6 ms·
How JPL keeps the 13-year-old Curiosity rover doing science
- ezst 4mo agoCuriosity is a teenager now? Damn, I didn't need to feel this much older today..
- NooneAtAll3 4mo agobepicolombo arrives on Mercury this autumn too
- ragebol 4mo agoIf a few years it'll be old enough to drive a car. That'll help exploration!
- rented_mule 4mo agoThe total cost of Curiosity to date is well under 5% of the cost of the recent trip humans took around the moon (something like $3B vs. $90B, or $20 vs. $600 per US taxpayer). Imagine the amount of science that could get done if we gave even half the budget of crewed spaceflight to rover / probe style exploration.
- zbendefy 4mo agoMaybe we would get a microphone on mars. Just kidding i know air pressure is vastly different, but still it would be cool to listen to ambient sound from there
- boxfire 4mo agoMars 2020 has a microphone. You can probably find audio out there but here’s some: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/mars-2020-perseverance/sounds-of-mars/ https://science.nasa.gov/mission/mars-2020-perseverance/soun...
- ceejayoz 4mo agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHenFGnixzU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHenFGnixzU
- andyjohnson0 4mo ago> Curiosity [...] has traveled nearly 37 kilometers, drilled into and sampled 42 different rocks, and as of publication has snapped nearly 763,000 photos. Without in any way minimising the amazing scientific and engineering achievements of the team and the rover: we need crewed space exploration because people on Mars would be able to do the above in significantly less than thirteen years. Or, to put it another way, would do much more science in the same amount of time.
- Thrymr 4mo ago> much more science in the same amount of time. I'm not convinced by the time argument, as astronauts would have limited time on Mars dictated by orbital mechanics and return schedules, but the bigger problem is cost. You are replying to a comment about how rovers and probes are cost effective; there is no way that crewed exploration could accomplish more science than Mars rovers without orders of magnitude more cost.
- rented_mule 4mo agoAnd if we're keeping costs proportional, send orders of magnitude more rovers and that helps the time argument for rovers as well.
- tkcashman 4mo agoA manned mission to Mars isn't even on the table yet (sorry, Elon) until we solve several huge problems, including cosmic radiation, landing heavy payloads, and a feasible alternative to chemical propulsion (most likely nuclear, but untested).
- peterburkimsher 4mo agoNot to mention supplying astronauts with food and managing their waste for 6+ months.
- ozim 4mo agoManned mission to Mars is a fad. But it is important fad just like space mining. We as humanity have to believe we are not in zero sum game to stay decent… Unfortunately last years are showing us how ugly it is with rare earth elements, energy etc. It is also showing what you wrote is true. No one really believes that we can affordably space mine for rare earth and no one believes in Martian colonization that would bring tangible benefits.
- thegrim33 4mo agoYes, and Curiosity weighs 899kg, whereas a single SLS launch can put 26,988kg of robots, cargo, and humans into trans-lunar orbit.
- hparadiz 4mo agoI get your point but the payload delivered to Mars was 3,893 kg. Entry/descent/landing system: aeroshell + heat shield + parachute + fueled descent stage / sky crane + Fueled Cruise Stage.
- mitthrowaway2 4mo agoThat sky crane system still blows my mind. Straight out of science fiction.
- contingencies 4mo agoAssuming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_crane_(landing_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_crane_(landing_system) can I ask which part of the system did you find most impressive? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1WX0CATyn8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1WX0CATyn8
- DonHopkins 4mo agoThe audacity.
- undebuggable 4mo agoIt worked out. Philae lander with harpoons was comparably complex but mostly failed unfortunately.
- mitthrowaway2 4mo agoMainly because it's a complex multi-step plan with so many potential failure points, which would already be impressive if executed on Earth but even moreso being executed on a distant planet where the conditions are different enough that it can't be fully tested in advance, and yet despite that the whole scheme worked flawlessly. But if I had to name a specific part, I'd pick the control system. The skycrane is dangling a heavy rover from a pendulum controlled by rockets. It's unstable in every axis and has tight performance requirements to let the rover down softly and not kick up dust. Just very impressive.
