SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Winds have so far Failed to Revive NASA's Opportunity Rover
There's little hope left for rousing NASA's Opportunity rover, which landed on Mars 15 years ago this month. For the past 6 months, the rover has sat silently and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, is running out of tricks to revive it. In the next few weeks, officials at the agency's headquarters will decide whether to continue the search, the mission's scientists say.
In June 2018, a planet-encircling dust storm blotted out the sun over Opportunity for several months, weaning it off solar power and draining its batteries. Since then, JPL has sent the golf cart–size rover 600 commands to revive it. Engineers hoped seasonal winds, running high between November 2018 and the end of January, would clear the solar panels of dust, allowing for its recovery. But that hasn't happened.
"The end of the windy season could spell the end of the rover," says Steven Squyres, the mission's principal investigator at Cornell University. "But if this is the end, I can't imagine a better way for it to happen ... 15 years into a 90-day mission and taken out by one of the worst martian dust storms in many years."
[...] Whenever its mission ends, Opportunity will leave a trail of superlatives. Although it was only guaranteed to last 90 days on Mars, it ended up enduring at least 5000. It traversed a path 45 kilometers long, often driving backward because of an overheating steering control. It explored ever-larger impact craters as it went, with their deposits revealing more and more of the martian interior. Even after all that time, its 1-megapixel cameras were still working beautifully, says Jim Bell, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University in Tempe who leads the rover's color camera team. Bell, for one, isn't giving up hope. The rover is perched on the rim of Endeavor crater, he notes, and a wind gust could still come and revive Opportunity. "No one has ever won a bet against it. I'm not about to start."
-- submitted from IRC
NASA Still Trying to Revive Opportunity
NASA Has a New Plan to Revive the Mars Rover Opportunity, as Time Runs Short:
Over the past seven months we have attempted to contact Opportunity over 600 times," John Callas, project manager for Opportunity, said in a statement. "While we have not heard back from the rover and the probability that we ever will is decreasing each day, we plan to continue to pursue every logical solution that could put us back in touch." [Mars Dust Storm 2018: How It Grew & What It Means for Opportunity]
As the silence stretched on over the summer, mission members hoped that the storm had simply dropped dust on the solar panels that power Opportunity and that a natural seasonal weather phenomenon on Mars could clear that dust away, letting the rover recharge. (Those dust-clearing events began in November and were expected to continue through this week.)
That hope led the team to focus on so-called "sweep-and-beep" commands designed to nudge the rover to send a signal home when it powered up again, even if its internal clock was still off-kilter because of the storm.
The new commands are designed to tackle that possibility and two others: the failures of its primary or of both its X-band radios. (In the statement, NASA called these scenarios unlikely.) With this new approach, Opportunity will be told not just to beep but also to switch communication modes entirely.
NASA's announcement of the new approach comes just one day after the agency celebrated the 15th anniversary of Opportunity's landing, on Jan. 24, 2004. When the rover and its twin, Spirit, landed, they were designed to last 90 Martian days, each of which is about 40 minutes longer than a terrestrial day.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 29 2019, @06:50PM (8 children)
just imagine how long it would have lasted if it had a windshield wiper... hindsight is 20/20 i guess.
(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Tuesday January 29 2019, @07:08PM (4 children)
Will Huawei send a guy to steal the wiper arm to copy it ?
Panels which can tilt all the way to vertical might have helped too. Get more sun late in the day, and flush the dust if it's not sticky...
That wasn't in the 90-day-mission must-have list.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 29 2019, @08:01PM (2 children)
That probably wouldn't have helped too much. You want as little moving parts as possible on these things, and the ones you do have, you want to be large. The dust is terrible on Mars. It is microscopic and non-weathered, meaning it can work its way into the various seals and then grind away at the innards. Much of the dust is also magnetic, which helps to guarantee that they will end up ruining those as well. One of the only reasons the motors and pivots that do work currently work at all is because they are big, massive and redundant, and even many of their siblings failed. Any sort of small and delicate hinging mechanism would be doomed to failure.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday January 29 2019, @08:36PM
I'm not disagreeing about the dust, but I don't see why hinges for solar panels wouldn't fit the definition of "large and strong".
I couldn't find the array size, but it covers most of the top of the rover.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 29 2019, @08:39PM
Why would it have been "non-weathered"? If it's blowing around, wouldn't it get weathered just as surely as if it were bouncing down a stream on Earth? More slowly perhaps, but I see no reason to believe it wouldn't get the sharp bits rounded off over time. Not like the Moon, where there is no discernible "breeze" to roll the dust around.
(Score: 2) by Username on Tuesday January 29 2019, @11:40PM
I would has assembled them like a tortoise shell, with little air nozzles at the top to blow the sand away.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 30 2019, @03:41AM (1 child)
Probably less. More parts to break and the weight would be taken from something else, making that thing more fragile and/or less useful.
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Wednesday January 30 2019, @04:59AM
A windshield would require power and wouldn't help after a dusty storm has emptied the batteries.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Wednesday January 30 2019, @10:41AM
It's not just a case of swiping it off. This stuff is sticky, even if it's not wet.
