Route map, updated to sol 747 and including some additional "ground features".

Click to view attachment (239k)

I'm not sure exactly when it happened but according to the official MER site Spirit is back in the total distance lead! Come on Oppy, get the lead out!

Spirit: As of sol 762 (Feb. 23, 2006), Spirit's total odometry was 6,589.83 meters (4.09 miles).

Oppy: As of sol 742 (Feb. 24, 2006), Opportunity's total odometry was 6553.93 meters (4.07 miles).

Sports Announcer: "As they round the bend Opportunity is in the lead...No, Spirit has jumped ahead! Now, they're neck-and-neck, heading for the finish line. It's Oppy...it's Spirit...it's Oppy...It's Spirit! It's anyone's guess at this point! Each rover has it's own motivations. Each has their own amazing accomplishments at this point in the race. You can see the fire in their eyes. Opportunity can see the finish line, but where is it for Spirit? Which will emerge triumphant in the end? ............. We must pause for this commercial break."

In the end, whenever that may be, we all win.

it's ....
.................. BEETLEBOMB!

"But wait! What's this? Scurrying out from beneath the wheels of Opportunity, bravely battling still, it's... ...Sojourner! Yes! Sojourner is in the lead, pushing ahead by just one length of her APXS! Yes! Yes! Sojoooooooooourner!"

Well, sadly not, but let's not forget the little guy!

Bob Shaw

Well, let's not forget the TRUE pioneer rovers, the Lunokhods of the USSR.

Lunokhod 1 did 10,540 m. on the moon in 1970, Lunokhod 2 in 1973 did 37 kilometers!!!!

Yes, that's 37,000 meters.... - in 1973!

That will be a hard target to beat: Let's hope the Mars roving laboratory will do it!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunokhod_program

This is true and perhaps, the surprising thing is that no one knows exactly where is located Lunokhod I. Stokes is helping to Russians to localize it, hope it would be soon. Here, we have map route of every sol for both MER rovers and we are truly know about their positions. Let think what adventourous is Lunkhood I with its 10,540 meters without knowning where it was on the Moon.

Rodolfo

"Wait! What's this! Still attached to Mars-3 by it's (fortunately highly elastic tether), racing ahead of even Sojourner is the Mars-3 Rover, now leading by the tip of it's small (but perfectly formed) penetrometer!"

Bob Shaw

Please note that the Lunokhod-2 page linked to above repeats the common error that Lunokhod-2's laser reflector cannot be used. In fact it is Lunokhod-1 whose reflector has not been detected since the end of the mission. Efforts are in progress to reacquire it using a new instrument on Earth and a new estimate of its location.

...and for fast driving, Lunokhod-2 was driven over 3 km (3130 m) in one work shift! (18 February 1973).

Phil

Looks like it happened during Spirit's 46-meter drive on Sol 743 (February 4). Of course, Opportunity was doing very little while Spirit came down off the summit and made its way to Home Plate. But you've got to expect that Oppi will re-establish a big lead when it's cruising to Victoria while Spirit is wintering on the hillside.

The Lunkhod rover had two speeds, ~1 km/h and ~2 km/h (0.62 mph and 1.24 mph) versus MER's with 5 cms/sec (180 m/hour at maximum and constant speed). But it is not possible since MER is programmed to drive for roughly 10 seconds, then stop to observe and understand the terrain it has driven into for 20 seconds, before moving safely onward for another 10 seconds.

The mission of Lunokhod-x aren't so geologic as the MER doing with 7 instruments against only our television cameras, and special extendable devices to impact the lunar soil for soil density and mechanical property tests. An x-ray spectrometer, an x-ray telescope, cosmic-ray detectors, and a laser device were also included.

Lunokhod was driven almost in real time, with between 2-3 lag seconds (velocity of light is 300,000 km/sec and the distance between Earth and Moon is in average 385,000 km and the round trip would be of 770,000 km) against to MER with batch command driven and/or coupled with hazard avoindance navigation system which is by far much slow and also the other favourable for speed is that Lunokhod was closer to the Sun which powered twice energy to the solar cells than MER. So it is like comparing between apples and pears.

