Having survived two years on Mars, obviously both MERs have succeeded beyond our wildest dreams... but I'm curious. What did everyone expect/hope them to go on to achieve on those heady landing days? How far did you think they'd get? What did you think would be their "best picture"? How long did you think they'd survive?

Might be interesting to compare our hopes and dreams with the reality...

Squyres is on record saying that he thought, 120 - 140...maybe 180.

Personally - I was thinking 180, twice the life of Pathfinder just about.

900....don't be so stupid.



Doug

QUOTE (Stu @ Jul 13 2006, 10:14 PM)

Having survived two years on Mars, obviously both MERs have succeeded beyond our wildest dreams... but I'm curious. What did everyone expect/hope them to go on to achieve on those heady landing days? How far did you think they'd get? What did you think would be their "best picture"? How long did you think they'd survive?
Might be interesting to compare our hopes and dreams with the reality...

I was with TPS on Spirit landing day and met with Bill Nye who's the one that got the idea to use the Sundial as a sundial. He was setting up a challenge worldwide so children around the world could make up their own sundial and could "compare" time on Earth and on Mars at the same time. Moto was "Two planets, One sun". When back to France I tried to hurry up the school teachers where my young son is studing and told them : you've got 3 months maximum to make it work!
We ALL know that spacecrafts last longer than their designated life but I was more thinking as "Soujouners", not "Voyagers"! That's my thought. Now I'd like to see dust devils in Gusev from the plain instead of uphill and I'm looking forward to the ENTIRELY NEW mission of Oppy when she'll get to Victoria.

I look back at Dan Maas animation and remember not believing it would work at all. I mean, how many other missions have cratered or flown bye? When Spirit landed, the first images were a yawn: all the interesting stuff seemed in those hills waaaay over there. But after oppy's hole-in-one I was saying yeeeehaah! it's game on. Get to work.

Never thought they would get to the hills or get out of eagle crater. Glad they did.

Stu, great thread !

Never, never expected that. We take for matter of course the flow of new images from exploratorium site every day.
This event is unique in our history. Any outcrop, rock, hill, crater taken from these rovers
NEVER been seen before from any human on our world. ! !

500 years ago C.Columbus was happy to see new coastlines in our world.
This is an another world.

Think about that.

I think we should see this from a whole new perspective.

When Spirit took a look around, I figured that, if we were very lucky, we might get all the way to the rim of Bonneville. Spend a month or so exploring the ejecta, hopefully find some lacustrine materials to make the mission worthwhile (to its "follow-the-water" goal), and die with a breathtaking view of a decent-sized crater. The hills on the horizon looked enticing, but I figured that, being several km away, there was no way in the world we'd ever actually be able to drive to them. (When they did annouince they were going to try and drive to them, I wished them luck and decided you have to have impossible goals in life... but that's what I thought it was, an impossible goal.)

When Oppy landed and spent sol after sol, week after week, puttering around that tiny little crater, I got distinctly edgy. I figured that, no matter how interesting the sediments in the walls were, we were completely ignoring the possible diversity we would find out on the plains. I was certain that there were interesting things to discover out on the plains -- and I despaired that Oppy would die before she ever got out to look at them! As much as I enjoyed the results we got from the rocks in the walls of Eagle Crater, I felt it was disastrous to spend so much time inside of it, when there were vast plains out there to explore.

I am gratified, to say the least, at how much more each of these brave girls has managed to do than what I expected. May they be like the Energizer bunny, and just keep going and going and going and going and going and going and going and going...

-the other Doug

I remember talking to my dad about Beagle 2 and saying that 1. I thought it would probably fail and 2. That if it didn't it was going to be totally upstaged by what the Americans were planning!

Even so I don't think I really had any idea of how spectacular it was really going to be, I think my mindset was infuenced too much by Pathfinder - I didn't expect the rovers to go trundling off over the horizon! After all they were only going 600m - you'd still be able to see the lander.

I remember seeing the Dan Maas animation and thinking that the terrain looked rather optimistic. I expected it to be much rockier and harder going. I was really surprized at how accurate the animation turned out to be when Spirit landed. Then came Oppy!

Just after the primary mission was over I remember a figure of 250 sols being mentioned and thinking, "no way, that's crazy".

I would have laughed at anyone crazy enough to suggest numbers like 900, (I still find it hard to beleve!) or that both rovers would drive 'miles' - Oppy driving out of the landing ellipse, Spirit not only making it to the hills but climbing to the top of one, etc.

I didn't expect to be so 'involved' - just read the press releases look at a few images now and again. I never expected to know the downlink times, and wait impatiently for the new images. Then examine them all closely - measure angles - identify features - stich - make colour from the different filters - spend 'hours' working on large pans - spend 'months' writing and refining my own image processing software. And best of all, getting to talk and share it all with so many like minded folks! (Thanks)

James

I thought 130... 150... maybe even 200 sols. As for distance, I was pulling for Spirit to circle Bonneville crater and examine her heat shield, then move on to the parachute. Of course, the direction actually taken was almost opposite. I was cautiously optimistic about Opportunity making it to Endurance once the journey was underway, and desperately hopeful about Spirit actually reaching the hills and maybe, just maybe, crawling up a ways.

Now both rovers are showing clear signs of age and breakdown and I'm thinking 300, 400, maybe 500 more sols. More now than I gave them at the start.

I remember clearly how after Bonneville Spirit's planners decided to move in the direction of the Columbia hills - they were cautious enough to not claim that the hills were an actual destination! It did seem like a very optimistic goal at the time, but I have to say that for me this was based in part on how the hills looked in the images from the landing site. They looked really far away. I've learnt again and again since then to always mentally add a disclaimer: "objects in these images are closer and smaller than they appear".

