WATSON picks up slack on Mars for SHERLOC as Perseverance gadgets show age

NASA's Perseverance is having trouble with one of its instruments – which could mean the rover will no longer be able to zap rocks with its laser. The issue concerns the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals (SHERLOC) instrument, mounted on the end of the rover's robot arm. The …

[Neil Barnes]

Ingenuity also far outlived all expectations before its retirement.

Sooner or later, someone in charge of providing funds to NASA is going to notice how long their projects last, versus how long they're scheduled to last.

And see an obvious way to cut budgets, right there... "if it's supposed to last a month, and it lasts a year, you're obviously spending far too much money. Here's less."

NASA needs more 'amazingly' and 'to our great surprise' and 'by a series of fortunate circumstances' in their press releases when they mention the longevity of their projects, because bean counters don't understand that (a) the amount spent on the bit that lasts a long time is a tiny proportion of the project cost, and (b) doing it right and over-engineering is the only way to do one-of-a-kind projects like this. They see only an opportunity for someone else to spend less, thus ensuring that their remunerations continue to rise.

A pint for the engineers doing it right --->

[Spazturtle]

Re: Ingenuity also far outlived all expectations before its retirement.

Lasting longer than planned does have downsides.

Spirit and Opportunity had a listed mission of 90 days but engineers expected them to last 120 days before the solar panels got covered in dust. They didn't know about the wind being able to clean the solar panels until after landing. Spirit and Opportunity lasting years longer meant that extra staff and budget had to be allocated to them which meant that over projects got cancelled.

[Andy The Hat]

Re: Ingenuity also far outlived all expectations before its retirement.

No.

"... lasting years longer meant that extra staff and budget had to be allocated to them" is incorrect.

The beancounters always have the option to kill the mission on the due date. They never "had to" increase the budget or continue to fund the project, the budgetary decision was made to do so.

The only thing to consider is the pressure of a functioning multi-million/billion dollar project being shut down simply for the want of relatively little funding ...

[Spazturtle]

Re: Ingenuity also far outlived all expectations before its retirement.

And how do you expect Congress to react when NASA comes to them asking for more money for a new rover/probe after shutting down a working rover?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Ingenuity also far outlived all expectations before its retirement.

With the delivery costs and timescales being what they are, I don't think even the most stringent of NASA beancounters will be overly worried about over-speccing.

One of the strongest arguments for getting humans in place is the ability to carry out maintenance! And the only real argument FOR the space shuttle as it happens.

[imanidiot]

Re: Ingenuity also far outlived all expectations before its retirement.

If they are a beancounter worth at least some of their salt they'll understand some basic statistics, and with that you can then calculate easily for them that if you built something with a certain certainty (lets say 99,999996% to last at least X days of operation, there is then a certain (fairly high) chance it'll operate for 2*X or even longer. Especially if you consider that things like the main drive and suspension systems can basically kill the mission due to a single failure these will have been designed to the highest standard and lowest probability of failure and a single failure in some other components (like the SHERLOC lens cap failure) might take out a single instrument but not immediately kill the mission.

If we consider the chance of a device failing to be a Poisson distributed event, cost savings to make something last less time directly impact the probability of something failing within the initial mission time. Thus trying to cut engineering costs because something "lasts too long" is stupid if it means thus also compromising the chance of primary mission succes. And yes, you CAN usually explain that to beancounters, but you have to put it in terms of data and numbers they can understand.

[Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch]

Elementary...

Activate the Hook for Opening Locked Mars Explorer Shutters!

[KittenHuffer]

Re: Elementary...

Mechanism On Rover to Increase Activation of Remote Tool canopY!

[Christoph]

Does this mean that the rover can no longer zap Martians with its Heat Ray?

[Anonymous Anti-ANC South African Coward]

The tripods are on their way to your location.

Black helicopter icon used as there's no tripod icon.

[Anonymous Anti-ANC South African Coward]

I came here to expect punnery.

Sad panda.

On the other hand, it just goes to show what proper engineers can achieve.

[Patched Out]

Percussive maintenance?

Can't they just take the arm and rap it against a nearby rock to loosen up the hatch?

Note joke icon ----->

[uccsoundman]

If you want the craft to expire on time or before, just have it built by Boeing.

[I ain't Spartacus]

Boeing's problem is covers unexpectedly opening, rather than staying shut.

[ldo]

Missed A Trick

“The left lens of the stereo imager is called Con, and the right lens is called Doyle.”

“Con & Doyle” ... see what I did there?

Or what I would have done, if only NASA had listened to me ... didn’t they pick up the secret message beamed in graviton waves from the UFO I sent them?

[kend1]

Re: Missed A Trick

"didn’t they pick up the secret message beamed in graviton waves from the UFO I sent them?"

Vogons: Checking ship records... Yes, the message was beamed [1.21 Gigawatts laser] to the NASA Ingenuity mobile receiver.