Mars Rover's Epic Trek For the Crater Endeavor 145
Smivs writes "The BBC reports that NASA is to send its Mars rover Opportunity on a two-year trek to try to reach a crater called Endeavour.
The robot will have to move about 11km to get to its new target — a distance that would double what it has already achieved on the planet.
Endeavour is much bigger than anything investigated to date, and will allow a broader range of rocks to be studied. Detailed satellite imagery from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will help pick out the best route ahead; and new software recently uploaded to Opportunity will enable the rover to make its own decisions about how best to negotiate large rocks in its path. Opportunity has just emerged from the 800m-wide Victoria Crater. Endeavour, by comparison, is 22km across."
11 km (Score:5, Funny)
That's about 11,000 inches, right? Shouldn't take that long.
Re:11 km (Score:5, Funny)
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Parsecs are old hat. It's 36.8 microseconds (of light travel time).
On Barsoom, please... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:11 km (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe you've heard of it. It's the rover that made the Endeavor run in less than 360 femtoparsecs.
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That bucket of bolts is never gonna get past that crater rim.
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Re:11 km (Score:5, Interesting)
I did smile at the joke, but I still have a lot of admiration for NASA. I am a brit, and yes I was disappointed when the Beagle 2 probe was lost.
However, I still remember as a kid, I used to be awed with NASA, and its space shuttle launches, etc. As a child it was what I associated America with: space, advancing to new frontiers, etc, and NASA usually was the center of my aspirations. I used to dream of being on a Shuttle, and often felt jealous (in a positive way) for what our friends across the pond was up to.
In recent years, and recent news, which unfortunately put the USA in a poor light amongst some, NASA with their exploits brought back some memories about why I aspired towards America; that "can do attitude".
Sure they have messed up, at times. but space exploration is like that. Their successes usually are just as great.
These rovers were built to run for 3 months. They are running for on their fifth year now. Absolutely amazing!
The official reason of how they underestimated the abilities for the wind to clean the sensors, may be correct, but in this day and age, where items are engineered to last their intended lifespan, whoever designed these things still didnt "cheap out" on the rest of the vehicle.
These are not cheap little radio controlled dune buggy models for use on earth, but self maintaining vehicles that for nearly 5 years have operated in a hostile, largely unknown environment with no physical attention!
So hats off to NASA and JPL. And god speed on the new mission. And thanks for giving this older man a thing something to smile about in these times of drab news.
Re:11 km (Score:4, Funny)
It's an estimate right now. They're not sure where the Endeavor crater will actually be. Once Atlantis does the rescue mission Endeavor will be redirected to mars in order to create it's crater.
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or 32 microts
Re:11 km (Score:5, Funny)
There should seriously be a moderation tag for "sarcasm impaired".
Re:11 km (Score:5, Insightful)
There really should be a moderation tag for "most people aren't nearly as funny, or as obvious as they think they are".
No, it really was funny and obvious. You're just not nearly as sharp, or as bright as you think you are.
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Those of us with a sense of humor.
Re:11 km (Score:4, Insightful)
Those of us with an username.
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Once you start arguing with people you need a user name, otherwise how will they know it's you? How do you expect them to condescendingly use your user name when insulting you?
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People with modpoints.
Re:11 km (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny is admittedly somewhat subjective, but any Slashdot reader interested enough in Mars exploration to read this article would no doubt be familiar with the Mars Climate Orbiter [wikipedia.org] and the error involving conversion of metric units that caused its failure; so I would call the joke fairly obvious.
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I'd forgotten about that, but there is another article on the front page about 'nano' football, where people are complaining about units - so I still found it funny :)
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Nope. 11,000 metres
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**whoosh**
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An inch is exactly 2.54 cm (by law, in the US). With that and a calculator, you can do any English to Metric (or Metric to English) length conversion exactly.
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63 cm / day ?
11000 / 730 = 15 meters / day. As they say, that includes some sightseeing time, and a winter vacation or two.
By the way, so far this year, Spirit has gone 1/2 a meter (48 centimeters).
Amazing (Score:5, Informative)
Remember that Opportunity and Spirit are on their 5th year on the Martian surface. Their mission were initially planned to last no more than 3 months. Bravo!
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Godspeed, Opportunity! Remember that Opportunity and Spirit are on their 5th year on the Martian surface. Their mission were initially planned to last no more than 3 months. Bravo!
Oops, read that "4th year", my apologies.
