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Unmanned Spaceflight.com _ Spirit _ Sol 800 coming up

Posted by: SFJCody Apr 1 2006, 08:16 PM

Yep, another nice round number to celebrate. 'Course, this one is slightly bittersweet now that Spirit has lost some mobility. But I remain optimistic that as Spirit crawls slowly through the dust towards McCool Hill, a tiny metallic chip will get lodged somewhere in the inner workings of the wheel and repair the open connection. wheel.gif cool.gif We can but hope.

Posted by: dilo Apr 1 2006, 08:38 PM

Frankly, I am a little bit worried by Spirit mobility/energy issues, so I do not want to celebrate Sol800 unless she is in a safer position...

Posted by: climber Apr 3 2006, 07:32 AM

You're right, I do have a strange mood too.
Anyway, don't forget the following. On April 13th three new milestones will be achieved :
1-Spirit will have lived 9 times her schedulled live.
2-Cost per SOL for any one of the Rovers will go under 500.000 USD***
3-We've got just over 150.000 pictures. Here you can see some data I collected from October 2004 when we get to 50.000 pics.

Pics N° Date Day diff Pic/Sol
50.000 12/10/04 543 92
75.000 28/03/05 167 75
100.000 19/07/05 113 111
125.000 27/10/05 100 125
150 000 01/04/06 156 80


*** Steve Squyres once wrote that, at the bigining of the operations wheel.gif , the big issue was trying not to screw up any SOL since cost per sol was 4 million USD! Now, if you consider the mission cost at 800 Millions USD (I know, it has rosen since, but well, it will just push back the real date by a few tens of Sols) a simple calculation give you 800M/1600Sols = 0.5 M/Sol.
Does any one have a recent figure of the REAL total cost of the mission by now ?

Posted by: djellison Apr 3 2006, 11:40 AM

QUOTE (climber @ Apr 3 2006, 11:21 AM) *
Does any one have a recent figure of the REAL total cost of the mission by now ?


I believe it's something like $900 including extensions.

That means, for 1580 sols (the total of the two) - it's about $580k/sol

Nominally, it would have been about $800m for 180 sols, $4.4M/sol

Pathfinder at $280M for 84 sols was about $3.3m/sol (nominally, 30 sols, so just about $10m/sol)

Viking, in total, with the estimated $3B tag today, would have been 1280 + 2244 sols = $851k/sol

MER Remains a bargin smile.gif

I seem to remember that they were expecting, thru technical or other problems, to lose one sol in three.

Doug

Posted by: vikingmars Apr 3 2006, 12:02 PM

QUOTE (djellison @ Apr 3 2006, 01:40 PM) *
Viking, in total, with the estimated $3B tag today, would have been 1280 + 2244 sols = $851k/sol

MER Remains a bargin smile.gif

Doug


wink.gif Well... please, don't forget that there were 4 spacecrafts involved as "Viking" for the USD 3bn : 2 landers PLUS 2 orbiters. Then, that's make only USD 425 k/sol for the Viking landers ! biggrin.gif

Posted by: djellison Apr 3 2006, 12:12 PM

ohmy.gif Good point - I'd totally forgotten to factor them in biggrin.gif

Doug

Posted by: climber Apr 3 2006, 12:25 PM

Well, pathfinder get Sojourner + Carl Sagan's station too wink.gif

Posted by: djellison Apr 3 2006, 12:58 PM

Sojourner was $25m over and above Pathfinder iirc, which at 84 sols as well, is $297k/sol - but would have been approx $3.5m/sol over it's nominal 7 day mission smile.gif

Doug

Posted by: mars loon Apr 3 2006, 01:26 PM

I dont have the numbers at the moment,

but how about Marineer 4, 6, 7, 9

and MGS, MO, MEX and the new MRO

ken







TODAY, 2006 April 3, is SOL 800

despite the wheel, lets celebrate

biggrin.gif mars.gif pancam.gif dd.gif pancam.gif mars.gif biggrin.gif

Posted by: dilo Apr 3 2006, 07:56 PM

Thanks for the statistics, climber et al.
In addition to figure out the cost/Sol of each mission, we should also consider quality and quantity of data transmitted to Earth!
Obviously, thanks to unparalleled mobility and newer technology, MER is for sure well above all the others... do someone knows how many bits were returned by each mission?

PS: about Sol800, maybe we could celebrate it if Sol799Sol small movement will continue...

Posted by: djellison Apr 3 2006, 08:12 PM

I have a different way to do the MER maths...

150,000 images
$900M

$6000 per image.

Some people pay more than that for a bad piece of art work smile.gif

Doug

Posted by: climber Apr 3 2006, 08:30 PM

You're right, but you'd better like "calibration-target-sundial's" pictures!

Posted by: djellison Apr 3 2006, 08:43 PM

I do smile.gif

Doug

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