So long Insight! Pleasure having some flash memory that was sent with you, there's a few bytes that have my name in it.
Woah that is so cool. What did the bytes do? Was it code for the lander?
‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off
61–70 of 187 posts
Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off
#62Interesting 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…
ChatGPT isn't general AI, not even close.
Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off
#63Interesting thread on why it's not possible for the solar panels to be self cleaned: https://twitter.com/NASAInSight/status/1590736220199735296?c...
I am seeing a lot of comments along the lines of 'windshield wipers?'
Cars were invented in 1886, the first windshield wipers became available for them in 1917, 31 years later. That is...
- in an environment with plenty of water - not near waterless,
- on glass windshields (much less fragile than solar panels),
- where we can physically replace the wipers when needed,
- where we can adjust if they get stuck,
- and where there is much less dust.
If we add 5 years of R&D to overcome each of those obstacles (very optimistic, it's more like 10 well-funded years I suspect), then even optimistically we're looking at 25 years. I suspect we might have a rover with self-cleaning panels, or safe cold-fusion, in 25 years. I don't expect one this decade.
Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off
#64So long Insight! Pleasure having some flash memory that was sent with you, there's a few bytes that have my name in it.
Woah that is so cool. What did the bytes do? Was it code for the lander?
I assume it's this:
https://www.space.com/38413-your-name-on-mars-nasa-insight-l...
Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Windshield wipers add weight and complexity but more importantly add to the budget. These things are designed only to serve the mission. This rover was designed to last 1 year and went for 4 so it’s a pretty good result. Some good discussion here [1] on Astronomy Cast regarding this topic and potential solutions NASA is working on. Such as an electrostatic dust blaster. 1. https://podcasts.apple.com/vu/podcast/astron…
Seems a bit shortsighted to me. Given that if they avoid a catastrophic failure before landing these things seems to consistently last beyond the originally planned mission, they should be building them with mission extensions in mind. Not putting all your eggs in one basket of course. Shit happens and probes are still lost even today. But a simple device to remove dust such as a vibration function, a small blower fa…
You're assuming that there's funding for an extended mission, or that said funding wouldn't be better used on other initiatives, or even within the mission that the opportunity cost is worth it.
At the end of the day the best way to ensure mission success is to put the mission first, not future missions, not "nice to haves", put every dollar you have into making the prescribed mission as perfect as possible. You're suggesting the equivalent of "Navy SEALs sometimes get caught in larger than expected firefights, so each man should lug an extra 1000 rounds of spare ammo into combat just in case". And they could, but that would slow them down and endanger the immediate mission, even if only slightly.
The opportunity cost of that million dollars could be that testing is slightly less extensive and that a minor flaw goes undetected, or other work is rushed because the engineers were busy getting the wipers to work properly. It could also be that there's no interesting science to do in that area even with an extended mission, so the mission extension turns out to be completely worthless.
It's a different mindset than most engineers are used to, because we're used to users having vague desires and needs that even when well defined are somewhat ambiguous, so we plan generic solutions for a bunch of different edge cases and assume things will be used in ways other than what they're intended. And we all like building durable stuff that lasts the test of time. But when you're building a missile you don't care about minor memory leaks, and these probes are essentially science-missiles.
Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off
#66Great video about Insight, the technical challenges, and findings from it: https://youtu.be/LmkRrtfY6VI
Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I was designing such a message I'd make sure there is a lot of redundancy in the message so even if I only received part of it I could figure out what it was. Adding quotes and other non-alphanumerics can add more clues that make the message unique enough to identify it even when significant amounts of the data are lost in transmission.
We have really sophisticated, formal strategies for that purpose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_detection_and_correction... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_correction_code
Yep, I worked in the disk drive industry over twenty years ago, and I was surprised to learn that a lot of what we read off the disk is actually wrong! If not for a lot of generous error correction they'd've been pretty unusable.
Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off
#68As 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 always assumed it sent some short, efficient code with the appropriate error correction, packet loss protection and so on and it was only the receiving program that translated to a verbose string. Is that not the case?
Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off
#69I 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.
These are the last of the "faithful" ones before AI driven ones make these obsolete. I am already feeling nostalgic for these "dependable and hardworking" robots in advance.
Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off
#70[deleted]