On red planet of life, blue screens of death

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It's always amusing when someone tells us "how easy the problem was"

> How on earth can NASA scientists spend 300million
> bucks on a rover with such a pathetic amount of
> memory. and it runs DOS nonetheless... what a
> TOTAL joke.

It's always amusing whenever someone chimes in like this to tell us "how easy the problem was" and how they could have solved it much, much better at a much, much lower cost.

You have no clue.

As someone already pointed out, one of the *FIRST* problems you come up against is radiation hardness. As you'll recall, the vacuum of space, unlike the surface of the earth, is just chock-full of nasty radiation. Only a very few components are "space qualified" for this environment. Other components can be used, but it takes a lot of effort to assure that they won't crap out the minute they leave the Earth's surface.

Because, unlike on the surface of the earth, it's pretty hard to make a field service call to your project when it's on the surface of Mars. In fact, it's a major project just to hit the reboot switch, 'cause you've got to have a well-designed communications protocol that can somehow get back in touch with a very week radio source that's a very great distance away in what could be a totally random direction (assuming your computer accident was bad enough).

So maybe you'd better design in some redundancy so that if a major subsystem fails, you still have some capability left. But remember taht the logic that creates the redundancy also contributes its own possibility of falures, so you'd better design for *THAT* too.

And then there's the issue of power management and cooling. When you're facing the sun, you have lots of solar power, but you bake. When the sun sets, you have zilch solar power and have to rely on batteries while your temperature rapidly plumets. Your equipment, of course, is designed to withstand any range of temperatures from near absolute zero to quite near boiling. Try that with you overclocked Pentium and see how long it lasts!

Now lets talk about communication delays. You understand that they don't drive these rovers around by sitting on earth, watching a screen and pointing a joystick. This doesn't work because the rovers may be 40 or so light-minutes away, round trip, and by the time you see the cliff and shout "Stop!", the rover has long since smashed to the bottom of the cliff and into tiny little rover-bits. So there's a lot of careful programming in the rovers allowing them a good deal of autonomy and self-protecting guidance.

The problems the designers faced were monumental, and the fact that the rovers are exceeding (by orders of magnitude) their design goals speaks to just how well the engineering team did their work.

But I'm sure you could have done better.

Posted by: Atlant   Posted on: 08/24/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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