NASA is hell-bent on getting every bit of information necessary to study Mars, and know
what best should be done to make it a human-friendly environment, perhaps in the next ten years.
NASA's Spirit rover, not actually the immortal Spirit that we cannot see, but an incredible
rover NASA sent to move on Mars, has done an excellent job by making a strange discovery
that got NASA scientists perplexed.
After all, humans on earth live far away from planet Mars, but since Mars looks empty and
spacious, we humans think of making good use of it to our advantage, we got curious and
now have a huge interest in making Mars our next home.
Today, we will discuss how the NASA spirit rover adventure began, the devil it had to
fight with on its way to Mars, the challenges it overcame, and finally, the shocking discoveries
it had made since 2003.
Stick to the end of this video as we dig out the most exciting scene.
What exactly is the purpose of Mars rovers?
Well, let's give you the best answer.
Simple vehicles designed especially for use on the Martian surface are called rovers.
Rovers offer several benefits over stationary landers, including exploring a larger area,
being guided to interesting things, positioning themselves in sunny area to stay warm during
the winter, and increasing our understanding of handling small robotic vehicles.
As a "great workhorse," Spirit operated for 6 years, 2 months, and 19 days, more than
25 times longer than it was designed to last.
The Mars Exploration Rover Mission of NASA is represented by the two rovers, Spirit and
Opportunity.
NASA gave up trying to reach the stranded rover on May 25th, 2011, and it deemed its
mission successful.
Since March 2010, the rover has been silent, without transmitting any signals.
On June 10th, 2003, Spirit was first launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The spacecraft was sent to a 28.5-degree inclination around intermediate parking orbit, at a distance
of around 296,000 miles, that is; 776,206 kilometers.
Each rover is around the size of a golf cart and seven times heavier than the Sojourner
rover that was launched on the Mars Pathfinder to Mars mission in 1996, weighing in at 405
pounds, which should be 185 kilograms.
Spirit and Opportunity were deployed to areas on the opposite sides of Mars, where it was
thought that liquid water may have once existed.
The rovers were designed to move from one place to another on mars and, do geological
research, take pictures using mast-mounted cameras that offered 360-degree stereoscopic
views of the surrounding area.
A robotic arm carried a trio of equipment known as the magnets, MI, and RAT (the instrument
deployment device or IDD).
The devices would be placed and turned on by the arm immediately on the ground or rocks.
To show how serious we are about dominating Mars, as of May 2021, six successful robotically
operated Mars rovers had been launched on the Martian surface.
By the date of Mars landing, the first five rovers were Opportunity (launched in 2004
but lived until 2018), Spirit (launched in 2004 and survived until 2010), Curiosity (launched
in 2012), and Perseverance (launched in 2021).
They were all operated by the American NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The sixth, Zhurong, was established in 2021 and is controlled by the China National Space
Administration.
The names of the four NASA rovers—Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, and Perseverance—represent
various phases of Martian exploration.
We had to first summon the will to move, but once we did, an opportunity presented itself,
and we were inquisitive, which is why we persevered.
So, in a nutshell, this is the ideal meaning of all NASA's rovers currently moving on Mars.
The fact that we can now send robots to planets of millions of kilometers away and have them
send pictures back to us is pretty remarkable.
And within a short while, we'll all be alive to witness humans land on the planet in this
lifetime.
That would be a dream come true.
Spirit has two 120-degree hazcams for seeing its surroundings, a tiny thermal emission
spectrometer for studying rocks and detecting their origins, and panoramic and navigational
cameras.
The rover's arm was equipped with a rock abrasion tool, a microscopic imager, magnets for collecting
dust, an alpha particle x-ray spectrometer, and a Mössbauer spectrometer for studying
the composition of rocks and soils.
Landing on Mars is a very technical adventure to achieve.
Only high-end tech engineers can build crafts that will successfully land on Mars without
getting destroyed.
