NASA rovers to lose comms this week as Mars moves behind Sun NASA has announced that its surviving Mars rover will be unable to receive commands from Earth for much of the week, as the red planet is about to pass behind the Sun. The plan is for rover Opportunity to spend the blackout period sitting stationary, (gently) blasting a rock with a cobalt-powered radiation beam. The Santa …
Considering the cost of shipping a Humvee to Mars, planning for 2 years fuel seems a little short-sighted. Is there any reason why they didn't plan on, say, 5 years? Or is this just assuming NASA's usual success rate, where the folow-up to something that was astonishingly successful is 10x more complex, and breaks down after a month?
"MMRTG is designed to produce 125 watts of electrical power at the start of the mission and 100 watts after 14 years." [http://pdf.aiaa.org/preview/CDReadyMIECEC06_1309/PV2006_4187.pdf]
So one would assume that although the current mission may only be timetabled for the first two years there will be plenty of power for many years to come.
CRCs and crafty encoding techniques have been used in spacecraft communications since the dawn of the space age. It's the only way, for example, to make sense of the data that is sent from any deep space probe. Such data is typically buried deep in the noise of background radiation and has to be picked out using clever mathematics.
My statement remains valid (even if 4 idiots managed to give it a thumbs down).
The article specifically states the fear of commands getting corrupted. If they have been using CRC since the dawn of the space age, why fear a corrupt command goes through? Unless your comms protocol stinks....
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