Nasa’s Curiosity Rover becomes more powerful after 13 years on Mars – Jalopnik

Happy 13^one Birthday to the curiosity Rover, who landed on Mars on 6 August 2012. Ah, I remember that I turned 13: just began to shave, crack voice like ice in the spring and learn how to multitask so that my small nuclear reactor would last longer. Unfortunately, curiosity will never learn to shave, but it has just discovered how to do that last piece. After all this time in the dust of another planet, the Rover literally gets better.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, which manages the Curiosity Mission, has pushed a new software update to the six-wheeled adventurer. The most important goal is to improve the lifespan of its Multi-Mission Radio Isotope Thermoelectric Generator (MMRTG), which is not a genre of video games, but an advanced form of radiootope power system (RPS). This is a Geminiaturized Plutonium energy power plant, which is quite amazing. The problem is, even plutonium eventually gets up, and it is not as if curiosity can simply jump to the garage to pick up a little more (and to exchange his wheels while it is on it).

Every time curiosity does something, it uses electricity. Driving the wheels, scanning on a route, taking samples that should one day have to return to earth, call home – it all costs a little juice and charging the batteries means spending plutonium. As soon as it’s all gone, curiosity becomes a future piece of Martian Museum piece, nothing more. So making the seven-foot-long man more efficient is quite critical, because it will extend the life of the MMRTG and therefore curiosity itself. How to do that? By doing what every 13-year-old juggling homework and social media does: Multitask. And then take more naps.

Curiosity has a lot to do, but all that is programmed by the good people back at JPL. So the mission of a day can drive there, take some pictures, upload those photos back to the earth and then drive somewhere else. Each of those steps is planned in order and curiosity she fulfills one by one. Wise, but also enormously inefficient.

So, crazy idea: what if curiosity could upload the photos during the drive to the second location? This reduces the total amount of time that curiosity should even be to reach the mission, which means that less total power reference. This means critically more naps, a priority for all of us.

In fact, before this update, the Rover would perform each of these tasks for a assigned amount of time, regardless of whether it achieved the goal early. Maybe the ride was a bit smoother than estimated, and he arrived a little early. The old curiosity would still serve the planned time. The updated curiosity can recognize when it has done its work for the day and is then eliminated. The more power is saved, the less the plutonium is used up, the more years of curiosity will take.

NASA has been using RTG systems since the 1960s. They used the Apollo missions, and the two voyager spaces that sail into the universe are still driven by them today. The current version used by curiosity and the perseverance of the brother or sister is “multi-mission”, which means that the same design can be used in space or in the atmosphere.

The most important principle here at work is that if two conductive elements are very different temperatures, electricity flows. There are plutonium pellets within the device, which, if desired, generate enormous heat. Outside the device, well, it’s Mars! It’s cold. You get the cold part for free. There is a reason why this stuff still works in the emptiness of the room. That provides 110 watts of 10.6 pounds of plutonium to charge the batteries of the robber.

The device itself is pretty sturdy, what it should be, in case there is an accident. Nobody wants a science mission to become a dirty bomb. In fact, in 1968, a rocket with a satellite with an RTG in the sea. The generator was successfully restored, intact and then reused on a future satellite.

How long will the MMRTG of Curiosity take it? As with all things on Mars, it is difficult to predict. Perhaps future updates will make it even more efficient; Maybe something is going terribly wrong tomorrow. But when it landed for the first time, NASA only hoped that the Rover would make it for two years. It just touched his 13^one birthday. Here is the next 13, buddy.