151–160 of 187 posts
Interesting thread on why it's not possible for the solar panels to be self cleaned: https://twitter.com/NASAInSight/status/1590736220199735296?c...
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That’s the most bizarre math I’ve ever seen. Once you’ve designed something once it’s a lot faster to design over and over.
Each one of those bullets is a different engineering problem. The math is based on real government R&D I've seen. "Once you’ve designed something once it’s a lot faster to design over and over". You forgot the last part of that sentence: Once you’ve designed something once it’s a lot faster to design over and over, if you are in a similar environment with somewhat similar conditions.
oh, now i understand the math
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Nitter got you covered.
I thought Nitter stopped working sometime after Musk's takeover. Maybe just the specific mirror I used?
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I don't buy it. There are so many ways to solve the problem that wouldn't add significant weight, that there must be some ulterior motive. And there is. NASA plans obsolescence into the rovers to get funding to build the next rover.
This type of arrogant, aggressive ignorance is really the worst part of HN. How many successful space probes have you designed? How much weight would the solution add, and what trade-offs would that impose on other mission parameters? NASA is by no means perfect. But we can start by assuming they have basic competence and positive intent unless proven otherwise.
I suppose this is kind of a trivial question, but does anyone know if the last message was ACTUALLY the STRING: “My power’s really low. Don’t worry about me though…”, or was it some binary/hex code to represent that, like, "503 ERROR", and the PR department just tweeted its interpretation as “My power’s really low. Don’t worry about me though…”? It raises more questions. Was this logging message decided by committee…
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Probably some bytecode representing an RPC enum variant
Yeah this sent me down a rabbit hole. Apparently "NASA had previously decided to declare the mission over if the lander missed two communication attempts" ( https://mars.nasa.gov/news/9321/nasa-retires-insight-mars-la... ). Ah well, nothing wrong with a little space theatre!
How do we know the lander wasn't captured by Martians and locked in a faraday cage, in dire need of rescue?
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?
This isn't cynicism- it's just the reality of trying to absolutely maximize the science return per scarce dollar spent. I personally would love it if ultimate lifespan was a feasible goal for every mission. So would pretty much everyone! But it isn't.
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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.
"A system like that would have added cost, mass, and complexity. The simplest, most cost-effective way to meet my goals was to bring solar panels big enough to power my whole mission – which they did (and then some!)."
I suppose this is kind of a trivial question, but does anyone know if the last message was ACTUALLY the STRING: “My power’s really low. Don’t worry about me though…”, or was it some binary/hex code to represent that, like, "503 ERROR", and the PR department just tweeted its interpretation as “My power’s really low. Don’t worry about me though…”? It raises more questions. Was this logging message decided by committee…
My guess is that it's PR baked into the software -- at least the receiver software. It was a line written by someone who understood that just an error code is really bad for humans to read. So they humanized it a bit. They had time to plan this, not like they didn't know this was the likely outcome. Good product management to give the robot a voice.
Like the newspapers have obituaries for most important personalities prepared (and sometimes publish them prematurely)?
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So its essentially "the system needs to be cheap and light enough to beat bringing more panels"
I remember calculating the cost efficiency of adding a sun tracking mount to some panels. It turned out that the increased power would be about the same as adding an additional panel and one panel was cheaper than the mount. The mount also would only help half the year and the extra panel would help the whole year.