Mars Rover Upgraded

MrShaggy writes "According to a BBC article, NASA is upgrading their MARS rovers. The upgrade will allow the rovers to sift through the pictures of dust-devils, decide which is the most appropriate, send it back. 'Clouds typically occur in 8-20% of the data collected right now,' Castano said. 'If we could look for a much more extended time and select only those images with clouds then we could increase our understanding of how and when these phenomena form. Similarly with the dust devils.' The article also discusses upgrades to the Mars Odyssey. They plan to make it self-reacting to events on the planet as they are happening."

Comments

hope NASA doesn't get Rover from VZ

[yagu]

I hope NASA doesn't get it's Rover from Verizon or any of the other cell phone industry, or some of the upgrades they'd have to consider would include:

• bluetooth (extra charge for making it work the extra millions of miles)
• a surcharge per picture to transfer them back to Earth
• extra games for entertainment while waiting for the right conditions for picture taking (oh, Tetris DOES come free).
• blurry video capability
• Martian voice-recognition (phone hommme)
• internet surfing
• GPS
• downloadable music (limited to 100 songs)
• text messaging
• customized ringtones (REM's Man in the Moon is free)

I wonder if the Rover gets unlimited roaming?

Shazbot, my head is STILL ringing from the utilitarian cell phone debate. (or is that a Britney Speers ringtone?)

Re:hope NASA doesn't get Rover from VZ

[FhnuZoag]

Maybe they're just doing to apt-upgrade to Ubuntu Dapper?

Re:hope NASA doesn't get Rover from VZ

[Ours]

You forget, that great reliability we've come to love from the cell phone industry.
They'll probably will have to reflash the Rovers ROM 4 times to get the damn thing to work and end up having to buy the next model that will work more or less OK for 8 months (if they go for the expensive one).

Re:hope NASA doesn't get Rover from VZ

[Anonymous Coward]

You got tetris free?

Re:hope NASA doesn't get Rover from VZ

[Korin43]

I've got VZ and I didn't..

Re:hope NASA doesn't get Rover from VZ

[Anonymous Coward]

Mars Rover?, Mars Odyssey? what about a Mars Accord? apparently NASA only points to a bigshot martians market.

Re:hope NASA doesn't get Rover from VZ

[SEWilco]

You got tetris free?

No. It costs too much to pay the holder of the patent for dropping stuff from above. That's why we only have two rovers on Mars, because NASA couldn't afford more.

I pity the guy who had to propose this...

[abigsmurf]

I could just imagine the guy from NASA who had to request the funding for this. "so, you want to spend millions upgrading the rover?" "yep" "what will these millions give us?" "it'll enable us to decide if a picture of dust is interesting or not!" "..."

Absolutely amazing

[datajack]

I am constantly astounded at just how well built and designed the rover must have been. AFAIR, it was only intended to run for a couple of months, yet it has now clocked up a couple of years, and now they are upgrading it's software to make it perform even better - that entire team is doing a fantastic job, and easily deserve whatever the US equivalent of an OBE is.

Tis a shame that Beagle2 didn't survive impact. I reckon that'd have done just as well, and the two teams would have mapped Mars and have the rovers playing a game of fotball with each other by now ;)

Re:Absolutely amazing

[Luminous]

I think it gets repeated because NASA's failures and stupidity get repeated just as often. It is a counter balance to help point out that NASA isn't always doing crap.

Re:Absolutely amazing

[suv4x4]

I think it gets repeated because NASA's failures and stupidity get repeated just as often. It is a counter balance to help point out that NASA isn't always doing crap.

Could be. I was never a fan of regurgitating NASA's failures either. Too much admirations or complaints just turn into extra noise.

Re:Absolutely amazing

[UnknowingFool]

I think it gets repeated because NASA's failures and stupidity get repeated just as often. It is a counter balance to help point out that NASA isn't always doing crap.

While I agree with you that NASA has made/is making some mistakes, the success of the Mars rovers is highlighted because of how enormously difficult Mars missions are. Something like only 25% of all spacecraft sent to Mars make it. And we're not just talking about NASA failing. The former Soviet Union lost a few spacecraft. The ESA lost a few.

Re:Absolutely amazing

[kfg]

. . .for a multi-million (billion?) piece of machinery, I'd expect it to work past my death . . .

Argument Ad Crumenam.

Price is not function. A $20 million Formula One car, for instance, has a functional halflife of about 4 hours, because it is designed that way, much of that $20 million being spent to effectively shorten it's halflife compared to a street car. In fact the perfect racing car has been defined as one that falls apart one foot after crossing the finish line, since anything else implies it has been overengineered at the sacrifice of its intended performance.

If such a car went a full season competively without an engine rebuild every mechanical engineer in the world would wish to study it. It would be a true marvel.

KFG

Re:Absolutely amazing

[kilodelta]

If you want, read Steve Squyers book "Rovign Mars". It'll give you a better understanding of why the rovers lasted as long as they did. They're built like tanks with proven technology. There was nothing flashy about what went into those robots, it was all tried and true.

They were originally supposed to last for 90 sols, or Martian days. They've now gone far past the origianl design goals and the benefit has been lots more data about Mars. Spirit is currently on it's 853rd sol. http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/home/

Re:Absolutely amazing

[Darth_brooks]

I am constantly astounded at just how well built and designed the rover must have been. AFAIR, it was only intended to run for a couple of months, yet it has now clocked up a couple of years, and now they are upgrading it's software to make it perform even better - that entire team is doing a fantastic job, and easily deserve whatever the US equivalent of an OBE is.

Here's the rub. Spirit and Opportunity were only expected to run a couple months. Intended is a whole other word. They were built with the idea that they could conceivably last this long but the mission profile (and all the press releases) were put together with the expectation that they'd last a couple months. It was the closest thing to a gaurenteed win NASA could do.

Think of it this way, if GM marketed the H2 as getting an "amazing 2 miles per gallon!" customers would brag about how their H2 actually gets five times that number, instead of complaining about only getting 10.

Don't get me wrong, the mars rovers are an amazing accomplishment and a feather in the cap of the "new" NASA. But somewhere along the line there was a choice that needed to be made; Either completly revamp the way NASA does business and eliminate the top-heavy "Office Space" culture of twenty managers for every one engineer OR build small & cheap to minimize failure while lowering the expectations for the missions being planned, ensuring an "artificially" high sucess rate. One of these choices is good for NASA long term. The other can be good in the short term if it help eliminate the problems that need to be addressed by the first solution. It can be a bad thing if NASA decides to stay the course and be happy with writing missions that have a lowered standard of success.

