6 ms·

I know this is off-topic, but reading about it's mission has me wondering why (as far as I know) no agencies are sending devices that could return more sophisti

by Pigo 10y ago

I know this is off-topic, but reading about it's mission has me wondering why (as far as I know) no agencies are sending devices that could return more sophisticated visuals. Even something simple like the 360 YouTube videos would be beyond words, and everyone could experience it. I've really enjoyed the panoramic images. I just wish they'd focus more on trying to get people there virtually since it's a fraction of the effort of getting them there physically, and it could be shared with everyone. Is there some kind of barrier to sending that much data through space? Or should the focus always be on looking for signs of life?

danpalmer 10y ago
Satellites still use CPUs with speeds in the hundreds of MHz, because creating technology hardened enough to withstand travelling through space, or being used on another planet, is a very difficult challenge, and we just aren't at the point where we can make an Intel i7 (for example) work in space. This isn't even accounting for heat issues, and power issues. Because of this, my guess is that the camera technology that we can safely get to Mars is significantly worse than what we expect in our day-to-day lives.
- wwggggoi 10y ago
  ok you answered my point...but is there not another way to shield consumer electronics ? wouldn't it be cheaper to find a good shielding system (magnetic ?) than to develop expensive custom hardware ?
  - adekok 10y ago
    Ever try upgrading the CPU on an iPhone? It's like that. These projects started out 10-15 years ago. So upgrading them mid-stream is almost impossible. They're stuck with the hardware available when they chose that part. Re-designing for new hardware means changing everything.
    - Pigo 10y ago
      I never considered that. I suppose that does give me some hope that we'll see future projects with today's hardware eventually.
      - macintux 10y ago
        Sure, but by then we'll be lamenting the lack of TrueVR(™) support that would allow us to walk the surface of Mars.
- AustinBeau 10y ago
  http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Canon-readies-miniature-satellite-for-March-launch http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Canon-readies-mini... Is interesting to see. But as I'm developing software for my Universitie's cubesat, it's incredibly interesting to read all that goes into Single Event Upsets and other hardware failures from being outside of Earth's protective atmosphere.
- Pigo 10y ago
  Is it an EMI issue? Slower speeds somehow stand the trip better? If there was enough money in it, I'd bet our top minds could find solutions to these problems.
  - takingflac 10y ago
    Less speed = less heat which is surprisingly a large concern in space. The other factor is that the transistors on the chips are larger than the ones used on Earth. I don't remember the specifics but the reasoning was that less transistors would be damaged if a spot on the chip was hit by radiation and built in redundancies would be able to compensate. (Source: had a few EE classes where this kind of thing was brought up been awhile though)
  - Balgair 10y ago
    Its answered downthread, but I'll tell you too and add some. The main issue is that the project started 10 years ago, and that is when the general specs were set for pretty much the whole bird. Minor upgrades are made, but you have many many teams working on many little things that have to be integrated, and that spec is 10 years old. I mean, our tech from 10 years ago is billions of times better than a Viking lander, but I get the sentiment. For silicon devices, the VERY hard rad environment of inter-planetary space is pretty much instadeath. So you are forced to be 'dumb'. You can shield it, but that adds weight and heat issues. Redundancy is out, it just doubles/triples the weight, heat, and interfacing issues. You can use rad-hardened devices (best idea) but then you have to fab that silicon anew, and this is really expensive. Then you have to test all these things before you put them up there. So you need to put your device in a vacuum-rad chamber. Governments are not so hot on just having these rad sources laying about and letting a piece of silicon 'cook' next to a power station that is in use. So you do accelerated testing, aka, super radiation. I've been in those chambers before, it's scary. After the magic glow machines are turned off, you have to evac all the air as the O2 in the room has been turned into O3 and you can't breathe in there. The roaches in the corners are literally cooked and brittle. It's nuts. Unfortunately for your testing, this environment is more like the sun's corona than the Earth-Mars transit, so you have to take the testing with a grain of salt. Also your vac chamber is not nearly as good as real space. So everything is oxidized and hat messes up your analysis. You do the best you can, but we don't get many sample returns from outside the Earth's magnetic field to test against. NASA et al do a GREAT job, but they are dealing with very extreme jobs and we just don't have a lot of data about what we are dealing with. We can't do a lot of in situ tests.
