Extricating Spirit, Digging out from Troy Options

[Julius]

Spirit and Opportunity have been a wonderful experience for all of us sitting at home and kind of living on Mars thru the pictures sent .I'm sure they have given a lot of lessons to MARS engineers to improve and rectify technical problems for future rovers.I'm hoping the delay in sending MSL will allow more time that such problems are anticipated and dealt with .

[MahFL]

I doubt changes can be made to hardware as the MSL was designed years ago, maybe software wise, some changes can be incorporated.

Also it's just plain bad luck if you drive into an unforseeable dust trap. They were were lucky both rovers landed in pretty good driving terain, both rovers could have landed stuck halfway up a large cliff.........

[Poolio]

Just a guess, but Mrund's post sounded to me a lot like sarcasm.

...both rovers could have landed stuck halfway up a large cliff.........

I have always been grateful that Oppy landed in Eagle Crater and not Endurance. The slightest change of trajectory could have made her a prisoner of her lander, surrounded by a sea of untraversable sand dunes.

[fredk]

...what I wondered is whether Spirit might be able to drive further into the small crater in which it may be stuck?

You've raised some interesting questions here. Traction is bad on the crater side, so my guess would be that if we tried to move west into the crater we'd make very little progress and bottom out fast, even with the downhill slope. Plus the RR wheel/anchor may not allow us to do much at all (except perhaps to pivot around the RR).

Very interesting thought about Spirit staying warmer this winter if she's bottomed out...

[djellison]

I would have thought the thermal conductivity between WEB and ground would be worse than having it in 'mid air' as it were. The air is so thin, it must act like a reasonably good thermos flask.

[nprev]

Maybe...but the MERs certainly seem to have no problem losing heat (quite the opposite). If the thin air's insulating then the heat loss path must be through the wheels to the ground, and in that case placing the WEB in contact with the soil would presumably accelerate that.

[marsophile]

The dark solar panels must lose a lot of heat by radiation during the night. From that point of view, a thin covering of dust might help the rover stay a bit warmer in the night. Bottoming out would not help there.

[BrianL]

Update here http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002288/

[fredk]

There's a gap of a couple cm between the outer shell and the inner electronics, so conduction to the ground won't necessarily be great if she's bottomed out. But of course this would still add another route for cooling. I'd think radiation determines the cooling rate when she's not bottomed, and it's not clear to me how the radiative cooling would be affected if she was bottomed.

Another factor is the local geography. Radiative cooling at night is always worse the bigger the unobstructed sky. At WH3 I don't think HP obstructed the sky much. At Troy, we've got HP to our east blocking some sky, so that should reduce nighttime cooling. Probably not a huge factor, though.

[fredk]

Update here

Original story here. It still looks like survival through the winter is possible:

"At the current rate of dust accumulation, solar arrays at zero tilt would provide barely enough energy to run the survival heaters through the Mars winter solstice," said Jennifer Herman, a rover power engineer at [JPL]

[HughFromAlice]

(I thought this should go here in this thread as it is about extrication, but admin please move/change if you want).

For the optimists - like me - among you at the start of the new year!!!!

Recent comment from Tara Estlin - Rover Driver "We have a lot of things left to try so I think she has a very good chance of overcoming this obstacle"

(From 1.05min onwards in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xly52Vx-_9Q...player_embedded Thanks to link originally posted by Alan - Post #9 in 6 Years On Mars)

[PDP8E]

Time off at Christmas was nice... and Spirit continues to have challenges.
Here is an animation of the Right Middle wheel as seen by the MI.
It spans Sols 2113 to 2130 (I triple-checked this time James C)
Adaptive contrast -etc.



Cheers and Happy New Year

[PDP8E]

Here is an animation of the underbelly of Spirit from Sol 2076 to 2130



As you can see, Spirit is digging in.

Cheers

[marsophile]

As you can see, Spirit is digging in.

It looks like belly rock got pushed down into the loose soil.

[Hungry4info]

Continued counterclockwise motion. Might we be trying to turn counterclockwise and then drive backwards? to the current right side and out of the trap?

Attached thumbnail(s)