Re:Absolutely amazing

[UnknowingFool]

Unfortunately one of impacts of success like this is that it is now expected. NASA and JPL have created rovers for little budget that have lasted well beyond their expected service life. Now the powers in charge expect that they can pull miracles all the time.

Re:Absolutely amazing

[suv4x4]

Argument Ad Crumenam.

Could you please speak in a language that's not dead yet.

A $20 million Formula One car, for instance, has a functional halflife of about 4 hours, because it is designed that way, much of that $20 million being spent to effectively shorten it's halflife compared to a street car.

They've sent a Formula One car over there?

You'll probably notice an F1 car returns its investment by braking down from excessive speeds.
Could you say the same for a Mars Rover?
Not that I can't imagine people being entertained from videos of the rover driving 200miles/hour through the Mars craters, but come on...

Re:Absolutely amazing

[VENONA]

I don't find it amazing, but part of a steady evolution.

Spacecraft autonomy software was a high-risk technology evaluated with Deep Space One, back in 1998-2001.
http://nmp.nasa.gov/ds1/

The Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment which flew aboard the EO-1 satellite mentioned in TFA
http://ase.jpl.nasa.gov/
even used autonomy software related specifically to clouds. The AES delivered results in 2003-04, from looking at that link, though TFA would seem to imply that the effort is ongoing.

And of course autonomous operation software is a research focus in countless terrestrial projects.

I do see ongoing references to the seemingly never-ending Geek problem of bandwidth. I expected better from NASA, although I can't think why. They've had bandwidth problems for years.

http://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/advmiss/#bandwidth
would seem to be a good information source. There's a lot to go through on that site, and none of it might answer my real questions:

- What will it take to create a scalable bandwidth solution?
- Who's working on it, and what progress has been made?
- Is it an international effort?

I'd like to see a lot more data coming down and being archived. There's a long history of discoveries have been made or confirmed through a review of old data. Another good use for recent data mining advances, as opposed to undermining our privacy, selling us more useless widgets, etc.

Autonomy at the tip of the spear must surely be regarded as a Good Thing (tm). I just hope it's not masking another, more fundamental, weakness in the system. It wouldn't surprise me to find that this is the case. Building infrastructure isn't sexy, and in these days of falling science budgets...

Re:Absolutely amazing

[MrNougat]

Didn't NASA pull the budget for these rovers not so long ago? More amazing is that the project continues on without official financing.

Re:Absolutely amazing

[Andy Gardner]

Play by play

Re:Absolutely amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

The point still holds. There is probably some engineer who willl always wonder if he could have pulled a little weight from the structural budget and squeezed an extra instrument aboard.

To give another example, lets compare our vehicles. Presumably from your handle, you drive an SUV which I will assume you got a good deal on and paid $24000. Up until recently I drove a Tercel which for I paid ~$8000. Over the fifteen years I owned it, maintenance and fuel averaged about $1800/year ($1400 fuel, $400 maintenance). To a first approximation the two vehicles have similar performance characteristics (the Tercel gets the nod on mileage and handling, the truck has a larger maximum payload) and identical usage (speed, distance, type of driving and actual payload). Consequently, by your own argument, you are a fool if your truck either costs more than $450/year in fuel and maintenance or fails in less than 45 years.

Re:Absolutely amazing

[suv4x4]

That's the tenth or eleventh time people bash me for driving a SUV and pointing me to suv hate sites where people explain how people that drive suvs are morons and so on.

Thing is, I don't drive a suv, maybe time for a nick change.

My sympathies to all people who drive a suv, however. Aparrently the hate towards suv drivers is ubiquitious.

Re:Absolutely amazing

[kfg]

Could you please speak in a language that's not dead yet.

I'm sorry, but English actually is my first language. Since I am aware that the average person these days cannot be bothered to look up things they do not understand (you'll find the phrase in any decent English language encyclopedia. Or even Wikipedia) I did, however, include an idiomatic translation into modern American. I cannot help it if the modern American mind is incapable of grasping the concept that price does not equal quality/correctness.

Re the rest of your post:

Joshua the savior who will come, WTF?

KFG

Re:Absolutely amazing

[suv4x4]

Since I am aware that the average person these days cannot be bothered to look up things they do not understand

If I encode my posts with a 128 key and give you the key, would you bother to look up the algorithm I'll refer you to and decode it?

You don't care enough? Well imagine some people care even less, so that looking up phrases on the web is not something they wanna do.

I cannot help it if the modern American mind is incapable of grasping the concept that price does not equal quality/correctness.

I'm not an American, I'm a Bulgarian (look that up.. ;), hint, it's not in Afrika). I grasp the concept very well, but I'm slightly childish at times, and I couldn't resist acting inane at your serious reaction to what was a sarcastic remark in my original post (and not to be taken so deeply and even quote Latin to me).

Sorry for wasting your & my time with this nonsense of a discussion we're having :)

Re:Absolutely amazing

[kfg]

If I encode my posts with a 128 key and give you the key, would you bother to look up the algorithm I'll refer you to and decode it?

I don't know. I might, if I were in that sort of mood. I know, however, that I consider it routine to look up words and phrases I do not recognize, especially those in languages I do not know. I cannot expect a Bulgarian, writing in Bulgarian, to know what Bulgarian phrases I do and do not know.

Had you written your post entirely in Bulgarian it is likely I would have taken a stab at understanding it, although I cannot guaruntee any sort of success. Your English is better than my Bulgarian, although I am not entirely unfamiliar with the Balkan linguistic union. I would have greater chance of success with Greek.

I have not quoted Latin at you. I have quoted a bit of Latinate English. Ironically, had I known you were Bulgarian I might well have used a more formally Latin grammar, since I would expect you to have a greater chance of understanding an international "Lingua Franca" than my own native tongue.

The phrase is extant and has the same meaning globally.

And, if I may repeat myself, and I may, I provided an idomatic contextual explanation of the phrase: Price is not function.

Your country has many fine luthiers working in it, making many fine violins. It is a shame that so many people reason by the purse, or they would surely have much greater respect.

A Bulgarian violin selling in America for $1000 dollars has its entire working life still before it, whereas the violin that just sold at auction for $3.5 million had expended its entire working life about 250 years ago (the object sold actually being little more than a collection of new parts, repairs and "improvements" on the original).

KFG

Re:Absolutely amazing

[aevan]

Compared to some of the things that tax money is wasted on, a 2 hour special on Martian drag racing would be an improvement. I know I'd clear an evening for it. Hel, could have some betting thing arranged to recoup some of the investment (just pray they work and you don't have to refund).

