Well, with perhaps a few more weeks of tilt-enhancing drives to go and then settling in for the winter, I thought it might be a good time to have a thread dedicated to ideas and observations that will come. It's likely that we won't hear much from Spirit during the coldest part of winter (April-June) possibly longer. There'll hopefully be beeps to tell us that she's still alive.
Already there are plans for radio science and determining the fluidity or otherwise of the Martian core, plus weather observations, surface changes etc.
What else could you think of that Spirit could do? Remember that she's not going anywhere (vonBraun is out)
In the meantime, have you sent your postcard to Spirit yet?! It's a great idea from the Mars outreach team.
http://beamartian.jpl.nasa.gov/spiritpostcards
What would you say to Spirit?
Now, let's derive some experience from the mission of Viking Lander 1, an active static lander for 6.5 years...
We did :
1. digging trenches (soil analysis AND soil mechanics) ;
2. long-term surface change surveys ;
3. monitoring dust storms (at that time we were not aware of dust devils) ;
4. "Marsquakes" surveys ;
5. sky dynamics surveys (i.e. for opacity and search for clouds) ;
6. Phobos & Deïmos imaging (i.e. also for dust opacity) ;
7. full 360° hi-res panoramic pics taken : early morning (7:30 am), at noon, early afternoon (15:00 pm) and some sections at sunset (i.e. 17:00 pm) ;
8. meteorology (temperature + pressure + wind direction).
I think nearly all the same goals can be met with Spirit as a stationary lander, with :
- wheels and/or the IDD for (1) ;
- the cameras for (2), (3), (5), (6) and (7) ;
- the inertial measurement unit (which provides 3-axis information on position) for (4) if sensitive enough ;
- some heaters consumptions from which an outside temp can be derived for (8) and dust movements on the solar panels for long-term wind directions for (8) also...
Well... still a lot of GOOD SCIENCE to expect from Spirit !
AND.. let's imagine Spirit sending back to Earth spectacular images such as romantic full hi-res 360° sunrise or sunset panoramas with rocks casting long shadows...
Now, let's have a "positive Spirit" !
So, I think there is something cool to do about full 360° pan. This is to do a super-res 360° pan, in B&W taken with the L1/R1 filters (so blank) for the super-res and in the same with the full set of filter, and compose a super-res color pan. This will lead to have the biggest pan we ever had of Mars. This will be a pretty hard imagery mission but this is my "little dream" .
I would love to see such a "beast" panorama but I don't see it happening.
The reason would be the lack of power / memory space / bandwidth to manage it in a reasonable timeframe.
PS: I suppose you mean L7/R1 filters.
Maybe they can finally do that rover MI self-portrait though! Though I don't expect she'll have power to before winter sets in. First job is winter survival, then we can have all this stationary science.
As a permanent station the ability to go back to a specific location over time might be an idea for study to visit several times for more specific study of data found. Is there any time line set up now?
I know that they plan to look at microchanges in soil particle movement over time using the MI.
It'd be interesting if they could brush clean a conveniently located flat rock surface and then watch the dust deposition that occurs and particle movement over time.
I don't want to worry anyone but according to the latest report on the official site Spirit is down to 182W!
I guess that explains the absence of new images downloaded from the last few sols.
Tasks were sequenced to be executed from 2162 up to 2165, including a drive on that latest sol which should be today, but no data has been downlinked since after sol 2161. My interpretation is that they are not making everyday UHF downlink sessions in order to store energy for this latest drive attempt.
RE the report, its an "old one" from a week ago. We may have a new one today or tomorrow.
Mixer, no offence taken!
To be fair, I should have posted the link, but I'm afraid my technical ability is very poor and thus I was unable to do so (I am working on it).
I think we've all slammed the desk or similar at some point recently following our brave Spirit rover! My dog Ben has never had so many walks!
Neil
What gives you the idea that they've been intentionally tilting south? Anything other than a norther tilt is an unfortunate and unintentional side effect of extraction, or hope for improved northerly tilt
He might have been alluding to Ashley's comment found in the latest http://www.planetary.org/news/2010/0131_Mars_Exploration_Rovers_Update_Robots.html:
I haven't seen any decrease in northern tilt for the time being.
And again. That 182Wh figure is from a week ago, sol 2158, before the last drive during sol 2161 where we saw an increase of the northern tilt.
Better wait for the next status report.
Indeed Poolio. From that report quote
'Spirit was slated to drive on 2161 (January 30, 2010) but the results were not available by presstime. The latest data clearly indicate the tilt to the north has degraded or gotten worse. "Before we started driving backwards, we were roughly at 4 degrees southerly tilt. Now, we're roughly in about 10 degrees southerly tilt," Matijevic informed last Friday. But this was expected and should be temporary.'
How low do they expect power levels to drop in terms of watts. Didn't Opportunity drop below 100W during the dust storm a year or so ago?
With regard to the liquid/solid core question, that seems like something really fundamental and important that Spirit can accomplish in her remaining days. I'm not clear on all the details, but I understand that if the rover remains absolutely stationary for a long enough period, very precise measurements can be taken of the planet's rate of spin and precession of the spin axis, and from these conclusions can be drawn about what's going on inside. For a better understanding, I'd be interested to hear informed opinions on the following issues:
A. How long is "long enough"? Do I recall having seen an estimate of "six months" somewhere on the web?
B. Within that time period, does the experiment require a series of observations at regular intervals, or just one "before" and one "after" with no rover movement in between?
C. How will the rover's precise position be determined? Optically, with the use of Hi-Rise, or by some triangulation procedure involving the three working orbiters? Or is there some way to do it from Earth?
D. Just how much precision can be obtained with whatever method is to be used? It sounds like probably a resolution of centimeters is required, but even earth-based military grade GPS is not that accurate, is it?
E. Does the rover have to cease all other activities and remain perfectly motionless during the entire observation period for fear of introducing spurious motions into the experiment?
F. If the rover doesn't make it through the winter, can the experiment be concluded passively by a "dead" rover?
(Sorry about that last one everybody, but really, what more could any of us wish for than to be able to continue doing worthwhile work in the afterlife...)
A - Six months is what I have seen as well
B - A series, I believe.
C - DDOR from the DSN. It's accurate to an extraordinary degree (and is nothing like GPS)
D - Centimetres is what they need, and what they'll get.
E - It's a case of not moving. The arm and camera past can, I presume, still be used.
F - No. It's a case of tracking the radio signal it's transmitting. No transmission, no experiment.
I remember in grade school, we learned to spin the Easter Eggs on the table to determine if they were hard-boiled or not. This must be a planetary-scale variant of the same technique. (All you out-reachers take note!)
