Chainmail tires re-invent the wheel to get future NASA rovers rolling.
NASA has developed chainmail tires with a memory and thinks they'll do the trick for future rovers.
As readers of The Register's coverage of the Curiosity Rover may recall, the vehicle has experienced considerable wheel damage that has led to changes to its route in 2014 and a 2017 software update to preserve the wheels and provide better grip.
Throw in the fact that it's not yet possible to send a spare wheel to Mars and have it fitted, and NASA has a clear need for more robust tires.
Enter a technology called "spring tires" that use a tubular structure of steel mesh – think tire-shaped chainmail - to cushion rovers as they roll. Spring tires have many fine qualities as the mesh forms a pattern that provides good grip on many surfaces. Mesh is also light by nature and can survive some damage. But spring tires don't deform well: if one rolls over a sharp rock, it can acquire a dent - or "plastic deformation" as NASA boffins put it.
The tires use a nickel titanium alloy that can endure plastic deformation.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Saturday November 25 2017, @08:39AM (6 children)
I'm thinking it will cost no less than $500 million to use a new rover flown to Mars for the purpose of changing the tires on Curiosity. Better just to build future rovers with these new tires. Starting with Mars 2020 [wikipedia.org] which is launching in July 2020. NASA should be hounded repeatedly on whether Mars 2020 will use the chainmail tires instead of the originally planned ones. They were the ones who touted their chainmail tire breakthrough after all.
Where we should have serviceability is our space telescopes. The James Webb Space Telescope is not designed to be serviceable. It will eventually run out of fuel for station keeping [nasa.gov]. Can a small spacecraft be sent to refuel JWST towards the end of its life anyway? Let's hope so. Although better telescopes than JWST will eventually be sent into space, old [wikipedia.org] and partially-broken [wikipedia.org] telescopes still get used as much as possible. There's an essentially infinite number of stars, galaxies, and other objects to point your telescope at, and making repeated or continuous observations can reveal planets, flares, etc.
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(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday November 25 2017, @09:31AM (5 children)
Station keeping . . . I've wondered why they don't put something like that into a higher orbit, where it's much easier to maintain station. And, if it does wander a little, the consequences are negligible. In LEO, being ten miles off course can be catastrophic. Somewhere close to the earth/moon Lagrange point, being a thousand miles off course would be almost meaningless. Everyone on earth who wants to see the signal from the satellite simply adjusts his antenna toward the off-course satellite. What, a couple tenths of a second, for 1000 miles at that range? Even if it's a whole minute, point your antenna at it's assigned position, then focus to get the strongest signal.
That would, however, make it more expensive to perform maintenance, since you have to get a lot further up the gravity well to work on it.
(Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Saturday November 25 2017, @09:42AM (4 children)
Why is JWST at L2?
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/284/why-should-the-james-webb-space-telescope-stay-in-the-unstable-l2 [stackexchange.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point#L2 [wikipedia.org]
It's important to make sure these instruments never point towards the Sun.
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(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday November 25 2017, @09:02PM (3 children)
Exactly.
Its not an easy place to get to either.
But a simple refueling port on the platform would have been cheap. You could easily justify the cost on a hunch that automated vehicles could be designed in the interim. Its expected life was 5 to 10 years.
Musk's first flight was in 2008. He's routinely landing rockets today 8 years later. Shit is moving very fast these days, and JWST isn't even scheduled to launch till 2019.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday November 25 2017, @10:16PM (2 children)
It's not an easy place for humans to get to, ala Hubble servicing missions. Or in other words, it would be further away than humans have ever traveled from Earth (although not that far, just ~four times the distance to the Moon). But robotic spacecraft? No problem.
I hope that despite its lack of serivceable design, it could still be serviced anyway. Even if takes physically ripping into it or having the second spacecraft grab onto JWST and become the new thruster. Because if you are going to let the nearly $10 billion scope go to waste, you might as well try.
If the scope ends up performing for a full 10 years, by the time we get to year 5 the science value of JWST should be clear in that it will be beating Hubble for many observations. It should be enough to pressure who needs to be pressured to try and make this happen.
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(Score: 1) by anubi on Sunday November 26 2017, @08:56AM (1 child)
Nor do we get the benefit of the Moon's gravitational field to sling us back.
So we are gonna spend either a helluva lot of fuel braking and resuming the trip velocity back, or take a helluva lotta time creeping up to it.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday November 26 2017, @01:21PM
One way or another, we should refuel JWST and get it to work for at least 20-30 years. How do you feel about a robotic craft attaching itself to JWST (increasing the mass)?
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