81–90 of 235 posts
Please have one minute of silence to remember this wonderful machine that gave us all so much... Kudos to all those who contributed to make this such an overwhelming success. Science FTW.
Earth minute or Martian minute?
Was looking through Opportunity's Wikipedia page, and found this cool comparison of the embedded systems used in Mars rovers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_embedded_compute... That lead me to the RAD6000 page, which was new to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RAD6000 "Reported to have a unit cost somewhere between US$200,000 and US$300,000, RAD6000 computers were released for sale in the general co…
I'm feeling humbled by NASA's achievements compared to those of our profession here wrt sustainability and longevity.
I built some warehousing apps in VFP 20 years ago and they're still running fine. Every time I go ship something the owner asks me to prune and reindex the DB and that's it, another year running smooth.
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More interesting would be when someone else from another species finds them in a couple of million years in the future and wonders what their purpose was all about.
Cassini was deliberately pushed into Saturn's atmosphere and destroyed (so as not to potentially contaminate habitable worlds) so we probably don't need to worry about that. Also, there's a great documentary TV series called "7 Days Out" on Netflix which covers the last week of the Cassini mission.
Seems like they could just send a drone to go wipe off the solar panels...
Opportunity's and Spirit's original missions were planned to last 90 Martian days each. They ended up lasting over 8,000 combined. That is almost as impressive as getting the rovers to Mars in the first place.
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Earth minute or Martian minute?
Excellent question. I assumed that one mars minute differs from an earth minute but I just learned that they don't. Seconds, minutes and hours are universal. Hours in a day is what varies by planets, moons etc. Funny that I never thought of that before :)
Edit: Or rather should I say it’s relative... (lol?)
Opportunity's and Spirit's original missions were planned to last 90 Martian days each. They ended up lasting over 8,000 combined. That is almost as impressive as getting the rovers to Mars in the first place.
That story is very much over sold. They defiantly designed the things with a longer lifespan in mind. NASA simply had more reasonable minimum specks so if they died on day 220 nobody would call the program a failure.