Rodolfo

Lunokhod was long before my time and I know practically nothing about it. How did the Lunokhods survive the two-week-long lunar night -- or were their missions shorter than that?

The Lunokhods (Ye-8 Soviet designation) had a Polonium-210 radiological heat source used to maintain internal temperature (though electric power was via batteries charged thru solar arrays). Check out the following if you're keen.

[email=http://www.astronautix.com/craft/lunokhod.htm]http://www.astronautix.com/craft/lunokhod.htm[/email]

Would I be correct in assuming that the Viking landers did something similar - ie use the RTGs waste heat to ward off the cold of the Martian night?

Vikings did use RTG heat, probably also a few powered heaters.
Note that VL-2 Survived ***AND*** operated during the northern winter at 48 deg north, far enough north that water ice frost patches formed on much of the soil around the lander. <air temps were well above plausible values for the frost to be CO2>

Yes, and I'm in no way trying to diminish the Mars rovers. We just have to remember that the Lunokhods were the pioneering space rovers, and an amazing accomplishment with 1970's Russian technology. - And they still have the odometry record...

The *REAL* problem with the Lunokhods were that the entire engineering effort concentrated on the enormous task of getting it there and roving. The science package and capabilities of the Lunokhods were rudimentary.

Lunokhod 1 carried analog mechanical facimilie cameras, unfortunately with rather high noise levels most of the time, an X-ray fluorescence unit for crude ground chemistry, a mechanical properties testor, and a sky-light photometer for daytime/nighttime sky brightness measurements. And the passive laser reflector.

Lunokhod 2 added a magnetometer and tweeked the payload in a few ways.

The published science results from these rovers, as far as I can tell, was less then rudimentary. The Surveyors, designed as engineering test missions, were milked for all they were worth for science data, and up to two sicence instruments were added within the limited modification range of the spacecraft after they were already built. These were vastly documented in Science Magazine articles, NASA SP publications, and more extensive JPL TR series mission reports, plus scattered reports in other journals.

Lunokhod science results were dribbled out in Soviet journals like "Cosmic Research" and other major journals available in translation, but the entire batch I was able to find with systematic searching adds up to maybe a 1/2 or 2/3 inche thick wad of xeroxed papers, most of which are wordy but don't have much real science to report. <sigh>

I also have a NASA or other US governmanet translation of a "Lunokhod 1 Mission Report", reprinted from microfilm (better than those usually were), but it's also pretty bare, though it does contain a lot of engineering and operations info I'd never seen elsewhere.. but the science is limited and essentially told us a lot of things we already knew.

The major goal of both Lunokhods appears to have been simply that of driving as far as possible for as long as possible, thus upstaging the US to some degree (as with the automated sample return flights) - science was a side issue. All of these were triumphs of far greater significance than their propaganda aims, however, and are worth a great deal simply as examples proving that these things *can* be done.

Bob Shaw

Yep, though there's been s__t-loads of science from the sample return missions. Whole volumes of papers. Not as good as Apollo missions after Apollo 11 by a long shot (11's samples were dominated by regolith breccias and were sort of like the luna samples in some ways), but enormously valuable as known-map-location sample returns full of tiny rock chips and mineral grains..

Like Stardust, but a lot more sample. We learned a lot of proto-stardust type methods of sample analysis on Luna sample allotments.

...But just imagine if NASA had taken the cue from the Lunokhod missions and had put some wheels on the Viking landers. It could have been done. Then we would have had Mars rovers 30 years before we actually did get them!

Maybe the scientific return from the Lunokhod rovers was not anywhere near what we are getting with the Mars rovers, but remember how different technology was back then. For their time, they were pretty impressive, but of course not so much when we remember that they were up against human explorers.

However, the Soviets not only pioneered automated rovers, but also automated sample return missions and deserve credit for those technological breakthroughs, regardless of the fact that they were made in the context of Cold War upstaging (as Apollo).

