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How JPL keeps the 13-year-old Curiosity rover doing science

271 points by pseudolus

by rented_mule

13 subcomments

The total cost of Curiosity to date is well under 5% of the cost of the recent trip humans took around the moon (something like $3B vs. $90B, or $20 vs. $600 per US taxpayer). Imagine the amount of science that could get done if we gave even half the budget of crewed spaceflight to rover / probe style exploration.

by squeedles

2 subcomments

Was excited to hear that they have a lower power rad-hard snapdragon system going into the new missions! The RAD 750 is basically a 30-year old IBM RS-6000. Very well known, but has been the goto CPU for way longer than I thought it would be.

by ezst

2 subcomments

Curiosity is a teenager now? Damn, I didn't need to feel this much older today..

by MinimalAction

0 subcomment

I am happy to know this emblem of knowledge stream keeps coming until 2035. It is wonderful to know our innovations have flown 200 odd million miles and work for so long!

by RedMagicBox

0 subcomment

by beastman82

4 subcomments

by IFC_LLC

0 subcomment

The argument about manned vs robotic missions is kinda like a good comparison of a capybara to an orange juice.
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.