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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

I'm waiting for the day where someone can tell their rover to drive / fly over and find out what the heck happened.

Opportunity is not so far (it's actually inside a crater nearby I think), but it'd take months to get to place, and there may not be enough scientific value in doing so just to see the charred remains of Schiaparelli. But who knows, it's so over it's expected mission life that maybe someone goes "f* it, let's go take a look".

Opportunity tried to see the descent, but it did not work: http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2016/1019152...

Damn. So cosmic rays are pretty intense huh?

Yes. Cosmic rays are a significant obstacle to any kind of automated event detection in imagery taken from space, especially outside low Earth orbit.

That streak was a classic CR. Depending on the angle of incidence on the CCD, you can see different shapes.

I love reading her stuff, even if I don't understand a lot of it. Her twitter feed is fantastic.

We're years away from landing anything that could dig a hole deeper than Schiaparelli's crater.

Depending on how hard it cratered, and how soon Opportunity could get there, it could be the most important thing for Opportunity to do.

Not necessarily. Schiaparelli used hydrazine for fuel, and if it smashed into the surface it seems to me that it's a reasonable assumption that the whole crash site is contaminated with it. Is that something we want to get all over the rover?

Hydrazine is extremely unstable right? Would much of it remain after slamming in to the ground?

With a bit more Googling, it appears that hydrazine's lifetime in (Earth) atmosphere is measured in hours. I'm not sure what that would be on Mars, or if soaking into the soil there would increase its lifetime.

It's a fun mental exercise, I guess -- I'd love to hear from somebody in the field who knew more about hydrazine -- but as the Opportunity rover is still a long (likely impossible) distance away from the crash site, it will likely just remain a mental exercise.

Both are good answers... let's see what scientists decide. In te meantime, MRO should give some interesting hi-res pictures.

Yes! I wasn't aware that a second fly-over with a better imager was going to happen, but now I'm morbidly curious.

> ...how soon Opportunity could get there...

Months, to say the least -- the rover moves very slowly. Ever since it got to Mars, it's moved at about ~3,5 km/year (just shy over 2 miles/year). I think a more realistic estimate could be "longer than it has been there".

Opportunity is very very far, yes technically it is close if you are thinking about traditional modes of transportation, but it traveled so far only about 40KM, and it's max speed is about 2 inches per second it is not going to get there.

We have proven designs for Mars rovers, and a proven delivery system. The R&D has been done, the infrastructure is in place - why don't we send some more? We should be able to make incremental updates and constantly improve the rovers capabilities.

That's pretty much what we have done: http://imgur.com/3Hg9O (Pathfinder, Spirit/Opportunity, Curiosity). Mars2020 isn't designed yet, but it will be based on Curiosity.

Thank you, that is actually a great picture!

Most pictures of the rovers fail to depict the difference in size between Sojourner (the Pathfinder rover), Spirit/Opportunity and Curiosity which is the largest to date.

Besides rovers, on the surface there are also several landers, sent by USA, USSR, UK and ESA.

A complete list of human made objects landed on extra terrestrial bodies is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_landings_on_extraterre...

I suspect the above link just made someone's week end ;-)

UPDATE On a separate note, it would be very interesting if future (manned or unmanned) missions could visit artifacts sent by previous missions and assess their state / decay over time. The only example that I know of is Surveyor 3 (moon unmanned lander) which was visited by the Apollo 12 mission a couple of years later.

For some reason, my dream is one day to be able to travel to Mars and visit Spirit in its final resting place at Troy[1].

[1] http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA12205

Mars 2020 is designed yet, you can view its design and experiments here: http://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/

Sure, it may not be fully officially built, but it has been designed almost to completion.

Since the vehicle design is based on Opportunity, I would say the biggest news is the array of sensor/instruments on board: http://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/mission/instruments/

The teams rarely stay together - there's often no stable funding source, and much of the grunt work is done by grad students. And the technology is advancing all the time - we're sending heavier and heavier landers, with better and better instruments. Even on Earth, if you were on a team investigating animal migration (say), you probably wouldn't be thrilled to use the same hardware that the last team used 8 years ago.

It's like software. Once you finally manage to get something kinda reliably working, you ditch it and start a new one.

Speaking of which, why didn't the Schiaparelli use a proven design for the landing system?

NASA was going to provide the landing technology, but the funding was cut.

different hardware for different types of mission / cost

The rovers we sent cost us about $400 million each. And one failed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Exploration_Rover

Considering that both rovers were planned to last for 90 days each both of them outlasted their mission like a boss you can't say any of them failed, yes Spirit has failed but after 2269 days in operation.

Opportunity by this time must be fueled by some dark magic since the darn thing out lasted it's planned mission by freaking 12 years.

https://xkcd.com/1504/

https://xkcd.com/695/

Are you Ken M? https://www.reddit.com/r/KenM/comments/4944og/ken_m_on_the_c...

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