NASA picks the target for Curiosity's first road trip NASA has pronounced the Curiosity rover ready to get roving and has picked an interesting venue for its first roll across the Martian surface, but the probe has to shoot itself before it can go anywhere. At a press conference on Friday, NASA said that Curiosity will move towards a spot dubbed Glenelg, which is located at the …
IT is all just more than a tad surreal, is it not, these great novel information games which are played out as alien realities in media programs with machines conveying the action and consequences to their biomechanical driver hosts .....human virtual terrain team players and/or virtual human terrain team players ..... Big Brother BioBots ..... which are barely a small step and a giant quantum leap into SMARTR Algorithm Programs for Command and Control of Planetary Curiosity and Universal MetaDataBase Exploitation ....... Imaginative Resource Application.
Or do you think that is much more suited to being a Leading Far Out East Indian Space for New Man Hunting Eastern Tiger Economies than Wild West NASA territory defined and confined by parameters and protocols to the refined breaking of rocks for a living ........ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/9480279/India-is-heading-for-Mars-it-doesnt-need-British-aid-money-to-pay-the-bills.html
Let the Eastern Train take the Global Runaway Strain with their Deeper Senses of Universal Understanding.
"Rock, take us to your leader"
Rock remains silent.
"Rock, take us to your leader or we'll blast you to smithereens with a laser!"
Rock remains silent.
Bzzzztttt - phoom warble warble bang!
Rock makes a large amount of noise for a split second and gets blasted to smithereens.
Wild cheers on Earth - "Earth one, Mars nil !", cue "War of the Worlds" soundtrack.
Yes, September 23, 1999, Mars Climate Orbiter lost.
The problem essentially was the difference between pounds and newtons in thrust as part of trajectory calculations.
Enttered orbit at 57km altitude instead of the intended 226km.
Have a look here, some other cracking software/units bugs, not just from NASA ...
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9183580/Epic_failures_11_infamous_software_bugs
Not only that, but the rover:
- has limited energy to use per day
- has limited cpu power to steer itself safely around hazards
- crew needs to get accustomed with driving, so it won't go at top speed for sure
- may find science underway that may arouse the scientists
- etc.
It's the first ride and there's no way to help the machine out of its pickles: it will take a lot longer than just a few hours to drive to Glenelg for sure...
Not only that, but the rover:
- has limited energy to use per day
- has limited cpu power to steer itself safely around hazards
- crew needs to get accustomed with driving, so it won't go at top speed for sure
- may find science underway that may arouse the scientists
- etc...
Also, don't forget the radio lag; round-trip light time is something like 20 minutes, so you can't really drive the rover in "real time", like the old Lunokhod drivers back in the early '70s. There's a bit of a radio lag to the Moon as well, something like two seconds; this meant that astronauts on the Moon had to be a bit patient when talking to Mission Control, but the radio lag wasn't so long that it kept you from controlling a rover from Earth in near-real time. For example: when the remote operator of the LRV camera was shooting the LM liftoffs on Apollos 15-17, he had to start panning the camera up at something like T-2 seconds, so that the command would reach the camera when the ascent stage lifted off.
the difference might be fuel and GPS. Very little energy/power on this rover for high speed travel and without GPS, they really have to keep tire slippage down to nil.
It's just a guess but this speed is probably the result of conserving power, limiting wheel slippage, and the 14 minute data delay.
So why are they not putting up a little GPS network I wonder.
"We are going to hit it with 14 millijoules of energy 30 times in 10 seconds. It is not only going to be an excellent test of our system, it should be pretty cool too."
I'd have thought it would be pretty cool to start with, but after blasting the crap out of it with a laser it's fairly likely to be quite warm afterwards!
But I calculated about 10 hours.
However, mars rotates, and so some of the time it's not in radio contact (unless they've been a bit clever with Mars Orbiter). Nonetheless, it's gonna be out of 'sight' of earth for some periods of time. NASA's gonna be very, very careful with its new toy, they sure as hell won't drive it blind, so I'd guess we won't see anything for 3 days.
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