Re:Absolutely amazing

[suv4x4]

Your English is better than my Bulgarian, although I am not entirely unfamiliar with the Balkan linguistic union. I would have greater chance of success with Greek.

I have not quoted Latin at you. I have quoted a bit of Latinate English. Ironically, had I known you were Bulgarian I might well have used a more formally Latin grammar, since I would expect you to have a greater chance of understanding an international "Lingua Franca" than my own native tongue.

No offend but, that's exactly how I've always imagined a conversation with a protocol droid.

You got a golden finish or we'll wait until Episode 3? :)

Re:Absolutely amazing

[GileadGreene]

Understand that the principal life-limiting factor was the accumulation of dust on the solar arrays. Since that hasn't happened at anywhere near the predicted rate (for a variety of reasons), the rovers have been able to continue operating far past their expected mission lifetime.

That does raise an interesting question though: given that the rovers were supposed to only last 90 sols or so, does the fact that they have lasted so much longer (once the prime life-limiting factor was eliminated) indicate that they were over-engineered? Could the mission have been done for a much lower cost? Hard to say, since there was such schedule pressure to get the mission done that the engineers probably tended to go with the most obvious solution (within the mass limit), rather than spending much time investigating cheaper alternatives.

Re:Absolutely amazing

[kfg]

No offend but, that's exactly how I've always imagined a conversation with a protocol droid.

I am not responsible for the things you imagine.

KFG

Re:Absolutely amazing

[Derling Whirvish]

They're built like tanks with proven technology. There was nothing flashy about what went into those robots, it was all tried and true.

So why aren't we building a dozen more of these and sending them up there if they are so proven? The next NASA lander won't even be mobile.

Re:Absolutely amazing

[WindBourne]

Because they are small and have relively little science. The next one will have a great deal more science than does these. I am hopeful that we will several of these landers rather than just one. But to be really useful,we need the mars communication network. Basically, we need a way to get data from there 24x7 as well as to increase the processing of all the points. Sadly, at this time, that Mars comm. network is canceled.

Re:Absolutely amazing

[mnmn]

I suppose it is a tough design. It should be copied for other rovers which should be sent to other planets. I know the design will have to change alot for Mercury, Venus and others, but it would be nice to send a pair of rovers to each planet every several years and keep data streaming back. Thats more productive per dollar than sending people up there.

Re:Absolutely amazing

[cthulhu11]

"under-promise, over-deliver"

Re:Absolutely amazing

[suv4x4]

I am not responsible for the things you imagine.

Damn it, with this disclaimer in place I can't even sue you now :(

Re:Absolutely amazing

[Hynee]

Here's the rub. Spirit and Opportunity were only expected to run a couple months. Intended is a whole other word.

I don't know about it being the difference between two words. It's more like they were designed for 90 days, that's how they got their funding (i.e., if they lasted less, there explanations would have been required), it had to be demonstrated that all components/systems could last for that time. But they could easily last longer than that.

For instance, the computer has to be able to take a certain amount of radiation damage, but chances are an off the shelf radiation hardened CPU can take Mars level radiation for 10 years (just pulling a number out of the air). Same with wheels; they were custom built, but how do you tell how fast a wheel hub will wear out on Mars? Just aim for it to turn X number of times in the anticipated environment. As it turns out, we've had 1 wheel motor failure out of 20 (6 driving 4 steering on each rover) in 2.5 years.

Re:Absolutely amazing

[instarx]

I am constantly astounded at just how well built and designed the rover must have been. AFAIR, it was only intended to run for a couple of months, yet it has now clocked up a couple of years,

Gimme a break, please. As impressive as it is to get remote vehicles to operate on another planet (and I do not minimize that accomplishment), their life expectancy was clearly set artifcially low in case they failed soon after arrival. Setting ridiculously meager performance goals is a classic way to game the system, declare success early on so you never have to explain why you spent hundreds of millions on a system that did not meet more realistic performance goals. The engineering on these rovers may indeed have been great, but the fact that they lasted longer than an absurdly short 90-day lifespan is more an indicator of the successful engineering of public and Congressional expectations by NASA than good mechanical engineering.

Re:Absolutely amazing

[kilodelta]

It was moderately expensive to build the two rovers. That might be why. NASA is on that faster, cheaper, better model these days but they're ignoring a fundamental rules of projects. (fast, right, cheap)

If you want it fast and cheap it isn't going to be right. The Rovers succeeded because Squyers put his feet to the fire and told NASA management what they needed to do and how they needed to do it. From reading the book you can tell it took a toll on all those involved which is probably why we don't have dozens of these things crawling all over Mars.

Re:Absolutely amazing

[walstib]

An OBE (Out of Body Experience) is the same in the US as in the UK.

Re:Absolutely amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

Aparrently the hate towards suv drivers is ubiquitious.

It's not. What you're experiencing doesn't stem from their being a vast majority of SUV haters out there, but from the fact that the vast majority of people prejudiced against SUVs are complete assholes.

Re:Absolutely amazing

[petermgreen]

given that the rovers were supposed to only last 90 sols or so
is that what was actually said though

or was it something more like: barring catastophic landing failure theese had BETTER last 90 days minimum.

to get a 99% chance of a lifetime of at least 90 days i'd imagine you would have to push the mean lifetime well above that.

Re:Absolutely amazing

[GileadGreene]

IIRC, "full mission success" included lasting the full 90 sols. The "minimum mission success" criteria were quite a bit lower.

Re:Absolutely amazing

[kilodelta]

Part of it is the culture within NASA proper. Fast, cheap and sexy rules the day. Most of their project managers are NASA folks who like that paradigm. Squyers wasn't one of them.

So the key difference is the culture of leadership. That's why you don't see more projects using proven technology. Part of that I blame on NASA feeling it has to put on the razzle dazzle in order to secure funding.

But the Mars Rovers were plenty of razzle dazzle and were relatively inexpensive projects too. That's sexy as far as I'm concerned and NASA management needs to learn that too.

Rumors that they're 'upgrading' from Ada.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have read on other Internet forums that they're also planning on switching from Ada to Java for the software on upcoming rovers. While Java was initially developed for such embedded environments, it isn't somewhere that we've seen it get a lot of use.

If there is any truth to those statements I have read elsewhere, I have to be a bit worried. Ada is known to be a rock-solid language for developing mission-critical software. Even considering the Arianne-5 failure, it's still more reassuring to know that a software system is developed in Ada than Java.

