5 ms·
This may sound silly, but: The closest I've coming to building a "robot" was a simple little arduino kit. The kit was terrible, the parts defective, and you can
by geocrasher 6y ago
This may sound silly, but: The closest I've coming to building a "robot" was a simple little arduino kit. The kit was terrible, the parts defective, and you can imagine I was pretty sick of troubleshooting it after a time. These are things happening on my workbench with a small amount of automation code. I'd have been thrilled if it had just worked as designed.
Now, take three robots. One is wheeled, one flies by rotors, and another is rocket powered. Put them on a rocket, fly to another planet, and land them autonomously without wrecking anything. As a hobbyist I'd be beyond myself to just do ONE of those. On Earth. Let alone millions of miles away on a distant planet.
And to get video of it just days later, bounced across multiple orbiters? Mind blowing.
- GeorgeTirebiter 6y agoWhat if you had $ 2.7B? Would that help? (I'm not suggesting Percy is anything but a near miracle; only that they did have at least some non-trivial resources.)
- andyzweb 6y agoWas that the budget for the whole thing? If that’s what it cost to put that thing up there why aren’t we doing this once a month.
- divbzero 6y ago… or at least once every 26 months or so. [1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mars#Launch_windows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mars#Launch_win... We sent 3 separate spacecraft to Mars during the most recent launch window. We’ll see how we do next time around.
- nier 6y agoNASA’s budget is not what it used to be during the cold war and specifically during the race to the moon. The budget for 2020 was $22.6 billion. Source: https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/nasa-budget https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/nasa-budget
- megablast 6y agoAnd a whole pile of experts who’ve done it before.
- yread 6y agoIn the press conference they said they've spent 4000 man-years working on it.
- jmcqk6 6y agoAlso, for all intents and purposes, the code driving these things are running in production for the first time. Of course they can do software updates now that it's on the ground. But the EDL code only gets one shot to run correctly.