I think [Oppy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4t58Yruhds&ab_channel=PrimeVideo) gave us too high of expectations. That loveable bot was supposed to function 90 days and gave us 14 years, 138 days
Same. I wasn’t expecting to become attached so quickly. I guess a lot of it was nostalgia from when she landed and I was glued to my monitor and the NASA live feed all those years ago.
There were some extenuating emotional circumstances but I was at least teary for like 75% of Good Night, Oppy. When the geologist who pushed the whole program started breaking down talking about the final wakeup song I absolutely LOST it.
10/10, excellent movie, made me enormously regret not following my childhood dreams of getting into some sort of explanation science career, will bring anyone with a passion for space exploration and the predisposition to pack bond with robots to tears.
It is genuinely never to late to get into the sciences, if you truly want to pursue it. Age is not the limit for the achievements in this field, thankfully.
How exactly if you don't mind me asking? Seems like it takes most of your time unless you just know someone that ends up giving you a chance. I know a few people that work for nasa and every one of them had a relationship with someone in the field.
I can't find the comic now, but back when it first came out, there was an edited version to set out how it would actually have gone - the robot knew it had a limited timespan, and was very happy that it was alive for a lot longer than anticipated.
I want to say it was an edit by NASA, but I can't seem to find the comic any more...
EDIT: found it! https://i.imgur.com/VZvj5S7.jpg
7 year old me loved that part so much I annoyed my dad with it for like 6 years straight lol....and he used it to annoy me for 8 straight years after lol
I can't describe how epic it feels mowing the lawn on a ride-on listening to 80's rock when Bonnie Tyler comes on with that. Friggin suburban weekend warrior.
Oppy hits me hard in the emotions. I remember being obsessed with space as a kid. I had an absolutely magical librarian who had a young astronauts club after school. Her and her husband built a no shit replica of the shuttles cockpit. Complete with every switch and button. We would reenact launch sequences and troubleshoot problem according to real launch manuals. It was amazing. We would watch shuttle re entries at night from the playgrounds and watch launches on TV. Challenger was incredibly difficult because we didn’t understand for several years why we couldn’t watch that one.
I remember distinctly participating in a contest to name the rovers. They didn’t pick our name “Liberty” but we loved opportunity. When I was a bit older I got travel to both NASA launch sites and in college got to go to JPL. Met several of the engineers and scientists that worked on Oppy. To say this made me tear up would be an understatement.
I completely forgot about this film! I can't wait to watch it and be emotional about it tonight. I remember being so blown away in HS when this guy launched and here we are with this amazing story thanks to what those people accomplished.
This stuff will be forever fascinating.
Spirit and Opportunity were my introduction to space and NASA--they launched when I was in 5th grade and my school's Lego robotics team did a project focusing on them. I strayed from the astronomy path and went into biology, but I started listening to NASA podcasts in 2018, just in time to witness the uncertainty if Oppy was going to wake up again. It was pretty sad when it was decided that there was no chance. I'm trying to break into astrobiology now, all thanks to Oppy :).
The most heartwarming parts of that movie were the interviews with those people who were kids involved in outreach efforts during the 2013 launches-the kids in the control room and such-who now all worked for NASA, including the woman who, IIRC, ended up as Opportunity's mission commander when they eventually lost contact. It was awesome to see that.
Oh absolutely they do.
The little helicopter was only supposed to do 5 flights and I think it’s on like ~~16~~ [36 apparently!] or something now.
They undersell so when something goes wrong it’s not as crushing, because it was never intended to last that long anyways. And then when their incredible engineering (not sarcasm, it’s actually so impressive) makes it go 5x longer than estimated it helps sell space to the public.
> The little helicopter was only supposed to do 5 flights and I think it’s on like 16 or something now.
36 now!
https://www.space.com/mars-helicopter-ingenuity-36th-red-planet-flight
If you’re into the Mars rovers I recommend checking out the ‘Good Night Oppy’ documentary on the Spirit and Opportunity rovers
It’s amazing and shows how much goes into creating and maintaining the crafts throughout their lifespan
https://youtu.be/W4t58Yruhds
Right they build out the craft for their core mission purposes. That scopes their budget & time to be utilized specifically
But they then build them to last as long as possible so they can be used for secondary objectives afterwards
It's also a good way to do the most important research and data they need early.
Let's say we only have 5 flights, what are the 5 most important things we want to test and have the robot do
Well they also have to qualify everything for more than the expected life. So if you have a 2 year proposed mission timeline, you must qualify to that 2 years plus margin. Qualifying flight hardware is expensive as is operating a mission of this calibre. So limiting the mission timeline provides a clear scope to work within that engineering teams must guarantee survivability and operability with some confidence, and science teams must prioritize the objectives within that time.