- drstewart 4mo agoSuddenly HN is very pro automating human jobs with machines because it's cheaper
- bezier-curve 4mo agoThe moon is probably the only celestial body humans can actually occupy with current technology, for every other object in the solar system we need robots.
- downrightmike 4mo agoJust like Hawaii, Islands require massive support and material inputs from the mainland. The moon is like Napoleon's exile to Saint Helena island, very remote hard to get to. Mars is like the antarctic, nearly all early explorers died and it take an international effort to stay down there.
- gosub100 4mo agoIt's not glamorous but I want to see SpaceX do a 6 month antarctic mission to prove they're capable of supporting life on Mars. No assistance from any existing antarctic base, fully self contained.
- fc417fc802 4mo agoRather than a one off mission, why isn't NASA operating a permanent base there along those lines? Locate it reasonably close to mcmurdo so they can get help in an emergency. I realize we have the ISS but there's probably still a lot to be learned about keeping a fully self contained system running in a hostile environment.
- m4rtink 4mo agoAny permanent lunar outpost (with maybe the exception of some of the coastal ones) needs to be fully self sufficient during the winter, that is nothing new. No one is going to go rescue you tracking or flying thousands of kilometers in total darkness, snow storms and ~-80C temperatures.
- ccamrobertson 4mo ago...and further imagine the science that could be done if we mass manufactured probes rather than using experimental engineering for each one. We could have had dozens of Voyager probes in the outer reaches of our solar system by now. I would have loved to see more Huygens probes dropped to the surface of Titan or more New Horizons zoom past Pluto. I don't think human spaceflight is to blame, rather it's what connects taxpayers to space exploration as an inspirational human pursuit. But, I do agree that can be more efficient with how we spend those dollars all around.
- WalterBright 4mo agoThe JWST space telescope cost $10b. I've been excoriated here by suggesting that a twin could be built probably for $1b.
- ericd 4mo agoSeems like we should build at least 11, if it’s 11 for the price of 2. There’s a lot of cosmos to look at.
- My_Name 4mo agoThat's what they did with Hubble. Of course the CIA bought them to point downwards...
- fc417fc802 4mo agoI think it's better to take a production line approach the way musk did with spacex rockets. That would give us a recurring fixed budget, career stability, and stable pipelines for training and research. It's bound to be far more cost effective and to have more benefits for society as a whole. There's no good reason not to have a steady stream of space telescopes and rovers being sent out at a rate of once or twice per year.
- m4rtink 4mo agoWith cost of launch to space finally coming down thanks to SpaceX & reusable rockets in general I would imagine this is how things will go much more often in the future. Not only mass production but possibly cheaper materials, more in-space prototyping & less expensive ground testing and paper studies before launch.
- zitterbewegung 4mo agoMuch easier to get a moon mission due to politics .
- downrightmike 4mo agoAnd they scrapped the lunar gateway to piece out the ion thrusters to send to saturn for some reason
- aaron695 4mo ago[dead]
- colechristensen 4mo agoThe goal is colonization and industrialization of the moon and mars and some asteroids. There is only so much interest in the surface geology of the other bodies in the solar system.
- tjchear 4mo agoPresumably a common argument for sending a trained human expert in place of a robot is because a human can exercise much better judgment on what to explore and dive deep into on site, whereas doing so via a rover is subject to high latency and low bandwidth. It’d be really cool if LLM (or any AI for that matter) reaches the level of sophistication of an in the field scientist and we can send them instead of humans for 80% of the results at 10% of the cost.
- foobarbecue 4mo agoYou'd probably be interested in Curiosity's AEGIS system if you aren't already aware of it.
- WalterBright 4mo agoNow that JPL has a design, they could crank out dozens of Curiosities and do lots of science with little more money.
