Thursday, September 4, 2008
After catching its electronic breath and uttering a robotic sigh of relief, the Mars Rover Opportunity looks back into Victoria Crater after its month-long struggle to escape. Note the two sets of tracks; the rover basically took the same route up that it did when it descended into the crater about a year ago. Image credit: NASA
In another remarkable accomplishment for the Mars Rover Opportunity (which along with its sister rover Spirit are two of the most amazing pieces of mechanical engineering ever created), the rover has managed to climb out of Victoria Crater, which it has been in for about a year for scientific study. Basically, the rover took the same way up that it took down (which makes sense), but it took almost the entire month of August to travel the 50 meters (164 feet) necessary to exit the crater. Apparently the wall of the crater is quite sandy and slippery, and therefore the ground controllers were exceedingly cautious. Opportunity finally emerged on level ground on August 28.
In a limited sense, you can think of the Mars rovers as very high-tech radio controlled cars much like you can buy at stores like Radio Shack. However, the process of moving Spirit and Opportunity around is not as much fun as chasing your cat with an RC car (not that I would know about that...) At home, if your RC car crashes into a wall (or a cat), it's no big deal (except to the cat). However, the stakes are infinitely higher with a Mars rover, naturally, so the drive is a lot more tedious. Basically, once the ground control engineers spot an interesting place to go, they send the rover a short distance, carefully photograph the terrain, and painstakingly plot the next short leg of the journey. Lather, rinse, repeat until the desired destination is finally reached. Mars is littered with rocks and boulders, and misjudging any of them can be catastrophic for a rover. I know I wouldn't want to be the guy who makes a rover flip on its side!
To illustrate the careful planning involved in maneuvering the rovers, consider this: in the four years and eight months that the rovers have been on the Martian surface, Spirit has traveled 7.53 kilometers (4.7 miles). Opportunity has traveled 11.7 kilometers (7.3 miles). That may not sound like much, but considering the fact that each rover was designed for a 90-day mission, it's nothing short of miraculous!
3 Comments:
This is the kind of stuff we should be doing instead of investing in manned space flight. We could probably send thousands of these all over the solar system for the cost of the anticipated mars mission. I never quite understood the idea of trying to keep the meat alive in space when you can send a robot to do a mans job.
Scripto, I totally agree with you. At our current level of technology, sending people into space is prohibitively expensive and very dangerous. The unmanned missions that NASA and the ESA have conducted over the last few decades have accomplished infinitely more than the manned missions have.
That said, I feel our destiny will eventually lead us to full-time manned exploration of space. And in order to accomplish that, we need to continue taking the baby steps we have been taking in manned spaceflight.
Even though I am a staunch critic of the International Space Station, it does have some value in that it gives us practice living and working in space. Humanity is not a species that gives up just because something is tough, dangerous or costly, and I believe manned space exploration is no different in that regard.
I guess it would be nice to have some sort of ark the next time a planet killing asteroid came whipping in. But I'm afraid the robotic technology will far outpace the life systems technology for the near future. Even further in the future would be a self sustaining mars station. I'm afraid there may not be enough money for both.
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