Spirit still kicking ass and taking names at 4 years old (mars rover)

Moz

Moz

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from /.

"Designed for a 90 day mission, the Spirit Mars Rover is starting its 4th year of exploration. Spirit's sister-module, Opportunity, will turn four on Jan 25. 'We never thought we'd still be driving these robots all over Mars,' said Mark Lemmon, a planetary scientist at Texas A&M University and member of the rover science team. 'We joked about driving Opportunity into Victoria Crater, but now we're there, and we're looking at doing even more science. Each day they still work is an amazing one.'"
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Now if NASA made cameras :)
 
Mars Rover 384lbs and might max at 300' per day... while the Lunar Rover, at 463lbs... could potentially go 200 miles in the same period of time.

Considering 1969 versus 2003... I've always been a little surprised at the level of excitement surrounding the mars rovers.

Hey it's cool... yeah... but "kicking ass"? The lunar rover kicked ass ;-) They should have sent one of those and had the mission done in a weekend. :cheesy:
 
MattinSTL said:
Mars Rover 384lbs and might max at 300' per day... while the Lunar Rover, at 463lbs... could potentially go 200 miles in the same period of time.

Considering 1969 versus 2003... I've always been a little surprised at the level of excitement surrounding the mars rovers.
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Ummmm... are you serious? If you are, you need to understand that the Mars Rovers are unmanned and (at the low level) largely autonomous. The Lunar Rover, without an astronaut on board, don't move at all.
 
Don't you think it's reasonable to wonder why they didn't utilize some of that previous tech?

I just thought that, considering the sophistication of modern computers and software, and the obvious robust build of the lunar rover... that they would have come up with something somewhere between the two devices. Remote controlling a device isn't rocket science, even though going to the moon or mars is.

It is incredibly cool that we can do that... and that it's still working after all this time, but when I see video of the lunar lander shooting rooster tails with it's total weight and payload of 1500 lbs... it seems crazy that the mars rover operates like it does 33 years after the lunar rovers were parked and forgotten.
 
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MattinSTL said:
Remote controlling a device isn't rocket science, even though going to the moon or mars is.
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Except, it is. That is, when you factor in the 1/2-hour speed of light delay between your input and the feedback. You can't remote control things on Mars... or if you did, you wouldn't get anywhere near 300' a day. Imagine remote-controlling a car when all the feedback you get is on a 1/2hour tape delay. You'd move an inch, then wait half an hour. Move an inch, then wait half an hour. Keep in mind this is NASTY terrain.

The Mars rovers (at least back when I was working at JPL) receive one set of instructions per day. Then they roll around and do their thing, travel, avoid hazards, take readings, pictures and samples, etc. without human intervention. They transmit their data back, a team on the ground decides the next days goals, and send 'em the next day. So, that 300' per day is UNATTENDED. The thing has to look at its environment, understand it, determine what's a hazard and avoid it, decide the best path to take, etc. With no GPS or even magnetic field, even knowing where it is is a major issue - basically, it's tracking its wheel motion, modeling the surface friction, etc to determine where it is... also, to some extent, using some optical tracking and sun-tracking. If the rover went so fast as to break traction with any frequency, it would not be able to localize itself. Further, speed is limited by power - and the rovers haven't gotten a fresh battery or AC charge since launch 4-1/2 yars ago. NONE of the Lunar Rover technology (or lack thereof) is applicable - it was a simple go-cart designed to run for about an hour total. And needed an astronaut.

I don't know if you've observed any autonomous robots here on Earth, but you'll notice 2 things: 1, they're still not so great at getting around, and 2, they're often given a helping hand by a friendly engineer when they get into trouble.

4 years in a pretty unknown and extremely harsh environment, with the nearest "friendly hand" a few hundred million miles away is pretty impressive. I mean, what piece of gear do you have that you could drop in a subarctic desert and expect to be operating when you get back 4 years later?

Also, keep in mind, computer technology on all spacecraft is 5-10 years before the state-of-the-art AT THE TIME OF PROJECT INCEPTION. Space applications require radiation-hardened components which are 5-10 years behind "regular" computing components; and the design of a spacecraft around a set of components takes a number of years.
 
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I documented the FIRST Robotics Challenge once before... and it looks like we may be doing it again this year.

I realize there's quite a difference between kids teamed up with scientists... and NASA... I was just saying that I would have thought they could look at a visual... then program a string of commands which ends in "stop"... then look again... program a string of commands, etc... and that a device with 18" Mesh-lins would sooner traverse obstacles then would a device with 8" wheels... as you see the progression of design from the sojourner to the spirit.

I'm not saying that this isn't an amazing thing... so I never intended to bug anybody on the issue... I just think people aren't giving the lunar rover it's due. If you put the two vehicles side by side... it would seem that something on order of the former would have been the most recent creation. Simply going on strength, mass, and power to weight ratio... it would seem that they could have done more, in less time, by using something more like the lunar rover (I'm not saying they should have USED the lunar rover... but something more like that... we didn't dump car designs from the late 60's... we improved on them... keeping the things that worked and evolving parts to include new technology as it became available. Why didn't we do that with what was obviously such an effective design?)