I also believe that Sun's implementation of Java does not allow for it to be used in mission-critical systems. If it is indeed true that a switch is being considered, they would likely have to write their own JVM, or at least use a non-Sun one. Would not that be something, if the space research futhers Java development!

And it's the 'BBC', not the 'bbc'. Please, it's not difficult to hold the shift key while typing those three characters.

Re:Rumors that they're 'upgrading' from Ada.

[TheKidWho]

lol java on the mars rovers...

lol!

Re:Rumors that they're 'upgrading' from Ada.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, they'd have to write their own JVM. They aren't the only ones who do this, www.pilz.com do the same for industrial software.

Re:Rumors that they're 'upgrading' from Ada.

[Avionics Guy]

The large majority of the MER software was written in C. The exception is a small module in the navigation code that used C++ with a custom memory manager. BTW, JPL doesn't "do" ADA and it isn't likely that Java will be used on the MSL, the 2009 rover.

Re:Rumors that they're 'upgrading' from Ada.

[Anonymous Coward]

And it's the 'BBC', not the 'bbc'. Please, it's not difficult to hold the shift key while typing those three characters.

He did, but his keyboard has quite bad latency ... it uppercased MARS instead!

Re:Rumors that they're 'upgrading' from Ada.

[LDoggg_]

lol java on the mars rovers...

That actually made you laugh out loud?

Not sure what the big deal is. They already use java to control the things.
old news.

Re:Rumors that they're 'upgrading' from Ada.

[MWales]

I believe the current ones would probably use C/C++ since they are using VxWorks according to Windriver. If they are using a RTOS now, I think moving to something like Java would be a huge jump. I could see them moving to embedded Linux though, it's becoming alot more popular in the embedded world

Re:Rumors that they're 'upgrading' from Ada.

[Ada_Rules]

I have read on other Internet forums that they're also planning on switching from Ada to Java for the software on upcoming rovers.

I am not aware of any significant NASA sw still done in Ada..Which probably helps explain the results of there "Better, faster, cheaper - Choose any 0" results they've been getting.

Re:Rumors that they're 'upgrading' from Ada.

[Anonymous Coward]

They're planning on using Java? Well at least with the 20 minute Earth - Mars lag time it won't be so noticeable.

Re:Rumors that they're 'upgrading' from Ada.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you may be conflating two things. Java was used to write the command and control system (Maestro), which does a combination of data visualization, collaboration, command and control. Java 3D and Java Advanced Imaging technology are used in the software that renders and interprets the realtime images captured by the Rover. NASA has even made a stripped down version of the software that you can download so you can view a simulated 3D landscape and drive the Rover around in it (see here http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/relatedsites/). However as far as I know the computer onboard the rover itself does not currently run Java and I don't know of any upgrade plans.

Re:Rumors that they're 'upgrading' from Ada.

[Tablizer]

If you think it took long on Earth, it would take like 3 days to load the Java applets at that distance ;-)

Re:Rumors that they're 'upgrading' from Ada.

[Tablizer]

What about "Ruby on Rovers" (R&R)? :-)

Re:Rumors that they're 'upgrading' from Ada.

[skavj_binsk]

Likes Ada over Java ... check.

Grammar nitpicker ... check.

Anonymous Coward ... check.

Teh Most Tedious Person EVAR!

Re:Rumors that they're 'upgrading' from Ada.

[UnrefinedLayman]

I use VBScript to control my SQL Server: put records in it, retrieve records from it. What makes you think that it would then be a good idea to re-write SQL Server in VBScript and replace the SQL language with VBScript?

The whip != the horse.

Re:Rumors that they're 'upgrading' from Ada.

[TheKidWho]

Except java is being used in the mission critical Real Time software thats actually running the rovers.

The OP was talking about Java on the actualy rover... Not as some utility app for plotting courses that can be programmed in any language since well you can just reboot the pc on earth.

So yes it did make me Laugh Out Loud.

Re:Rumors that they're 'upgrading' from Ada.

[oliderid]

could anybody explain why java isn't a good choice for such a mission?

Is it related to the JVM?
The language structure? the fact that it is less "strict" than ADA?

Just wondering.

Re:Rumors that they're 'upgrading' from Ada.

[M1000]

the rovers don't use Java; only some analysis software in some Nasa HQ do.

Re:Rumors that they're 'upgrading' from Ada.

[TheKidWho]

I work for NASA.

So I am really getting a kick out of most of these replies.

Some of you guys are very good at making it sound like you know what you are talking about.

But trust me.... You don't.

I think you just want to make yourself sound smart, when in reality you dont know what you are talking about.

This is how bad info gets passed around.

If you dont know about the topic....Dont make yourself sound like you do.

Cuz some /.'ers believe anything they hear.

Re:Rumors that they're 'upgrading' from Ada.

[LDoggg_]

I use VBScript to control my SQL Server: put records in it, retrieve records from it. What makes you think that it would then be a good idea to re-write SQL Server in VBScript and replace the SQL language with VBScript?

No offense, but that analogy is for shit.

First off, it would be stupid to write the database server engine in a scripting language. And as much as I personally can't stand vbscript, it might be appropriate to write stored procedures for MS SQL server in a vbscript syntax.

BTW, Oracle has long had the ability to run java stored procedures.

Replacing the structured Query language itself with an object oriented programming language is just silly and really has nothing to do with using embedded java to control a mars rover.

Re:Rumors that they're 'upgrading' from Ada.

[UnrefinedLayman]

The analogy works just fine (which you seemed to have missed). The whip is not the horse: while a whip works well for telling a horse to move in the direction you want, a whip does not necessarily work well as a horse.

The point is just because Java works great for what it does on earth for NASA, it won't necessarily work well on rovers on Mars. You were chastising someone for having an opinion on the matter; I'm chastising you for using a really weak argument to do so (your argument being "Java is used for X, what's the problem with using it for Y?").

In this context the VBScript example works well. VBScript is used for getting records in and out of a database (X); what's the problem with using it to run and manage the database (Y)? Obviously it's a stupid idea, and by highlighting that you've drawn the same conclusion about your point.

Your argument about scripting/object oriented vs. compiled/structured only drives it home: the rovers use a RTOS on specialized hardware, which isn't exactly the first home of Java (regardless of how well suited Java may be to the tasks NASA defines).

Replacing the structured Query language itself with an object oriented programming language is just silly and really has nothing to do with using embedded java to control a mars rover.

That's what analogies are, and if it's silly in one respect it's silly in both.

Re:Rumors that they're 'upgrading' from Ada.