´
it's not so simple
the difference in roving the Moon versus roving Mars is that the former can (in principle) be done in "real time" with simple 1960 TV camera + remote control whereas the task of roving Mars is fundamentally more difficult due to the long distance radio signal delay (limited speed of light) with the hour-long
delay of direct feedback.
So it's mainly the AI (Artificial Intelligence) enabled by the lightweight and powerful early 1990 micro computer technoloy together with the advanced autonomous navigation software that's key for the MER
mission.
I remember reading in the space books in my childhood (late 1970ties) that predicted the first Mars rovers for the mid-1980ties and the emphasis was in the utilization of quite an impressive predicted artificially intelligent "computer brain" to be used by the hypothetical rover ...

so the prdiction sort of became true at last even so with about twenty years of delay ...

and while we are at it: there was that other prediction in another book about "a fleet of nuclear powerd manned space ships sent to mars by 1985" ...

The original purpose of the Lunokhods was to survey human landing sites and deposit one or more radio beacons to guide the lander. (Exactly the same as the once-proposed Surveyor rovers). If the program had continued they were to be used in conjunction with sample return missions to gather samples over a wider area. The Lunokhods as flown were neither, and could be thought of as a combination of engineering tests with a bit of science added. However, the lack of publication of results is misleading. Lunokhod-2 did a lot that was never properly published. The money ran out too soon. There is some interest in trying to recover the old data sets, but there's no money for that either so it is painfully slow. I have been told (by the people involved) that the TV transmissions used to drive the rovers - not the panoramic photos - were recently recovered and might eventually be available.

Phil

The Lunokhod itself consisted of a tub-like compartment with a large convex lid on eight wheels. It stood 135 cm high, 170 cm long and 160 cm wide, with a mass of 840 kg. The 8 wheels each had an independent suspension, motor and brake. The rover had two speeds, ~1 km/hr and ~2 km/hr. Lunokhod was equipped with four TV cameras, three of them panoramic cameras. The fourth was mounted high on the rover for navigation, and could return high resolution images at different rates (3.2, 5.7, 10.9 or 21.1 seconds per frame). These images were used by a five-man team of controllers on Earth who sent driving commands to the rover in real time. Communications were through a cone-shaped omni-antenna and a highly directional helical antenna. Power was supplied by a solar panel on the inside of a round hinged lid which covered the instrument bay. A Polonium-210 isotopic heat source was used to keep the rover warm during the lunar nights. Scientific instruments included a soil mechanics tester, solar X-ray experiment, an astrophotometer to measure visible and UV light levels, a magnetometer deployed in front of the rover on the end of a 2.5 m boom, a radiometer, a photodetector (Rubin-1) for laser detection experiments, and a French-supplied laser corner-reflector. Lunokhod was designed to operate through three lunar days (three earth months) but greatly exceeded this in operation.

"... the TV transmissions used to drive the rovers - not the panoramic photos - were recently recovered ..."

(nods at Phil) Good!

A big part of the problem indeed seems to have been a failure of science funding support, especially for #2. Remember that Surveyors 8 through 14 were scrubbed before #1 ever flew, so we only flew the engineering test vehicles, instrumented to the gills for flight performance data, but not science.

Surveyor 1 carried a descent TV camera, not used (at least partly due to the failure of one omniantenna to deploy so they didn't point the high-gain antenna at Earth during the final descent), and the Survey Camera, both "engineering" instruments. #2 crashed and #3 and #4 (which failed) substituded the soil mechanics instrument for the descent campera, using the descent camera's controller to control the arm. #5 and 6 substututed the alpha-xray chemistry set for the arm, while #7 managed to find some way of carrying both the alpha-xray and the arm, which SAVED the alpha-xray which didn't deploy properly on it's own!

There was a proposal to fly the Viking 3 mission using engineering hardware and putting little crawler feet on the lander giving it a primary mission capability of a few tens of meters. I think ALL legged landers like Phoenix should include that ability. But Viking 3 got the same "oh-YAWN!" reaction that the Halley Rendezvous proposals got and never flew. "We've DONE Mars".

Route map, updated to sol 751.

Click to view attachment (239k)

Has anyone done a size comparison of the Lunokhod rovers vs the MER/Sojourner rovers? Would be a neat 3D picture.