One small correction -- I've been told Spirit can actually roll a few centimeters while the experiment is still going on, so there could be motion first thing in spring when power levels start going back up.
Spirit had an all time low of 86 whr during the regional dust storm of November 2008. That's an unsustainable level of course, but it only lasted for a few days and Spirit was able to live off her batteries until the situation improved.
I think Opportunity's lowest power level was around 128 whr during the global storm in July 2007.
I don't know how low they expect the power levels to get for Spirit this winter, but I would imagine it doesn't matter that much. Whether the batteries take three days or three weeks to drain, she will still need to endure some lengthy period of being subjected to the unmitigated chill of winter.
Thinking about the "hibernation" period for Spirit some more, I have a couple questions. Forgive me if these have been covered before; I don't recall seeing anything...
Once she has "shut down" and is hibernating, is it correct to assume that Spirit will not be consuming any power? If so, wouldn't that mean that what little power the panels do generate each day (whether its 10 whr or 100) would go into charging the batteries? And if that's the case, could we expect Spirit to wake up periodically throughout the winter and try to make contact? (Even though the simple act of waking up may prompt her to trip a low-power fault again.)
During any brief periods of wakefulness, would the computers generate enough heat to provide some warmth to the WEB? And (finally!) would such temperature cycles be helpful or harmful to her chances of long term survival?
Sorry for all the hypotheticals. I know that the hibernation period has been discussed, but I don't recall seeing anything about the possible effects of cyclic sleeping and waking.
Some details in http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/spotlight/20100211a.html It looks like preparations for the winter, and the stationary science campaign have begun:
Guess that's it, then; our girl is hunkering down for the long, hard winter. But we'll keep her company here, on UMSF, that's for sure.
The rubbing sound you can hear is the sound of thousands and thousands of fingers around the world being crossed.
I assume there is no danger of the flash memory anomaly returning while Spirit is incommunicado?
The flash memory anomaly is now http://www.flightsoftware.org/files/FSW07_Ali_Flash.pdf and there is a lot of easy to find discussion of it.
The short answer is, no. The programming error that caused the flash memory to fill up was fixed on both rovers once the problem was identified. There is no chance of that particular problem of ever recurring.
Is there anything published about Spirit's "moment of inertia" experiment? I can't find anything...
Wow, Doug, thanks for all the relevant info. I will delve into those documents in my copious free time (!), but the quote you highlighted and your follow-on comments were very illuminating.
So the rover does consume a minimal amount of power and the BCB "stays awake" even during hibernation. This also explains questions I had about how the rover wakes up -- what triggers the event that prompts the comm attempt. This must be different from Phoenix who suffered no sunlight and therefore no power for many months. I assume that if you dropped Spirit into the arctic circle at winter, she would become irrevocably dead.
The excerpt also sheds some light on the latest JPL update that talks about adjusting the comm window for the winter. And somehow I never knew that the rovers had RHU's in their bellies.... So there are 8 RHU's generating 1 W each. Winter temps are expected to reach -40C. Does anyone know what the resulting temperature would be in the WEB given these parameters?
When I win the lottery, I'm funding a start-up to develop immortal batteries, capable of surviving months of no charge and then recharging. Oh, and electronic components capable of surviving, say, 200 degree thermal cycles indefinitely. Hopefully there'll be enough left over for Doug's pony, too
There are 801.9 Mb of imagery data and an unknown amount of spectroscopy and telemetry data stored in flash. Since flash is volatile memory, will it be cleared if a low power fault is tripped?
My bad. For some reason I thought that the flash memory was volatile.
Greetings everyone. Longtime lurker here (since the mer.rlproject.com days!) and I finally have a question that I can't find the answer too. Here goes:
The Viking landers lasted for many years on the Martian surface, immobile. Is there some technical reason their comm. data cannot be used for measurements of Mars's interior, like the long-term plans are for Spirit? I'm just asking because I find it hard to believe that no one would use that 30+ year old data to do the same things we're doing now. There must be some good reason they can't be used.
Thanks, and keep up the good work keeping this place great!
MI Pan now she's parked up. Others will do a far better job of sharpening these images up
I asked Squyres about past landers during the January press briefing (when prodded to by Doug!). He said that the Viking radio system wasn't the right type to permit the precise tracking required. They had S-band radio, the rovers use X-band. I think that's the reason. They did do tracking with Pathfinder, but the mission didn't last long enough.
--Emily
Well that explains it. Thanks for the quick reply! Hopefully Spirit will last long enough to be able to do this.
That would make sense. I don't know, though.
Here is the MI images of the final parking spot of Spirit
(as Doug said, others may do a better job of sharpening... mine has brightness discontinuities between images...oh well!)
Couple of new 3D views here...
http://twitpic.com/13dfni
http://twitpic.com/13dfrz
And a new blog post here: http://cumbriansky.wordpress.com/2010/02/13/spirit-stops-roving-and-soon-will-sleep
Don't read it if you're not a fully paid up member of the Rover Hugger Club; you'll just upset yourself.
It's been said before, and often - Don't bet against Spirit, it's a great way of losing money...
Spirit's adventure is far from over yet, of that I'm sure.
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status_spiritAll.html#sol2171
I assume they will have time to upload the table before spirit goes "night night" ?
Anyone know what the final aspect was? How much of a northerly tilt did they end up with?
To the south? I thought they were angled north now?
No, Spirit is tilted 9 degrees toward the south :
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/spotlight/20100211a.html
Here is the IDD work volume pan taken between sol's 2163-2176 with L257. Lots of color variations in the soil
Yes the tilt is South, time, energy and luck ran out for getting Spirit into a Northerly tilt. A bit like what happened to Phoenix, in the end sunlight rules what you can do and cannnot do.
Spirit is such a drama queen sometimes. I'm reasonably confident of a revival and a cleaning come next spring, but it's going to be a nail biting 2010 for our old gal.
That rock looks like countless thousands more just to our east on the edge of homeplate.
tau is indeed very low : look at the contrast on the surface, details on the hills, and at the dark sky...
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/2/n/2175/2N319449738EFFB27MP0703L0M1.JPG
I'm anticipating seeing something we wouldn't have seen if we'd kept moving. Maybe standing still will be a good thing too.