[Anonymous Coward]

Generally its a combination of both. Done properly ADA can be tested to the point where its almost certain to operate correctly (if you want to be totally sure you can use a subset of ADA called SPARK).

The architecture of the rovers from what I understand is extremely similar to military technology. There are redundant 1553 Milbus that link the control computers to the various equipments. The computers obviously run VxWorks to ensure real-time control and C/Assembly and ADA are layered on top of that to actually perform the functions.

From when I last looked at uCLinux (about a year ago) you still needed an add-in such as RTLinux and in fact from what I understand this is true for any linux as it is inherently not a RTOS.

Re:Rumors that they're 'upgrading' from Ada.

[glwtta]

could anybody explain why java isn't a good choice for such a mission?

Just guessing here, but it probably has something to do with no one having even heard of real time java when these systems were designed?

Theoretically there's probably nothing wrong with a VM in such a situation, but keep in mind that currently these systems are written in C (not Ada, like the OP stated) on some really old hardware, that often has trouble keeping up with the load. And this software doesn't just snap pictures - think "landing thrusters".

I remember there being some hoopla about the unexpectedly massive amounts of data the system had to shuffle around (I think the deal was it uncovered an inversion of priority bug in a system library) - they have to push their hardware pretty far; you can't just slap the latest K8 in there and watch it fly.

Re:Rumors that they're 'upgrading' from Ada.

[glwtta]

Even considering the Arianne-5 failure, it's still more reassuring to know that a software system is developed in Ada than Java.

Arianne 5 was the result of pure, old-fashioned incompetence. An obsolete component - left on when even its original function would not have been needed - dumps debug info on the bus, that's then interpreted as trajectory data. And the backup system runs identical hardware and identical software to the primary (I believe the backup actually failed a fraction of a second before the primary).

The rover software on the other hand - written in C, btw - is a gold standard of excellent engineering and testing practices. Most of the time it's not the platform that counts, it's the development team.

Re:Rumors that they're 'upgrading' from Ada.

[solitas]

Kinda like the way pseudo-insiders sound...?

Re:Rumors that they're 'upgrading' from Ada.

[LDoggg_]

The analogy works just fine (which you seemed to have missed). The whip is not the horse: while a whip works well for telling a horse to move in the direction you want, a whip does not necessarily work well as a horse.

The bad part of the analogy is that it implies java can not be used for an embedded system, which it can.
A whip can in no way be saddled or fed oats.

Java may or may not do a better job than what NASA is currently using, but at least there is room for speculation.

Re:Rumors that they're 'upgrading' from Ada.

[Billly Gates]

Java is already used heavily. I assumed the rovers already were java based. The software at JPL which monitor and sends and recienves commands to the rovers is java based for sure.

Java is very reliable as its a very strict programming language which helps eliminate bugs. Java is not just used for webservers, but rather for mission critical apps at many banks and government agencies. The number language in demand is Java for many cities if you search monster.com and java is the most sought after language to rewrite many RPG and Cobol apps on the mainframe.

Re:Rumors that they're 'upgrading' from Ada.

[LarsWestergren]

While Java was initially developed for such embedded environments, it isn't somewhere that we've seen it get a lot of use.

Think again. At JavaOne this year Boeing held a presentation showing how they are using real-time Java to control drones for instance. There are around 1.5 billion java smart cards sold, and similar number of mobile phones with J2ME.

I also believe that Sun's implementation of Java does not allow for it to be used in mission-critical systems.

Standard legal "cover your ass". It says the J2SE you download for free is not INTENDED for mission critical systems and if anything goes wrong Sun cannot be held liable. All corporations put in these clauses.

Re:Rumors that they're 'upgrading' from Ada.

[hurfy]

Glad you cleared everything up

oh wait.......

Firmware

[nacturation]

Wow, now if only I could get my device firmware updated as successfully as this has gone. Imagine having to RMA the rover?

Interesting side-note: I suppose when we're living on other planets, companies who offer to pay return shipping will likely have to update their T&Cs to specify that it applies only to Earth.

Re:Firmware

[kfg]

I suppose when we're living on other planets, companies who offer to pay return shipping will likely have to update their T&Cs to specify that it applies only to Earth.

Outsource.

When I have a Martin guitar repaired under warranty it goes to a guy who lives down the block, not back to Nazareth, PA.

KFG

Re:Firmware

[nacturation]

When I have a Martin guitar repaired under warranty it goes to a guy who lives down the block, not back to Nazareth, PA.

Easy if it's just a tune-up. Harder to do if the parts aren't available on your local planet. So unless it's easily repaired or a mass-market product, I don't suspect warranties will survive space travel.

Re:Firmware

[kfg]

Every ship at sea has a machine shop.

KFG

Re:Firmware

[petermgreen]

while space travel is just a goverment/military/exploration venture the rules will remain the same as for other ventures to any other areas that aren't served by civilian transport services (an antarctic research base say).

If something breaks you either fix it yourself (yourself here reffers to the unit as a whole not to any one person), junk it or transport it back to civilisation yourself and you plan your equipment loadout in advance with that in mind (e.g. taking spares and/or fabrication equipment with you).

If and when we see normal people living on other planets with native industry then presumablly everything purchased locally will be covered by local warranties serviced by local repairmen with parts held in stock (whether imported from earth or manufactured locally). If you take something with you then it may not be covered (just as lots of stuff isn't today on earth!).

What will happen however (barring a major technological advancement) is that timescales will increase again. Messageing will be availible but it won't be realtime (more like sending a telegram or e-mailing someone on a slow e-mail system) and travel times will be very long.

Mars Exploration Rovers and the future

[chroma]

The current generation of rovers have shown themselves to be reliable and very flexible. They've brought back a view of Mars that far surpasses anything we've seen before. It's really disappointing, therefore, that NASA is throwing away all of the knowledge used to make these missions a success. Delivery of a robot to Mars requires a successful launch, accurate navigation, and, of course, a good landing. To say nothing of the design of the rovers themselves. All of this must be carefully worked out in advance.

But NASA has decided instead to throw away all of that and spend money to develop a new, bigger probe, the Mars Science Labratory. It's a shame that the limited science money NASA gets isn't being spent in the most efficient way possible on stuff that we know to will give excellent scientific data, but instead is used for these kinds of big budget employment makers.

