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‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off

theguardian.com

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Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off

#41

Post by gpderetta »

logicallee wrote: post #32
simonswords82 wrote: post #19

Interesting thread on why it's not possible for the solar panels to be self cleaned: https://twitter.com/NASAInSight/status/1590736220199735296?c...

After reading your note "why it's not possible for the solar panels to be self cleaned" I clicked through and as I clicked I was thinking "okay so obviously it is possible for the solar panels to self-clean. prove me wrong." I mean how hard could it be? No way is that an "impossible" task. I went out of it thinking, "yep, look at these excuses we are making for the state of robotics." - the quote is: "A system like t…

"A high resolution picture of the Insight Mars Rover on mars, with a simple, light weight and foolproof robotic arm brushing sand off its solar panels, in the style of Greg Rutkowski and Alphonse Mucha, 4k, trending on artstation"

Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off

#42

Post by wazoox »

simonswords82 wrote: post #19

Interesting thread on why it's not possible for the solar panels to be self cleaned: https://twitter.com/NASAInSight/status/1590736220199735296?c...

It's pretty amazing to think it still works with the panels as covered in dust as they are in the last frame!

Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off

#43

Post by Avshalom »

thathndude wrote: post #12

I know these are inanimate objects and we shouldn’t humanize them. Blame XKCD, I suppose. But I feel a connection to these robots, and I pray that one day we can go to Mars and erect them a place of honor or bring them “home” to a Smithsonian. They are a testament to the best of our space programs and the men and women who work in them. It’s amazing how well some of these machines overperformed.

>>we shouldn’t humanize them

Nah, our ability and willingness to develop empathy and emotional connections to dogs, bugs, robots, small rocks... It's one of our best traits.

Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off

#44

Post by ilyt »

simonswords82 wrote: post #19

Interesting thread on why it's not possible for the solar panels to be self cleaned: https://twitter.com/NASAInSight/status/1590736220199735296?c...

So its essentially "the system needs to be cheap and light enough to beat bringing more panels"

Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off

#45

Post by MobileVet »

simonswords82 wrote: post #19

Interesting thread on why it's not possible for the solar panels to be self cleaned: https://twitter.com/NASAInSight/status/1590736220199735296?c...

If only there was a simple mechanism, maybe a four bar linkage, with trillions of cycles of testing... it would have to be light weight and include some form of brush or wiper and function with significant forces applied, similar to wind from a moving vehicle...

I guess the downside of having JPL in SoCal is that none of the engineers are familiar with windshield wipers.

Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off

#46

Post by blululu »

logicallee wrote: post #32
simonswords82 wrote: post #19

Interesting thread on why it's not possible for the solar panels to be self cleaned: https://twitter.com/NASAInSight/status/1590736220199735296?c...

After reading your note "why it's not possible for the solar panels to be self cleaned" I clicked through and as I clicked I was thinking "okay so obviously it is possible for the solar panels to self-clean. prove me wrong." I mean how hard could it be? No way is that an "impossible" task. I went out of it thinking, "yep, look at these excuses we are making for the state of robotics." - the quote is: "A system like t…

I would suspect that the problem is more difficult than you make it out to be. First, Mars is very windy/dusty. Second, there is no water so brushing dust is harder than on earth. Add in the increased static cling and dust ingress into the motors and it is not clear to me that brushing is actually viable on mars without a lot of extra engineering (and teams to figure all this out). I’m sure this decision was made with a good e evaluation since they did make the choice to add more panels which has its own downsides. There might even be some interesting papers out ther.

Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off

#47

Post by blululu »

rwmj wrote: post #5
prettyStandard wrote: post #2

I'm confused on why the end state for all these rovers is to loose power because of dust on the solar cells. They did such a good job engineering these things to survive the trip and the conditions in general, but they can't give them "windshield wipers for dust"? Seems like with that minor upgrade they could have much longer lifespan. Can someone enlighten me?

Some kind of passive self-cleaning solar-cell cover might work. You could direct and shape the wind so it blows more strongly over the cell surface to clean it, or since the dust is charged[1] you might use a conductive layer with the same charge. (Although I'm sure engineers have thought long and hard about this already.) [1] Moon, but similar: https://youtu.be/0k9wIsKKgqo?t=378

The static charges necessarily come in pairs so the dust is charged both positive and negative, but the surface also gets charged as dust hits it so trying to blow it off does not necessarily work in the long term. Static dust is a real pain in a low water environment.

Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off

#48

Post by Clamchop »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #34
user3939382 wrote: post #17

As a programmer my first thought reading this was: If I was designing a program to send me back a message and it was super critical I received it, I wouldn't put any quotes or non-alphanumerics in the message. Even if my string handling checks out, if the stakes are sufficiently high, I don't trust em!

I thought it was pretty annoying that the communications are put forth here as if the lander is an animate thing engaging in conversation with us. Perhaps one day we'll achieve something like that. Heck, maybe we'll send up the grandchild of ChatGPT to be the voice of a future exploration probe. But that's not what we have today. These messages were coded by the engineers who built the thing, and any implication of s…

Because the messages were written by people, the sentiment is more authentic than anything made by gpt.

Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off

#49

Post by bnralt »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #39
bnralt wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> almost all of these Mars robots seem to do useful science well beyond the end of the stated mission How are we defining "useful science" here? They all do some kind of scientific investigations, but it's hard to say if it's useful or not. If you look at coverage or discussions about the lander (including here), people get very excited about the landings, and somewhat excited about the pictures. The science almost n…

I'd go as far as saying "useful science" doesn't have much meaning. The misunderstanding comes from the conflation of "science" and "engineering". The reason engineering exists is to be useful: to create artifacts and technology to make our lives better, easier, etc. But science only has three uses: to inform engineering; to satisfy our human curiosity; and to beget more science. Any "usefulness" here is of a very na…

And even whether or not it's important is hard to say. Whether the experiments being done were important or completely unimportant, we'd get the same thing - hyped up results from NASA talking about how these things were a big deal, vague comments from lander fans about how the landers are doing important scientific work. You're not going to get NASA to come out and say, "actually, we can't think of a good reason to send anything to Mars anymore. Maybe in a couple of decades when our technology improves." Similarly, you're not going to get them to say that the shuttle or SLS were misfires. If you look at the stuff NASA releases, these were all enormous successes.

If I try to look at what the Insight lander accomplished, for instance, I find articles claiming that Insight found that the core of the Mars was much larger than previously thought. Let's leave aside whether the exact size of Mars' core is important or not. If I look for estimates of the size of the core prior to Insight, they're all in line with the estimates that came from the Insight data. From what I can see Insight brought the range of estimates closer together, but it seems to be about what people were expecting beforehand.

Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off

#50

Post by hawski »

phone8675309 wrote: post #35
hawski wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sure it comes down to economics really, but I do wonder now about a mission in far future, that would clean solar panels of all those older missions to make them work again. For shits and giggles I guess.

IIRC this was a plot point in The Martian

Oh, yes indeed. I forgot about that.
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