Kids these days
Look at Voyager 1. Kids these days have no stamina.
In a year during which AI started making art and conversation, the question of whether a robot can make you cry with a tweet seems very apt. NASA's Mars InSight probe might have made the answer to that question "Yes". As The Register has previously reported, the probe landed in 2018 and has since done sterling work …
In a year during which AI started making art and conversation, the question of whether a robot can make you cry with a tweet seems very apt.
NASA's Mars InSight probe might have made the answer to that question "Yes".
Does anyone really believe the probe made the tweet?
== Bring us Dabbsy back! ==
Does anyone really believe the probe made the tweet?
Yes! There is life on Mars and it can fly and make sounds. We hear this as tweets. On Mars it is a survival skill.
This is the untold story why we pour so many giga bucks into Mars exploration. In reality it is a contact situation that keeps being interrupted by sand on the solar panels and cameras. I'm wondering whether the Marsian tweets really mean "stop polluting our redish planet with metal barges and radiating heaters".
It's a simple trade-off of cost, weight, complexity, and useful life.
As it was already mentioned in the article InSight has already long overlived it's expected life, without needing a brush. So when you're designing for a set life and you can do that without adding yet another complex part, with it's own weight and cost, then naturally you leave it off. Every kilogram of weight on a Mars lander adds a massive cost, not least because you add about 20kg of fuel for each kilogram you want to send to Mars.
It would be nice to just leave the landers and rovers to run indefinitely, but the costs don't just end with launch. There are costs involved with collecting the data that the rovers and landers send back (such as the costs involved with co-ordinating first the satellites above Mars to collect the transmission from the surface, and then the costs of operating the deep space network to collect the throughput signals), there are costs involved in maintaining teams to process the information coming in, as well as storage costs for the data. Finally, there are costs in maintaining teams that can handle troubleshooting and over the air maintenance of the landers/rovers. Even where those people are primarily working other projects, taking them away to work temporarily on these lander/rover projects does come with a cost.
At some point, you just have to decide that you have all the data that you need and that the money is better spent elsewhere. InSight performed excellently, collected reams of excellent data, but was always going to slide slowly into the long sleep. It's done it's job for Mankind, now it can rest a bit... ;)
This is the World at her best. Making science and reason work for humanity not denying it!
Fixed that for you. ;)
InSight was a major multinational project. The Lander was from the US, the Seismometer was French, the Mole was led by Germany with a large Polish input, the weather station was from Spain. Universities in Switzerland, and Austria played their own parts in the site selection and data processing. I'm sure I've missed other places too. Not to mention within the teams themselves, where you can add dozens more nationalities. Our small Mole team based in Bremen, Germany featured Germans, Australians, Dutch, Greek, Polish, and Indian members at various times.
InSight really was a true multinational project, and greatly successful for it.