Re:Mars Exploration Rovers and the future

[ookabooka]

The Spirit and Opportunity rovers were bigger than Soujourner (sp?). It makes sense that after a big success, expansion would be done to further increase that success. What exactly upsets you? The fact that they aren't sending an identical probe to a different place to get more data? Each rover mission has a specific goal in mind, in spirit and opportunities place, to confirm that there was once water. That goal has been accomplished, why would we send the same kind of probe down there to further support it? I say we move on to newer and better things.

Re:Mars Exploration Rovers and the future

[Anonymous Coward]

Who's to say that nasa won't use what it learned with the rovers while building the next probe?

Re:Mars Exploration Rovers and the future

[chroma]

What bugs me? It's that there isn't a good incremental and cheap approach being used. Success isn't being built upon. Design tweaks could reduce weight, instruments could be upgraded, riskier landing spots could be tried.

Take, for example, the parachutes used by Spirit and Opportunity. A team had to design, test, redesign, and repeat in order to make sure that they met their weight requirements and that they would function properly. If you watched the special on PBS about the rovers, you know all about this.

This process will have to be repeated for the much larger MSL.

Re:Mars Exploration Rovers and the future

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed!

Now that they have a (relatively) proven path from Earth to a safe landing on Mars, they should be (like you said) adding/upgrading/etc what's INSIDE the lander. For example (no coffee warning): it would even be worth seeing what type of higher speed (say 15 inches/sec over the current 2) rover could be put into the current lander with a maybe few tweaks. Cover more ground, study more sites, spend less time moving from site A to B etc etc, and overall GATHER MORE DATA.

They could even start over from stratch on the hardware INSIDE the lander. Say you want to do some major digging and spectroscopy (on said soil) so design a payload that works with the current lander with minor tweaks.

In a nutshell: The hard part is getting the payload from Earth to a SLOW/SAFE touchdown on Mars.
Once you have that figured out, just about everything else (rover hardware/software) can be very thoroughly tested on Earth before launch.

Okay I need some coffee...

Re:Mars Exploration Rovers and the future

[Tablizer]

Good post.

I would like to add that future rover missions want to do things that require far more hardware than an Opportunity-sized rover can deal with. They want to dig deeper into the soil, do detailed soil chemistry analysis, and check for life. The Viking experience made researchers realize how difficult life detection can be, so such instruments have to be complicated.

Aside from more bulk, solar power is not strong enough for that. Thus, future rovers will be at least partly powered by plutonium heat cells, which changes the engineering.

Further, they can use more modern wheel designs. The existing rover wheels have proven problematic over longer distances.

However, there is still a lot of room to barrow technologies from past rovers. Even the current rovers barrowed ideas from Sojourner (sp?).

Re:Mars Exploration Rovers and the future

[khallow]

That goal has been accomplished, why would we send the same kind of probe down there to further support it?

Because repeated observations is how scientific progress is made. We've demonstrated that we can directly observe things on Mars back in 1975. We knew back then that there was ice on Mars and that the interior of Mars was at some point above the melting point of ice. The combination already strongly indicates the presence of liquid water somewhere in Mars at some time. My take is that we should begin exploring Mars instead of demonstrating that we could, if we really wanted to.

To be blunt, the current missions to Mars are expensive toy missions. We spend a great deal of money on a few missions that generate a limited amount of usable science. Frankly, I see no reason there shouldn't be dozens of active missions to Mars at a given time.

Re:Mars Exploration Rovers and the future

[DerekLyons]

The current generation of rovers have shown themselves to be reliable and very flexible. They've brought back a view of Mars that far surpasses anything we've seen before. It's really disappointing, therefore, that NASA is throwing away all of the knowledge used to make these missions a success. Delivery of a robot to Mars requires a successful launch, accurate navigation, and, of course, a good landing. To say nothing of the design of the rovers themselves. All of this must be carefully worked out in advance.

But NASA has decided instead to throw away all of that and spend money to develop a new, bigger probe, the Mars Science Labratory.

The current Rover's can only reach about 2% of the Martian surface, and are extremely lucky to last more than a few months - so we should stick with them? That's insane.

Here in the real world, the Mars Science Laboratory builds on the experience gained from the two MER rovers, in the same way that the MER rovers built on Pathfinder, which built on decades of research and development. Nothing is 'thrown away'.

It's a shame that the limited science money NASA gets isn't being spent in the most efficient way possible on stuff that we know to will give excellent scientific data, but instead is used for these kinds of big budget employment makers.

Sure, they've given us excellent data - but there's more questions and more data needed. Questions the MER rovers can't answer and data they can't provide.

Re:Mars Exploration Rovers and the future

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

Frankly, I see no reason there shouldn't be dozens of active missions to Mars at a given time.

1. The most cost-effective time for a trip to Mars is once every 26 months; it would be a huge waste of fuel to launch anything during the interim.
2. Every active mission needs at least dozens and usually hundreds of people actively working on it just to keep it going.
3. Mars surface missions relay data to Earth using orbiters; there's only a limited amount of bandwidth the existing orbiters could support. Even if we sent more orbiters, there's a limit to what the DSN can support here on Earth.

Re:Mars Exploration Rovers and the future

[khallow]

1. The most cost-effective time for a trip to Mars is once every 26 months; it would be a huge waste of fuel to launch anything during the interim.

But we can launch more than one thing at a time at those points.

2. Every active mission needs at least dozens and usually hundreds of people actively working on it just to keep it going.

Two things. There's no reason that a mission requires that much man-power. After all, it's ultimately someone deciding where the probe goes and the resulting data transfered back to Earth (the latter can be heavily automated). That crowd of people most likely can handle multiple missions at once. Having each mission unique means that it becomes difficult to manage multiple missions at once.

3. Mars surface missions relay data to Earth using orbiters; there's only a limited amount of bandwidth the existing orbiters could support. Even if we sent more orbiters, there's a limit to what the DSN can support here on Earth.

Sending more orbiters is quite feasible (and ultimately a good idea IMHO). Second, the DSN is earth-based infrastructure and hence relatively cheap. If DSN is a bottleneck, then there's something fundamentally wrong.

Glancing at the cost figures for the Mars rovers, I see that two of them cost roughly $800 million (including $100 million in launch costs and $75 million in operation). Apparently it is claimed that marginal cost of the second was on the order of $200 million minus launch and operation expenses. Doubling the expenditure on the mission then doubling funding would appear to me to allow one to launch another 3 or 4 rovers to Mars (I think 4). In addition to the mentioned economies of scale, there would be a lot of synergies with 4 or more active rovers (assuming a failure occured). If one rover finds something interesting, it is more likely that there'd be a second rover in similar circumstances able to verify that observation.

