Skip to main content

NASA's latest effort to revive Opportunity will likely be the last

[ad_1]


NASA has begun what is very likely its final attempt to re-establish contact with the Opportunity rover, after a massive Martian dust storm forced the agency to put the 15-year-old robot to sleep. If unsuccessful, this effort will make for a sad finale to the rover, but also cap off one of the greatest Mars missions ever conducted—propelled by technology that’s punched way above its weight.



To recap: a gargantuan dust storm swelled over the red planet last summer, effectively blotting out the sun. NASA chose to move Opportunity, a solar powered rover, into an energy-saving mode, keeping it technically on, but shutting down its scientific operations and most of its instruments. This way, the rover could run enough power to keep its heaters on and protect itself from cold temperatures that could do irreparable harm to its parts. Once the storm abated, the rover could use sunlight to recharge its batteries and come back to life once again.



It didn’t exactly work out this way. The skies cleared up, but Oppy stayed asleep. NASA hasn’t been able to communicate with the rover since June 10 of last year, and the reason isn’t totally clear. John Callas, the project manager for the Opportunity mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, explained in a press release that the team planned to conduct a “sweep and beep” strategy for contacting the rover, transmitting new commands to Opportunity instead of simply putting an ear out and listening.



There are dozens of potential explanations for Opportunity’s silence. The rover’s solar panels might simply be caked in too much dust to function, or the storm might have broken something vital. Less likely, NASA suspects the primary and secondary X-band radios Opportunity uses to communicate have failed, or that the rover’s internal clock (which orients its “computer brain”) is down. The “sweep and beep” commands could help to reset some of the rover’s internal software and force it to switch to a backup X-band radio or reset the clock.



Unfortunately, the window on re-establishing contact with the rover is almost surely about to close. Here’s the thing: Opportunity has lasted long outlived its initial 90-day mission (it’s been going for 14 years) because Martian winds have periodically cleaned dust off the rover’s solar panels and allowed it to recharge. This was an unexpected boon, but it’s allowed Oppy to survive 55-times its planned lifespan.



Mars is currently in the midst of one of its windy seasons that helps clean the dust out, but that’s quickly coming to an end, and will be followed by a southern winter that’s sure to bring temperatures low enough to cause catastrophic damage to the rover’s unpowered batteries, as well as other internal circuitry. The Martian winter is what killed the Spirit Rover back in 2010.



Even if this is the end of Opportunity, there is no question the mission has been a phenomenal success. Besides the rover’s storied body of observations and scientific data, it’s been a terrific example of the sorts of planetary exploration technologies capable of lasting years and able to withstand extreme environments and climates found on other worlds. The rover’s battery and power system in particular has been a tremendous success story, inspiring the power systems developed for the Curiosity rover and the Mars 2020 rover later on.



We all hope that Opportunity can muster up the willpower to go for another 15 years, but even it’s down for the count, it will have already done more for Mars exploration than we ever anticipated.




[ad_2]

Written By Neel V. Patel

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ice technicians are the secret stars of the Winter Olympics

[ad_1] The emphasis of this year's two-week-long Winter Olympic Games has been placed squarely on the Olympians themselves. After all, the stated purpose of the international competition is to bring together the world’s greatest athletes in a nail-biting competition across fifteen different winter sports. But before the curlers, skiers, and skaters even arrived in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the Olympians of the ice technician world were already a few weeks deep in a competition of their own. Mark Callan of the World Curling Federation and Markus Aschauer of the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation both say they’re hoping to make the best ice the Winter Olympics have ever seen. To transform the barren concrete jungle of existing tracks and arenas into an ice- and snow-covered wonderland is an enormous undertaking. And it takes a keen understanding of the physics and chemistry that keeps frozen precipitation pristine. Curling Callan has been making and maintaining ic...
Post a Comment
Read more

With Operation Popeye, the U.S. government made weather an instrument of war

[ad_1] It was a seasonably chilly afternoon in 1974 when Senators Claiborne Pell, a Democrat from Rhode Island, and Clifford Case, a Republican from New Jersey, strode into the chambers of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations for a classified briefing. While the meeting was labeled “top secret,” the topic at hand was rather mundane: They were there to discuss the weather. More specifically, Pell, the chairman of the now-defunct subcommittee for Oceans and International Environment, and his colleague were about to learn the true extent of a secret five-year-old cloud seeding operation meant to lengthen the monsoon season in Vietnam, destabilize the enemy, and allow the United States to win the war. Though it cycled through several names in its history, "Operation Popeye" stuck. Its stated objectives—to ensure Americans won the Vietnam War—were never realized, the revelation that the U.S. government played God with weather-altering warfare changed history. The...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to avoid the mid-movie bathroom break

[ad_1] Long movies and the urge to pee have been linked since the early days of cinema. Sixty-three years before Avengers: Endgame and its three-hour runtime, moviegoers settled in for nearly four hours of The Ten Commandments . “There will be an intermission,” director Cecil B. DeMille announced during the movie’s introduction. And audiences’ bladders were relieved. On average, movies aren’t getting longer, but they also don’t come with a predetermined bathroom break. That means when nature calls, you’ve got to either sit in growing discomfort or gamble on the best time to run to the restroom. But it doesn’t have to be this way, and for most people, setting your body to “do not disturb” is fairly simple. Go before the show The first piece of advice is also the easiest: pee before the movie starts. Generally, healthy adults urinate every 3-4 hours, so the longer a movie runs, the more urgent it becomes to reset your internal p...
Post a Comment
Read more