Building an IT Infrastructure Around Mars 121
bfwebster writes "Space.com has an article talking about the efforts to observe the arrival of the Phoenix lander on Mars this coming May using current Mars orbiters. This community will likely be intrigued to see the ways in which NASA is using existing landers and orbiters to prepare for, and then monitor, that landing. This includes using the landers Spirit and Opportunity to simulate transmissions from Phoenix as a testing procedure in advance of the actual landing; using the Odyssey orbiter as a high-speed data transmission link from Phoenix to Earth during the landing; and using the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Express orbiter as backup data stores for Phoenix data transmissions during the descent. How long until we get a terabyte solid-state dataserver (running IPv6, natch) in orbit around Mars?"
Hmm (Score:5, Funny)
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Imagine trying to do chat.
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ACK ACK ACK ACK-ACK ACK!
Don't forget Australia (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Don't forget Australia (Score:4, Funny)
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Or, you could move to Australia and pay $90 for unlimited ISDN @ 128kb/s.
Face it. NZ and it's subsidiary island of Australia doesn't rate in the big world of internets.
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Lots of better plans there.
O_o (Score:1)
TTL (Score:1)
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> The time is measured in
> units of seconds (i.e. the value 1 means one second). Thus, the
> maximum time to live is 255 seconds or 4.25 minutes. Since every
> module that processes a datagram must decrease the TTL by at least
> one even if it process the datagram in less than a second, the TTL
> must be thought of only as an upper bound on the time a datagram may
> exist.
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I think you meant to say "number of hops", in which case we're not in disagreement about that so long as you use the qualifier "effectively". If you did mean "number of seconds" then I don't understand your point, as you seem to be contradicting your original statement. Mine was that the TTL cannot be regarded in a general technical sense as a "count of hops not time", but is rather a mixture of both.
The quest
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Each of them would be discarding the packets as soon as it received them for being expired, unless their TCP handling was altered for the specific Earth-Mars route.
Or, if one router had its time incorrectly set almost 30 minutes late, the other router would discard its packets as being twice as expired as above.
Or so I think.
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That might be the current state of play. In the not too-distant future, the number of spacecraft in different parts of the solar system is going to require at the least several relaying stations in wide orbit. At the very least, two relays at the leading and trailing Trojan points would do away with the problem of regularly losing cont
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I thought they just used... (Score:4, Funny)
Before we do this, we'd better check... (Score:2)
It sure sounds like the plot to Man Plus [wikipedia.org] might be coming true, excuse the bat wings.
Art imitates life once again.
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A terabyte, for the whole planet? (Score:2)
Obligatory (Score:2)
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Tera-byte? (Score:2)
Obligatory (Score:1)
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How Long? (Score:2)
Only If You Run Windows (Score:2)
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That sounds like the title of a bad straight to DVD movie.
IPV6 (Score:2)
by suggesting IPv6 you've guaranteed it will never be implmented...
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And while we're at it, let's start referring to it as the System Wide Web, so we don't sound so old-fashioned and provincial.
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this.isfrom.mars
Crossover point (Score:5, Insightful)
The recent proposal to send humans to Mars is idiotic. I.e. we send take months and god knows how many $$ to send a few humans to Mars and then bring them back. What kind of an idiotic idea is that? One should be engaged (and I hope the folks at NASA are reading this) in a serious discussion of what is the information retrieval rate of a space probe (robotic explorer, etc.) vs.a human being?
And so the discussion should be when the light speed transmission of information across the solar system will exceed the mass transport of humans across the solar system?
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On the other hand, just sending a team there and getting them back after a week of exploration IS a waste of resources. It's just a kind of "my peni^Wrocket is bigger than yours"... It will end the same way as the Apollo missions to the Moon: we'll collect some data, plant a flag or two and then just
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Reality check: most people wouldn't care, and you wouldn't ever get enough funds together. Fund Mission to Mars or see Britney's snatch on TV? You do know what most people will choose, don't you?
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There's no point in going to Mars unless we go there to set up forward base for colonization.
I wrote about this the other day. See here [metaphrast.com].
Here is the thought that sums up my meanderings...
But with life on the Moon or Mars, I think we can't afford to assume that resupply missions will always be possible. I believe in providing the astronauts with a system to produce their own resources.
I think that the hardest question for celestial colonization is how to design that system.
Re:Crossover point (Score:5, Interesting)
Consider the cost (Score:2)
Similarly, a human can do much more than Spirit, but you can probably send 10000 rovers like that for the same amount it costs to send one human.
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"Similarly, a human can do much more than Spirit, but you can probably send 10000 rovers like that for the same amount it costs to send one human."
That's a good point--the question is, will you have fewer limitations?