- cucumber3732842 4mo agoIf they actually want to do that they'd need to come up with a design more suited to serial production. Not sure how much modification that would take. If SpaceX ever credibly gets to the point of preparing to send people to Mars I'd think that that would have to happen because how else do you vet your landing sites.
- WalterBright 4mo agoThe simple fact that in order to build the first one, you have to build jigs and set up machinery and make a test plan and make test equipment, and debug it means doing a twin would likely be less than 10% of the cost of the original.
- rtkwe 4mo agoThey'd need to source the plutonium for the RTGs for that and from what I've read that's in pretty precious supply. Though maybe we could start disassembling bombs to source it.
- somenameforme 4mo agoThe unreasonably high price is because NASA is obligated by Congress to use Boeing and their SLS. It costs orders of magnitude greater than SpaceX for no benefit whatsoever, as a Falcon Heavy could absolutely be fitted for a lunar flyby if desired. Another problem is that rovers are way more limited than most people realize. The fundamental problem is that moving parts break, so their design/behavior are very limited. For instance Curiosity's drill can only drill to about 6cm, and even then it broke after 16 limited activations. It then took a team of scientists around 2 years to come up with a partially effective workaround. A guy on the scene could have fixed it a few minutes, or done just as effective 'drilling' himself with a spoon. We're literally not even scratching the surface of what Mars has to offer. Another issue is in mobility. That involves lots of moving parts. So Curiosity tends to move around at about 0.018 mph (0.03 km/h) meaning at its average speed it'd take about 2.5 days to travel a mile. But of course that's extremely risky since you really need to make sure you don't bump into a pebble or head into a low value area. So you want human feedback on a ~40 minute round trip total latency on a low bandwidth connection - while accounting for normal working hours on Earth. So in practice Curiosity has traveled a total of just a bit more than 1 mile per year. And as might be expected its tires have also broken. So it's contemporary travel time would be even worse. Imagine trying to dig into all the secrets of Earth by traveling around at 1 mile per year, and once every few years (on average) being able to drill hopefully up to 6cm. And all of these things btw are bleeding edge relative to the past. The issue of moving parts break is just an unsolvable issue for now and for anytime in the foreseeable future.
- lisper 4mo agoThe space program is not about science. It has never been about science. Science is just the excuse, the window-dressing. What it's really about is military power and sending money to the right congressional districts. Source: I worked at JPL from 1988 to 2004.
- rented_mule 4mo agoI want you to be wrong, but I think you're right. The cost discrepancy I pointed out is evidence of that. I've heard a lot of things that are consistent with what you're saying from one of my closest friends, who happened to work at JPL and Caltech from 1992 to 2011, much of that time on Mars rover related software.
- lisper 4mo agoWhat was your friend's name? If they were working on robotics in that time period we probably worked together.
- rented_mule 4mo agoI'm trying to keep this account anonymous so that I'll speak my mind more easily, and she's probably more private than I am, so I don't want to say her name. Among other things, she worked on mission control software for tracking rover-carrying spacecraft en route to Mars and related ground data systems (I'm probably getting the wording wrong, but that's my outsider understanding of it). Later she worked on software used to analyze interferometer data for exoplanet research on the Caltech side (again, wording?). I'm not aware of her ever being near robotics work. Part of her shift to Caltech was to try to get to an environment where there was more predictable focus on the science, but a lot of the grant money there was from the same or related budgets as JPL's money, with plenty of strings attached that weren't always pulling in directions she was excited about.
- GuB-42 4mo agoThere is some science that can only be done with crewed missions, and that studying what happen to people in space! That's already a big part of the experiments done on the ISS. In addition, people still can do a lot of things that robots can't do, like repairing things, or do it much faster: Apollo did more in a few days than the robotic missions did in months. So sure, a lot of science could be done by moving crewed mission budgets to robotic missions, but that would be a different kind of science, we would learn more in some aspects and less in others.
