How JPL keeps the 13-year-old Curiosity rover doing science
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/mars-2020-perseverance/soun...
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.
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.
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.
People said that about everything. I wore a $10 silk tie to work today and ate toast with a $1 Avacado on it.
Marco Polo would shit a brick if he saw Interstate 90.
This could very well be why planned economies seem to struggle with innovation. People being able to devote significant resources to endeavors, that might not make sense to most, is how you get lots of failures, and the occasional revolutionary successes. Do everything by committee and all you get is a shinier version of what you had last year.
The argument that "progress always needed bold steps" can lead into dead ends too. Past experience isn't enough to justify future steps without additional evidence. Exploration and learning are always good reasons but if you jump to the "it's good business" step before knowing all you can reasonably know, it's probably a fad. It's shooting in the dark. It could still hit the target, or it could miss. You only really know if something is a fad or not with hindsight.
It's hard to say with certainty today whether Mars is a viable target for colonization in the long term compared to other places like Titan or even the Moon. Before you drill for oil you do a lot of exploratory activities. If those bring back solid positive results then you go for the full blown thing. Before you launch a business you build a business case. Did anyone provide a solid business case and exploratory evidence for why "going for Mars" is the viable future?
As far as I can tell it's not scientists pushing for colonizing Mars. All we have to go on is the push from a man widely known to pump up the value of his own companies (which this would do and then some) by repeatedly making sweeping promises he failed to keep.
Musk has become demonized mostly because of his politics. He's made bold claims and overwhelmingly fulfilled them in space. For instance there was a time when something we now take for granted - autonomous landing reusable rockets - was deemed impossible by the powers that be. They were even taunted by Boeing et al along the lines of 'yeah, we tried that long ago - the economics don't work. it's cute to see you having a go at it though.'
He's also brought the price to get things to space down multiple orders of magnitude relative to the Space Shuttle. And similarly before him, electric vehicles were glorified go-karts for virtue signaling hipsters. Having any public political opinion in a country as divided as America is going to make a whole lot of people hate you, but I think the efforts to try to marginalize what he's done are a mixture of silliness and ignorance. If he died tomorrow he'd already go down as the Edison of this generation, and there's yet many a decade remaining for him to cement what may be the ultimate legacy of the first man to make humanity truly multiplanetary.
What about the countless voices, academic included, against it? It's not whether someone thinks it's a good idea but if we have a reasonable consensus on it. 50/50 is a coin flip, not a "peer reviewed" conclusion. It took the blink of an eye to realize putting things in orbit is greatly beneficial. We've been looking at Mars from all sides for decades and the business case is yet to be clear except mostly for people making money by selling you the idea, or the book.
> Musk has become demonized mostly because of his politics. ... He's also brought the price to get things to space down multiple orders of magnitude relative to the Space Shuttle. And similarly before him, electric vehicles were glorified go-karts for virtue signaling hipsters.
Let's not make this the core of the discussion, my objection to him isn't ideological. The companies he has led have a history of fraud, misinformation, and lies. Tesla is the poster child of this. If I can pick just the most obvious examples, FSD has been promised just around the corner for close to a decade now and the recent retroactive change of the contracts really drives the fraud home. Solar Roof was a sham from the start. Boring Company, sham. See how I'm not listing just a "normal" business failure, like xAI failing as a frontier AI lab. Not everything is destined to be a success. I'm just mentioning the things that were overtly lies told for money. SpaceX is probably successful because by all accounts Musk left the leading of the company to the CEO. His history of lies to enrich himself legitimize the attitude to start with the baseline that any wild claim that could enrich him is a lie and wait to be proven otherwise.
For a hammer everything looks like a nail, so for Musk everything is in space. As it happens, he's one of the few parties in the world with easy access to that resource, and acts as a gateway for almost everyone else.
I'm not losing or making money on his success so this for me is just a matter of common sense. If someone lies as often as he does, it's "shame on me" to still assume truth until proven lie.