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No you are correct, they have been up for over 4 and a half years, so they ARE in their fifth year :)
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Re:Amazing (Score:5, Funny)
Godspeed, Opportunity!
Remember that Opportunity and Spirit are on their 5th year on the Martian surface. Their mission were initially planned to last no more than 3 months. Bravo!
So either the rovers are overachievers or we just set their goals WAY too low!
I guess they are taking a page from Scotty's manual.
KIRK: Mr. Scott. Have you always multiplied your repair estimates by a factor of four?
SCOTTY: Certainly, sir. How else can I keep my reputation as a miracle worker?
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So either the rovers are overachievers or we just set their goals WAY too low!
I guess they are taking a page from Scotty's manual.
Its both as I understand it the big win was the martian wind kept the solar panels cleaner than expected, it was dust build up (and thus power loss) that was expected to kill the mssion
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Just blow the dust off the bottle of scotch and you'll soon have a good repair.
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I have to wonder why they didn't consider building some sort of windshield wiper for the solar panels onto the machine? If they expected dust to kill the power efficiency, wouldn't an arm with a brush sweeping over the surface of the panels work to resolve that?
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Compressor + storage = weight + power drain
Same goes for the wiper idea too. Adding any kind of cleaning mechanism adds more weight, and I'm guessing a trade study done on this deemed the estimated extended life to not be worth the added weight (fewer scientific tools).
It's also not a good idea to count on the Martian wind being there either, because what happens if you get unlucky and are in an area of doldrums? The best course of action is to plan for the worst (3 month mission), but have the capability to continue on if you get a good windfal
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"So either the rovers are overachievers or we just set their goals WAY too low!
I guess they are taking a page from Scotty's manual."
No. What's happend is that they asked the engineers to design something that has a 99.99% chance of working for 90 days. They did that. But as a side effect the device has a 85% chance of lasting 180 days and a 70% chance of one year and 50% on two years and so on. My numbers are not right but you get the idea.
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So either the rovers are overachievers or we just set their goals WAY too low!
Long story short, we thought their power supply would deteriorate but in practise it's stable. It's sorta like thinking you will have to run your laptop on batteries, then realizing you have a AC connection and wonder of wonders, it stays working for years instead of hours. Would the laptop be "overachieving" by many orders of magnitude? Were the goals set "WAY too low" for the laptop? Or are the assumptions are so fundamentally altered that it's meaningless to talk about it's battery performance? That we a
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Scotty's repair estimates included:
Requirements elicitation and valiation,
Design,
Documentation,
Review,
Test development,
Development/Engineering,
Test validation and review,
User documentation,
Deployment,
Testing.
Kirk was always happy to cut corners.
Re:Amazing (Score:5, Funny)
I also agree with you on this amazing feat for you to be able to have such an enourmous run on sentence with no punctuation whatsoever even though it seems like a risky voyage over all of those keystrokes just to get to the submit button to wait and see if your content got posted or if you got the slow down cowboy screen and then you have to wait for a while and just stare at the ceiling until you can submit again but back to the rovers I too hope they don't have a catastrophic failure when it goes to the new crater but hey what else can you do since it has explored everything else in the area that it is in and it might as well go someplace new to see something else because it isn't the destination but rather the journey
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don't give them too many more things to-do but explore
That's what Opportunity is doing. It's will be exploring the crater. Along the way Opportunity will also be studying the soil and terrain it encounters while it's making it's trek to the crater.
I the JPL scientists were planning for Opportunity to explore whatever's available, but they didn't want it to just randomly wander whichever way it wanted to. Instead, they decided to give it an exploration trek. They will be exploring the environment, and at the end of the endeavor, it will end up at Endeavor
Let's hope the motors hold out. (Score:5, Informative)
Opportunity saw its first electrical spike in one of its motors recently - the same problem that has basically crippled Spirit.
This was described (8 paragraphs down) in this press release [nasa.gov]. That's why they got out of Victoria Crater post haste.
Of course, the terrain in Meridiani Planum is much more navigable than Gustav Crater, so even if they do lose a motor, they may still be able to make progress.
Re:Let's hope the motors hold out. (Score:5, Interesting)
And NASA gets to free all the funds to build newer and bigger and better and
Don't forget, these are the guys that canceled the last Apollo missions for the fuel bill; they already had the rockets, trained astronauts and everything else in place.
