Opportunity's and Spirit's original missions were planned to last 90 Martian days each. They ended up lasting over 8,000 combined. That is almost as impressive as getting the rovers to Mars in the first place.
I remember talking to a high up on the program at a FIRST robotics event who complained about them running so long. They weren't making any major new discoveries and sucking up resources and mindshare stopping him for kicking off and focusing on new projects. He said nobody would take the PR hit to decide to just end a mission like this so he was stuck.
That story is very much over sold. They defiantly designed the things with a longer lifespan in mind. NASA simply had more reasonable minimum specks so if they died on day 220 nobody would call the program a failure.
JPL wrote a fascinating reflection on what engineering practices allowed this to happen. For any of you who have not experienced the NASA Knowledge Gateway, I would recommend. https://llis.nasa.gov/lesson/1743
The 90 days was, as mentioned, a lower bound, not an upper bound. They were planned to last at least 90 days.
Framed this way it's not entirely surprising they lasted longer, especially given the fortunate turn of events with the martian wind cleaning the solar panels of dust.
This of course does not in any way diminish the engineering and ingenuity involved with designing and operating the rovers.
I’ve never found it impressive, it’s a horrible padded estimate meant to cover NASA and make them look good. A real estimate needs to be useful and somewhat close to the actual outcome. There’s no way they were this off without it being on purpose.
Imagine if your retirement planner or accountant was off by 44X in their number crunches for you. Would you say they were good at estimating?
Steven Squyres, the Principal Scientist of the program came to Microsoft to give a talk. One of the best talks I’ve been to.
So many interesting tidbits like the parts about the rovers expected short lifetime due to the dust, and how (if I remember correctly) they fixed this by shaking the solar panels like wings.
He talked about the rover drivers, and how they all had to live in special light cycle controlled buildings to get them used to working on Martian days vs. Earth (the extra hour adds up over time).
He wrote a book, a worthy read. The printing I got had some amazing pictures in it:
I was really fortunate to have him as an astronomy professor right around the time of the launch. He's great at making complex things easy to understand, and his enthusiasm is contagious. Highly recommend his book, but if you've only got an hour here's a good video conversation.
"Reported to have a unit cost somewhere between US$200,000 and US$300,000, RAD6000 computers were released for sale in the general commercial market in 1996"
Anybody know why the per unit cost is so high? Low yields or is it that much more expensive?
1) The yield rates for spaceflight-qualified chips is very, very low. Like 1%-5% or so. The chips are inspected when they come out of fab, and only the most perfect ones are given a spaceflight certification. The rest of the chips are used for other, less stringent applications (test boards, or military/embedded applications).
2) Spaceflight parts have significant paper trails. For metal parts, they are traced from the moment a lot of material comes out of the mill, and every time it is touched or changes hands thereafter that fact is recorded. Same thing with chips. Every chip has a "traveler" associated with it that records when it was manufactured, how it was stored, etc. Keeping those records costs a surprising amount of money. Handling the parts so the paper trail can be kept costs even more. You have to organize your logistics train such that every part is individually trackable. That reduces efficiency and adds cost.
I saw a video once saying that SpaceX uses general purpose computers on the rockets instead of specific purpose hardware. If I'm not mistaken, they amount to 6 and have a checking system to assure the output of them is the same.
Low sales, meaning the R&D cost (which'll be higher than a non rad hard chip anyway) can't be as easily amortized. And probably half of it is or so is just the .gov markup.
More interesting would be when someone else from another species finds them in a couple of million years in the future and wonders what their purpose was all about.
You know the craziest thing about all of the mars exploration programs is to me?
The first time there is an entire full-up test of the system is live, AT MARS. There isn't a good way to test the entire entry descent and landing sequence because the earth's atmosphere is so different than mars. I know NASA works hard to test parts of it in the vicinity of earth, but I can't imagine designing something so complicated (especially the system for curiosity) and then not being able to test it completely before the real thing.
I've actually read, that the upper part of the atmosphere, where a returning Falcon 9 booster does retro burns to slow down, is similar to Mars (in terms of pressure I guess).
Opportunity is going to be the standard for longevity that all future rovers are measured against until one surpasses it.
If you said you expected a rover to last 5yr in 2004 you'd have been called crazy. Here we are in 2019 and after ~15yr of Opportunity driving around up there the idea of rover lasting 5yr or seems perfectly normal. Opportunity has raised the bar for all future missions.
Curiosity is doing well at about 6.5 years and had a 2 year mission but it probably won't stay fully operational that long. Its RTG could last that long but it will eventually stop producing enough power for the rover to move.
Is it possible for someone other than NASA to send a message to the rover? I'd be happy throwing a little money at a project to ping it monthly to see if there is a response.
Yes and unlikely :-) The protocols are all documented but the ability to receive signals from the rover requires a pretty sensitive receiver and antenna combination. If you have the resources to build a 10m or 15m steerable radio antenna parabolic dish then you could probably manage it.
You could send a message. The source code is available[1], but you would need to build or have access to a large antenna, which would be extremely difficult and/or expensive.
It's physically possible but I'd have to imagine there's a security key required for the Rover to accept a message and there's no way in hell NASA would give you that key.
