Hacker News Reader

Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

This is perhaps a good example for those who believe that robotics and probes can rival, or even exceed, humans on the ground. This paper is 11,000+ words, involved computer simulations, a mass of data, and dozens of researchers. All to investigate whether there's morning water frost in certain areas on Mars.

It's actually quite interesting, particularly to imagine the process playing out on such a different planet 40 million miles away, but with humans on the ground with access to reasonable tools and utilities, this would be a morning experiment. Perhaps even more relevantly, they could also be carrying out work which is impossible right now, such as deep drilling or exploring the literally hundreds of cave entrances that have been discovered in the exact same (Tharsis) area.

View on HN

I'm reminded of this quote, often attributed to NASA: "Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor."

Robotics and tele-science will improve at a much faster rate than our ability to solve getting humans to Mars, sustaining them there, and returning.

Plus, sending robotic probes is already "solved".

This seems intuitive enough, but I think the evidence makes it surprisingly unlikely. Not only is there a fairly clear path to getting humans to Mars that we're already quite far along on, but there's a fundamental roadblock with robotics that seems to have no real solution - even on Earth. The more moving parts you have on something, the more it breaks. And obviously vigorous movement results in things breaking even faster.

This is why on Mars the latest, and most sophisticated, drill can only go about 2.5 inches deep. [1] And it's used extremely sparingly, nowhere near max depth, because even given such limitations it tends to break very rapidly, as happened on Curiosity. And similarly, why the latest rover can only go about 0.07 mph [2].

And there's no real solution to these problems. Because even extremely minor failures, the sort a human could fix in a few seconds - like a drill jam, can easily mean end of mission on Mars. So the rovers are built with extreme safety in mind, but even that tends to result in relatively quick failure - moderately iterated upon in a ~decadal cycle. For now it seems to be mostly an inescapable problem.

[1] - https://attheu.utah.edu/facultystaff/qa-perseverance-rovers-...

[2] - https://www.space.com/perseverance-rover-self-driving-on-mar...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com