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Exploration

You Can't Keep a Good Rover Down

By Marc Boucher
NASA Watch
June 4, 2018
Filed under
You Can't Keep a Good Rover Down

NASA: Mars Curiosity Rover’s Labs Are Back in Action
NASA’s Curiosity rover is analyzing drilled samples on Mars in one of its onboard labs for the first time in more than a year.
“‘This was no small feat. It represents months and months of work by our team to pull this off,’ said Jim Erickson, project manager of the Mars Science Laboratory mission, which is led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The Curiosity rover is part of the MSL mission. ‘JPL’s engineers had to improvise a new way for the rover to drill rocks on Mars after a mechanical problem took the drill offline in December 2016.‘”

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7 responses to “You Can't Keep a Good Rover Down”

  1. wwheaton says:
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    Bravo ! To what extent, I wonder, does this completely restore the rover’s capabilities for drilling and scientific analysis?

    • fcrary says:
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      Based on the JPL press releases, not completely. The experiments weren’t affected, just the drill, so they should be as good as you can expect. (After five years on the surface, that isn’t 100%. For example, I believe one has a finite supply of stored gas used for calibrations. If that isn’t used up, it must be getting close.)

      The drill itself isn’t being operated in the same way. The press release wasn’t too clear on the technical details, but it involves some sort of rocking motion instead of constant pressure against the rock it’s drilling into. That may mean it takes longer to drill, but they aren’t in any real hurry.

  2. Michael Spencer says:
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    Darn you, Elon!

    You’ve made me take a (very) hard look now at every single claim by NASA/JPL/Boeing/ULA! And I was such a trusting soul, once upon a time.

    I think I’d like to know exactly what was required during those months and months?

    • space1999 says:
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      Well, there are a number of instruments onboard the MSL that don’t depend on the drill… so certainly the science and ops teams had plenty to keep busy with. You can read an account of what the engineering team has been up to here (at least through Sept. 2017):

      http://www.planetary.org/bl

      I believe MSL has met all of its mission success criteria, and I think it’s in its second mission extension, so I imagine there’s not a huge engineering effort devoted to this. Probably JPL is primarily focused on Mars 2020 now…

    • fcrary says:
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      As space1999 noted, they were operating the rover, driving around and taking pictures. Since some of the most qualified and experienced people to deal with the drill are the ones who operate the rover, that probably means they weren’t working on the drill problem full time.

      But you are right to mention Mr. Musk. JPL has an extremely strong culture of not breaking things by accident. They wouldn’t try something and see if it works; that could accidentally make the problem worse. They’ve got an engineering model of the rover, and they’d try (without causing permanent damage) to reproduce the problem, study different solutions, study the consequences of something going wrong if they had mis-identified the problem, etc. That’s fundamentally different from the SpaceX approach of tying things, seeing if they work, and if they don’t, trying again.

      As an example, at the end of the Cassini mission, some of the scientists wanted to try some things we normally weren’t allowed to do. There was a long list of flight rules to avoid accidentally breaking something. The scientist’s logic was that accidentally breaking something a day or two before we deliberately burned the spacecraft up in Saturn’s atmosphere wasn’t such a big deal (the impact would happen regardless; the orbit was designed to assure that.) The ran into a brick wall, since the engineers and managers at JPL felt taking a risk and letting something go wrong by accident was completely unprofessional and unthinkable. That’s actually a bit of an exaggeration, but not a huge one. Some things were on the table that previously wouldn’t have been. But I did have a conversation about heating one of the IR instruments beyond limits in the last few hours before the impact.

      In that context, I have no doubt they were being very careful diagnosing and solving the problem with the Curiosity drill, and willing to take as long as necessary to be sure they were doing the right thing.

      • Paul451 says:
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        about heating one of the IR instruments beyond limits in the last few hours before the impact.

        For what purpose?

        • fcrary says:
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          Mostly geometry. The way Cassini was built, any sunlight on one entire side of the spacecraft would heat the two IR instruments. Including sunlight reflected from Saturn’s atmosphere or rings (if they were close enough.) The last twelve hours or so of the mission was very highly constrained and the geometry was a mess.

          The spacecraft was close enough to Saturn and the rings that they took up over half the sky; the Sun was in the other part of the sky. The project did not want to do any kind of ballet turns at that point. (On other occasions, we did some complex turns to avoid or minimize heating.) The science requirements was to have the high gain antenna pointed at the Earth and spacecraft rotated to allow measurements my the mass spectrometer. Oh, and the spacecraft in a telemetry mode where the spacecraft didn’t record data from one of those two IR instruments.

          To be fair, it wasn’t a complete melt for those instruments. It was heating to the point where damage was possible (the flight rule specified a small number of times that much heating would be allowed.) And the conversation wasn’t about whether or not to heat them up. It was about the formal approval process for waiving a flight rule. But it still gives you an idea about how serious JPL is about not unintentionally breaking anything, even a few hours before intentionally vaporizing the spacecraft.