Physorg is running a story
"Spirit's Journey to the Center of Mars"
http://www.physorg.com/news186415686.html
They're talking about Spirit's science campaign to determine Mars' interior, but ... darn if that isn't ironic considering the recent drives.
via twitter
@elakdawalla Ray Arvidson: Spirit's last 9 drives did 39 cm, "pretty good for a lander." In spring, a couple weeks of work should get Spirit out. #lpsc
(only 2 because , well, you know)
More details in the http://www.planetary.org/news/2010/0228_Mars_Exploration_Rovers_Update_Spirit.html On driving in the spring:
http://www.planetary.org/news/2010/0228_Mars_Exploration_Rovers_Update_Spirit.html also contains the following quote:
Callas scheduled an ‘all-hands’ meeting at JPL to discuss the engineering realities and to make sure everyone on the team is fully aware of just how tough this winter is going to be for Spirit. The long period of silence, as well as the possibility, though seemingly unlikely at this juncture, that it may stay silent could send team members into a kind of rovershock.
Laubach, who suffered the silence of the Mars Polar Lander back in 1999, has also been talking with her drivers and engineers one on one, bracing for all possibilities.
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean about MSL. Shortly after NASA declared Spirit a stationary rover, it started to hit me how terribly attached to the MER rovers I was. It hurt a lot that Spirit was permanently stuck. I don't know how I will feel when Spirit and/or Opportunity cease functioning. I dread to think of it.
Phoenix was okay, we all knew it was coming, how and roughly when it would die. Never got the time to really get firmly attached to it. I can't imagine how much it will hurt those who operate the MER rovers once one of them fails. .... ugh that's a dreadful thought too.
Like all the best funerals (and that's not a construct of words you use very often) it's about celebrating rather than mourning. It will be emotional, it will be frustrating, but it will be a chance to finally look back and appreciate all that has gone before.
I was just wondering this a few weeks ago. I think if MSL had kept with its original schedule, it would be wheels down on Mars now or very soon? So in my estimation, Spirit and Opportunity already made it to the party, it's MSL that's fashionably late.
Rovershock??? Oh Noez!!! I'll get that!
Well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
Together.
In the meantime, here's Spirit's latest view of the Hills...
http://twitpic.com/169cql/full
Something I've been wondering about for some time, (Mods move this if I'm posting in the wrong topic):
When/where did Spirit last catch a glimpse of the lander? I don't recall it being visible from the top of Husband Hill, due to haze and/or distance, so it must have been much earlier than that, correct? Looking at the panorama, It would be nice to see a sort of 'goodbye' image, like when Oppy left Eagle crater and took some last photos of the place.
It's been so long since those days, and I don't recall when our last sighting of the lander was. But the reflective heatshield, and the big bright parachute were visible to at least around sol 600, ie the summit of Husband. Check out http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=1476
Probably not. I think they're on the other side of that mountain.
I thought about looking for the heatshield (easiest to see) from the last couple of winter haven sites, but never got around to digging through the pancams. Actually, you'd first want to make sure the right azimuth was in view. The landing site was visible from both WH2 and WH3 according to jpl - they've labelled it on these pans:
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/panoramas/spirit/2007.html
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/panoramas/spirit/2008.html
But there are errors in those jpl pans (both incorrectly label West Spur), so you'd want to double check the azimuths.
The azimuth is right for West Spur, but West Spur is hidden behind another promontory we used to call "Lookout Point " in the really old days. (IIRC, there was talk before the big climb began of driving up to that point for a view of the inner basin.) Check out http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=44&view=findpost&p=82916
Compare those jpl pans with a hirise view like http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/tm-spirit/images/MERA_A2158_2_br2.jpg What we see, Lookout Point, is just to the west of Eldorado. West Spur is roughly twice as far away to the northwest.
West Spur, however, is in that direction. 'Lookout Point' formally, is near Larrys Lookout, and I can't find any formal name for that hill. Notice they put it with a line pointing down and stopping at the top of that feature, they've not put the label ON it, like Home Plate and El Dorado. I don't think it's right to call it 'incorrectly labelled'.
"Lookout Point" was only ever an informal name, as far as I know. http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/press/spirit/20040521a.html including the story of the plan that never panned out.
I'd have to say that it seems a bit of a stretch to suppose that they meant to indicate that West Spur was behind "Lookout Point". Anyone who didn't know the geography well would assume that what they were pointing to was West Spur. Maybe the jpl people meant to add a dotted profile of the invisible West Spur but never got round to it.
http://www.marstoday.com/viewsr.html?pid=12928 shows that before it was decided that Spirit could climb West Spur, one plan was to skirt the base of Husband Hill and climb to "Lookout Point" for a view of the inner basin.
Lots of Pancam pictures returned on March 3rd, including some of Stu's "lucky horseshoe" crumbling apart as Spirit moved those 39 cm! I'm sure he doesn't mind one bit
Looking forward to some color mosaics by the experts!
From roverdriver's twitter feed:
The last status report on the project's web page already mentioned the 150Wh figure (153, actually) for sol 2191 (2nd March).
She may be down, but she's not out!
Another amazing milestone just a few hours away - Sol 2200!
Spirit 2200: sounds like some sci-fi movie title from the 50's.
YES ! Only 46 more Sols to go before beating Viking Lander 1 record for the longest Mars surface mission !
I.e. Sol 2245 (last transmission received from VL1 with latest images and meteo data from Sol 2238) + 1 Sol = Sol 2246
I was wondering when they'd beat that old record. Guinness book, here we come! (Crossing fingers)
Odds are we are going to be in "hibernation" (low power fault) during the breaking of the record. We will only know if she made it if we regain radio communication come spring. Scott Maxwell referred to this as "Schrödinger's Rover" on Twitter a few weeks ago.
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status_spiritAll.html#sol2192
No, you've seen those people too.
Everyone has the same look of fear, angst, concern, joy, pride and satisfaction on their faces.
The names may change but they are the parent's, brothers, sisters and extended family of these twin rovers.
They care about them as much as we 'rover-huggers' do (are you hearing me Stu)
Looking forward to the Spring when Spirit returns anew
New images are now down. Most recent are from sol 2202, yestersol.
Great news!
Now, if we could have info about the daily power production / consumption...
According to the tracking site, the only onboard images we don't have full copies of are a few dust devil images from sols 2116, 2128 and 2129.
via twitter a few minutes ago
@marsroverdriver Spirit, brave little girl that she is, is still hanging in there at 139 W-hr/sol. Not hibernating yet.
keep yer chin up, girl! hope those devils clean your wings
(sigh)...gonna be a long several months. Hang in there, Spirit.
>>According to the tracking site, the only onboard images we don't have full copies of are a few dust devil images from sols 2116, 2128 and 2129.
Does that mean that we've finally all but cleared Spirit's flash memory? Is this a first?
TTT (hoping that Spring reveals a cat and not just a grin)
Seems that poor Spirit is having to face a body temperature of -41 deg C...
... and so...
http://twitpic.com/19kl3m (illustrated version)
http://cumbriansky.wordpress.com/2010/03/19/spirit-shivering (text only version)
New astropoem, hope some of you like it.
