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posted by martyb on Tuesday January 29 2019, @06:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the e's-not-dead-yet! dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Tuesday January 29 2019, @07:08PM (4 children)

    by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday January 29 2019, @07:08PM (#793680)

    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.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 29 2019, @08:01PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 29 2019, @08:01PM (#793706)

    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

      by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday January 29 2019, @08:36PM (#793724)

      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

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 29 2019, @08:39PM (#793726)

      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

    by Username (4557) on Tuesday January 29 2019, @11:40PM (#793828)

    I would has assembled them like a tortoise shell, with little air nozzles at the top to blow the sand away.