Pete Theisinger on Mars Exploration Rovers Longevity
CuriousMars: Opportunity’s First Project Manager Hails Longevity, SpaceRef
“The NASA Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is beginning its 10th year roving Mars, completing nine years of “shocking” performance and historic discoveries that began with a bouncing airbag roll into tiny Eagle crater on Jan. 24, 2004.”
“It’s amazing, we never expected these kind of results!”, says Pete Theisinger, the original MER project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Calif. He also led JPL’s Curiosity rover development in the same role.”
I hope Curiosity can match the longevity of Opportunity. The data returned would be priceless.
If they have built the rovers not 36 times better than necessary they would have costed a lot less.
Two rovers 36 times better than necessary = 500 mio$. Two rovers 2 times better than necessary = 30 mio$. Or 18 rovers 2 times better than necessary = 500 mio$. ( I know that this is an unallowed way to calculated, The dust was the limiting factor in the calculations I think.)
And even at 72 times the nominal mission they would find new things nobody ever expected
In what world does the amount of money spent on hardware map directly to the amount of time a rover survives? This is totally ridiculous pseudo math.
Not 18 rovers but 1 additional one would be the real world calculation!
You’re dead wrong. The MER program was, and continues to be, extremely inexpensive. The total cost for the initial program was $820 million. That includes everything — design, construction, launch, and operations through the initial mission period. That’s really an amazing deal, and it included two rovers exploring different parts of the planet.
Just getting a probe near Mars is very difficult. Just look at all those failed Soviet/Russian missions. But not only did the MER program get near Mars, they actually landed successfully. And not only that, they managed to drive around the planet, looking at different things in different places. $820 million is an incredible deal for that.
In the years since, they’ve spent another $104 million to keep driving the rovers around, and keep receiving and analyzing the data. Again, a real bargain.
In fact, the fact that those rovers lasted so long is probably because they kept it simple and cheap. Mega-programs that go over budget because they try to push the technology envelope are the ones that tend to be less reliable.
The idea that you could spend less and get more rovers that only last a few months might sound superficially possible if you know nothing about these rovers, but it’s clearly nonsense to anyone who digs a little deeper.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…
The total cost for the initial program was $820 million. And it included a 36 times safety margine on the engineering.
To argue that 820 million was cheap and therefore the overengineering was OK is not nice.
The whole thing would have costed 600 mio if the overtesting and margins would have been in a reasonable scale.
This would have allowed at least one additional rover or several improvements in the instruments.
This is gibberish.
You honestly cannot reasonably design it to actually only last 90 days or even near it. The _inescapable_ reality is that many components will happily last years and years and years whether you test them for it or not.
You would have to build the wheels out of chocolate or use a motherboard from a Nintendo.
And if your MTFB really is near your 90-day mission target, that means the chances are pretty good that you’ll get a failure _during_ your mission.
The machines have to meet some specifications:
-They must survive launch.
-They must survive several months in deep space.
-They must hit the ground.
-They must tolerate the Martian temperature swings.
If you can be specific about how to meet these specifications without accidentally building something that can last more than three months while very slowly crawling over some dirt and snapping pictures, please, elaborate.