They continue to amaze
@marsroverdriver Brilliant uplink team found way to shave Spirit's energy needs; can get by w/120ish now. Might stave off hibernation another couple weeks!
With http://twitter.com/marsroverdriver/status/10740899361
According to the tracking site, Spirit had a successful downlink on sol 2210.
The latest images include old DD navcams and tau pancams from as recently as yestersol (2209).
How Spirit might eventually get free - with a little other-worldly help
http://barsoomtales.wordpress.com/2010/03/23/freeing-spirit
(note: this is a just-a-bit-of-fun sci-fi short story. If you're not into that kind of thing, best give it a miss, especially if you don't like blue police boxes... )
http://twitter.com/marsroverdriver/status/10906070963
Cryptic comment in the http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status_spiritAll.html#sol2204
Hibernation begins (probably)
Sleep tight girl.
We'll keep a light on for you.
Enjoy your sleep, little one, you deserve it. Dream of hills climbed and distant peaks seen, and come back to us when you're ready. We'll keep peeking in through the door to make sure you're alright.
omg! Can we get real here? As much as we all love Spirit and hope for her well-being, she is a cold-blooded robot. We dream; she doesn't. Let's hope this incredible machine can survive another brutal Martian winter and provide all of us with more, wonderful, planetary exploration come the spring.
This mission has accomplished more than any of us could ever have hoped for. Let's hope it can go a bit further...
You have no soul, CosmicRocker
And MER A is an it, not a she.
There. Now we've eliminated any trace of anthropomorphism. Is everyone satisfied?
Are we going to fight a battle against metaphor? Sheesh!
Some unashamedly "rover huggy" thoughts on Spirit's hibernation...
http://cumbriansky.wordpress.com/2010/04/01/spirit-shuts-her-eyes
It is not uncommon for humans to ascribe human characteristics/emotions to robotic machines. Especially by their creators.
This is an absolute very evocative image of what has been done and what is left to explore.
You can easily add in the up right corner Stu (or myself actualy) sat on a rock looking down at the plain at his feet.
Thanks Eduardo.
Thanks Spirit
The most horrible part is not having an exact date. It's all up to Mars whether we'll hear Spirit again in the spring; if we don't we'll just have to guess when EOM came.... what a charged acronym that is!
And it's not bad, for a potential final image.
Thanks Tesh, that's Saved.
Seems like quite a bit was downlinked yesterday.
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/pancam/2010-03-31/
Also, this Navcam sequence with a great dust devil.
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/navcam/2010-03-31/
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/navcam/2010-03-31/2N299748282ESFB1E5P1561L0M1.JPG
Downloaded from the JPL servers to the Exploratorium, yes. Downlinked, no.
I always thought the dates listed were the downlink dates.
Two dust devils--one near each edge of images.
There can be (and in this case I guess there MUST be, given the missing comms pass from the 30th, and those files being 31st) burps and knots in the pipeline from downlink to distro. I think this is one of those cases. (I'll know for sure once MMB has finished downloading)
I cried like a baby this morning, hoping Spirit can survive the Martian winter.
Because Spirit did little more than upload and download data in preparation for sleep, the AJS Rayl rover update for last month is extremely heavy on spacecraft engineering details when discussing Spirit:
http://www.planetary.org/news/2010/0331_Mars_Exploration_Rovers_Update_Spirit.html
An additional little detail about the heater issue being a "tiny deadband" -- the heaters have been cycling at a higher frequency, as well as master clock faults being something to hope doesn't occur and prolong the hibernation.
I've been fretting about our girl since reading about the WEB being -41c. Yikes that sounded scary.
Then I remembered this
http://bit.ly/85JNar
My 2002 Chrysler started @ -46c on Dec. 15.
We're good to go. See you in spring girl!
OK, I will publicly apologize for being an ogre. My intention was only to tease about what appeared to me as overly gushy sentiment. In retrospect, I see that it sounded like criticism or even worse.
Don't worry Cosmic, seriously, no offence taken, it was all good natured joshing! We're all rover huggers here, to a degree. And your post did give me inspiration for a post on my own blog, so I should thank you!
And yes, I remember your early and continuing support for my poetry, and truly appreciate it. Now, my literary lens flare can be overly sentimental and gushy, but that's the nature of the beast; "Barsoom" is just too good a rhyming word to waste!
For all those feeling nostalgic, I found a couple of really good YouTube vids following Spirit's journey, one day at a time...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vQQKQhX--M (to Sol 1724)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaaz9A8Pu5k (the rest)
Same treatment for Oppy, too...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWI2WuqhQ2A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2ePuOcPJA8
I added a soundtrack to Spirit's 343-Sol recap, three years ago
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=4994769
Anthropomorphistic (whew!) sidenote: Working on a whole bunch of airplanes has utterly convinced me that complex machines individually have something very like personalities. There may be twenty or thirty F-4s, A-10s, C-17s or whatever in a given USAF squadron, each theoretically identical to the last rivet, but any of that squadron's technicians will tell you that tail number XXX is a @#$%, but YYY is a sweetheart, and they all got their own vibes (and in the US all of the planes are female, of course!)
It's an emotional relationship between man & machine, always. You'll curse them and coddle them by turns, and it's a core part of the culture. For example, one of the deepest customs/superstitions is that when launching an Air Force plane, the crew chief always ensures that s/he touches her one last time before taxi so she'll perform well & bring the crew home safely. On cargo aircraft like C-5s, you rub the nose as if it were the head of a much-loved dog before walking out to the marshalling spot; on fighters, you jump up & touch the wingtip as it goes by you.
We got two sweethearts on Mars right now, and they were clearly touched before they launched for they've given a million percent & more.
Spirit has to rest now, but she won't let her crew chiefs & specialists down, ever, though I do feel their pain at this time every bit as much as I've felt joy from & taken vicarious pride in their accomplishments. Hang in there, everybody.
My GF must be a machine
You live in a different world to me re airplanes etc, Nick, but I can absolutely identify with the feelings those air crews have. There's something in us that makes us want to have physical contact with the machines we use and rely on, and, yes, love. Yet again, I'm reminded of that wonderful scene in "Star Trek: First Contact" when a wide-eyed Picard reaches out and tenderly touches the hull of the "Phoenix", the first warp-capable starship, down in that silo. I watched that and suddenly had something in my eye...
I'm sure many of us have been to museums, galleries and places like that to see something special to us, and have felt an urge to ignore the "Do Not Touch!" sings and just reach out and touch it. I would love to visit the Air and Space Museum one day, to see all those legendary machines from the history of flight and spaceflight, but I'll probably get thrown out because there'll be something in me that will desperately want to touch the exhibits, just to, I don't know, bond with them, if that makes sense?