Change the gearing... add more travel to the suspension... add solar panels... revise the chassis since it won't have to support 1100 pounds of payload, and put some of that power to use in other functions. If that thing could go 22 miles in 3 days with the ability to carry over a half-ton then what could they have done in a lighter machine that didn't have to carry 2 people and 550+ pounds of rocks? As a designer I think that would give me a lot of latitude on where to put material and how to power various functions. That's all I'm saying.
 
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Put them side to side in a lab, and sure the lunar rover will seem more impressive. Put them both on mars, and the lunar rover isn't going to move at all.

The fact they could make faster, more powerful robots in the past isn't applicable. I'm by no means an engineer, but I can imagine with all of NASA working on the project there's a good reason it's not faster or stronger.
 
I'm just as impressed as hell that there's manmade objects on the moon and Mars.

I mean I have a hard enough time getting across town sometimes. :)

To look up at the moon and realize that people actually walked on it's surface and that we have manmade machines traveling on Mars right now, is the amazing feat.
 
Oh, Matt! There's no relation. At all. The Lunar Rover is not a robot; it's a go-cart. It does NOTHING by itself.

Your argument is analogous to a comparison between a mirror and an HVX. We've had mirrors for millennia, and they have have far superior lattitude, are not limited to 60fps, have much better resolution, don't need batteries, no compression artifacts, no graininess in low light, etc. If we had such great characteristics in mirrors all these years, why does everyone think the HVX (RED, F23) is so great?
 
If it's any comfort, there are certaonly lots of project proposals that flow through NASA relating to other types of mobility for Mars rovers... but the interesting facet is not how to make a rover faster; that's trivial. The interesting thing is how to make a faster rover useful. One of the likely ideas is a big round inflatable thing (think giant beach ball) that just gets blown by the wind all over the planet. It would do experiments that don't need precise localization; and likely wouldn't do any rock or soil sampling.

If the goal were to go as fast as possible, Matt, perhaps Lunar Rover tech would apply. But the Mars rovers are mobile science laboratories. They conduct scientific experiments. They analyze soil and rock characteristics. They can place an instrument with great precision. They are as UNDISTURBING of the environment as possible. They are long-lasting. The goals just don't match yours!
 
I'm not confusing speed with power... it takes power to make speed, but you don't have to use the power for speed... you can use it for all the functions that a robot performs... and all those functions take power... whether it's performing an experiment or clearing the crest of a sand dune... or raising a boom camera 10' in the air to plan the next string of commands.

When a designer starts out on a project they have a set of parameters... and I was simply saying that the lunar rover was an impressive machine considering it's power... weight... and maneuverability... for 1969. You wouldn't have to create a mars rover that utilized all that power for forward propulsion... the power (coming from batteries) could be split for whatever purpose... be it exploring vast terrain, digging, drilling in a rock, or physically moving something... or running experiments.

I didn't mean to personally offend you in saying that I expected the mars rovers to be built more like the lunar rover.
 
Oh, I'm not personally offended. Hope it doesn't seem that way.

But power is not the issue - PRECISION is the issue. The Lunar Rover is a big bouncy beast. Barely under control. Spittin up dust. Couldn't even be parallel parked because of its traction issues. Definitely not something where you could say "stop in such a way that I can place a sensor on that 1-inch wide rock", even with human control. The Lunar Rover is more "get me within 20 feet and from there I'll walk".

Look, in the first 90 days of the mission, I was closer to agreeing with you; during that "official" mission period, there was far less autonomy, the rover did very little without a lot of back and forth with Mission Control. But this is the cautious approach NASA has to take; since the official mission ended, the level of autonomy has increased tremendously. (If you know what living on Mars time is like for the poor Earthbound rover team, you know why they pushed so hard for this).

The FIRST competition is remote-controlled. Teams in the DARPA races are dependent on GPS, an engineered environment (roads), and very high power usage. And they have folks following them to solve problems. The distinction between a "dumb" vehicle and an autonomous robot is tremendous. The difference between an autonomous robot in a known, engineered environment and one in an unknown environment is tremendous. The difference between a robot that can be helped out of a tricky situation by a human and one that designers know will be millions of miles from help is tremendous. Don't you like my mirror analogy?
 
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this is ridiculous. the lunar rover gets to drive around in like 1/10 of the gravity. Of course it's going to be faster. Also, because payload has to be as small as possible on any space mission (someone else probably knows this but what's the ratio? To take every pound into space is like 1 million dollars? And the further the craft has to go, the higher that dollar number is) they can't make the mars rover this huge beast. I'm sure if they could make it as big as the lunar rover, it would be just as powerful. You're lucky the NASA scientists don't visit this site. If they did, they'd rip you a new one for your - sorry but it's true - ignorance.
 
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Oh, man, are you serious?

The "next" Mars rover (delayed and canceled and revived and delayed and canceled a few times now) is planned to be much larger (on the order of the Lunar Rover's footprint) and likely much slower. Dudes, understand that bouncing around at high speed is not the goal!

It's like you're comparing a pencil to a computer printer. How come if they were able to make such portable pencils years ago, I can't tuck a printer behind my ear?
 
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