Energy Usage Estimates for Past Rover Missions

[Louis Schoeppach]

To whom it may concern,

I'm working on a university project where we're supposed to come up with a power solution for a hypothetical rover mission. We've found a lot of useful data on past mars rover missions to guide our design decisions. Looking at the sojourner micro-rover from the pathfinder mission has been especially helpful, as it's basically the scale we're targeting, and there's information available about power usage of different subsystems, power generation from solar panels, and battery capacity. 

The one thing that we're missing which would really help narrow down design decisions, is a record of energy generated and energy used for each day of the mission. The ideal would be something like the attached summary of all of Sojourner's activities, (which came from this summary of the pathfinder mission), but a few added line items indicating "Watt-hours used" and "Watt-hours generated" for each sol.

Is this information available anywhere?

 

Thanks,

Louis

[Abigail Knight]

Hi Louis,

 

The Mars Pathfinder Rover Engineering Data Records are available at the PDS Cartography and Imaging Sciences Node. If you navigate to /mprv_0001/rvr_eng/solXX and download solXX_eu.zip, I believe power data are provided here for a given sol. The .lbl files provide metadata that include descriptions of and units for each column of the data. There are quite a few columns, but I quickly found some relevant data (e.g., "BATT A USED") by searching for keywords like "battery" or "power". Also, if you navigate to /mprv_0001/document you will find documentation for the dataset. If you have further questions about the dataset, the Imaging Node can be contacted at pds-img-usgs@usgs.gov.  

 

Best,

Abigail