Opportunity Is Preparing To Descend Into The Victoria Crater
 

Lookey, lookey - how cool is this!

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2007...ia_Crater.html

Re: Opportunity Is Preparing To Descend Into The Victoria Crater
 

You beat me to it. I was just going to post this from MSNBC.
Rover may R.I.P. on Mars after its next descent

I bet they won't be able to kill it....:ahh:

Re: Opportunity Is Preparing To Descend Into The Victoria Crater
 

PLEASE don't give us a challenge like that! :)

-dave

p.s. the images of Victoria crater (several of them are available here) are pretty cool. If you look very closely at the next-to-last image (the one titled "Opportunity Gets Read To Roll") you can see a little blue dot half-way between the "Ripple" and "Cape Verde" legends. That blue dot is actually the Opportunity rover, seen from the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Also, we particularly like the animation of the rover entering the crater at the bottom of the page.

Re: Opportunity Is Preparing To Descend Into The Victoria Crater
 

Sorry John - I had just finished reading an article about whale fossils that Çhilean students found that are believed to be 5 million years old and then saw the article on Opportunity. I went into the Nasa website to see what they had to say. I remember when they started looking for a good point of entry into the crater - it is very exciting...

Re: Opportunity Is Preparing To Descend Into The Victoria Crater
 

makes me think of this

Re: Opportunity Is Preparing To Descend Into The Victoria Crater
 

Maybe they can name the next two rovers "Thelma" and "Louise".....

Re: Opportunity Is Preparing To Descend Into The Victoria Crater
 

Sounds like dlavery is a proud papa with all the pictures.:) But Dave, where is the green target light?

Not to be overly critical (Monday morning quarterback/backseat driver/etc), but given that they designed this thing to last only 90 days, and it lasted 3 years, why didn't they design it to last a longer time? There's a lot of exploring to do there and the scientists have it stop at almost every rock. Or did we have extra good engineers building it? It's sort of like Columbus finding America and going back to Europe at the end of the day.

My money is on the rover. Obviously it had time to practice climbing ramp-bots.

Re: Opportunity Is Preparing To Descend Into The Victoria Crater
 

If it gets stuck down there, all they need to do is get a few of the better 2006 drivers together. Ours climbed the ramp with only 3 wheels!

They could have designed them to last forever... but they had a budget. And weight restrictions. (sound familiar?). So at least 90 days was the lower limit.

Yes, they just did a really good job with the resources they were permitted, and also had a bit of luck, and so here we are 3 years later and still running. If I was a betting man, I'd bet there's a pool at JPL as to which component proves the be the crippling element. (I think it'll get smooshed by a meteor. In 2013. Unlikely, but then nobody has to eat their hat 'cause their system is the one...)

Don

Re: Opportunity Is Preparing To Descend Into The Victoria Crater
 

My money would be on any system that Dave didn't have his hand on.

Re: Opportunity Is Preparing To Descend Into The Victoria Crater
 

Oh, next rover by the way is called Mars Science Laboratory, they have a mission page up already. The critical design meeting was i think May 25th, where it became solid that they were going to make this mission happen. I'm sort of working on that mission....

Opportunity going into the crater has been the sort of chit chat news on JPL the past week. That and Dawn being launched next week!!! I find it funny that there are multiple animations of opportunity going into the craters yet when MER first launched, there was only one animation (if i remember correctly). lol.

Re: Opportunity Is Preparing To Descend Into The Victoria Crater
 

Because it was never designed to last only 90 days. It was designed to respond to the Mission Success Criteria requirement that it absolutely must last at least 90 sols (a sol is a Martian day, which is 24 hours 40 minutes).

-dave

Re: Opportunity Is Preparing To Descend Into The Victoria Crater
 

Sorry for sounding like a penny-pinching bureaucrat. The news reports just read it that way.

On preview: this may be a NASA positive spin to keep the bureaucrats away.

Then the engineers (fortunately) didn't get that memo. I'm glad the rovers work longer than expected. I'm hoping that when people finally get to Mars, the rovers will still be driving around.


Found it:

Wait a minute -- 2004?:confused: Sorry -- wrong crater.

(I'll shut up now.)

Re: Opportunity Is Preparing To Descend Into The Victoria Crater
 

40 extra minutes per Martian Day?

Sweet! Sign me up to live on the first colony. :cool:

Re: Opportunity Is Preparing To Descend Into The Victoria Crater
 

Yeah, just think of them as bonus time. Me, I'd use them for sleep...

Re: Opportunity Is Preparing To Descend Into The Victoria Crater
 

Not if you work down here but your business is up there. If you're on Mars time (like all the rover watchers) you have to keep on the rover's day schedule to stay in the sun. Every day you start work later and later (it's actually 39 minutes 35+ seconds solar day), then eventually get bumped in time to align again, or take time off to realign to Earth time. Your work time is shifted to all hours of the day or night, making for interesting scenarios for family and friends.

On the plus side, you get to have a Mars Clock! Or a commercially made one. Or one for your computer.