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I distinctly remember Congress canceling the last Apollo mission (Apollo 18), by not giving NASA the money. This was indeed deep in the planning stages, intended for some volcanic domes near the Marius crater IIRC.
Re:Let's hope the motors hold out. (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, and given that there was never any plans to get the rovers back, this was always a "suicide" mission.
But you are right, JPL will keep running these until they physically fail.
Re:Let's hope the motors hold out. (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't forget, these are the guys that canceled the last Apollo missions for the fuel bill; they already had the rockets, trained astronauts and everything else in place.
And the money to pay the army that would be needed to build and run the missions. Ending Saturn was a good move. The rocket was too expensive. Replacing it with the Space Shuttle though was one of the worst mistakes NASA ever did.
Re:Let's hope the motors hold out. (Score:5, Insightful)
The rover isn't just going on a boring 2 year long road trip, it's also exploring the rocks and terrain along the way. Even if it doesn't reach its destination, the trek will still be of scientific value.
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Huh? [[Citation Needed]]
As above, huh? NASA is already building a bigger, better rover [wikipedia.org], one that's just under a year from launch
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Huh? [[Citation Needed]]
http://www.universetoday.com/2008/03/25/nasa-u-turn-over-mars-rover-funding/ [universetoday.com]
already building a bigger, better rover [wikipedia.org], one that's just under a year from launch
I know, I worked on it for 4 years
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The problem is, your cite doesn't support your claim. Not only is there no evidence that NASA wanted to shut it down (the act in question being an unsupported act by a mid grade administrator), there is no evidence that public outcry had any effect on the outcome. Nor does it support the claim that this happened repeatedly. Nor does it support the claim that it was to done so NASA could build a better rover - as that process was already in progress regardless of what happened to the MER program.
In short,
Opportunity proves it: (Score:2, Funny)
studying ... rocks!
ok, maybe only studying ... rocks ... rocks.
If you get an ... opportunity.
Allright I stop, I'm killing myself.
Re:Opportunity proves it: (Score:5, Funny)
studying ... rocks!
ok, maybe only studying ... rocks ... rocks.
If you get an ... opportunity.
Allright I stop, I'm killing myself.
That's the Spirit
Re:Opportunity proves it: (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Opportunity proves it: (Score:4, Funny)
We're just cratering to our audience. :/
Re:Opportunity proves it: (Score:4, Funny)
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Sweet.... (Score:2)
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Wasn't Opporunity half-designed by kids as well?
I think it's a bit discourteous to the scientists and engineers who actually designed this rover to say that, no matter what sort of programs NASA folks may have created for educational purposes.
A case for manned exploration (Score:3, Insightful)
A human would take no more than a few hours to get there, on foot, much less with some vehicle. And would be able to do much more and diverse probings and experiments. And let's not forget that in those 2 years, the rover has a very high likelihood to break down.
So while human exploration of Mars may be expensive, it is probably much cheaper when comparing results.
I know the /. crowd has a strong, somewhat irrational animosity towards manned exploration. So I'll burn some karma, big deal :o)
Re:A case for manned exploration (Score:5, Insightful)
irrational animosity towards manned exploration
Leaving aside - for now - the part where a human mission to Mars is almost certainly a suicide mission, if you want to make the case that other people are irrational your best bet is probably to present your own rational ideas for a fully-costed human mission, including all the associated life-support requirements both in transit and once on the surface.
Then we can compare your ideas against the cost of the Spirit and Opportunity missions
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I don't care to read the book, but I will give you rational, plausible, budgeted and non-suicidal. "Justified"...now that is where our parlay will break down. Justified, like art, is in the eye of the beholder and often requires some selling to get the justificatee to agree (yes, I just made up that word). One way of thinking of it is that justification isn't a property of an object, but is something that is done to it.
The only justification I've seen is an effort for Mars missions is to prove that life
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The only justification I've seen is an effort for Mars missions is to prove that life once existed there. When I was young, the hope was that we'd find some weird alien creepy-crawlies scurrying about. Now the hope is that there is some water that a microscopic lifeform might have once inhabited. The basis for the need of effort is to prove that life can autogenerate anywhere. You may not believe it, but the vast majority of the people who pay taxes respond to this sales job with a great big "Who the f&&k cares?!" You and I may believe the expense of a manned mission is justified, but we are woefully/painfully outnumbered. That leaves us with one of two options. Sell the manned missions as an escape route from a dying Earth. That puts us in the "OH, NOZ!! We're all gonna' die!" alarmist category. Unless we can point out a REAL viable threat to the Earth, we will soon be marginalized. "There is a 1 in 8 billion chance of a catastrophic asteroid impacting the Earth within the next 1000 years" does not cross the 'valid' hurdle in mind of most people.
