The Opportunity Rover, also known as the Mars Exploration Rover B (or MER-1), has finally been declared at end of mission today after 5,352 Mars solar days when NASA was not successfully able to re-establish contact. It had been apparently knocked off-line by a dust storm and was unable to restart either due to power loss or some other catastrophic failure. Originally intended for a 90 Mars solar day mission, its mission became almost 60 times longer than anticipated and it traveled nearly 30 miles on the surface in total. Spirit, or MER-2, its sister unit, had previously reached end of mission in 2010.
And why would we report that here? Because Opportunity and Spirit were both in fact powered by the POWER1, or more accurately a 20MHz BAE RAD6000, a radiation-hardened version of the original IBM RISC Single Chip CPU and the indirect ancestor of the PowerPC 601. There are a lot of POWER chips in space, both with the original RAD6000 and its successor the RAD750, a radiation-hardened version of the PowerPC G3.
What an awesome little tidbit of information about these Mars rovers, which I’m assuming everybody holds in high regard as excellent examples of human ingenuety and engineering.
Excellent news article.. it definitely belongs on the website !
They could’ve put some wipers on the panels, no?
“Originally intended for a 90 Mars solar day mission,” everything’s said…
Wasn’t the 90-days thing a limit supposedly imposed by the dusting? (before the observation that gusts would remove some dust from the panels was made).
Which begs the question: Why design such a failure point? Couldn’t they de-dust the panels using wipers?
Mars is cold as hell, with surface covered in corrosive dust, which puts severe limitations on what materials you can use.
Also, without a lubricating liquid in the panels (such as water), the panels would get scratched pretty badly.
The panels are also also pretty big and unusually shaped. That means brushes + motor(s) to drive the wipers are going to be heavy.
It’s also easier to get funding if you mission is planned for 90 days, then extended, than start with a request for 10 years of finding
kurkosdr,
No, it doesn’t 🙂
Actually, the martians quit the maintenance contract because the NASA stopped paying for it.
…. or maybe the simulator crashed …