so Spirit's recharging her batteries and getting ready to do some moving sometime soon.

The PS website is working now.
Nancy

By: Astrofiend

Astrofiend — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 00:46:57 +0000

I wonder if the public at large even knows that these little things are still valiantly powering along on the surface of Mars?

One day, there will be a news story informing us of demise of one of these intrepid little explorers, and people won't even remember what they are or what they've been doing for us all these past years…

Just a thought.

By: Jorge

Jorge — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 23:30:52 +0000

"He'll never make it" (guess the animated character)

… which won't matter anyway. As you say, it's all in the travel.

I have been puzzling about something for a while and I guess this is as good an occasion as any other to pose the question: why is it that Opportunity travels so much, while Spirit travels so little, mostly sitting around Home Plate? Is it just Spirit's dragging wheel or is there more to it than that?

And an off topic post scriptum: anyone knows what happened to the Planetary Society website?