- rtkwe 4mo agoThere's a lot to be said for the flexibility of humans for performing experiments. With someone else or a country broadly sustaining people in space the cost to perform a particular experiment can go down by a lot. Trying to replace people with automated experiments will run up huge costs of designing, building and launching the robotics required to perform that individual experiment that would largely be single use. It'd also be a lot more fragile and prone to failures as well.
- MinimalAction 4mo agoI am happy to know this emblem of knowledge stream keeps coming until 2035. It is wonderful to know our innovations have flown 200 odd million miles and work for so long!
- beastman82 4mo agoJet Propulsion Laboratory, for those who are missing basic writing standards.
- xp84 4mo agoJPL has been around for over 80 years now -- I'm not sure that assuming basic familiarity with it, among people who would care about the Curiosity rover, is even a controversial choice, let alone 'substandard' writing. I think especially for an organization like JPL, where the name is far from a full description of what they're currently about anyway, people tend to just think of them as 'JPL' rather than how we think of, say, the United Nations. Edit: Also, all a reader even needs to know is what the sentence already directly implies -- that "JPL" are the ones in charge of operating Curiosity. It's like saying "How AMR Corp keeps American Airlines flying during challenging times for aviation"
- DharmaPolice 4mo agoI do care about the Curiosity rover but I'll be honest that I only know JPL from The Martian.
- WalterBright 4mo agoIt was named "Jet Propulsion Laboratory" for PR purposes, as they thought the local citizens would be concerned about a "Rocket Propulsion Laboratory" in their vicinity.
- bruckie 4mo agoThe first line of the article starts out "Thirteen years ago last August, I was camped out in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory press room..."
- hatthew 4mo agoAnyone not familiar with "JPL" will not be helped by spelling out "Jet Propulsion Laboratory", since it's a misnomer anyways.
- voidUpdate 4mo ago
- squeedles 4mo agoWas excited to hear that they have a lower power rad-hard snapdragon system going into the new missions! The RAD 750 is basically a 30-year old IBM RS-6000. Very well known, but has been the goto CPU for way longer than I thought it would be.
- themafia 4mo agoIt turns out GNC is significantly easier than rendering a video game. You don't even need that fast of a control loop. Your bigger concern is legitimate real time processing over raw compute power. Otherwise, we have shown, if you need power, send the astronaut up there with a laptop. Which is far easier to replace and upgrade as years advance.
- MutexMaven 4mo agoAnyone who wants a more in depth look at how patches keep getting applied to what's essentially a radhard version of the candy shell Mac processors can head over to this link -> https://www-robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/media/documents/Curiosity_R13_Flight_Software.pdf https://www-robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/media/documents/Curiosity_... Leveraging VxWorks you effectively have 3 different ways this software gets updated. Hot Patch -> Do it live! where you modify the RAM with compiled code so that the changes persist until next reboot. Cold Patch -> Same as a hot patch, except this time you actually copy the contents into non-volatile memory. VxWorks has a really slim profile and thus this helps keep the size manageable to continue doing science experiments. Full Updated -> Basically a clean install gets burned in.
- RedMagicBox 4mo ago[dead]
- IFC_LLC 4mo agoThe argument about manned vs robotic missions is kinda like a good comparison of a capybara to an orange juice. The guys who do those robots are real studs. 13 years on 64 megs of ram, remotely rebooting and formatting drives. One has to have a steady hand to do such operations. I can only imagine how much time, study and planning any command takes on such a mission. I'll bet they are not allowed to run a `pwd` without a full test and permission check. Guys who do manned missions to space stations and the moon are also epic. The same amount of prediction while being human. It's quite a show of excellence in training and study. The human won't need a new mission to Mars should he find a new type of rock. Humans can solve problems the rover was not designed to solve in the first place. So there will be manned and unmanned versions of those missions. Which one - is a tough question depending on myriads of factors that will be decided closer to the time when we are ready for said mission.