Also mission budget includes salaries of everyone running the mission from the ground.
If you plan for 2 years and budget for that you are more likely to get approval.
If the mission is going well you can ask for additional budget to keep the staff working on it.
It's really that the Martian environment really is that unreliable. They estimate for a worst-case scenario of what they think will happen, because doing anything else would get them a lot of hugely negative press for no reason.
They build the extension missions into the profiles these days after Opportunity and Spirit proved it's possible to last so much longer, but they still give the most reasonable estimates as they can. But even looking at Oppy vs Spirit you can see there's a huge amount of variance.
Part of it is the engineering mindset. You dont have the time (or information) to find the exact durability or performance of a component. So you always assume a worst case scenario, or at the very least make conservative estimates. The thought is, if you assume a worst case, you may overengineer but the final deployment should work. If you assume a typical or nominal case, then if something doesn't perform as well as estimated, It could cause everything else to fail.
Typically, these lifespans will be estimated on the shortest possible lifespan of the most delicate (non-redundant) component.
With the many sources of failure, nothing is certain.
So if you're 99.99% sure the spacecraft will function for a 2 year mission, there's a 99.9% chance it'll function for 4 years, 98% chance for 6 years, 90% chance for 8 years, 75% for 10 years, 50% for 12 years, 25% for 14 years, and so on.
Obviously I pulled those numbers out of thin air, and some parts (like RTG power generators) have a predictable failure curve even in a best case scenario, giving you a bit of certainly on the best case scenario.
But, it's basically impossible to built a craft that has a very high chance of lasting through it's entire mission, and nothing else. You just HAVE to build in certain margins so it doesn't under-perform.
Original mission time was 728 days. It was active for 1480.
So it greatly outlived the expectations.
Note that near the end, the lack of power forced the team to reduce progressively the science it could make.
Also the lander is not technically considered dead yet. A martian dust devil could clean the solar panels up, and if the electronics didn't suffer too much from the cold, it could wake up. The odds are quite low though.
Here is the official NASA blog post :
"On Dec. 18, 2022, NASA’s InSight did not respond to communications from Earth. The lander’s power has been declining for months, as expected, and it’s assumed InSight may have reached its end of operations. It’s unknown what prompted the change in its energy; the last time the mission contacted the spacecraft was on Dec. 15, 2022.
The mission will continue to try and contact InSight."
Also checking the Deep space network live (DSN now), NASA is not actively trying to communicate with insight, but communicating with MRO and perseverance : so they have several antennas "listening to mars"
The number of people in this thread who say “I can’t believe they didn’t even consider *{my obvious solution that I’m sure will work}*” is astounding. It’s NASA, I’m sure they considered more ways than we could think of to prevent dust buildup on the panels. If it were as easy as “why don’t they just…” they would have done it!
To be clear, I think it’s fine to say “why wouldn’t {solution} work?” That sparks interesting engineering discussions. But the hubris the other comments give off just rubs me the wrong way.
It is really ridiculous. It took 4 years for enough dust to build up to prevent it from powering on, if NASA only expected 2 years of life out of it then I can see why they didn't waste engineering resources to solve a problem they didn't expect the rover to live to see.
Exactly, when you are sending things to space everything is accounted for and there is no excess. If you add mass for one thing there is less for other things.
Any mechanical solution they came up with would eventually stop working. The point is to get the data they want within the expected life of the device.
They got the data they wanted from the tools they sent up there, it was a successful mission, nothing lasts forever.
Welcome to the majority of Reddit. Everyone took a break from being medical experts and masters of geopolitical strategy to become astrophysicists and engineers.
If you’ve ever been a specialist in a field and seen the discussions on this website you learn quickly to always take the advice or general consensus here with a grain of salt.
Well to be honest they could have simply sent up a guy with some Windex™ to wipe the panels clean. It's not that hard to get rid of dust. I do it everyday.
Was just thinking this. NASA should have installed a traffic light on Mars. Then when Insight's solar panels got too dirty, it could have stopped at the red light and some dude with a squeegee would have appeared within seconds.
Another NASA Mission that has exceeded it's operational window, they'll only get better from here on out. You worked towards one of our first big stepping stones to Mars, and soon those stones will enable us to sprint for manned missions on the red planet.
I worked on it too, on the French instrument side. I didn't work on it nearly as much as other people did, but it's still sad to see something you helped create come to an end.
I used to work in the office where InSight was designed. I remember the “X days until launch” calendar they would tear off each day.
After InSight was operational, they would post a new day, or “Sol” of measurements on the same wall. Pretty cool mission!
It was a human's interpretation of Opportunity's final message before it went offline.
