Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]

Post by callesgg » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 5:05 PM UTC

jws wrote: post #344

Azrael3000 wrote: post #55

It's a great achievement with some really interesting work done on the landing algorithms with terrain recognition and it seemed to have worked exceptionally well. Looking forward for the next landing in May of the Chinese rover and all the science these robots will produce. Also, the test of Ingenuity, the helicopter, will be very interesting to watch, that could really pave the way for a different exploration style…

Early starships got me thinking: given the high likelihood of a failed starship landing, and maybe having the ability to send one before fully engineering a payload… What would you ballast a starship with for the practice missions? Useful materials which might survive a RUD and aim for someplace near a likely landing zone? If you crash the parts of a milling machine, a lathe, some tooling, some assorted metals stock,…

Post by craftinator » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 6:55 PM UTC

_-___________-_ wrote: post #408

jessriedel wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great video! I am also surprised by the fact that they bring that much mass just to jettison. In theory they could mounted some of the useful mass on a slider/rail system to achieve the necessary adjustment to the mass distribution without dropping mass overall, but apparently it wasn't worth the complexity/volume cost. I'm sort of surprised we don't yet have ML powered "de-accent-ization". His french accent isn't ha…

I’m amazed that people still say things like “de-accent” as if there was such a thing as “no accent”. You are asking for a button that makes his French accent more like your own. It’s a separate thing from native vs. non-native speakers - there are plenty of native English speakers with accents that you would also find challenging.

Post by jvanderbot » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 8:12 PM UTC

peter303 wrote: post #467

tectonic wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, InSight's SEIS seismometer is a true marvel: "We have been able to detect, at about 10 hertz, displacement of the ground of the order of less than 5 picometers…which is a fraction of the size of an atom." — https://eos.org/features/a-modern-manual-for-marsquake-monit...

LIGO puts this shame with 10^11 better sensitivity.

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 8:42 PM UTC

bernulli wrote: post #489

mulmen wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But one of the systems does have an advantage because it stays in base 10, whereas the other doesn't. That's a benefit to humans, not to hardware, which was the context in which I was speaking. > But you can't if you just use the `intuitive unit', and that's the whole problem. How would you measure the amount of liquid fuel in, say, the small tank for an attitude control thruster of some probe? How does that add to…

Frankly, I can't even tell if you're just being sarcastic at this point.

Post by nickik » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 8:48 PM UTC

zo1 wrote: post #445

mikewarot wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't have to be efficient, just small and reliable, no matter how slow... if there were enough small machines to turn out enough materials to build new ones faster than the failure rate, then geometric growth wins, and you can build whatever you want, eventually.

It could be something very low-tech even. Just a machine that turns solar-energy + some mechanical power into say mars-dust bricks, non-stop for use in future missions? Maybe something that just keeps digging a perpetually deeper and deeper trench in a straight line so that subsequent missions don't need big drills to find out below-surface samples? But thinking about it now, I can't envision that we here would be ab…