4 ms·
On the bright side, the mission goal was five flights and Ingenuity completed 72 flights in three years!
by pnw 2y ago
On the bright side, the mission goal was five flights and Ingenuity completed 72 flights in three years!
- bpodgursky 2y agoIt was genuinely impressive and I don't mean to downplay that, but NASA always massively lowballs "mission goals". In practice, probes either fail completely, or wildly outperform.
- cogman10 2y agoI assume it's because the things that make stuff fail early are also the things that if addressed will make a project live for 75 years. For example, solar panels for the rovers are overbuilt because you can't clean them if a chance dust storm is a bit too dusty. But that overbuilding also means that as long as the panels stay reasonably free of dust, the rover will last a long time.
- amelius 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve
- UltraSane 2y agoThe two most recent rovers are nuclear powered.
- verandaguy 2y agoTo be fair, this means that solar panels are unlikely to be the source of any issues.
- UltraSane 2y agoYou are technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.
- angry_moose 2y agoYes/no. The design spec is something like “95% probability of completing 5 flights” - that is, the minimum threshold to be successful. That leaves a lot of extra margin to keep going well past it - 90% for 10 flights; 80% for 20; etc. (made up numbers) You also get the “bathtub curve” in most mechanical systems. Once you get past the early design defect failures, things tend to last a long time, until they start wearing out.
- Mistletoe 2y agoIt's insulting honestly. If any of us made estimates that off we would be fired.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rozab 2y agoAs I understand it, the reason for this is it would be much harder to get funding for a years-long mission up front. Ingenuity funding was not actually included in the original Mars 2020 program and there was huge internal opposition to it, due to potentially infringing on the science goals of the mission.
- mrandish 2y agoYes, it so wildly exceeded its mission goals they were past all the "bonus round" goals and coming up with new targets. Since they tend to sequence goals by potential value for a given risk, I imagine they were knowingly accepting more mission risk and stretching the risk envelope. Not quite explicit 'test to failure' but either way you eventually end up finding a failure point. Identifying this as the likely failure mode strikes me as pretty valuable for informing future designs, at least compared to the alternative of it just never being heard from again one day.