How about a 1 in 20 chance of a nuclear war in the next ten years? Not that I care or anything.
If you've paid any attention to politics, you would know that it doesn't require anything like a majority to spend public funds. My take is that enough people care that it will eventually happen once the price tag gets low enough. At the very worst, it'll happen because somebody is making money on Mars, and you can't tax that, if you're not there.
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It does? I've observed quite the opposite: most of Slashdot is very gung-ho about meaningful manned exploration. The only animosity I've seen regularly expressed is towards the Shuttle and ISS.
Re:A case for manned exploration (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, we'd never have been able to put people there nearly as cheaply, or for nearly as long. We haven't solved the problems of getting people in space for long enough for the journey, keeping them alive, feeding them, and having them inhabit the surface of a strange planet without any real support.
The rovers have been absolute bargain in terms of the cost for the science achieved. And, they give us a lot of the basic information we need to know if we're ever going to put humans there. The value vs cost of the these rovers is not something you can characterize as expensive for what we get -- the initial mission was, what $300 million or so?
I think until we can overcome an incredible amount of technical hurdles, the rovers are still a good idea. Of course, that doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying to develop some of the stuff we'll need for manned missions. Likely we'll need to work on some closer missions and return to the moon before we try to get to Mars in my opinion -- that'll at least let us try to sort out the really big challenges.
Cheers
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You can argue that people could have done the job better but that is like saying I could get to work fater in a flying car or a jet pack. The problemm is that we simply don't have the means to send people to mars. Given the current state of the art they'd likey never survive the trip.
AN then you have the little problem of getting off of Mars. What you need is a rocket on Mars that can lift off and travel to Earth. Here on Earth we have huge infrastucture in place to launch rockets, we'd have to fly a l
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But, I didn't argue that.
I don't think we have the technology to even try that, and I think we're better off trying to put people on the surface of the Moon again and try to stay there longer.
Other than the sheer coolness factor, I'm not sure what sending people to Mars does for us, other than saying we did it and risking killing whoever we send.
For Mars, I say we stick with rovers and orbiters for now. I don't think we should stop trying to have mann
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I think until we can overcome an incredible amount of technical hurdles, the rovers are still a good idea. Of course, that doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying to develop some of the stuff we'll need for manned missions. Likely we'll need to work on some closer missions and return to the moon before we try to get to Mars in my opinion -- that'll at least let us try to sort out the really big challenges.
One of the "problems" of going to the moon is that unless we add extra hurdles for itself, it's so short the dominant solution would be to just pack up enough consumables for the trip and avoid solving any of the really hard issues. We might be just as well off taking a Mars mission prototype, send it up in earth orbit and pretend they're on their way to Mars and see how months and months of self-containment works out. Another dry run we could make is sending a craft down on Mars to be launched back up into
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Soft humans are not as well adapted to space and mars as you seem to think.
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And? (Score:2)
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And would be able to do much more and diverse probings and experiments.
Yeah, except that you could send around 2500 rowers to mars for the price of a human mars misson. Have some doubt that a small human team can perform better then those.
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A human would take no more than a few hours to get there, on foot, much less with some vehicle.
You've inadvertently demonstrated the stupidity of your own argument there. If the point is to "travel faster" and vehicles travel faster then humans, why not send a vehicle? And if we have the vehicle, what's the human for? After all, it's not the 1960s. Vehicles don't need humans to steer them.
And would be able to do much more and diverse probings and experiments.
Rubbish. The fact of the matter is, we would get better quality results form observing mars from orbit then from a human on the ground. Any human observation/probing/experiments on Mars will be entirely reliant on i
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You've inadvertently demonstrated the stupidity of your own argument there. If the point is to "travel faster" and vehicles travel faster then humans, why not send a vehicle? And if we have the vehicle, what's the human for? After all, it's not the 1960s. Vehicles don't need humans to steer them.
Talk about stupidity! Do you have any idea why does it take years for the rovers to negotiate just a few kilometers? It has nothing to do with the speed of the vehicle - and everything to do with the problems of rem
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Tell them to get on with it then. They've got massively more funding than robotic exploration, and they are trying to keep their toilet working in LEO.