Still, odometers don't lie, and I certainly never imagined on landing that the rovers would do 7 or 8 or more km, and indeed pass over the horizons that were visible upon landing!

It's also so cool that for both rovers we've always had another intriguing destination ahead. This I did not expect. What if Spirit had landed nowhere near any hills, or Oppy far from any sizable craters? This to me has really made the missions so compelling to watch (take part in??!). Absolutely fundamental to this has been the work of Tesheiner, Alan, et al on mapping. It took jpl too long to catch on how important up to date mapping was to make the public feel like they're taking part in the missions.

I was expecting nothing, from some spiritual training, and also from experience, as I follow the space exploration program since its beginning. There was so much dreadful failures, along with some outstanding long lasting success (Voyagers)...

However my technician background was telling me that these frail looking machines were not designed to live long in a rugged terrain. With their stated goal, three months, 600 metres... and Spirit's software problems just after some metres. I would have be really surprised if I had a vision of the future at time of landing!!

Now Spirit seems definitively unable to move for long distances, but she could still bring some surprises. If I was the mission planner I would try to send her toward the smaller hills to the south of Columbia hills. They look strange and different. The future of Oppy is still unpredictable, and I shall not try to guess when she will encounter a crippling failure. Tomorrow, one year, ten years... a motor could stall, batteries are cycling... So I receive each passing sol as some divine grace. Exploring Victoria may take months, and Oppy could not climb back. But if she does, the wild bet would be to send her toward the big crater in the south-east... the only place which is not covered with evaporites and which could bring a glimpse of the underlying soil.

I can't speak for the rest of the gang, but I share your perspective as well. On Pathfinder, I remember seeing the twin "peaks" off in the distance to the west. When Tim Parker did the triangulation, I was surprised at how close they turned out to be and a bit taken aback when I realized we could have seen a person standing on them. I knew they were far out of reach of little Sojourner, but I had hoped that we would have been able to drive her up a mild slope to the North and possibly peer over. I resolved then that we really needed a rover that was free of its lander and able to trundle off away from our landing spot. Prior to MPF/Sojourner the thought that it might really be possible to build a "roving" spacecraft was just a tad too "out there" to be real. A few of us in late '97 considered a design for '01 where the inner box of the MPF lander would stand up and drive off. Mark Adler came into my office in April of '00 with the same idea and the rest is history. Being stuck in one spot is frustrating (unless your lander is a backhoe like Phoenix).

I agree with James, Dan Maas' video seemed too unreal to be believable. Despite the rock abundance estimates from Matt Golombek, I fullly expected a site (at Gusev) that was closer to VL-2 and MPF than the relatively drive-able place it turned out to be. I was thrilled that we actually made the decision to head to Bonneville, but I was really (pleasantly) surprised when the science team decided to head to the hills the moment they discovered that there where no outcrops in Bonneville. When we finally got there I realized that Dan's video was the tip of the iceberg so to speak. Dan is a visionary. (I gave Dan a tour of the sandbox testbed rover last year - it was the first time he had seen a rover with his own eyes. He is amazing.)

Back in March '04, in the 5th floor science room a huge MOC strip of Eagle down to Victoria was laid out on a line of tables. Endurance was still the target, but Tim gave me a serious look and pointed to Victoria as our ultimate destination. I laughed but secretly hoped that he was right. We weren't even sure if those little "snake-like" structures between Eagle and Endurance were traversable. What if they were hollow and the rover fell in? 6 km looked like a long walk.

Before landing I guessed that the longest these two would have lived was about 4-5 months and about a km or so. Certainly not 10x both life and distance. No one did (at least no one admitted it to me). The team is still rather skeptical.

-Rob Manning

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Comments made here are the express opinion of the author and do not represent the views of JPL, Caltech nor NASA.

After the landings and the slow initial journeys, I thought they would make it to winter which was 200 - 250 sols. Then after they made it thru winter and got dust devil dust-off, I no longer had any expectations on how long they would keep going other than they would keep going and going. Now, my hope is that they both make it to when Phoenix lands. Having 3 operating spacecraft on Mars is a cheery thought (assuming Phoenix makes it, too).

From the little data we got from MPF and Sojourner, we estimated something like a quarter of a percent per sol loss on the solar arrays from dust accumulation or 25% or so after 90 sols. There was some test data that suggested it could be better - or worse. We all thought that the dust would be "sticky" and no amount of wind could remove it. (There were afternnon dust devils that passed on top of the Pathfinder lander that did not have much affect on the accumulated dust on the arrays. why? height above ground?)

Apparently, design margin, the wind and milder temperture swings has made all the difference.

-Rob

I remember when the rovers landed and my idea was "Pathfinder/Sojourner on steroids" but nothing else.
A longer mission (90 sols), longer driving capabilities, and that was the scenario; I didn't expect (by that time) they could surpass the nominal mission by more then 50%.
When they planned to go toward the hills I thought it would be very nice to end the mission with pancam images resolving details on the hills, that's all.

I think there are two things I could never imagine before this mission:
1) It's longevity, therefore the big number of sites that could be visited.
2) The almost immediate access to the images and the ability to work with them, giving the feeling of being "part of the mission".

Hi all!

I've been a lurker for a good while now but this is my first post, since I can't really speak authoritatively on the more serious topics.

I had high hopes at landing, at least 100 sols maybe even 150-200 and at least one rover to rove over 1km. I had much higer hopes for Gusev (I really like the PP presentation by Nathalie Cabrol advocating for it). Meridiani always felt like such a sure thing, only really unique site identified by TES and so flat. I was certainly surprised by the results, though I still have a soft spot for Spirit.

Eluchil