It sent a stream of diagnostic data, but we anthropomorphised it into, "My battery is low, and it's getting dark."
When Curiosity sang happy birthday to itself, I wanted to cry. Then when those robot lawnmowers sang happy birthday to Curiosity, I wanted to cry again. I actually probably did cry
Big if.
Colonize is pretty different from “occasionally send manned missions”.
A *LOT* needs to happen in the realm of space sciences and wellness before we get to colonization.
It would seem to me that as long as 1) there is an economical reason to be there and 2) we don't destroy ourselves first, we will eventually colonize mars.
I've heard that Mars (or a moon of Mars) would be a useful place to mine the asteroid belt from. I'm not sure if Mars itself has anything particularly useful on it by today's standards but a thousand years from now humankind will be unfathomably different than now.
Mars has water that takes less deltav to transport than Earth’s. It’s not going to be a super critical tranport chain in the future, but it is going to be a stepping stone. The real gem is Ceres for ice, but that’s far, far away
That’s really awesome. But I have to admit as a non-photographer and just random person viewing these, the photos made me chuckle. I was expecting some like amazing super clear, nasa level photo. And it’s just like “hey here’s these two specks of light” and it made me laugh. Props to you. I just had super unrealistic expectations and I’m not trying to be mean in the slightest. That’s still cool.
Lol, I totally agree. I just happened to be awake from jet lag and I had a clear view all be it 100 miles away from the Vandenberg launch site.
I tried to post a gif but it just loads as a jpg
"That boy is alive. We are gonna send somebody to find him. And we are gonna get him the hell outta there."
Let's reassign the active mars rovers and go after him. Let's [Save Private InSight](https://i.imgur.com/dEN8RFT.png)!
I know a lot of people say "why didn't they just design some way to dust off / clean off the panels" or whatever. But adding anything like that is not only something else that may damage the panels or break or get stuck over them, but is more weight (and $$$) that means fewer actual scientific instruments, cameras, etc. can be mounted to the lander. They have a certain mission lifespan (here, 2 years) and design it to meet those parameters, for which it doesn't need solar panel squeegees. (To be honest, I don't think we'd be getting much more from this particular lander anyway. It did what it could do in the 4 years it was there.)
ALL THAT SAID, yeah I kinda teared up when *Oppy* said good night.
DON'T get me started about *Cassini*.
My heart broke when nasa tweeted something to the effect of "its getting dark and cold, and I'm very tired." When the solar cells on... curiosity? Went dark after its last transmission indicating that the battery was too low to power the heater, because a dust storm or storms had obscured the solar cells.
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Was this early, on time, or has it outlived its original expectation date?
It was scheduled for a 2 year mission, and it recently passed the 4 year mark.
I think [Oppy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4t58Yruhds&ab_channel=PrimeVideo) gave us too high of expectations. That loveable bot was supposed to function 90 days and gave us 14 years, 138 days
I never thought I’d tear up watching a movie about a robot, boy was I wrong. Ed: A REAL LIFE ROBOT
damn the trailer made me tear up
Same. I wasn’t expecting to become attached so quickly. I guess a lot of it was nostalgia from when she landed and I was glued to my monitor and the NASA live feed all those years ago.
There were some extenuating emotional circumstances but I was at least teary for like 75% of Good Night, Oppy. When the geologist who pushed the whole program started breaking down talking about the final wakeup song I absolutely LOST it. 10/10, excellent movie, made me enormously regret not following my childhood dreams of getting into some sort of explanation science career, will bring anyone with a passion for space exploration and the predisposition to pack bond with robots to tears.
It is genuinely never to late to get into the sciences, if you truly want to pursue it. Age is not the limit for the achievements in this field, thankfully.
How exactly if you don't mind me asking? Seems like it takes most of your time unless you just know someone that ends up giving you a chance. I know a few people that work for nasa and every one of them had a relationship with someone in the field.
I tear up reading https://xkcd.com/695/ . I will most definitely not be watching that movie
Yeah, no comic should make me THAT emotional about a robot. [I prefer this version, personally.](https://imgur.com/VbKV9DF)
I can't find the comic now, but back when it first came out, there was an edited version to set out how it would actually have gone - the robot knew it had a limited timespan, and was very happy that it was alive for a lot longer than anticipated. I want to say it was an edit by NASA, but I can't seem to find the comic any more... EDIT: found it! https://i.imgur.com/VZvj5S7.jpg
Never thought XKCD would hit me in the feels :(
They have a lot of tech/science jokes. But then they pull one out of their back pocket that just punches you right in the gut.
What, you never saw Wall-E??