A spacecraft must perform EDL - meaning; entry, descent, and landing, to land on Mars - a
method that uses merely a heat shield, a parachute, some thrusters, and an airbag to reduce the
speed of the spacecraft to zero kilometers per hour on the Martian surface.
It takes six minutes for any spacecraft that adopts this technology to successfully land
on Mars.
The name given to this scenario is the six minutes of terror because it occurs so fast
and is influenced by many different factors.
The heat shield on Spirit reached a temperature of 1600 degrees Celsius as it flew towards
the Martian surface, yet the vessel's interior stayed at an average temperature.
The parachute opened after spirit slowed to about Mach 2 throttle at the height of 4 to
5 miles above the Martian surface.
The lower heat shield of the aeroshell was launched after 30 seconds.
10 seconds later, as the rover sped toward the planet's surface, it started to unroll
a cable at 70 meters per second.
This is just a glimpse of how difficult it is to land any spacecraft on Mars.
Spirit rolled out onto the surface of its new home, Mars, once the airbag had settled
and began capturing panoramic pictures to aid NASA scientists in identifying prospective
geological targets.
Mars Global Surveyor and 2001 Mars Odyssey, two spacecraft orbiting above the surface
of Mars, were used to send the photographs.
Four pancam photographs high and three wide were combined to create a full-size image
with a resolution of 4000 by 3000 pixels for the first pictures that Spirit captured.
Thirteen filter wheels allowed for the formation of pictures in various wavelengths, and these
separate images were captured in black and white.
The hills spirit rover investigated on Mars include Ramon Hill, Husband Hill, Mc Cool
Hill, Charla Hill, Brown Hill, Anderson Hill, and Brown Hill.
A target for the lander was a circular depression that became known as Sleepy Hollow because
of its potential to shed light on Mars' core.
The landing site, surrounded by the hills mentioned earlier and natural features, earned
the moniker "Colombia Memorial Station" in memory of the Space Shuttle Columbia accident,
which claimed the lives of seven astronauts - a very pathetic incident that happened.
Spirit got busy right away by investigating the Sleep Hollow crater, which is barely 12
meters from the lander and 9 meters wide.
But before long, something appeared to have the potential to completely destroy the mission.
NASA's Deep Space Network unexpectedly lost all communication with Spirit on January 21th,
2004.
And it left NASA's team perplexed.
The next day, they heard a sound across the network, indicating only one thing: Spirit
was still receiving communications but had been diagnosed as being in a failure mode
and rarely responding to orders.
This was a major problem, but it could be easily fixed if a software bug or memory corruption
caused it rather than a hardware problem.
When the crew ordered Spirit to transmit engineering data, they learned that a fault in the rover's
sleep mode had led to battery waste and overheating.
Issues that, if not resolved right away, might kill Spirit.
This was made more difficult when Spirit refused the team's order to "Shutdown Dammit Until"
on sol 20, which sought to halt its operations.
A guess for the rover's fault was that it was caught in an endless reboot process.
Spirit was built to reboot if it detected a fault, but if that fault happened while
Spirit was rebooting, Spirit would reboot forever.
The researchers employed a design feature that allowed the rover to boot without using
the flash memory after determining that the problem was in the memory, effectively ending
the reboot cycle.
In addition, they found that Spirit's file system had an excessive number of files, which
interfered with Spirit's functions.
Fortunately, most of these files were unnecessary in-flight data that could be erased, which
was done right afterward.
Even the complete flash memory system was reformatted.
Guess you wouldn't wait to hear the earthshaking outcome?
Spirit was back online and free to explore Mars' surface on February 6th.
However, after having crossed Space, passed through Mars' atmosphere, and endured the
landing and a severe failure...
Its journey had only barely begun.
What technology can NASA engineers use to fix any problems Spirit encounters on Mars?
The Boring Company is also doing their best to achieve Mars colonization, but is that
The Key to SpaceX Mars Colony?
Click on the video to know more.