Author: Tom Nardi / Source: Hackaday
Everyone knows that space is an incredibly inhospitable place, but the surface of Mars isn’t a whole lot better. It’s a dim, cold, and dry world, with a wisp of an atmosphere that provides less than 1% of Earth’s barometric pressure. As the planet’s core no longer provides it with a magnetosphere, cosmic rays and intense solar flares bathe the surface in radiation.
Human life on the surface without adequate environmental shielding is impossible, and as NASA’s fleet of rovers can attest, robotic visitors to the planet aren’t completely immune to the planet’s challenges.
As a planet-wide dust storm finally begins to settle, NASA is desperately trying to find out if the Red Planet has claimed yet another victim. The agency hasn’t heard from the Opportunity rover, which landed on Mars in 2004, since before the storm started on June 10th; and with each passing day the chances of reestablishing contact are diminished. While they haven’t completely given up hope, there’s no question this is the greatest threat the go-kart sized rover has faced in the nearly 15 years it has spent on the surface.
Opportunity was designed with several autonomous fail-safe systems that should have activated during the storm, protecting the rover as much as possible. But even with these systems in place, its twin Spirit succumbed to similar conditions in 2010. Will Opportunity make it through this latest challenge? Or has this global weather event brought the long-running mission to a dramatic close?
A Fair-Weather Rover
Conditions on the surface of Mars were fairly well understood even before Viking 1 touched down on the surface in 1976.
Due to the fact that the surface of Mars only receives around 40% of the sunlight that Earth does, early missions used radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) to provide power rather than relying on the inefficient solar panels of the era. Unfortunately Opportunity does not have an RTG and must rely on solar to recharge batteries.But even as solar panels got smaller and more efficient in time for later missions to Mars, the constant accumulation of dust on them meant they would provide less energy over time. Accordingly, anything that uses solar panels on Mars needs to be designed with certain safeguards if it’s to have any chance of surviving. When the Opportunity and Spirit rovers were being designed, the possibility of them experiencing long periods of darkness was anticipated.
When the rover detects that the batteries are running low and the solar panels are not producing enough energy to recharge them, it will trigger a low-power fault. This causes the rover to shut down systems and go into a “hibernation” mode until such time that the…
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