- imtringued 10y ago
  Thinkpads are used on the ISS but the ISS itself probably uses far more reliable and slower hardware. http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/thinkpad-laptop-nasa-youtube-spacelab http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/thinkpad-laptop-nasa-youtube-...
  - mnw21cam 10y ago
    The ISS is still close enough to the Earth for it to experience much less radiation than it would while travelling to Mars.
  - danpalmer 10y ago
    Correct, and the reason it is only thinkpads, is because that particular model went through extensive testing and verification that its heat output, etc, were ok for use up there. Also I don't think they are used for critical systems.
wwggggoi 10y ago
this is something I never got: why don't they just chuck a whole bunch of cheap consumer gadgets on these things ? Is it really that hard to attach an array (for redundancy) of gopros to constantly transmit video at 60fps (and sound, even if Mars doesn't really propogate sound) ?
- eriknstr 10y ago
  Consumer grade electronics would likely not survive the radiation that is present in space outside of earth's atmosphere.
- wyldfire 10y ago
  Mostly because of mass. I think the cost of these probes scales with mass and adding those cheap gadgets would displace other scientific instruments. A 60fps camera might be interesting for entry but then it's mostly useless on the surface. And it would take a veeeeeery long time to transmit video (even if you downsampled in spatial and temporal resolution it's just not worth it). As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the consumer grade devices cannot withstand the extremes of space (not just temp extremes, also high energy rays/particles we're shielded from here).
- lucozade 10y ago
  > why don't they just chuck a whole bunch of cheap consumer gadgets on these things This [0] is an interesting read on some of the considerations for the Curiosity rover cameras. [0] https://www.dpreview.com/articles/0353350380/curiosity-interview-with-malin-space-science-systems-mike-ravine https://www.dpreview.com/articles/0353350380/curiosity-inter...
  - wwggggoi 10y ago
    great link thanks!
- Arnt 10y ago
  Yes. Space radiation doesn't kill 1% of gopros, it kills 99% of them (both numbers made up, but you get the point). Then there's the power budget. A watt is cheap here, not so cheap on Mars, so even what counts as "low power" on the surface of earth isn't cheap on Mars. And of course, n-item arrays need correspondingly more power than single items. (I realise it's not your main point, but broadcasting 60fps video across the solar system sounds like it might need a LOT of power, no matter of sensitive the receiver is.)
riffraff 10y ago
the focus of this mission was the orbiter, the lander was basically "ah, we can fit this too", that's why it had minimal capabilities.
- Pigo 10y ago
  I get it, and I'm definitely not knocking any endeavor as being trivial. I'm just curious, in general, why this isn't more of a focus. Possibly for selfish reasons.
Cyph0n 10y ago
The hardware has to be manufactured from the ground up for space. The silicon has to operate over a wider temperature range, the processor needs internal redundancy as well as external redundancy, and memory (caches included) has to include support for multi-bit error correction. Getting electronics to work reliably in space is no small feat. And since the fabs that manufacture this kind of stuff are working at a relatively large technology node, it's non-trivial to design something like an i5 for space. Why? Well, Intel and friends have no interest setting up an entire fab process that will be utilized once in a blue moon. Even if you could use a more advanced node, the extremely high circuit area overhead required to realize the requirements I listed above will remain a limiting factor.
- 3chelon 10y ago
  Plus the very real and difficult problem of any system being literally shaken apart under the launch forces. AFAIK, they like to pot all circuitry in epoxy to stop the solder joints breaking.
  - Cyph0n 10y ago
    I did an internship at an oil drilling company, and the electronics on the tools were covered entirely with epoxy (or something similar) to minimize the impact of mechanical shocks. So yeah, I'd assume you're right.

