Exceeded 90 days by 10 years: Mars rovers

It's things like this that give America serious respect internationally.

The Voyager probe and Opportunity rover are two amazing devices. I believe they operate in conditions that are almost impossible for someone like me to imagine.

The other day it had gone from warm to very cold in a few hours and a dampness/dew developed inside my Prius. The plastic on the dash had dew all over it as did the doors and obviously the glass (both inside and out). I did wonder how the manufacturers design computer systems to operate in this sort of impossible condition; severe damp and computers don't mix as anyone who has had a smartphone fail and had a warranty claim refused because the litmus paper in the phone indicated water damage.

How do you design a car computer system to work in these dreadful conditions day after day. But then I thought how do you design a computer system to work in space where the temperature swings are immense, and then design it to last a year, 5 years, 10 years or upto 50 years in the case of Voyager? Serious respect due to these designers.

 

The unmanned NASA missions continue to overacheive.

I hope someday, the manned NASA missions will return to their glory back in the 60's.

Recently on I saw the BBC documentary (search within YouTube: BBC Space Race) Interesting history of how the US and the USSR took V2 technology and built on it led by von Braun (US), Korolev (USSR.) In varying ways, both of these rocket scientists had considerable adversity...Korolev needs more recognition for what he did during his Gulag-shortened life. Is it me or does the actor in the BBC mini series look more like Mel Gibson than the actual Korolev?

 

It was so unbelievable the way they landed on Mars with that bouncing ball approach.
Talk about out-of-the-box ideas.

 

Palo Alto is not near LA. Altadena is. Oh dear

Robotic spacework is the way to go. I am totally (somewhat sadly) convinced. It is just really too unfriendly to humans out there.

The question is, can the public conceive of rover 'drivers' as real explorers? Sort of a tough sell, given that they can work in their PJs

 

I remain exceedingly jealous. This must have been such a good thing to be involved with.

It's amazing what those rovers have achieved. These and Huygens have shown us pictures of real places that don't look all that different to Earth, which I think has really helped to reignite people's imaginations about space.

 

I would love to have been in the room when they float-tested THAT idea!

 

Even absent that unfriendliness, the fuel cost multiplier of needing to bring humans back argues very very strongly for non-return missions.

 

When young people present their enthusiasm about going to Mars (personally) my reply is depressing. As Fuzzy1 said, bringing all your own chemical propellant is pretty daunting.

If we bumble our way out of this century (food supply, wars, mini ice age , whatever), then maybe 22nd century people can develop a better way to move mass around than 'big fire'. It's so weird - after fire was shown to be effective at solving small problems, we have just stayed on the same path and expected it to solve ever bigger problems.

Well, maybe not.

 

.... but then that's one of the nice things about these new Chinese moon missions. If they can find the right chemicals - and there seems little reason to doubt that they're there - all you need to do is get your people to the moon and make the fuel there. Then you can launch your big rocket with people and equipment from a low-gravity body. That massively reduces the amount of chemical propellant you're going to need to carry: you don't have to use huge amounts of fuel to get your other huge amount of fuel off of Earth. Similarly, leaving your chemical propellant for the return trip floating in orbit around Mars, and just taking down enough to get back into orbit, would make the loads an awful lot lighter.

I should think, once we've had a good analysis of what chemicals there are on the moon and on Mars, that 3D printing gives us a lot of potential for weight saving too. Rather than carry the rovers and the housing modules and everything, we could just print them when we get there. And there's so much iron oxide on Mars that we just need to develop an efficient way of extracting enough oxygen from it for a life-support system for the team of astronauts. The less stuff - breathable oxygen, houses, kitchen sinks, etc - we need to carry, the less propellant we'll need.

 

Right - the moon is the obvious staging point. But the 3D printers etc. are going to need to operate in a very dusty environment, and that dust is pretty mean all by itself.

NASA’s Dirty Secret: Moon Dust

the Chang'e 3 (currently asleep because it is colder than Chicago during lunar night) has some downward-looking gadgets that had not been invented during the earlier round of lunar exploration. Remains to be seen if everything they find out will become public knowledge.

 

Yes. That's why you would also need to pack several feather dusters.

Indeed. I'd be astonished if they tell us everything.

btw, how is your Internet doing now? You mentioned you were having trouble with it last week. I was in Beijing during that alleged suicide attack at Tian'anmen in late October or early November, and the Internet slowed down to almost a complete halt for some of that week.

 

Some more cool space stuff.

Rosetta the comet-chasing spacecraft wakes up | Science | The Guardian

Chasing a comet, finding it 500 million miles from home, orbiting it, landing on it, and tying yourself to it so you don't fall off. Cool.

 

After shadowing Opportunity and hiding behind boulders, that Martian has finally thrown a rock at it to grab its attention and see how it responds.

 

Nah. They never got to the moon or mars and to save face Opportunity is in a shed in Area 51. The rock is one that was accidently kicked by an engineer who took a short cut.

Or so I heard.

 

^ Busted.....

 

Jelly donut!

 

I missed this when it happened, but I caught it on a re-run of a news show this week.

Mars Rover Curiosity 'draws' penis on surface of Red Planet | News.com.au



Makes me proud to be human.