Ok, just me then...
" "Barsoom" is just too good a rhyming word to waste! "
Moon... June... Barsoom... yes, I see what you mean.
Phil
A reader has posted a lovely comment on my blog, which I thought some of my fellow rover huggers might find quite touching...
http://cumbriansky.wordpress.com/2010/04/01/spirit-shuts-her-eyes/#comments
She cried? Um....OK.
Couple of colourisations from the latest set of Spirit pancams to hit Exploratorium...
Have to say, I love - and am a little intrigued by - the misty look of the lower part of this first one...
...with the top section added...
That 'mist' is just when the sun is directly falling onto the lens of a camera, or some other similar effect - we've seen it a lot, and it's just an optics thing
Yeah, thought so (see blog: http://cumbriansky.wordpress.com/2010/04/03/some-pictures-from-spirit ), but just for a moment there I had a beautiful vision of Spirit actually catching a DD waltzing past her...
Don't quite know why, but when someone mentioned Spirit dreaming, this v-clip by Múm as what imediately came to my mind
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHTFmJk7fH0
Dream through the winter and see you next spring Spirit
No problem, Tom; always happy and a little bit honoured when someone wants to use one of my pics.
Looking at your (great!) blog tho, you need to change your caption re the self portrait pic: as I say in my blog, that pic was taken some time ago (June 2009), not recently.
Yeah, I did see that wasn't a very new image. Just started writing stuff about her sleeping and lost track of dates while commenting. I'll update that. Thanks!
Tom
Can somebody tell me why exploratorium has been updated yesterday? http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/
Pipeline was broken over the weekend, as often happens over the holidays, hence no new images from Oppy for a few days. Webmaster comes back after long weekend, 'kicks the server' to unclog backlog and a few Spirit images come out along with the Oppy images.
Another reason may be (and this is my personal hypothesis) that images are downloaded to the exploratorium not only when they are new (i.e. downlinked from ODY) but also when they are updated by any kind of internal process done at JPL. It may explain some spurious updates not associated to a recent downlink session like those multiple instances of an image with a filename ending on M2, M3, M4 and so on.
Winter Solstice today -
Things will start looking brighter for Spirit from now on
Hang in there!
LATE EDIT: The Canberra DSN's tracking schedule today included a 2 hour 'listening' period for MER2-Spirit.
Weird, given that today is Winter Solstice and I would have thought it a most unlikely day to be hearing any 'beep' from her.
When was the last signal recived from Spirit ?
http://marsrover.nasa.gov/mission/status_spiritAll.html#sol2211 (March 22).
I would think that, since Spirit began hibernating about 50 sols prior to solstice, that she wouldn't have enough power to wake up until about 50 sols past the solstice.
So March 30th then.........
March 22th was the last communication:
22 is my lucky number, so all will be well !
The flurry of images that showed up on Exploratorium a few days ago, turned up some really nice sequences.
Here's a section from a late afternoon observation taken on Sol 1994 at about 1740 local time.
ooooh nice....good catch Astro0.
The start of a brand new day.
Beautiful pix, Astro0! I must admit I never thought to look at the Spirit pix after seeing the massive data dumps on the Oppy side. Will have to take a look later; might be some good 3D views waiting to be made...
And well done for having the patience to wade through all the images!
Here's a nice animation sequence of images depicting sunrise.
I've used images taken over a few sols and put them in 'time of day' sequence (but not sol sequence) starting with Sol1976 at about 5.26am local time and finishing with Sol1974 at 8.26am. Added a few transition frames to smooth the animation.
Really impressive 'Nought. Nice job with the transition images too.
WOW!
Beautiful job, Astro0! That set of images and animations are beautiful and inspiring!
I second that! Lot of work for you, lot of inspiration for us...thanks
Very nicely done on the panorama. However, the images aren't new to the public. In fact I posted http://mmb.unmannedspaceflight.com/MERA1984.mov (2.3 MB) of it back in August of last year.
Ah OK? This is a bit strange.
It would seem that Exploratorium is repeating images then.
Here's the file string...
/mars/spirit/navcam/2009-08-18/2N301760114EFFB1E5P1947L0M1.JPG
/mars/spirit/navcam/2010-05-16/2N301760114EFFB1E5P1947L0M1.JPG
I wonder how many other images on Exploratorium are repeated?
Would MMB pick this up?
MMB picks it up as "Local copy has same file size."
With the solstice long behind us, how much power could or should Spirit be getting now?
If you are only using a calendar to guess when Spirit will phone home around July 4 would be the earliest you could expect to hear from her. That's roughly an equal number of sols after solstice as the last signal was before the solstice.
IIRC it's expected to take longer though because the heaters are used more during autonomous recovery so it will may be months before the batteries are charged enough to send a signal to earth.
If I remember correctly the combination of Mars' orbit and Spirit's location means that the date when there is the lowest overall insolation (and energy from the panels) is about 7 Sols prior to the Solstice although the actual lowest energy point will vary hugely in response to the amount of dust in the atmosphere, dust on the rover's solar panels and the orientation of the panels. The positive thing to remember is that the amount of additional dust deposited at this time of the year has been very low over the past few Martian years although that starts to change as spring rolls in and the atmosphere becomes more energetic again.
I don't expect that we'll hear from her much sooner than the end of July but one good breeze could change all that so here's hoping I'm wrong.
Are there video cameras of any kind in the control rooms for the rovers? I'm hoping we might see the operators reaction if and when Spirit phones home.
four notable tweets from Scott @marsroverdriver yesterday for those that don't twitter
# In meeting, learning how we plan to locate Spirit if she's had a Mission Clock fault and doesn't know how to talk to us. Complicated. :-/
# According to power models, the very earliest we could *possibly* hear from Spirit would be late next week.
# Even if Spirit's waking up (soon), we'll have a hard time catching her during one of her wakeups. This will take some luck as well as skill.
# If our predictions/models are good, we have a very, very good chance of hearing from Spirit by ~ mid-November. #FreeSpirit, baby.
wow..... November
or late next week
Or never. Won't know until after November.
It is not accurate to state that we won't know until after November. Read Scott's remarks again. We could know as early as late next week or ANY TIME between now and November.
November 13th is the spring equinox.
Since Opportunity is experiencing strong cleaning events, one must wonder if Spirit is also. Perhaps some MRO hirise images could determine whether there is an increase in visible dust devil trails, which might be an indicator of increasing wind activity. The knowledge of strong or weak wind activity might be relevant to the recovery strategy.