by Pigo 10y ago

danpalmer 10y ago

Satellites still use CPUs with speeds in the hundreds of MHz, because creating technology hardened enough to withstand travelling through space, or being used on another planet, is a very difficult challenge, and we just aren't at the point where we can make an Intel i7 (for example) work in space. This isn't even accounting for heat issues, and power issues. Because of this, my guess is that the camera technology that we can safely get to Mars is significantly worse than what we expect in our day-to-day lives.

wwggggoi 10y ago
ok you answered my point...but is there not another way to shield consumer electronics ? wouldn't it be cheaper to find a good shielding system (magnetic ?) than to develop expensive custom hardware ?
- adekok 10y ago
  Ever try upgrading the CPU on an iPhone? It's like that. These projects started out 10-15 years ago. So upgrading them mid-stream is almost impossible. They're stuck with the hardware available when they chose that part. Re-designing for new hardware means changing everything.
  - Pigo 10y ago
    I never considered that. I suppose that does give me some hope that we'll see future projects with today's hardware eventually.
    - macintux 10y ago
      Sure, but by then we'll be lamenting the lack of TrueVR(™) support that would allow us to walk the surface of Mars.
AustinBeau 10y ago
http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Canon-readies-miniature-satellite-for-March-launch http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Canon-readies-mini... Is interesting to see. But as I'm developing software for my Universitie's cubesat, it's incredibly interesting to read all that goes into Single Event Upsets and other hardware failures from being outside of Earth's protective atmosphere.
Pigo 10y ago
Is it an EMI issue? Slower speeds somehow stand the trip better? If there was enough money in it, I'd bet our top minds could find solutions to these problems.
- takingflac 10y ago
  Less speed = less heat which is surprisingly a large concern in space. The other factor is that the transistors on the chips are larger than the ones used on Earth. I don't remember the specifics but the reasoning was that less transistors would be damaged if a spot on the chip was hit by radiation and built in redundancies would be able to compensate. (Source: had a few EE classes where this kind of thing was brought up been awhile though)
- Balgair 10y ago
  Its answered downthread, but I'll tell you too and add some. The main issue is that the project started 10 years ago, and that is when the general specs were set for pretty much the whole bird. Minor upgrades are made, but you have many many teams working on many little things that have to be integrated, and that spec is 10 years old. I mean, our tech from 10 years ago is billions of times better than a Viking lander, but I get the sentiment. For silicon devices, the VERY hard rad environment of inter-planetary space is pretty much instadeath. So you are forced to be 'dumb'. You can shield it, but that adds weight and heat issues. Redundancy is out, it just doubles/triples the weight, heat, and interfacing issues. You can use rad-hardened devices (best idea) but then you have to fab that silicon anew, and this is really expensive. Then you have to test all these things before you put them up there. So you need to put your device in a vacuum-rad chamber. Governments are not so hot on just having these rad sources laying about and letting a piece of silicon 'cook' next to a power station that is in use. So you do accelerated testing, aka, super radiation. I've been in those chambers before, it's scary. After the magic glow machines are turned off, you have to evac all the air as the O2 in the room has been turned into O3 and you can't breathe in there. The roaches in the corners are literally cooked and brittle. It's nuts. Unfortunately for your testing, this environment is more like the sun's corona than the Earth-Mars transit, so you have to take the testing with a grain of salt. Also your vac chamber is not nearly as good as real space. So everything is oxidized and hat messes up your analysis. You do the best you can, but we don't get many sample returns from outside the Earth's magnetic field to test against. NASA et al do a GREAT job, but they are dealing with very extreme jobs and we just don't have a lot of data about what we are dealing with. We can't do a lot of in situ tests.
imtringued 10y ago
Thinkpads are used on the ISS but the ISS itself probably uses far more reliable and slower hardware. http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/thinkpad-laptop-nasa-youtube-spacelab http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/thinkpad-laptop-nasa-youtube-...
- mnw21cam 10y ago
  The ISS is still close enough to the Earth for it to experience much less radiation than it would while travelling to Mars.
- danpalmer 10y ago
  Correct, and the reason it is only thinkpads, is because that particular model went through extensive testing and verification that its heat output, etc, were ok for use up there. Also I don't think they are used for critical systems.

wwggggoi 10y ago

this is something I never got: why don't they just chuck a whole bunch of cheap consumer gadgets on these things ? Is it really that hard to attach an array (for redundancy) of gopros to constantly transmit video at 60fps (and sound, even if Mars doesn't really propogate sound) ?

eriknstr 10y ago
Consumer grade electronics would likely not survive the radiation that is present in space outside of earth's atmosphere.
wyldfire 10y ago
Mostly because of mass. I think the cost of these probes scales with mass and adding those cheap gadgets would displace other scientific instruments. A 60fps camera might be interesting for entry but then it's mostly useless on the surface. And it would take a veeeeeery long time to transmit video (even if you downsampled in spatial and temporal resolution it's just not worth it). As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the consumer grade devices cannot withstand the extremes of space (not just temp extremes, also high energy rays/particles we're shielded from here).
lucozade 10y ago
> why don't they just chuck a whole bunch of cheap consumer gadgets on these things This [0] is an interesting read on some of the considerations for the Curiosity rover cameras. [0] https://www.dpreview.com/articles/0353350380/curiosity-interview-with-malin-space-science-systems-mike-ravine https://www.dpreview.com/articles/0353350380/curiosity-inter...
- wwggggoi 10y ago
  great link thanks!
Arnt 10y ago
Yes. Space radiation doesn't kill 1% of gopros, it kills 99% of them (both numbers made up, but you get the point). Then there's the power budget. A watt is cheap here, not so cheap on Mars, so even what counts as "low power" on the surface of earth isn't cheap on Mars. And of course, n-item arrays need correspondingly more power than single items. (I realise it's not your main point, but broadcasting 60fps video across the solar system sounds like it might need a LOT of power, no matter of sensitive the receiver is.)

riffraff 10y ago

the focus of this mission was the orbiter, the lander was basically "ah, we can fit this too", that's why it had minimal capabilities.

Pigo 10y ago
I get it, and I'm definitely not knocking any endeavor as being trivial. I'm just curious, in general, why this isn't more of a focus. Possibly for selfish reasons.

Cyph0n 10y ago

The hardware has to be manufactured from the ground up for space. The silicon has to operate over a wider temperature range, the processor needs internal redundancy as well as external redundancy, and memory (caches included) has to include support for multi-bit error correction. Getting electronics to work reliably in space is no small feat. And since the fabs that manufacture this kind of stuff are working at a relatively large technology node, it's non-trivial to design something like an i5 for space. Why? Well, Intel and friends have no interest setting up an entire fab process that will be utilized once in a blue moon. Even if you could use a more advanced node, the extremely high circuit area overhead required to realize the requirements I listed above will remain a limiting factor.

3chelon 10y ago
Plus the very real and difficult problem of any system being literally shaken apart under the launch forces. AFAIK, they like to pot all circuitry in epoxy to stop the solder joints breaking.
- Cyph0n 10y ago
  I did an internship at an oil drilling company, and the electronics on the tools were covered entirely with epoxy (or something similar) to minimize the impact of mechanical shocks. So yeah, I'd assume you're right.