Re: Opportunity Is Preparing To Descend Into The Victoria Crater
 

Dave,
Please pass along our congrats to the team. Many here in Chicago are very proud of the Rover missions. I bet everyone is hopeful about the unusual strata at the bottom of the crater/lake showing new information.

Re: Opportunity Is Preparing To Descend Into The Victoria Crater
 

Thanks, Al, I will pass it along. The most scientifically interesting part of the crater exploration is likely to be relatively close to the rim. The central part of the crater has been filled in with sand, dust and eroded material that has fallen into the crater. The actual crater floor has been covered by this material, and is inaccessible. Also, this stuff covers the crater floor in soft dunes (clearly visible in the overhead images) that are hazard areas that we try to avoid. Conversely, the inner portions of the crater rim are relatively accessible, and potentially science-rich. The rim area is rife with exposed strata. The ingress path down into the "Duck Bay" alcove will allow the rover to examine layers that could be the original surface that was in place when the crater was formed. All of this should make for an interesting exploration of the crater once we start to drive in.
The rover operations team works on standard 24-hour Earth time, on a slightly modified 40-hour/week schedule. The major activities all take place during a fairly standard 8-hours/day (daytime), 5-days/week schedule. The team did work on "Mars time" during the early part of the surface operations. But that approach was dropped nearly three years ago. To compensate for the differences between Earth time and local Solar time (defined by a Mars solar day, or sol, which is actually 24 hours, 39 minutes, 35.24409 seconds - but common convention rounds the sol to the nearest minute, so it is most frequently termed 24 hours, 40 minutes) at each rover site, the team has developed a series of procedures that allow them to shift the timing of operations planning activities on a daily basis, while maintaining a relatively standard work schedule.

-dave

Re: Opportunity Is Preparing To Descend Into The Victoria Crater
 

I'm glad they dropped that schedule. It probably was a good idea at the start, but to keep it up year in and out got -- well, fill in your own word*. (That's when I heard about it, when it first started.) Does it matter that you don't have to be "live" with the rovers (well, with the time delay), so long as you tell it what to do and come back the next day to see if the task is done? How autonomous are they?

It'll be interesting to see how "layered" Mars ends up being. Judging by a recent Astronomy Pics of the Day here there's a lot to look at.

*My cat has a similar (but opposite) schedule where feeding time is always at least one to two hours ahead of local time, and this is after years of training her that dinner is 6:30pm. What world is she from?

Re: Opportunity Is Preparing To Descend Into The Victoria Crater
 

They are very autonomous. I think CMU helped develop a new software to allow MER rovers to go i think 50 meters (which is a good portion of its day, if not all of its day, traveling) autonomously when previous was only a few meters. But I don't find it hard to have someone on the MER rovers at all time. At JPL, there are a lot a workers 24 hours a day and every day. But they are very autonomous, I'm sure of that. A conference room after a seminar i went to there was on that exact topic of mars rover autonomous programs.

Re: Opportunity Is Preparing To Descend Into The Victoria Crater
 

In the Mars series (Red, Green and Blue) by Kim Stanely Robison, the humans living on Mars came up with a solution to the extra 40 minutes a day.

They ignored it. Every night at 24:00, clocks stopped for 40 minutes and then started back up. I can't think of a better solution.

Re: Opportunity Is Preparing To Descend Into The Victoria Crater
 

How does NASA fund a program like this that goes way beyond it's expected life span? They has been so productive, but certainly not budgeted for being an open ended mission.

Re: Opportunity Is Preparing To Descend Into The Victoria Crater
 

Well, I knew they were autonomous, as in "go over there and do some testing, and call us when you're finished", and the rover would drive x meters avoiding rocks and such, then do some testing on the rocks. I just wasn't sure how much you could tell it to do at one time and go home at night knowing it'll do it by morning.

That's Amtrak's solution when the time changes. They stop the trains for an hour every fall. (In the spring they're an hour late. Well, an hour more late.:o) My boss, however, would have found something for me to do for those 40 minutes....

Re: Opportunity Is Preparing To Descend Into The Victoria Crater
 

uh oh - bad dust storm(s)
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,288254,00.html

Re: Opportunity Is Preparing To Descend Into The Victoria Crater
 

It sounds like the Rover's should point at the sun and charge up while they can and then shut down to minimum power and hope for the best. Maybe the crater can give some shelter from the wind if it gets up close to a wall. Can the rover deploy one of those shiny space blankets and duck and cover?

Re: Opportunity Is Preparing To Descend Into The Victoria Crater
 

I think they want the wind. It cleans off the solar panels. Staying close to the walls is dangerous from falling earth (well mars) from winds and planetary movements like earthquakes, if there are earthquakes. Sticking to the middle of the crater i think is best bet as it wont dirty the panels as quickly, as well as allows more sunlight. When needing to sample, that would be the only time i would go near the walls, if that was necessary. Im more concerned as there was rumor that Opportunity has a wheel thats goin bad (but is not bad yet), to which they can not do what they did with Spirit's bad wheel to get out of the crater from the slope. This should be an exciting slow mission. :)