Winds are likely picking up. Small storms come in 3 weeks or so. I'd guess that sustained and truly strong winds are anti-correlated with dust devils, but not necessarily cleaning. Strong wind = strong wind shear = hard to maintain a DD (?). I think we know more about the seasonality of the weather than we'd be able to guess from a single image (or from a couple) at one time of day. But the next few weeks present a good chance for cleaning (although a bit early) and a local maximum in power before the storms knock it down and summer brings it back up.
http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2010/jul/HQ_10-182_Spirit_Hibernation.html
"NASA's Hibernating Mars Rover May Not Call Home"
bah - for all anyone knows we might as well say
NASA's Hibernating Mars Rover Might Call Home Today
Silly NASA - Remember Sol 18?
Our girl will call home when she's ready. Never count her out.
Here is an image that Spirit took on Sol 2181 (a few sols before she went to sleep)
Spirit took 14 images with 6 filters in less than 3 minutes.
It is looking at Scamander crater, (front view) as it was trying to back out.
I have reduced the JPG artifacts (a lot) and sharpened the image (a little)
It is the best I can do with out color and radiometric calibration ... your mileage may vary (too much green? ... but it was 6 filters!)
Nice work, PDP8E. I enjoyed seeing the soil and those layered rocks in subtle colors.
in 3 days time, we get the calibrated stuff up to Sol 2160 on the PDS.
While we wait for Spirit to wake up, yawning, from her sleep, isn't it amazing to think that it's 5 years since she stood on the top of Husband Hill and we all drooled over those first clear images of Homeplate...
New astropoem for anyone who wants to read it:
http://twitpic.com/2hq1li (image)
http://astropoetry.wordpress.com/2010/08/24/when-spirit-was-free (text only)
For those that want to reminisce, as well as http://marsandme.blogspot.com/2010/08/opportunity-sol-562-spirit-sol-583.html there is the UMSF thread from 5 years ago:
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=1301
Those we incredible times. It was around that time that I first started to dabble in processing the raw images as well.
Here is the Calypso Panorama with the rover deck that I'm putting together. I'm almost done, but this is what I have so far . I'll finish it up later today.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/43581439@N08/4924866679/
*Updated: Finished!
I'm not sure exactly when this was posted, but the Pancam team's version of the Scamander Plains Panorama is now available.
http://pancam.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_instrument/scamander.html
I just read this interesting but pessimistic article: http://is.gd/gYU8L. "On 20 September, Mars rover team leader Steven Squyres of Cornell University said, "I firmly believe that in the next 4 to 6 weeks, we're going to hear from that vehicle." That was 8 weeks ago". "There's a good possibility it died, and we'll never hear from it again" Squyres now says". "Spirit might still pipe up, he says. "So we listen, [but] it could be a long wait."
Ugh! I wonder when they will give up and give us all the bad news?
WAKE UP SPIRIT!!
The situation lives under a bell curve, defined by several parameter that we don't have a good grasp of.
Whilst prospects get less positive over time, the sun continues to climb each day.
This story is a long way from being over, whatever the outcome.
Today is the Spring Equinox. Summer Solstice is not until April 9th 2011. I'd be highly skeptical of anyone pronouncing Spirit dead before then.
A very long time from now, a DD might sweep her panels clean. How far do her chances diminish if she doesn't wake up this spring/summer?
I don't think the primary problem is lack of power from the cells. The issue is whether or not her electronics survived the winter cold. Without power, she was unable to keep her WEB (warm electronics box),er, warm. So potentially components could have gotten cold enough that their differential contraction caused a failure, ie the circuit board vs the chips on it, or the batteries themselves (but I think there was confirmation the batteries could survive that temp that long, electrolytes in the capacitors frozen out, etc.
I still feel that Spirit's story isn't done quite yet. I will light a candle for her tonight.
The WEB has radio-isotope heater units (RHUs) so that is less of an issue than other parts of Spiirit outside the WEB.
Coming out of the last Martian winter, Spiirit did not get a cleaning event until Feb 2009.
http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/mission/status_spiritAll_2009.html#sol1810
That was about 1.5 months after the southern Spring equinox in Dec 26, 2008, so iif history is any guide, we might hope for a cleaning by Christmas this year.
"If you wish upon a star..."
Sun and wind, c'mon Spirit, send us some beeps,
would love to hear from you...
Can we read anything positive from this report from the PDTI?
One of those images showed up at Exploratorium yesterday.
1. What new EDRs from ANY sol were received on sol 2445?
Number of EDRs received by sol, sequence number, and image type:
Sol Seq.Ver ETH ESF EDN EFF ERP Tot Description
----- -------- --- --- --- --- --- ---- -----------
02080 p2104.10 1 0 0 0 0 1 pancam_mtes_cal_target_L267
02081 p2535.24 0 0 0 1 0 1 pancam_scamander_plains27redo_L234567Rall
02128 p1561.09 0 0 0 0 0 1 Unexpected sequence!!!!
Total 1 0 0 1 0 2
This is the F (11th) version of this image. My guess is that it's just stuck somewhere in the pipeline and keeps trying to come through.
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/pancam/2010-11-19/2P311106873EFFB204P2535L2MF.JPG
The timestamp on the latest image is the same as the image uploaded to the Exploratorium on Sep 15.
Well, the time stamp would have to remain the same as the time the image was captured, but that is a good point that this image has attempted to come down multiple times over the past months. It does look like a pipeline issue. ...what a bummer.
30th Nov update at http://marsrover.nasa.gov/mission/status.html#spirit
Sol 2457 ........ Spirit remains silent .... also conducting a paging technique called "Sweep & Beep" to stimulate the rover in the case of a mission-clock fault...... peak solar insolation is not until mid-March 2011. So Spirit has plenty of occasion to respond.
Beep - Beep - there's still hope!!!
Is it considered likely at this point that the rover is in a mission clock fault state, if it has survived? Otherwise we would more likely than not have heard from her by now?
There are many possible scenarios, and as Scott and others have said in the past, "Never bet against Spirit!"
Damn Facebook...I actually looked for the "like" button for Astro0's comment!
Spirit map update for sol 2458. How sad.
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/tm-spirit/spirit-sol2458.html
I understand that when contact was lost with Viking 1, it entered a mode in which it tried to communicate with Earth at randon times of the day similar to the mission-clock fault mode that Spirit may currently be enduring.
I would like to know whether if the level of effort currently being employed to talk to Spirit had been tried on Viking 1 then contact could have been re-established with Viking 1? Were the two problems essentially the same? Given that Viking 1's RTGs kept its electronics really warm, how long might Viking 1 have continued to try to phone home? Could Viking 1 still be trying to phone home today?