You get some efficiency even with the above one-off design. Imagine probes that were designed from scratch to be produced in number. One no longer would need to make superprobes stacked with a huge amount of hardware. Economies of scale could reduce the cost of everything from spreading out the R&D costs, lowering marginal cost of manufacture, driving down launch costs, generating a pool of usable "components off the shelf" for other projects (COTS right?), reducing risk from mission failures (because more missions means more missions produce), synergies between missions because observations and knowledge about technology quirks and failures can be usefully shared and acted on, and mission operations can be shared between multiple missions.

The point is that there are rather large efficiencies that can be obtained from more missions. It is unhealthy to handcraft one or two instances of a more or less unique design. At some point, you need to focus on gather scientific information rather than pushing the envelopment.

Re:What Upgrade?

[D4rk Fx]

Obviously, you didn't RTFA. The article states that it is a software upgrade. They didn't really say how the upgrades were performed, but most people probably wouldn't understand it anyway, and that wasn't the purpose of the Article.

Re:What Upgrade?

[Zonekeeper]

Obviously, you didn't RTFA.

DUH. This is Slashdot.

And the upgrade went online on August 4th...

[Lead Butthead]

Mars Rover begin to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14am Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug...

Re:And the upgrade went online on August 4th...

[geobeck]

...then the rover goes on a rampage, killing every human on Mars.

What? That's why we don't see any, right?

Re:And the upgrade went online on August 4th...

[KimmoA]

It begins to build terminators right away to eventually come back to Earth and take revenge!11

Re:And the upgrade went online on August 4th...

[vertinox]

It becomes self-aware at 2:14am Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug...

Only to realize they had forgot they were solar powered.

Re:And the upgrade went online on August 4th...

[Naito]

It becomes self-aware at 2:14am Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug...

Only to realize they had forgot they were solar powered.

hence why we scorched the sky

=0

Re:And the upgrade went online on August 4th...

[vertinox]

hence why we scorched the sky

Oh really? Next you'll be telling me the Mars rovers are using people as batteries. Oh wait...

Old News

[maytagman]

I heard this reported on CBC radio SEVERAL months ago. I'm thinking it was febuary... The scientist they were interviewing was saying how hard it is to trust a robot to make the right decision even though they knew the algorithm they were using was pretty fool proof. Lets hear it for CBC radio!!!

Don't power off the Rover during reflash

[MobileDude]

Would be a hell of a trip to reset the CMOS.

Excellent!

[Anonymous Coward]

No more 'Buffering ...'

Rover

[certel]

That's pretty interesting. Wonder how they would do that?

Key quote.

[jpellino]

"Leaving the robots to "get on with it" - to do the decision-making - is the way ahead, Nasa believes."

Where have I heard this before...?

"I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you. "

Upgraded?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it have spinners and a neon kit now? :D

Re:Upgraded?

[MrSquirrel]

I was hoping to RTFA and see "now the rover is a battlebot -- soon, Biohazard will be sent to face it; the winner goes to the finals".

Re:Upgraded?

[AndroidCat]

I don't have a problem with the cast of one of those "pimp my ride" shows being sent on a one-way trip to Mars.

Re:Upgraded?

[RobertLTux]

is this a version of the
"ive got a job for you"
"but you said there was no job on earth you would trust me with"
"that is correct" ...
joke??
hey why don't we send the next survivor cast with them???

Ofcourse not, they are going to outsource it

[SmallFurryCreature]

That martian labor is dead cheap you know and you hardly notice the language barrier.

Re:What Upgrade?

[the_brobdingnagian]

The upgrade is a software upgrade. But it's not an easy task to do this at such a distance. Two way communication is a painbecause of the lag time. I can't remember the exact time, bu I believe the lag is about 20 minutes. They use a specialised protocal that was designed to handle such extreme lag. The protocol is PROXIMITY-1 SPACE LINK PROTOCOL (specs). They are verry carefull to make sure they dont have to reset the rover the hard way (A.K.A. reset-button) after updates and even during normal operation. I believe they build in all kinds of auto-reset features so the rover could reset itself.

Not a PR conspiracy

[Tablizer]

They were built with the idea that they could conceivably last this long but the mission profile (and all the press releases) were put together with the expectation that they'd last a couple months. It was the closest thing to a gaurenteed win NASA could do. Think of it this way, if GM marketed...

Hogwash. It is a combination of factors:

1. Nasa increased quality control effort and spending in response to the Polar Lander failure and two orbiter failures.

2. Wind has blown dust off of the solar panels. Many expected the dust to be probe-sticky and accumulate based on the Viking lander data.

3. Constructor contract payments were actually stipulated based on a 3-month survivle. It is not an arbitrary deadline.

Re:Not a PR conspiracy

[Darth_brooks]

Hogwash. It is a combination of factors:

1. Nasa increased quality control effort and spending in response to the Polar Lander failure and two orbiter failures.

while at the same time they could not afford to blow it again. They needed the PR from a successful mission. They they'd have predicted a year from the rovers and only gotten a few months, it would have been tagged by the media as another failure.

2. Wind has blown dust off of the solar panels. Many expected the dust to be probe-sticky and accumulate based on the Viking lander data.

Didn't matter. The martian blow job happened long after the mission's 90-day profile had ended. Even then, the effectiveness of the solar panels wasn't increased that much. But it gave NASA a nice excuse to remind us how far ahead of "expectations" the mission was.

3. Constructor contract payments were actually stipulated based on a 3-month survivle. It is not an arbitrary deadline.

"Don't worry, even if it only runs three months, you'll still get paid."

Not that $random_guy_on_slashdot memories matter for anything, But I've read articles from folks on the project and they've all said the same thing. The surivival rate is nice, but it's not unexpected. The overall plan was for the mision to run long, but to be prepared to call it a success if all they got was 90 days.

Re:Not a PR conspiracy

[Tablizer]

The martian blow job happened long after the mission's 90-day profile had ended. Even then, the effectiveness of the solar panels wasn't increased that much.

I've seen the before-and-after photos, and unless they were doctored, it appears fairly thorough to me. And, they did not know what the pace of build-up would be.

Well, what about the wrong firmware ...

[thrill12]

as resetting the CMOS doesn't really help anything if you flashed the wrong image. I wonder if this could be a possible scenario an engineer will go through :

"Bill, to you the important task for upgrading the Rover, please do so before the connection breaks, we expect dust devils tonight."

"No problem dude, will do!"
 
