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back to article Mars rovers can keep on rovin'

Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity have been given the green light to keep on roving, possibly through to the end of 2009. The rovers' continued good health is the only limit mentioned in NASA's announcement of the mission extension. The twin rovers landed on Mars in 2004. The original mission called for the pair to spend three …

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  1. Thorin

    Re: @Thorin

    "And in perspective - what's 8.2 billion comparing to 150 or so billion a year the US spends on Iraq and Afgan wars?"

    Well it's approximately ~5.46% as opposed to ~0.55% for a rover.

    Would American's (or the world) consider the mission a success if the crew didn't return? I highly doubt such a notion would ever be acceptable. Look at how long it look to get the Shuttle back to flight status after a crew died. (If it was purely up to NASA do you think it would have taken so long. Sadly NASA has to exist right along side the court of public opinion).

    Plus sending a crew on such a lengthy mission can't be assumed to have the same arrival and scientific result probabilities as proven robotic technology. So we've lost a rover or satellite or two out of a dozen or so robotic missions big deal. If we end up without a ship any results or a crew it's a big deal (rightly or wrongly).

    If we could just as reliably send a crew and get results back as we currently do with robotic missions I'd completely agree with you however that isn't the reality of the situation. Or if we could do it for the same cost, but that isn't the reality of the situation either.

    Lastly, how do you convince the US Gov't to stop spending 150 Billion+ a year in the middle east and start spending it on Space?

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  2. Thorin

    @ Vlad

    Grrr I missed a point in my previous reply.

    "And I look at that, actually, from this point - we will have to go to Mars (and incur the cost) sooner or later anyway, so playing with robots in the meantime just adds incremental costs to the whole thing."

    Again this would be true if the cost was equal or the likelihood of success was equal. Every Robotic mission increases or chances of success and reduces (through research etc) the cost of the future manned mission. 820 million and some electronics is vastly different than 8.2 Billion and a bunch of lives.

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  3. Daniel

    Re: manned exploration is better, but...

    "The trip is a year out and a year back in zero-gravity. We don't know how to keep astronauts' bones and muscles from atrophying. If we sent a manned mission to Mars today, they wouldn't be able to stand up (even in Mars light gravity) when they arrived."

    Agreed. This is why we need constant thrust engines for the trip, preferably at reasonable fractions of a G. This has two advantages: 1) the trip becomes much, much shorter, and 2) the constant acceleration provides a form of "gravity" for the astronauts during most of the trip.

    The downside to this is we simply do not have the technology for it at this point in time; the energy requirements are tremendous, essentially mandating the use of some form of nuclear energy source. Once you have a source of energy, you still need some way of actually converting it into thrust. Ion drives seem the most attractive with what we know now, at least we know how to build an ion drive, even if we don't yet know how to scale them up this large. Also ion drives don't require huge quantities of reaction mass, especially if energy is abundant and your drive design is optimized to save reaction mass and consume energy (best trade off for very long, high thrust trips).

    Of course, we COULD send people to mars on low thrust ion drives using solar arrays instead of nuclear power sources, but then we're back to all the problems entailed with 2 year long missions spent mostly in micro-gravity.

    -daniel

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  4. Simon Brown
    Paris Hilton

    ion drives

    so someone would have to write drivers for VxWorks to recognise the ion drives then?

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  5. Adrian Esdaile
    Unhappy

    Someone cocked up...

    ...if a system designed to last 3 months ended up lasting 3 years! That engineer won't get a job a Ford, or Sony, or Apple now will they?

    NASA will have fun with their budgets now too, in true goverment fashion:

    NASA: 'We need another $400mil for some new rovers please Mr.Congress'

    Congress: 'The you're still using the rovers we paid for last time, and you sad they would last three months - so you can have $40mil to last you three years now'

    NASA: "Er, no, but...'

    Congress: 'NO SOUP FOR YOU!'

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  6. lglethal Silver badge
    Joke

    Send some british convicts!

    Australia was colonised by sending British convicts to a big unexplored landmass on the other side of the world without bothering to send out any probes, rovers or even a reconnaissance craft of ANY sort. And look how we Aussies turned out - only 20-odd million people and we consistently beat the rest of the world in most sports!

    Send some British convicts and I'm sure they'll be able to turn that barren Martian landscape into a land worthy of its new name - New Australia!

    Plus there's the added benefit of emptying those overflowing British prisons a bit! ;)

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  7. Vladimir Plouzhnikov

    @Thorin

    Well, about NASA etc - I'm not sure that Americans as a nation are so averse to human losses in space exploration. American politicians surely are though. That's who the "return to flight" program was for. Are Shuttles now safer to fly? - nope. Foam still flies and hits the orbiters. Tiles still fall off. But NASA went through the motions and they are now good kids again...

    And I agree with you, albeit sadly, that the likelihood of the US politicians diverting Iraq war money to space exploration is zero. But I stand by my points about costs, value for money etc.

    MER rovers mission is too remote from manned Mars trip - different hardware, different procedures, everything's different. Every book I read on Apollo and other programs convinces me that you only learn when you start doing things with a particular purpose. You don't learn how to send people to Mars if your mission purpose is remote exploration.

    Also, we must make no mistake - ships are going to crash and people are going to die regardless. Look at Apollo 1, Soyuz 1, Salyut 1, Shuttle 1 (aka Columbia) - OMG, number 1 seems to be bad for space programs.

    But people die all the time - how many test pilots died during the aviation history? How many regular pilots? How many car drivers (and passengers)?

    An A380 will crash one day, taking 400-500 lives with it - and so what? People are not going to stop flying because of it.

    But, forget America, Africa is a more promissing asset in space exploration. All these people in Darfur and other nice places - they starve and kill each other in droves because they have no value proposition to the rest of the world at the moment. Yet, these are people just like you and I, with brains, but they are totally unutilised. Surely, given the state they are in, they must have much more appetite for risk than the Western society, if in return they get the chance to break out of their vicious circle.

    If some bright rich head will go there and bring technology, no matter how experimental, dangerous - he may find a good reception there... but it's all wishful thinking, I admit.

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  8. GrahamT
    Mars

    @Iglethal

    Forget the convicts, just put the Big Brother house on Mars. You would have people queuing around the block to be on the first mission.

    (Most of the past residents are from another planet anyway.)

    Imagine the Friday night audiences for the evictions:

    "Space cadet Smith, leave the Big Brother Pod now! Errr... no, the space suit won't be necessary."

    You only have to plan to bring one person back, thus keeping the costs down, and the public will have voted out the others (on premium rate phone lines, further subsidising the costs), so no worries about public reaction.

    Buy your shares in EndoMars™ now!

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  9. lglethal Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    @ GrahamT

    Where's a TV producer when we need one???

    With the amount of money the TV companies are willing to throw away on crap programming, funding a small expedition to Mars for a new Big Brother would seem like nothing at all!

    Brilliant Idea!!!

    Just wait for the Celebrity Big Brother version... :D

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  10. oldfartuk

    OS

    Do stargates run Novell then ?

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  11. Daniel B.
    Mars

    @ Graham T

    Maybe US TV producers won't, but at least the Russians might! They did a reality show about astronaut training, the winner would get to go to the ISS. Maybe they'll do something like that???

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