Spirit's winter solstice was May 13,2010
We lost contact on May 22
She entered Spring in middle November 2010
Summer Solstice will be mid April 2011
And Fall arrives in late September 2011 (all times approximate)
...so Spirit is one month into Spring (which is like 2 weeks of spring on Earth)
If she is in one piece we should hearing from her anytime now...
Hoping for a dust angel to wipe her plates clean!
Happy New Year 2011 dear Spirit
with all our wishes for your good recovery
(just to help you and this topic roll into 2011)
I`d like you to help me understand something. I have read in the September 30, 2010 Planetary Society MER Update that: "When there is enough power to wake-up, Spirit will get up for between five and 10 minutes, long enough to power things up and check for a signal called solar groovy, which essentially means the rover has 1.1 amps of power coming off its solar array. " and "...so eventually it will be waking up in the time period when its gets a solar array wake-up, another signal from the solar array indicating that the rover has 2 amps of power coming off it. “That, in turn, signals an autonomous wake-up to the CPU,” Nelson pointed out. " How many watt-hours are the 1.1 and 2 amps?
hop for the best
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/newsroom/pressreleases/20110104b.html Claiming to be the author of about 75% of what you publish is a little disingenuous, don't you think?
I'm assuming that this refers to current available on the bus rather than what is coming off the arrays themselves before it gets into the power management and distribution system. The power bus on the MER's is nominally 28V so 1.1A would be just over 30Watts and 2A would be 56Watts. Those are instantaneous numbers. Assuming those are peak values at noon then a (very rough) approximation of the daily power available in watt Hours would be about 3x that number so 1.1A would be around 90 watt hours and 2A would be 168 watt hours. That range seems about right given that Spirit went silent when the daily power numbers dropped below about 130watt hours per sol.
I'm making a lot of assumptions there though so you can take those with a fairly large grain of salt.
I just want to applaud. That's a beautiful piece of work.
(On my ridiculously bright monitor the first one looks best.)
Very inspiring indeed Olivier, may Spirit ear you call...
Come on baby, wake up! Give us more of these.
It's Sol 2500 for Spirit!
2500 Sols....no one could have ever imagined it.
Seems like only yestersol since we arrived!
Wow Spirit! 2500 sols on mars! (Jan 14, 2011)
I think that the milestone is just that "2500 Sols on Mars". Humans like round numbers
Of course we don't know Spirit's condition. She may or may not be operational.
Until someone, probably SS says to the contrary, then I'm sure we'll continue to note these 'round numbers'.
Opportunity of course carries the torch for now.
Tonight I dreamt Spirit had woken up.
It was...nice.
I've done that at least twice.
I dreamt that I went for a walk around Home Plate and thought to myself that it was a pity that Spirit was not currently working because when I got home I wouldnt have any holiday snaps.
I didn't want to make a new thread so I might as well ask here:
What if Spirit were to make contact during conjunction? It can still send messages, but it won't be able to receive; and of course there's no relay system beyond LEO, or the previous conjunctions wouldn't be issues at all. (though that's quite an idea for a new mission!)
Would they just have to wait for conjunction to end like normal? That seems rather tense! Yes, I agree that the chances are low but it's not impossible.
The rules are fairly clear - you don't command during conjunction ( because you never know what that inconvenient ball of plasma will do to the signal at the far end )
Opportunity will be in touch with Odyssey during conjunction, it's not out of the question that Spirit might attempt that as well, assuming listening windows were uplinked to Odyssey ahead of time.
New Update from JPL:
SPIRIT UPDATE: Spirit Remains Silent at Troy
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status.html#spirit
Hang in there little buddy
The sun is now favorable at your tilt and bathing your solar arrays ... Come on Spirit .... you must be at 'solar groovy' by now ... charge that battery ... boot up ... send out that beep!
I'm pretty sure most of UMSFers follow or at least know about Scott Maxwell's blog on the rovers. Just want to highlight that his notes are right now just a few days/sols before the RF wheel stopped working, exactly when they were rushing to reach McCool Hill and its northern tilt.
http://marsandme.blogspot.com/
(this is perhaps not the best thread to post it, but it's the only active one so I'm doing it here anyway)
It's now almost a year since we lost contact. According to http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/newsroom/pressreleases/20110318a.html, available solar energy was estimated to peak around March 10th. And this sad statement:
I don't know about the March 10 statement, or the numbers that went into it. But the daily flux onto a level surface through a dust-free atmosphere peaks well before solstice. The tropical location (Sun is highest at specific times before and after solstice) and elliptical orbit (Mars is farther from the Sun at or after solstice than it is before) both come into play. However, factoring in dust loads in the atmosphere, peak solar flux onto the surface has always been after solstice. This year may not follow the pattern, though, and things like cleaning events matter more than the details of when the predicted peak is.
That's it, of course - my mind's stuck at temperate latitudes. A quick estimate says that the Sun's overhead at Spirit's 14.6 degrees south at around 100 days before the solstice. But that'll be very sensitive to the rover tilt - a tilt of just 5 degrees to the south means the Sun would hit the panels perpendicularly at noon only 70 days before solstice. So this could easily account for the March 10th figure.
But if the Sun hits the panels perpendicularly a month before solstice, it'd also do that a month after solstice. So we might expect a 2nd maximum of power in early May. But perihelion is before solstice, so the 2nd maximum wouldn't be as large as the first.
Of course all this talk of the precise dates of maximum isn't actually very critical, since the energy available would very smoothly and gradually peak, remaining high for weeks around maximum.
I think we need to distinguish between maximum noonday sun angle and maximum daily insolation. I don't know which is more important to Spirit's chances of waking up. It is correct that there are two times when the sun is overhead at noon from Spirit's 14-degree-south position, one before the solstice and one after. But during the time in between, the sun should overshoot the zenith at noon and describe a circle around it, so if Spirit's panels were pointed straight up, the average insolation per day should continue to increase until the solstice. I think that's the case anyway, but I admit I can't produce the trigonometry to prove it. Any ship's captains in the audience? It also seems to me that the fact that the panels actually point a few degrees south probably accentuates the solstice peaking of daily insolation even further.
But as far as the likelihood of Spirit's getting back in touch, the problem is far from symmetric. Each sol of increased insolation that goes by without a signal basically reduces the likelihood that Spirit's silence is due to insufficient sunlight. As you slide back down the autumnal side of the solstice, you know that you have have visited these intensity levels once already and they have not proved sufficient to solve the problem. (Yes there could be cumulative charging of the battery going on, but my practical experience with batteries here on earth kind of argues against that.)
