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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."
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:
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?)
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!" "..."
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
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.
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.
Your design to a real part online: Big Blue Saw
DUH. This is Slashdot.
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...
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
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!!!
Would be a hell of a trip to reset the CMOS.
10 MD
No more 'Buffering ...'
"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. "
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
That martian labor is dead cheap you know and you hardly notice the language barrier.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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.
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.
Table-ized A.I.