Opportunity's and Spirit's original missions were planned to last 90 Martian days each. They ended up lasting over 8,000 combined. That is almost as impressive as getting the rovers to Mars in the first place.
People have to be continually convinced that exploration of the solar system is a worthwhile expenditure of a lot of money that could be spent on other things. Seems obvious to those who are already thinking in the direction of where humanity is going, but most people do not.
Not to mention, science without proper PR has a disastrous level of near-term utility. See: climate science
https://web.archive.org/web/20120504171453/http://www.msnbc....
Not surprising at all. Coached a FIRST team for several years. At this point they sell licensed robotics kits with canned instructions for kids to put together and those kids win because of time limitations. The teams that build from scratch and actually contribute discover or learn anything at all are intentionally blocked from winning. The entire program is total crap for retarded children. Meanwhile smart kids are off doing their own projects that are 1000x as complicated as the most challenging FIRST challenges. It's just turned into a money burn.
This is ridiculous, and I'm saying it is from the perspective of having been a student whose team finished fourth in FRC in a recent year (and won multiple events per year), and having volunteered and assisted multiple teams.
While it is true that a lot of lower resources teams may be better off going with commerical off the shelf (COTS) components, such as the Greyt Elevator and Greyt Intake, teams that perform at a higher level will build everything from scratch. Whether this means utilizing gussets or welding, building your own drive train or using the AndyMark prebuilt chassis.
While it is true that some kids may be better off doing research projects, there is nothing wrong with participating in a team. From my three years as a student, I was exposed to developing solutions to split messages up and verify data integrity when communicating over serial with external microprocessors, utilizing version control, setting up Continuous Integration on our repositories, first deploying apps from Cordova to developing Progressive Web Apps, which forced me to learn to use a VPS on Digital Ocean, running a docker swam on hyper.sh, and storing files on S3 and using RDS.
FIRST is what you make of it, and I'm personally glad that someone holding your opinions towards the program is no longer actively interacting with kids in the program.
A group of engineers put a working robot on a moving object 140 million miles away, and that robot trucked along for fourteen years.
I honestly do not see any aspect of this which is not totally and completely astonishing, marvelous, and awe-inspiring.
Distance makes little difference past the first day. Doing the same thing on the moon would not be easier becase it’s closer. It’s local conditions that make this hard more so than simply getting to that point.
I think the book "Roving Mars" covers this the best. They were worried about a dust storm like the one that killed Opportunity, so they designed the rover to last 90 days even in the pitch darkness of a dust storm. To make sure they'd succeed even in this worst case, they added two additional petals worth of solar panels (IIRC, about a 50% increase in area) to the MERs.
Reading a contemporary description, they seemed to be very scared they wouldn't make the 90 days - hence this major and risky redesign. (The new panels had to open, and if one failed it would block off both the new solar panel, and one of the original ones.)
It worked, and so they had enough extra power to last through that first Martian year, where the winds blew the panels clean. And the rest is history.
There is no chance anyone involved in that program expected the rover to last for 5 years, let alone 15.
90 days was because they didn't think a rover would last over 90 days due to dust storms. They figured that after 90 days they'd encounter a bad dust storm that would cover the solar panels and make them unable to collect power, and thus the battery would be drained and unable to charge after 90 days.
They didn't account that the winds on mars would be able to clean the solar dust off the solar cells so well that it turned out dust storms weren't a huge issue until the latest one.
And from my understanding it wasn't the intensity of the latest storm that killed it but the part of the rover's computer that kept track of time was shot, so it wasn't able to optimize when to go to sleep and when to wake up properly, causing it to run out of charge while it was dark.
Nah, it's a method for giving you a lot of wiggle room if you (or your business) fucks up in something.
NSF, too. The VLA opened in 1978 and the first data recorded by it can be reduced by the current radio astronomy analysis software. In fact the software data format developed for the VLA (FITS) is now popular with high-end camera people... 41 years later.
So, did he make it beyond Pluto or not?
Meanwhile software industry is... Ship to prod ASAP, hire junior devs to reach head count, outsource to overseas and contractors.
I realize the risks are different... But management gets pissed when software causes financial lost and wonder why.
I wonder whether family owned companies are closer to NASA in their testing/hiring practices?
Don't take my word for it. Go out and try to make earth yourself. If you can reinvent this fundamental, elementary process, you will join Jonas Salk and Fritz Haber, and very few others, in changing The Game in a fundamental way.
Note: I think you mean humus. Hummus is "a Levantine dip or spread made from cooked, mashed chickpeas... blended with tahini, olive oil, lemon juice, salt and garlic."
I used to have a huge garden, and made a compost by barely dumping anything organic on a big pile. It worksed great: low maintenance, never one problem, plenty of compost produced.
I now live in a flat, and have composter using worms.
I can't make it practical for the love of me.
If I put it inside, I get flies, no matter how much carbonated material I put in it.
So I put it outside, but it dies from either heat, or cold.
Even when I manage to avoid the worm genocide, the process is so slow. It does produce a fantastic liquid fertilizer in mass, but the volum of organic matter consummed is nowhere close to what I need. I eat a lot of vegies and fruits, and in 2 weeks, I have to put most of it in the trash can, waiting for the worms to work on the legacy pile of trash.
Any advice ?
On to your situation. In home composting is always tricky. My wife and I do indoor/outdoor because we have a yard. In your situation, I'd advise against vermicomposting for the same reasons you listed. I was the technical manager for an enterprise vermicompost startup. Our facility was a rowhouse basement and the owner of the property was a founder. Flies are unavoidable, as is the occasional vermischwitz. They are fragile guys and minor mistakes have major consequences. The exact ratios escape me, but 1lb of healthy, mature red wigglers can consume half a pound of Green (fresh) cellulose in a day or two. We were engineering soil additive, so we supplemented heavily with Gray (dead) cellulose (cardboard, paper, etc.) In an attempt to hit profitable output. I will spare you the further details of our failure. Suffice to say that vermiculture is tricky in the best circumstances.
My suggestion to you is twofold: use the Bokashi Method (https://www.planetnatural.com/composting-101/indoor-composti...) and find a friend with a garden to offload your Bokashi Tea. That link is one of the first hits on Google (read: not vetted) because if you go this route you are going to be reading a lot and there are many roads to Rome.
This is very short due to medium, but if you'd like to discuss in depth and at length I'd be more than happy to. Both composting and waste neutralization are passions of mine. Just let me know how to contact you should you desire.
Once a robotic mission accomplishes its primary objective, NASA has a great story to tell about marginal cost vs return of additional funds. It's not that uncommon; heck they still get funding to keep the Voyager program operating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleaning_event
and:
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/mer/images.cfm?id=1823
The second link shows about 18% power drop after 90 sols ~= 90 days.
Framed this way it's not entirely surprising they lasted longer, especially given the fortunate turn of events with the martian wind cleaning the solar panels of dust.
This of course does not in any way diminish the engineering and ingenuity involved with designing and operating the rovers.
Imagine if your retirement planner or accountant was off by 44X in their number crunches for you. Would you say they were good at estimating?
You think NASA is overly concerned about public perception to the tune 44x an original estimate?
I see nothing wrong with this.
Imagine you design a bridge to support 100 tons. No one would accuse you of mispredicting if it holds up at 200 tons. They will accuse you of negligence if it collapses at 105 tons.