Off topic. I like to imagine that when we start to colonize mars, our two robots will be recovered and put on display in reverence. Someplace where everyone can see them, much like the statues of important human figures.
I've been following these guys for so long, so this is really awesome/sad.
Much like a moment from a Baxter(?) novel I found very stirring. It describes a small world, completely terraformed except for a domed patch of gray sand and vacuum. The dome was built to preserve an ancient spacecraft named Eagle and the footprints of its crew.
Further off-topic: My college robotics professor used to go on and on about how incredible it was that the Mars rovers had lasted twice as long as in the spec.
He was from Glasgow and had a really thick Scottish accent, and he was obsessed with Daryl Hannah's character in Blade Runner. He used to say "Noow tha' theer... tha's a sexxeh rrowb't."
At some point, he decided that Spirit and Opportunity were "sexxeh" as well.
Very verbose and longwinded article. Summary: Rover gets stuck straddling a crater. Wheels sping uncovering sulfates. Sulfates are associated with volcanic steam vents.
I think they intentionally did that to make science appealing and interesting to people who otherwise couldn't care less. I think they did a good job with that article.
I like that. We need more people to be interested in science and less on reality TV and celebrities.
From my experience as a science blogger, they failed miserably because they weren't telling a story. The way it read is that they are constantly delaying getting to the point.
They need to tell a story. Maybe something like "Many many years ago, Mars was covered with steam vents <insert image of a steam vent on the red plant>. How do we know? Ah, we had to get stuck to find out." That is an interesting story. Delaying is not.
The stay-tuned-to-find-out message of the last paragraph seemed kind of out of place. Made me think there could a reality show in this mission somewhere.
It's not the number of words, it's what you do with them. You can be long-winded in one sentence if you try. I found myself thinking "get to the point!" with this article.
Apparently NASA didn't expect them to function this long; on the dusty Martian surface, the solar panels should have been covered with dust completely, leaving the rovers dead long ago. It's a lucky coincidence that "sand devils" on Mars had been cleaning the solar panels and keeping the rovers alive.
Wipers sounds like a good idea. Not sure why they didn't implement it in the first place.
Now that actually makes NASA look bad if they go around claiming that here was a problem that we could have taken care of by just adding a good old windshield wiper, but guess what? we didn't. But luckily we got saved by the fact that Martian sandstorms had been doing this job for us, which by the way we didn't know until we actually went there ....
That doesn't sound very PR savvy to me.
Putting "Windshield Wipers" on the probes to another planet isn't exactly like going down to Auto Zone and picking up a few strips of black silicone.
Wipers would have to survive the extremes of space and the surface of Mars. They would need motors, which require heaters to keep them from freezing (increasing the amount of energy the probe needs). They would increase the weight of the craft, increasing costs or requiring them to leave off other features. They would have to be extensively tested, like the rest of the craft -- especially the mechanical elements. Imagine the press if they got to Mars and found their expensive wiping mechanism had jammed and would be useless. Finally, if the dust of Mars was charged at all, the wipers would have just rubbed the dust around on the panel, so they could have ended up with functional wipers that did no good.
The mission was designed so that it could complete its high priority scientific objectives in three months, and the probes were engineered so that they had a high probability of surviving for three months.
Dust accumulation was not expected to be a problem in the high priority part of the mission, and since it was a hard (expensive) problem to address, it was not addressed. It was happy circumstance that previously unknown phenomena on Mars meant that it ended up not being a problem at all.
They probably sandbagged their lifespan by a factor of 2-3 (6-9 months design lifespan), but I doubt anyone expected them to last for 6+ years. Engineers don't often try to exceed design goals by more than a factor of 10, because that typically requires a completely different design.
Mechanical windshield wipers would probably get clogged and jammed by dust, for instance. I'm from New England; I usually had to manually clean the snow/salt/mud/ice off my windshield wipers every couple days or so during the winter. There's nobody who can step outside the Mars Rovers and run their fingers along the wiper blades.
It was probably also a sneaky way to get more funding for the project. Politicians won't want to shutter working rovers on the surface, but building in 6+ years of operation would have significantly increased the projected budget. Savvy!
I know! I read the first few sentences and they mentioned this amazing discovery, but it forced me to scan down about half way through the article to actually find out what it was..
I've been following these guys for so long, so this is really awesome/sad.