If you had a car that you left in a desert for several years, never touching, would you expect the wipers to clean the screen sufficiently? Or would you expect the screen to have a buildup of dust and sand even after swiping?
What would happen to the dust you swipe off? It's going to go onto the other parts of the vehicle or build up into a solid clump. Your car windscreen gets washed regularly. This would not. You'd end up with a big sand-encrusted arm sweeping over the panel, dropping sand everywhere (including behind itself) and gumming up everything (including itself) in the process.
Though there is a solution, it's similar to the way we deploy dust-protection on SLR cameras. The mirror in those literally shakes itself clean (I'm talking about Canon EOS for example, other manufacturers may not have that), but you still need to keep it fairly clean and sealed to work for any length of time.
Pretty much you can't just build something extremely light and cheap that works unattended in a desert for years at a time without any human intervention, outside cleaning, water, etc. Even the automated mines with automated vehicles just drives them to what is effectively a car wash every now and then.
Anything like a wiper would be about as practical as those people who laugh and joke that spectacle-wearers "need a windscreen wiper" on them. Sure, it's a fun gimmick. But it just doesn't work as you would want, and would be entirely too expensive and impractical if it did.
Moving parts are your worst nightmare. Abrasion and friction are terrible ideas that you want to avoid as much as practically possible. Reliance on lubrication (either with water or oil) you want to minimise and seal off entirely. And what you absolutely don't want is something that needs to move abrasively and quite harshly across your main power source when there's no water available to you, in a desert, in extremes of heat and cold (never stripped a wiper by turning it on while frozen?) which piles up the sand over time to make the problem worse while also being the main attracting point for sand to gather, freeze and break things (i.e. freezing your wiper to a block of sand stuck to the main solar panel).
To be honest, you'd be better off with an air compressor and directed tubing - at least you'd have some control over it and could program it with an "emergency clean" for a lot lower energy. But the filter would clog very quickly and then you have the same problem further down the system.
(Score: 2) by Snospar on Tuesday January 29 2019, @08:19PM (2 children)
If the mission was originally designed to be 90 days long, how have they managed to continue to fund the ground operations for 15 years? That's over sixty times the "guaranteed" lifespan. Even if they were optimistic and planned for 5 years they've burned through that budget a decade ago.
Huge thanks to all the Soylent volunteers without whom this community (and this post) would not be possible.
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday January 29 2019, @08:25PM (1 child)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_(rover) [wikipedia.org]
Extensions = more budget given.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday January 30 2019, @05:28PM
It's also a lot cheaper to pay for a person or a team of people than it is to design/test/launch a new rover. It was also a mission funded by NASA. Not a crowdfunded mission, that happened to meet all of their obligations, and then dissolved into the ether.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Funny) by Thexalon on Tuesday January 29 2019, @08:29PM (4 children)
"We have finally manage to disable the robot attack forces attempting to spy on our planet. We will be dismantling this attacker at a later date to learn what we can about the alien's technology. We've shot down many of their robots already, and we've noticed that it takes quite some time between attacks.
We shall fight on the craters and the ice caps. We shall fight in the canyons and the volcanos. We shall defend our planet, whatever the cost may be!"
- His Majesty Xargon, Sixth of His Name, Wekmet of Mars, Conqueror of Deimos, Defender of Olympus Mons.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RandomFactor on Tuesday January 29 2019, @11:14PM
It is not that it isn't communicating.
It is no longer communicating, with us.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday January 29 2019, @11:50PM (2 children)
"We already told you we apologize for Xargon The Fifth's truly tragic demise. Honestly, given the size of the planet and the transit times, we really could not have planned that the heatshield would crush him, especially on the holy occasion of his Seventh Rebirth. We reiterate our offer to keep the debris of the skycrane and parachute as a token of our profound embarrassment, but remind you to stay away from the nuclear-powered robot currently waving a drill around. Regards. Earth."
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday January 30 2019, @12:21AM (1 child)
"We of course thank you for disposing of our predecessor, Xargon the Fifth, who was preventing us from taking control of our empire. But now that our rule is cemented, we have no further use of foreign alliances and thus kindly demand that you leave. Now."
- His Majesty Xargon, Sixth of His Name, Wekmet of Mars, Conqueror of Deimos, Defender of Olympus Mons.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Wednesday January 30 2019, @01:00AM
"Well, you see ... We kinda had a gust of wind the other day ... Long story short, our early dev prototype for the machine which could take stuff off your planet ... well ... just fell over, and is all borked. We're definitely building a new one, but it sorta pushed our schedule back a liiiittle bit, and the closest appointment we can give you is about 5 Elon-Years. Should I pencil it on that Thursday, say, by 10:30 ?"
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Wednesday January 30 2019, @05:06PM
For the next mission to mars, I wonder what the feasibility would be to attach a small glider/drone type thing that would fall off from the important payload somewhere in the high atmosphere and coast over to Opportunity, then "poof" release a blast of air right over the rover and fall to the wayside. If it could be done cheaply enough, I really wonder if they'd go for it. Of course the big concern would be damaging or infringing on the primary unit's function, but someone might have some good ideas to mitigate risk.