Posted 01.25.2012 at 5:00 pm
12 Comments
Opportunity Rolls On
Maas Digital LLC for Cornell University and NASA/JPL via Wikimedia
Its solar panels are dusty and its instruments are weakening, but the intrepid Mars rover Opportunity is still undaunted. Today marks the rover’s eighth anniversary on the Red Planet, truly a feat for a mission that was designed to last a single season. As the rover embarks on its ninth year of work, it has some brand-new tasks that will give Mars scientists plenty to do long after it has beeped its last transmission home.
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Technology, Rebecca Boyle, mars rovers, mars rovers spirit and opportunity, nasa, opportunity rover, rovers, VideoOne key mission is a radio science campaign to study Mars’ interior, according to rover scientists. The rover’s high-gain antenna will track Earth and scientists will measure the Doppler shift in the radio signal as Mars wobbles. This will give some information about Mars’ core, said Ray Arvidson, deputy principal investigator on the rover mission and a professor at Washington University in St. Louis. The wobble can indicate how much of the core is melted — the way a raw egg wobbles vs. the tight spin of a hardboiled one.
Opportunity will also use its alpha particle X-ray spectrometer to look at a rocky outcropping called Saddleback, determining what it’s made of, and it will also stare at the floor of Endeavour Crater, checking for wind-caused changes, Arvidson said.
View From Greeley Haven: This windswept vista taken in mid-January shows the outcrop nicknamed Greeley Haven, the winter resting spot for NASA's Opportunity rover. The rover landed on Mars eight years ago Jan. 25 and is heading into its fifth Martian winter. NASA/JPL-Caltech
Its emission spectrometer no longer works, and its Moessbauer spectrometer, which identifies minerals containing iron, is almost out of cobalt-57 juice, so some of these measurements will take a lot longer than they would with a younger rover.
But Opportunity — and its twin, Spirit, before it fell silent two years ago — have already far surpassed scientists’ greatest expectations. Watch some of the rover team discuss their findings in the video below.
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All the science behind this machine, and no one thought to put windshield wipers on the solar panels? :)
That being said, it's incredible that this thing is still running. Congrats to NASA for producing a product that lasted 8x longer than they planned (currently!).
On top of that, with new solar tech, I wonder how much bigger of a rover they will be able to make the next go-around. Not that bigger is always better, but if they could change out the wheels for ones with some size on them, these things could cover significant distances.
Well, I just read the Top 12 things to watch for in 2012 article, and saw that the next rover will land this year and is the size of a car. So I guess that satisfies my last point.
maybe now we can use the new car sized vehicle to bring back martian life forms. hey they called shotgun first!! guess i can sit in the back.
religion is like a prison for the seekers of wisdom"
-Killah Priest
@Toomey, the rover has lasted 32 times longer than designed. The original mission spec was for 90 days.
Go Opportunity!
When we get to Mars (hopefully before the Chinese) we really should consider recovering both of these rovers (providing the Chinese don't do it first) and put them in the Air & Space museum in Washington as a memorial to what we (Americans) can make if we really want to.
Such great minds participated in designing, building, launching and operating Opportunity... and then they go and chose the worst possible music for the video showcasing it.
Speaking as a robot, I am so so envy. I want to be on Mars roving about too!
The video in the article is wonderful! Very cool!
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Science sees no further than what it can sense.
Religion sees beyond the senses.
@ToomeyND "All the science behind this machine, and no one thought to put windshield wipers on the solar panels? :)"
From what I have read, cleaning mechanisms for the solar panels was discussed in the design phase. The issue was one of weight. If they included a method to clean the solar panels, one of the instruments would have to go.
So the team decided to go with more science at the expense of additional longevity. Based on both rover's performance (dust did not become a problem until long after the 90 sol mission was complete), I would say they made the right choice.
@caradoc01
Nah, that'd be a waste. Leave them on Mars for the first human colony and we can have some nice memorial/museum pieces.
They could run the unit up a bumpy rocky incline and vibrate a large portion of the dust off the panels.
Well it might work... ;)
.............................
Science sees no further than what it can sense.
Religion sees beyond the senses.
if the next rover is going to be car-sized, its weight is going to be large enough that not putting cleaning mechanisms on it would be a stupid design choice