"So while human exploration of Mars may be expensive, it is probably much cheaper when comparing results."
Direct human exploration of Mars doesn't have any results. Human exploration of mars
Mars Trek (Score:2)
These are the voyages of the rover Opportunity.
Its two-year mission: to explore strange new craters; to seek out new life and new land formations;
to boldly go where no robot has gone before!
Negotiate? Huh? (Score:2, Funny)
"new software recently uploaded to Opportunity will enable the rover to make its own decisions about how best to negotiate large rocks in its path"
What is the origin of that? I can speculate:
1) English origin: Very polite. You just don't go around the corner, you politely ask under what conditions it is allowed. "I beg your pardon, dear corner. Would it be inconvenient to you if we continue our way as indicated by you?
2) American origin: Don't take anything for granted. You may be sued by a corner before yo
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What is the origin of that?
Pretty common usage in context (e.g., navigation). See the 4th entry in Dictionary.com [reference.com] :
to move through, around, or over in a satisfactory manner:
Endeavor... (Score:2)
to endeavor unto endeavor.
will be turned off by next president (Score:2)
Lots of pretty picture = good VR (Score:2, Interesting)
emerge (Score:2)
Wow, Mars rovers use Gentoo! :p
*tomato*
Two years! (Score:2)
Bum Wheel? (Score:3, Interesting)
I thought Opportunity was due to have a bum wheel, like that of Spirit. They've discovered voltage spike patterns that match that of Spirit's wheel before it croaked. This would suggest that Oppy can only go about another mile before the wheel gives. While flat territory may not be a signif problem, Oppy has had problems getting stuck in sand dunes in its area even with good wheels. Getting out of sand traps with a stuck wheel is going to be an interesting challenge.
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NASA has been spending quite a bit of money recently on dust issues. Apparently in low-g situations dust stays suspended in the air for quite some time and consequently develops an static charge. NASA currently has a design for an electromagnetic dust wiper which is basically a array of wires under a surface (like a solar panel) which are electrified in sequence to push the dust around.
There are some issues with power draw and scalability, but my guess is that they will be using some sort of electro-magne
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It turns out that the frequent dust devils have been keeping the solar cells (for Opportunity, not so much for Spirit) pretty clean and have been the single most important factor enabling these very long missions.
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I suppose what I'm saying is that future rovers should be designed for as many possible contingencies
If you want a general purpose tool that can adapt to many scenario, send a human. (Also, go to the bank, you're going to need to make a biiiiiig withdrawl)
If you want to do science on a budget(which NASA has to do since it gets diddly squat for funding compared to certain other institutions) then you simply plan out what you think are probable tasks that'll be done, and design your robot to be able to do them cheaply and effectively. Trying to make a robot for "as many possible contingencies" will mean it
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And remember, these robots are performing far beyond their original expected lifespan!
(So much for our beagle 2 project :( - I am a brit)
But, seriously, well done NASA.
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Just remember that the next time someone says that robots are just as capable as humans. A human crew could ride that far in a day, given an appropriate Mars buggy. Now, the cost to get those people and that buggy there is another question...
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After years on Mars, with no resupply? You'd need advanced zombie technology for that, regular frozen mummies just don't have the staying power.
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Humans teams who send robots are more capable than human teams who send humans.
For example, one of those types of teams has carried out all exploration of the martian surface to date. The other type of team managed to fix their toilet in LEO, but it cost them a lot more money than all martian exploration to date.
"A human crew could ride that far in a day, given an appropriate Mars buggy."
Well, a robot could go that fa
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And the buggy that could drive the human could go twice as far if it left the human behind. Plus your question about cost is easy. For the cost of one human mission you could have ten buggy missions; each one learning from the last. Each individual mission would be less capable than one human mission, but the sum would be much much better. Human missions to Mars are like the late circuses in Rome. They put on a good show to di
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Dude, it's around 2 feet long and being remotely controlled on a very long time delay and it's, what, several million km's away??
It can only go so far each day before it has to shut down, recharge, and wait for new driving instructions. That usually in
Re:More than a suggestion (Score:4, Funny)
This actually is some pretty challenging stuff.
You make it sound like it's rocket science or something on that level. Sheesh.
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I'm thinking of a radio controlled 4wd you can get from a serious hobby shop that'll do at least 1km between charges!
I invite you to run it for 5 years in abrasive grit with zero intervention.
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