I built some warehousing apps in VFP 20 years ago and they're still running fine. Every time I go ship something the owner asks me to prune and reindex the DB and that's it, another year running smooth.
In an IT industry magazine website (Information Week? not sure) had an article about an IT engineer at JPL who was picked/trained to be one of the drivers of the rovers. He was just a normal IT guy, but got the chance to be a driver for the rover.
He recalled that the first night after he spent a day driving the rover on Mars, he couldn't sleep at home. He had just driven a vehicle on the Mars. Certainly one of the first in human history.
As one of the PIs said at the NASA briefing. If you can bring Opportunity home I'll prefer if you bring back 180kg of Mars rocks. We already know what the rover is made of. :)
[+] [-] slg|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ianworld|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Retric|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HALtheWise|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Consultant32452|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] magicalhippo|7 years ago|reply
Framed this way it's not entirely surprising they lasted longer, especially given the fortunate turn of events with the martian wind cleaning the solar panels of dust.
This of course does not in any way diminish the engineering and ingenuity involved with designing and operating the rovers.
[+] [-] seppin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnJamesRambo|7 years ago|reply
Imagine if your retirement planner or accountant was off by 44X in their number crunches for you. Would you say they were good at estimating?
[+] [-] aspectmin|7 years ago|reply
So many interesting tidbits like the parts about the rovers expected short lifetime due to the dust, and how (if I remember correctly) they fixed this by shaking the solar panels like wings.
He talked about the rover drivers, and how they all had to live in special light cycle controlled buildings to get them used to working on Martian days vs. Earth (the extra hour adds up over time).
He wrote a book, a worthy read. The printing I got had some amazing pictures in it:
https://www.amazon.com/Roving-Mars-Spirit-Opportunity-Explor...
RIP Opportunity. An amazing testament to our need to explore.
[+] [-] dbg31415|7 years ago|reply
* Roving Mars with Steve Squyres - Conversations with History - YouTube || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NI6KEzsb26U
[+] [-] wiremine|7 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_embedded_compute...
That lead me to the RAD6000 page, which was new to me:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RAD6000
"Reported to have a unit cost somewhere between US$200,000 and US$300,000, RAD6000 computers were released for sale in the general commercial market in 1996"
Anybody know why the per unit cost is so high? Low yields or is it that much more expensive?
[+] [-] GlenTheMachine|7 years ago|reply
1) The yield rates for spaceflight-qualified chips is very, very low. Like 1%-5% or so. The chips are inspected when they come out of fab, and only the most perfect ones are given a spaceflight certification. The rest of the chips are used for other, less stringent applications (test boards, or military/embedded applications).
2) Spaceflight parts have significant paper trails. For metal parts, they are traced from the moment a lot of material comes out of the mill, and every time it is touched or changes hands thereafter that fact is recorded. Same thing with chips. Every chip has a "traveler" associated with it that records when it was manufactured, how it was stored, etc. Keeping those records costs a surprising amount of money. Handling the parts so the paper trail can be kept costs even more. You have to organize your logistics train such that every part is individually trackable. That reduces efficiency and adds cost.
3) Relatively low economies of scale.
[+] [-] luizfzs|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monocasa|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Timothycquinn|7 years ago|reply
Kudos to all those who contributed to make this such an overwhelming success.
Science FTW.
[+] [-] slowhand09|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lykr0n|7 years ago|reply
Same thing happened with Cassini. It's kinda poetic to see these outposts of Humanity's reach fade out after a sublime performance.
[+] [-] pjmlp|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] torpfactory|7 years ago|reply
The first time there is an entire full-up test of the system is live, AT MARS. There isn't a good way to test the entire entry descent and landing sequence because the earth's atmosphere is so different than mars. I know NASA works hard to test parts of it in the vicinity of earth, but I can't imagine designing something so complicated (especially the system for curiosity) and then not being able to test it completely before the real thing.
[+] [-] FrojoS|7 years ago|reply
edit: found a paper on the topic https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/201700...
also: https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/04/spacex-has-already-d...
[+] [-] dsfyu404ed|7 years ago|reply
If you said you expected a rover to last 5yr in 2004 you'd have been called crazy. Here we are in 2019 and after ~15yr of Opportunity driving around up there the idea of rover lasting 5yr or seems perfectly normal. Opportunity has raised the bar for all future missions.
[+] [-] brandonjm|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] sanj|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] 2trill2spill|7 years ago|reply
[1]: https://sourceforge.net/projects/ion-dtn/files/ion-3.6.2.tar...
[+] [-] DevX101|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] duxup|7 years ago|reply
The idea that we send a robot to another planet and it drives around for that long still astounds me.
[+] [-] sandis|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Entangled|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zaarn|7 years ago|reply
Thanks Opportunity, for all the knowledge you gave us. Thanks for the amazing pictures you sent us. Rest in Peace.
[+] [-] dba7dba|7 years ago|reply
He recalled that the first night after he spent a day driving the rover on Mars, he couldn't sleep at home. He had just driven a vehicle on the Mars. Certainly one of the first in human history.
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