... logs in to rover ...
"Mars Rover OS 1.3 (c) JPL (2002-2004), (c) VxWorks (1999-2002)"

# upload firmware.bin
... uploading firmware.bin
.....

(sips some coffee, goes to another monitor, plays a small game on his second PC)
......ready

# checksum

Checksum CRC32: 0xaffe34ef

"Hrm, lets see if that's the checksum of the image I got here... hrm yep thats the one, lets flash it so I can go back to home early today"

# flash firmware.bin ...flashing firmware.bin ...

(sips some more coffee, packs gear, puts on coat) ....ready

"Great, it's done, now reboot and of I go !"
# reboot
...rebooting...

(Looks casually to the directory in which firmware.bin was, finds out it's not the firmware.bin he was supposed to flash...)

Connection lost. ...

connect

connecting to Rover...
...

connection timed out...

I guess that would make one sweat considerably :)

sounds wrong

[Tablizer]

Currently, the rovers are allocated time to look for clouds and dust devils, which may or may not appear - they are naturally transient events. And getting humans to sift the images is time consuming.

I don't think the bottleneck is human sifting, but rather data transmission and uplink time. Compaired to the cost of current space transmissions, human labor to sift images is cheap.

If the rover can pre-sift the images, then less has to be sent.

Re:sounds wrong

[stunt_penguin]

Yup, sounds about right to me- it'd take a human observer about, ooh a tenth of a second to decide if there's bad visiblity in a pic or not. One other thing occurred to me as well about taking and transmitting the pics, and that's battery life; if the rover gets to the stage where it's batteries or solar cells are failing, then power becomes more critical than bandwidth, and the power saved from not transmitting useless pictures will help increase the useful life of the Rover. OK maybe the power used for picture transmission is much less than that used in moving around the surface (actaully if someone could tell us how much power the Rover uses to transmit it's pics back to Earth that'd be cool- I don't think there's an intermediary signal-boosting satellite in orbit on this mission, is there? :)

Re:sounds wrong

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

I don't think the bottleneck is human sifting, but rather data transmission and uplink time.

Yes, the primary problem is to send more interesting data in the same amount of uplink time.

However, a secondary problem is that the people most qualified to look for anomalies in those images are scientists with Ph.D.s, and they understandably don't want to waste hours and hours looking for needles in haystacks. So AI software that helps filter the images is very useful.

That's what happens when you get old -

[Progman3K]

you get to sit around and think about what you've seen... Or in this case, what you have recently seen!

Congrats, mission team.

How ?

[Joebert]

They plan to make it self-reacting to events on the planet as they are happening.

How can you teach a robot to determine important moments, from unimportant moments, when nobody actually knows what's going on there ?

I hope they don't plan on using somthing like the motion lights on my house, thoose things never work when they should.

Re:How ?

[Anonymous Coward]

How can you teach a robot to determine important moments, from unimportant moments, when nobody actually knows what's going on there?

It shouldn't be terribly hard to at least improve on it. They are currently interested in clouds. Through physics, analysis of the existing pictures or both, you can arrive at a pretty good guess what any given pixel above the highest object should be given time of day, camera position and no clouds. If several consecutive pixels are off by more than a bit, you've got an interesting sky (or at least a nice sunset). You could also use a similar function to compare nearby pixels to look for bright spots. Finally, you could compare consecutive pictures for significant changes. Any of these could be checked over the whole sky or some sample set (such as a row across the middle of the sky) depending on the operating constraints.

Quoth The Neo

[BrettJB]

Hmmm... Upgrades!

Hell, it should have all the new fads!

[c0dedude]

Will destructable terrain and HDR be included as well?

Re:What Upgrade?

[Gothmolly]

You got flagged as Overrated and Troll because your post was stupid. Everyone knows that TCP can't work to Mars - the transmission delays are too long. Secondly, while your attempt to sneer at NASA through postulating nonsensical questions, in the hopes that people will think that you're insightful, well, its just embarassing. Lastly, your trollish username and high userid indicate that you lack credibility about real topics, perhaps other than your parents' basement and Natalie Portman.

Re:What Upgrade?

[NoMaster]

Everyone knows that TCP can't work to Mars - the transmission delays are too long.

Rubbish - you just have to set your RWIN, sliding window flow control, & MTU/MRU values appropriately ;-)

(Seriously, though, a lot of rfc 1323 could apply just as well to high-latency links like that.)

Say it with me...

[Anonymous Coward]

I, for one, welcome our solar-powered, Mars-Roving overlords!

*ducks*

Wrong Protocol

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the linked document:

"...These links are characterized by short time delays, moderate (not weak) signals, and short, independent sessions.".

Sounds like that excludes anything on Mars

Re:Wrong Protocol

[the_brobdingnagian]

Let me fill in those dots:

Proximity space links are defined to be shortrange, bi-directional, fixed or mobile radio links, generally used to communicate among probes, landers, rovers, orbiting constellations, and orbiting relays. These links are characterized by short time delays, moderate (not weak) signals, and short, independent sessions.

I think your definition of a "short time delay" deviates from the definition used by people who have sent probes much further.

Mars power supply.

[Sqreater]

The boys of science at NASA have put the cart before the horse in my opinion. Before the rovers, they should have put up a power station that would have allowed ranging vehicles to dock and recharge their power systems. These can be either batteries or perhaps fuel for a fuel cell. A web of nuclear base stations on Mars would allow wide-ranging exploration of Mars by robot vehicle far into the future. Perhaps even a small nuclear base station in orbit of Mars could beam down power to robots using a microwave beam.

A power base station may not be a source of sexy space photos, but it is the kind of actual science and engineering that the current space program has decided to eschew in favor of photo ops.

Re:Mars power supply.

[Anonymous Coward]

Before the rovers, they should have put up a power station that would have allowed ranging vehicles to dock and recharge their power systems. These can be either batteries or perhaps fuel for a fuel cell. A web of nuclear base stations on Mars would allow wide-ranging exploration of Mars by robot vehicle far into the future. Perhaps even a small nuclear base station in orbit of Mars could beam down power to robots using a microwave beam.
Screw Mars, we need this for Earth!

I think we may be missing the point

[Cicero382]

They're using s/w to select which data might be worth examining.

WTF!!

The whole point of these probes is to gather raw(ish) information so that we can gain some insight. The only way it would be reasonable to cut out data is if we *know* that it's irrelevant. Do we? The article doesn't say so.

And if they're complaining about the amount of time it takes to process the raw data - who said that a data feed which includes so many unknowns was going to be easy?!

Sheesh!

Upgraded Rover?

[hcdejong]

So they stuck an MG badge on, and installed a V8?

CPIP

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carrier s

Longer delay than Mars