Human beings are pretty good tool users. So you send a geologist with lots of geology tools. He can wander across the plains of Mars looking for interesting rocks. Those rocks he finds that are interesting, he can bring back with him to the base where he has more tools. He can chip off a bit of rock with a hammer and look at it under a microscope.
In short, figure out how to keep said geologist alive and productive on Mars and you've
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My point is that it's not "the same money". If it was, by all means send some adventurers. But it is actually several orders of magnitudes difference.
I don't know about light/heavy rocket stuff. I'd go for whatever works best for least money and effort.
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I wouldn't send 10,000 identical rovers to Mars. But you could do thousands of similarly complex robotic missions for the price of one human. Yes, humans are better in many ways.
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Sending rovers and other robots will no doubt also get much cheaper over time.
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Similarly, a human can do much more than Spirit, but you can probably send 10000 rovers like that for the same amount it costs to send one human.
In 30 years, there have been 130 Shuttle flights [wikipedia.org]. Two of these flights have been disasters. Granted, it is *easier* to send one rocket with a Rover on it per month... but saying "10,000" is a bit obtuse.
What I would like to see is research aimed at sending robots that can build a habitable structure so the astronauts can survive for 6 months once they eventually make it to Mars.
And you know what would have been under the rocks? (Score:2)
Unlike Discworld, on Mars, its rocks, all the way down. The ones studied by Soujourner are among the most expensive rocks in history. The ones studied in that 30 minutes would BE the most expensive rocks in history. But they'd still be rocks!
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A better point for the exploration of the solar system is *when* can we set up a complete solar system that involves an information discovery and transmission system system which exceeds that which humans can carry out!
Right now the humans are the decision makers and that is unlikely to change intentionally. Any setup that leaves humans on Earth and tries to do anything realtime is fundamentally flawed (once you get past a few light seconds and the orbit of the Moon) no matter how much AI you put in.
Second, an unmanned only approach creates a high threshhold to doing anything in space. That is, you need to have considerable infrastructure and software in place to support a remote operated probe. Supporting a much larg
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I think I see an easy way to save half the time, and probably more than half the money.
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what is the information retrieval rate of a space probe (robotic explorer, etc.) vs.a human being?
Currently, the *information* retrieval rate, potentially distinct from the *data* retrieval rate, is much, much higher for a person. The reason is that our ability to learn on Mars is limited by our tools, and robotic tools are far less capable than human-operated ones. This becomes especially true when you account for the fact that you can give a person instructions like "gather data on x, y, z, and anyt
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The discussion has long been engaged and has been over for almost as long - human explorers outperform robotic ones b
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It's the kind of idiotic idea that will help us figure out what we need to do next time to send more humans to Mars.
--Rob
All your bases are belong to us! (Score:2)
I suppose the biggest question is, how long until CCP gets an EVE server up there?
An offworld dataserver... (Score:5, Funny)
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1. Who does the scientific data belong to? OK, most likely the hardware will be Chinese or American (built in Taiwan tho), and after some amount of political wrangling some of the Apollo/Ranger data was shared with other superpowers eventually. Who owns the raw data being stored or relayed by said hardware?
2. As to commercial storage. What would the legal position be if some entity like TPB had a hosting platfor
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2. If I buy a server in space, it will have to down-link somewhere. The **AA can just get a court order on the down-link provider. As for NASA/Gove
"Mighty White"? (Score:2)
I haven't heard that phrase used since the '80s. It seemed to me to have a dual meaning -- on the surface, a compliment, if you accept the underlying dynamic. But it's a backhanded compliment, implying that you've done something that is so obvious that you'd have to be pretty goofy *not* to do it. That's the disturbing part -- if you hadn't done it, you'd be "not white".
The opposite
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4.294 million (Score:2)
Wasn't this pretty much (Score:2)
hell yes! (Score:2, Funny)
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I don't think they'd notice the scenery change.
"One town's very like another when your heads down over your pieces, brother."
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Australian game players rejoice!! (Score:1)
Bandwidth/Latency (Score:1)
Ask Slashdot (Score:2)
COmm and GPS for mars (Score:2)
RFC (Score:2)
Nice Fit (Score:2)
This seems to fit in nicely with the MarsDirect idea, which revolves around having a lot of the infrastructure for a manned mission already in place before the astronauts leave Earth. I'd flat-out love to see us take the first real step off the planet before I croak.
We'll have to do it sooner or later, anyway. Why not now?
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Either that, or they should find a couple of terrorists in Mars for the Marines to invade.
Interesting... (Score:2)
Has anyone realized that if Mars were inhabited, this would essentially be War of the Worlds in reverse?
Little green people, prepare to be invaded!
All as planned. (Score:2)
IETF draft on Interplanetary Internet (Score:2)
Time to update those routers (Score:1)
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Given that, I want to use this opportunity to implore all slashdotters to use {uni,linu}x, instead of *nix. This is a serious problem!
Pong! (Score:2)