This relatively old chart shows http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA03607 for the two rover locations, assuming zero tilt, over a period of a couple of mars years from the start of the mission. The peak preceeds the solstice by a fairly small amount for Spirit, with a slightly larger variance for Opportunity but there is still just one peak. The effect of Martian orbital eccentricity reinforces the peak in the Southern Hemisphere but there are some Northern Hemisphere latitudes where an actual double peak will happen because the eccentricity works to (slightly) counter the seasonal effect from obliquity but I suspect that other factors (tilt, dust loading) would generally mask that since the effect would be small.
Of course, the daily duration of daylight is maximum at the solstice, independently of changes in the angle of illumination. Probably not a large effect in this case, though it might affect the amount of nightime heating.
May I be controversial and say "forget it ... it's gone... dead " ?
Hold a little hope if you wish, but I suspect most of us now feel that Spirit is finished, after a tremendously vailant service to science.
Spirit is Schrödinger's cat.
It's easier to prove the spacecraft is "alive" than it is to prove it is dead. There's no absolute proof that the Viking Landers, Pathfinder, or Sojourner are absolutely, unequivocally dead either. It's highly improbable, but there is a non-zero chance that they could phone home someday. Short of going up there and "checking for a pulse" by tapping into the spacecraft's electronics, you can't prove from Earth that any of those spacecraft are completely gone.
Indeed - isn't it possible that Spirit is already awake and well for the most part, except that it can't communicate for some reason? Of course in that case if we couldn't regain contact, then we'll never know. But maybe an alive and aware, but unable to communicate, Spirit is a more pleasant alternative to a dead Spirit? Maybe Spirit lives on...
Happy thought: Really, any truly surprising news we can hear about Spirit now can only be objectively good.
Perhaps small comfort...but I follow the advice of the smart money.
We can all hope for a signal... but I'm with Kenny on this. Not an absolute assertion, just what I think is most likely.
Phil
Let's not get diSpirited!
What matters is the state of the antennas, the rover could be in perfect shape but if something catastrophic happened to them... it's EOM (or is that when both rovers go?).
It will be another generation that finds out what happened in the end, until then it's just another mystery.
And of course MRO will continue to tantalize...
"until."
Ain't over yet!
Like, Spirit had some unfinished business or something...
A cleaning event could come along at any time -- how 'bout really soon?
Some people here may have influence over when the funding gets turned off, but most of us might bear in mind that it doesn't really make any difference whether we "give up" on Spirit or not. I admit that my hopes and my expectations now run in two completely different directions, but the eventual outcome will be happily independent of both. Not a very romantic point of view, but those members who adopt it may find that it makes the waiting easier to bear.
VikingMars,
Your comment is in line with something I was thinking. For future situations such as these, maybe we could use non-radio methods of determining if the craft is alive. For example, with MRO we could monitor the antennas as you said for VL. My idea was to monitor the shadow of the camera mast, and put into the "wake from deep sleep" code a command to rotate the camera mast, say 45 degrees on each wakeup. Then if she can't communicate back to us, we can at least watch her shadow for changes in the size. That would be a hell of a motivator for trying different communication options.
Sorry to fire off an unpopular loose cannon, guys.... it certainly showed there is plenty of "spirit" left in the forum, anyway!
Has staff already been reduced on a temporary basis until communications are reestablished? Dang, I really didn't want to ask such a question, but flexible or reduced staff levels could have a bearing on recovering Spirit, both positive and negative.
IIRC, some or many of the MER staff work on both rovers at different times, so if they have the full team right now, Opportunity will be getting lots of attention on the home stretch to Endeavour!
If The Mer Team does go to a one rover operation. Will they keep one computer on that will alert them if they here a Signal from Spirit??? Just curious is all.
As I recall, they'll continue to listen, but not devote as much resources to it. At least until winter. If it's not awake by winter, then it's probably not going to awaken.
This is from last months Mars Exploration Rovers Update,
"Longer term, we will probably continue with the sweep-and-beep activity, but will probably go from seven times a week, as we are now, to maybe just one or two times a week," Callas continued. "Further, we did program onto the rover before she went to sleep, back in March 2010, one UHF pass per week for the rest of calendar 2011. So we will probably continue to ask the relay orbiters to listen to that one pass a week for the rest of 2011." That means the team will be listeing and reaching out, at least a low level – once a week sweep and beep and once a week UHF – for the rest of the calendar year.
http://www.planetary.org/news/2011/0228_Mars_Exploration_Rovers_Update_Efforts.html
As a wise man once said:
"...as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."
This may be a little fanciful but suppose the transmitters are not working, but a receiver is. That might mean we could command Spirit. Following up on Viking Mars' suggestion, is there any command we could send that would produce a result visible from orbit? A drive of course, but anything short of that?
The link briv1016 posted talked specifically about that.
"In addition, the engineers are considering sending other more aggressive commands to the rover, because perhaps Spirit is hearing the signals from Earth, but can't respond for whatever reason, because of more than one failure. "We're going to be sending commands to the rover to try and change the configuration on the vehicle to account for some of these possibilities," Callas said. "But it's a complex thing. When you send commands to change the state of the rover, you don't know if the commands got in and changed the state, so anything you do after that, you have to consider now two possibilities – either they got in or didn't.""
In that context, the 'configuration' of the rover means things like different transmitters etc, not changing it's orientation etc etc. that might be visible from orbit.
Just about the only thing that would be visible from orbit would be driving (but you need to get it out of power fault safe mode first, which you can't do with any confidence without proper downlink) or folding up solar arrays ( motors that have not been actuated in >7 year, and would likely compromise the power situation of the rover, and the power-fault safe mode caveat still applies
I sadly think Spirit is dead.
It would be interesting if Spirit could receive but not transmit. (If that is even possible...?) In that case, right before closing the casket they might send the instructions to continue that "swimming" extraction routine that seemed to be working at the very end, and afterward also extend the arm perpendicular to the mid-day sun for a HIRISE image.
I'm wondering if the heat generated by Spirit is visible at night by the TES instrument on Mars Odyssey? In that case, it might be possible to manipulate that to send a signal. It's a pity the poor rover does not have some laser instrument that could be pointed upwards at night; perhaps that would be visible to HIRISE. One lesson the Mars probes have taught us is the more means of communication, the better.
THEMIS-IR images are 100m/pixel. A rover warm electronics box that's less than a metre in any dimension will be contributing to 1/10,000'th of a pixel.
And HiRISE doesn't image at night.
MER has three communication pathways. For the rover to be functional in a usefull way, one of those would have to work anyway.
I did a cleaning event here at home, but still didn't see any response.
When I do a cleaning event at home, the response I get is, "It's about freakin' time." (from my wife)
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