Has anyone done a size comparison of the Lunokhod rovers vs the MER/Sojourner rovers...

A good graphic would be all wheeled (or equivalent) planetary rovers, including the astronaut dragged MET from Apollo 14 and the later rovers.

Route map, updated to sol 753.

Click to view attachment (239k)

OT: I'm really surprised by the Lunokhod rovers performance that long time ago. Shouldn't this discussion be moved to another new thread?

Route map, enlarged and updated to sol 755.

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Route map, updated to sol 758.

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I love your Opportunity route maps with the landing ellipse. I know the width of the ellipse reflects the degree of certainty of its location based on NASA illustrations of the ellipse, but I was wondering if there is an actual mathematical description of the ellipse somewhere that could be represented by a line -- or several lines representing different probabilities of containing the landing site.

Hmmm. Interesting that we backed up the ramp again. Was going forward hazardous, or have we just switched to the southbound Victoria Express?

Premptive Route Map



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Assuming the rover drivers are paranoid about crossing dunes

Definitely going to South on Sol760.
It seems Oppy avoided to go into this dangerous dune at the last moment, or it was intentional?
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Doesn't look they are, actually: http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...KEP1215L0M1.JPG
"South, James, and don't spare the horses!"
You might want to straighten out that route a little, Alan.

It looks like the usual after-drive turn in place for better UHF communication.

It's interesting that your drive path stops at the edge of the victoria ejecta blanket. I wonder how traversible it is?

Interesting hopscotch route, Alan. It looks a pretty circuitous path, but given that the operational constraint should be avoiding deep, loose ripples, staying on the bedrock windows is a must. It looks like we will be dancing on the rims of paleocraters.

--Bill

Route map, updated to sol 760.

Click to view attachment (332k)

Almost 20 meters to landing ellipse.

Keep on rocking Oppy - good to see the journey to Victoria has started. I look forward to seeing that huge crater....is that going to be Oppy's last stop?

Who knows? Everyone is looking at Victoria as the last stop but there might be just enough gas in the tank to keep on exploring (there's a huge crater towards the southeast but it's at least 10 miles away). With the problems both rovers are experiencing I will be more than satisfied if Oppy does make it to Victoria. We can all breath a sigh of relief then..I know I will.

I'd be satisfied if Victoria has to be Oppy's last port of call.

Agreed....seeing as Spirit's right front wheel may be DOA (?) and the rovers are way past their designed lifetime.

Victoria Crater may be the finish to the whole MER project...then look toward Phoenix and the MSL. But the rovers may have more surprises left. Too bad Phoenix isn't a rover, but it will be very exciting in its own way.

More like PDAVEIDLBAOOMAM
(Possibly Dead After Vastly Exceeding It's Design Lifetime By An Order Of Magnitude And More)
Damn shame if the wheel is actually out of action for good but we can hope that it is an inconvenience rather than a death sentence for Spirit.

While I like the monster acronym, I think "KIA" describes the wheel failure nicely, with overtones of intrepid heroism.

All this talk of Opportunity's last resting place has made me depressed... very depressed... I think I'll go and stick my head in a bucket of water.

Now, now...let's not write off either of the MERs yet. These machines are amazingly durable and adaptive (gotta give a shout out to Lockheed-Martin, for once, and of course the MER JPL team who have really shown us all how it's supposed to be done!!!)

While I know that they have to stop someday, it just seems like now is not the time. Personally, I would give an even chance of both of them lasting until mid-2008, and one of them surviving until 2010.

Yup - Mars Odyssey is doing good relay.

But they didn't have much involvement with the rovers as I understand it.

Doug

It's a bit more (70 meters). I vote for the center of Tes's drawn in landing elipse that fixs the limit.

Should we start a pool, then? I'd prefer not to look on it as a 'how long until Spirit/Opportunity dies' but instead 'how much longer than the nominal mission lifetime will the rovers last?'.

Bob Shaw

A rover dead pool? Yuck! There would be the grisly detail of deciding what constitutes death. Last transmission? Last useful data relay? Official termination of communication attempts?

How about: "Place your bets on which rover lasts longer."? or which goes farther?