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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

#161

Post by rob74 »

jws wrote: post #123
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tweet thread itself doesn't say that using self cleaning panels would be impossible, or even that hard, just that it's easier and more cost effective to just bring bigger panels. Not of your bullet points seem that relevant honestly - using an equivalent of a leaf blower would do the trick. But any added complexity to a mission just means there are more failure points.

With an atmospheric density 1/150th that of Earth, the engineering of a leaf blower might be tricky. Clearly the atmosphere can move dust, but you might hit speed of sound problems in your turbine. Someone should spend a couple years doing some PhD work on Martian dust blowing turbine designs, but not burn out completely so they can write a 1000 word, interesting blog post with some pretty pictures for me to consume.

Also, you would have to carefully weigh if using the blower would not consume more energy than you stand to gain by clearing the panels...

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

#163

Post by rob74 »

billfor wrote: post #151
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...

This makes wonder about solar roofs and efficiency over time. For example I don't see anything immediately obvious about how a Tesla Solar Roof might degrade over time due to dust and debris, but it stands to reason that it should. It seems like it should be easier to find this type of information on solar panels given the emphasis.

Well, your solar roof won't be on Mars. Here on Earth, you have rain from time to time in most places. And even in the middle of a desert, you can simply wipe the panels clean once the dust storm has passed...

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

#164

Post by [deleted] »

chasd00 wrote: post #150
devsploit wrote: post #129

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…

heh it was probably a single byte with one bit signaling low battery and the other 7 signaling other things.

[deleted]

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

#165

Post by rob74 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #84
logicallee wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This reply completely misses the point. All missions have an expected lifespan. The reason why they didn't use some sort of cleaning system is simply because it wasn't needed . The lander gathered all the data it was expected to, and then some. Why add complexity if it isn't useful?

Not only complexity, also weight - and for spacecraft, every gram you can shave off matters...

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

#166

Post by throw827474737 »

bogantech wrote: post #142
devsploit wrote: post #129

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…

It would have been a data packet containing the battery gauge and some other metrics, it wouldn't make any sense for the lander itself to waste precious bandwidth by spitting out human readable ASCII strings like that. It's just PR like the last one

They sent two flash chips full of names with the lander, they are transmitting whole hi-res pictures and even Apollo missions already had at least 1.6 kbit/s, sorry but those 64 bytes would have fit everywhere.

But yes, that message didn't exist for other reasons.

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

#167

Post by logicallee »

nradov wrote: post #149
logicallee wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(writing this comment myself by hand) In case you click through, what I want you to focus on in the transcript is that it came up with the two additional analogies at the end at my request, but I absolutely didn't suggest or introduce what they are specifically and I had no idea what it would come up with. You can't know this, but it's my experience. Understanding and coming up with analogies is a gold standard of ge…

The analogies are garbage, not even remotely relevant to the issue. I have tried ChatGPT for myself. It's a great technical achievement, and has some practical value in writing rough drafts on certain limited topics. But you haven't provided any evidence that it is a form of AGI in any meaningful sense.

I believe I have provided evidence it is a form of AGI. It is a generic type of request for it to come up with an analogy and it did so for me. I think arguing over whether it's general AI is quite similar to arguing whether uber is a taxi company. People pay to ride in someone else's car which gets them from A to B. It came up with that analogy at my request.

You can make chatgpt generic requests and it answers them. just try it if you don't believe me.

I asked it how it would solve not being able to get some cookies off of a high counter if it were a small child, it replied with its plans:

https://hastebin.com/raw/geponewiki

I had it generate a PDF of the latest advances in AI. It gave me something pretty generic and not that insightful. See for yourself:

http://online.verypdf.com/app/sharepdf/?url=http://online.ve...

That is a PDF titled "AI Advances:A Review of the Latest Developments in Artificial Intelligence". Nothing special as far as titles or contents goes. But an AI wrote the whole damn thing.

(Though it couldn't fix the broken formating when I tried to make a latext document out of it.)

But that's not the point. The point is I asked it to create an executive summary of advances in AI and it did as well as a seventh or eighth grader.

What you really don't understand is you can't just instantly apply the standard of "this thing must be the best at everything and never make any mistake" to be generally intelligent. Ask it some intelligence type of tests of a generic nature.

I mean what's more generic than some new question nobody has any reason to ask and that requires inductive and deductive reasoning to solve? https://hastebin.com/raw/gupevutohe

That's the definition of AGI. I mean what is your standard? What is AGI supposed to do that this thing doesn't do at all?

I just think that this meets my requirements for handling generic arbitrary tasks. Its input and output is language but it is able to think and keep track of complex thoughts including about entirely novel situations. It's usually pretty reasonable.

What more evidence of AGI do you need than that it can solve novel generic tasks it has never encountered before?

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

#168

Post by dredmorbius »

Zancarius wrote: post #117
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cant just use a pad on the arm to rub away at them?

What happens when the pad gets choked out with dust?

Great Mars-dust-wiper pads have little Mars-dust-wiper pads upon their backs to wipe 'em.

And little Mars-dust-wiper pads have lesser ... pads, and so ad infinitum.

It's pad's all the way down.

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

#169

Post by SoftTalker »

rob74 wrote: post #163
billfor wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes wonder about solar roofs and efficiency over time. For example I don't see anything immediately obvious about how a Tesla Solar Roof might degrade over time due to dust and debris, but it stands to reason that it should. It seems like it should be easier to find this type of information on solar panels given the emphasis.

Well, your solar roof won't be on Mars. Here on Earth, you have rain from time to time in most places. And even in the middle of a desert, you can simply wipe the panels clean once the dust storm has passed...

Yeah, I'm not walking around on a pitched glass-surfaced roof that may be slimy with mold. Ever seen what a window eventually looks like in a humid climate if it hasn't been cleaned? Rain can wash off some surface dust but it doesn't really clean beyond that. Maybe this isn't as much of a problem in a desert.

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

#170

Post by andrewflnr »

dougmany wrote: post #137
ilyt wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But would the sun-tracking mount also let you shed dust buildup? That might make it worth it for long term missions. My next idea after blowers for removing dust was to just flip the panel vertical for a bit...
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