For instance here [1] is the NYTimes claiming that human flight would be impossible, published just about 2 months before the Wright Bros achieved human flight. Incidentally they also said space flight would be impossible, and were actively patronizing towards the concept. They felt that any child with a basic understanding of science would understand that there's nothing to 'push back against' in space, so spaceflight simply can't work. Until that's proven wrong by actually doing it, some might actually think 'wait that's kind of reasonable - omg maybe it is impossible.'
As for Musk, you're simply assuming malice when e.g. everybody thought full self driving was just around the corner when he made his claims about Tesla bringing it to market. It's kind of the same way that today everybody thinks that in a decade LLMs will be replacing knowledge workers left and right. It's just extrapolating outward from a trendline that exists at one point in time. But it may well be that in a decade we're still predicting that in a decade LLMs will finally be there. Or maybe there will be some revolutionary change, as promised by by all the people pushing LLMs. If it fizzles out, I wouldn't jump to calling them all fraudulent hucksters.
[1] - https://archive.is/F3nnP
I say fad because I don’t think it will happen in my lifetime and I would say 90% it will never happen.
But that 10% possibility of it happening is important or 0.01% of possibility it happens in my lifetime.
It is important that people believe it is more than my numbers. It is important to spend money and work towards that goal.
Because alternative is much more terrifying.
However, I'm quite curious of something. I don't understand how one can think Martian colonization would never happen. We went from horses (for most at least) to putting a man on the Moon in about 60 years, and that's it? Or are you implying that you think Mars may be less desirable than other targets for colonization?
Almost regardless of what motivation you put forward for people - greed, curiosity, adventure, desperation, or whatever else you can imagine - it ends up with us expanding beyond Earth. The only way this might not be true is if it's somehow literally impossible, but the ISS is already an unstable hellish nightmare relative to Mars, and people survive there just fine for years at a time.
Also a big problem can be attacked by solving a small part of it, see what's left & repeat until remaining bits are easy.
Over time, what used to be 'impossible' becomes easy. What matters is deciding what to focus on for the foreseeable future, and spend resources wisely. See eg.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel#Wait_calcu...
Yeah a human mission to Mars, colonizing the clouds of Venus, asteroid mining or Dyson spheres may not be achievable now (if ever). But exploring the problem space, or having a good look at the required engineering, is. And may be cheap as well.
Sure it is a "solved" problem but all the solutions are very heavy.
We generally have selected the most vigorous military personnel to participate in these types of missions, using old volunteers would be quite a change.
There is no way that human space exploration is ever cost effective with robot space exploration.
That said, personally I'm in favor of manned missions to as many bodies in the solar system as possible.
You could argue that forever. When is it time to accept that there isn't any there, and if there is, it is insignificant?
It seems quite plausible that there could be ground water. If that's the case (and I suppose even if it's not) it wouldn't be at all surprising for the cave systems to contain microbial life.
We should be spreading Terran life everywhere in the solar system, not pretending we are some sort of contagion.
While on the topic of human flexibility, it is important to understand that it will be limited due to the resources available. What we saw on Apollo 13 wasn't the product of people trying to expand beyond the mission objectives with what is on hand, it was a last ditch effort to save the Apollo crew. They could afford to do unintended things with the equipment on hand since the only other option was to admit defeat then let people die. Even the very much fictional The Martian was based upon that premise. Treating it as a thought experiment: the primary response was to terminate the mission and evacuate. The part about the lone survivor on Mars was about ditching every mission objective in the name of survival. It would be very difficult to even create a fictional narrative of a human team going beyond the abilities of a similarly appointed robotic mission without abandoning reality altogether.
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.
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.
No one is going to go rescue you tracking or flying thousands of kilometers in total darkness, snow storms and ~-80C temperatures.
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.
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.
Not only mass production but possibly cheaper materials, more in-space prototyping & less expensive ground testing and paper studies before launch.
There is only so much interest in the surface geology of the other bodies in the solar system.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.