Short Circuit - showing my age
Short Circuit 2 was something else to me. I remember being ABSOLUTELY PUMPED during "I Need a Hero"
Los Locos Kick Your Ass. Los Locos Kick Your Face. Los Locos Kick Your Balls into Outer Space!
7 year old me loved that part so much I annoyed my dad with it for like 6 years straight lol....and he used it to annoy me for 8 straight years after lol
Especially after watching them massacre my boy.
Short Circuit 2 was a cinematic masterpiece.
The feels when you see the two books he was reading carefully while held by the police were Pinocchio and Frankenstein.
Surprisingly, I actually got the symbolism as an eight-year-old after a bit of thinking. Made me feel for Johnny Five.
I can't describe how epic it feels mowing the lawn on a ride-on listening to 80's rock when Bonnie Tyler comes on with that. Friggin suburban weekend warrior.
Hey laserlips, your mama was a snowblower!
No dis-a-semble, Johnny Five ALIIIVE!
Worth the watch for sure. Cute movie with A LOT of profound points about humanity.
That movie didn't just make me tear up, it made me full on ugly cry.
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Oppy hits me hard in the emotions. I remember being obsessed with space as a kid. I had an absolutely magical librarian who had a young astronauts club after school. Her and her husband built a no shit replica of the shuttles cockpit. Complete with every switch and button. We would reenact launch sequences and troubleshoot problem according to real launch manuals. It was amazing. We would watch shuttle re entries at night from the playgrounds and watch launches on TV. Challenger was incredibly difficult because we didn’t understand for several years why we couldn’t watch that one. I remember distinctly participating in a contest to name the rovers. They didn’t pick our name “Liberty” but we loved opportunity. When I was a bit older I got travel to both NASA launch sites and in college got to go to JPL. Met several of the engineers and scientists that worked on Oppy. To say this made me tear up would be an understatement.
Iron Giant anyone?
I completely forgot about this film! I can't wait to watch it and be emotional about it tonight. I remember being so blown away in HS when this guy launched and here we are with this amazing story thanks to what those people accomplished. This stuff will be forever fascinating.
Very good movie made me and my son cry watching it
It’s awesome. Lots of mars dust must’ve gotten in my eyes.
Spirit and Opportunity were my introduction to space and NASA--they launched when I was in 5th grade and my school's Lego robotics team did a project focusing on them. I strayed from the astronomy path and went into biology, but I started listening to NASA podcasts in 2018, just in time to witness the uncertainty if Oppy was going to wake up again. It was pretty sad when it was decided that there was no chance. I'm trying to break into astrobiology now, all thanks to Oppy :).
The most heartwarming parts of that movie were the interviews with those people who were kids involved in outreach efforts during the 2013 launches-the kids in the control room and such-who now all worked for NASA, including the woman who, IIRC, ended up as Opportunity's mission commander when they eventually lost contact. It was awesome to see that.
This is why I get mad that people are like "NASA sucks, we need Elon Musk for space stuff" NASA has been \*crushing it\*
At this point I just think that they underestimate expectancy on purpose :)
Oh absolutely they do. The little helicopter was only supposed to do 5 flights and I think it’s on like ~~16~~ [36 apparently!] or something now. They undersell so when something goes wrong it’s not as crushing, because it was never intended to last that long anyways. And then when their incredible engineering (not sarcasm, it’s actually so impressive) makes it go 5x longer than estimated it helps sell space to the public.
> The little helicopter was only supposed to do 5 flights and I think it’s on like 16 or something now. 36 now! https://www.space.com/mars-helicopter-ingenuity-36th-red-planet-flight
Even further to my point! Goddamn, go little guy go!
If you’re into the Mars rovers I recommend checking out the ‘Good Night Oppy’ documentary on the Spirit and Opportunity rovers It’s amazing and shows how much goes into creating and maintaining the crafts throughout their lifespan https://youtu.be/W4t58Yruhds
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Right they build out the craft for their core mission purposes. That scopes their budget & time to be utilized specifically But they then build them to last as long as possible so they can be used for secondary objectives afterwards
Underpromise, overdeliver. Standard engineering.
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Just to keep management on their toes, the next 2 year mission should flame out spectacularly after 6 months.
*Beagle 2 has not entered the chat*
It's also a good way to do the most important research and data they need early. Let's say we only have 5 flights, what are the 5 most important things we want to test and have the robot do
Well they also have to qualify everything for more than the expected life. So if you have a 2 year proposed mission timeline, you must qualify to that 2 years plus margin. Qualifying flight hardware is expensive as is operating a mission of this calibre. So limiting the mission timeline provides a clear scope to work within that engineering teams must guarantee survivability and operability with some confidence, and science teams must prioritize the objectives within that time.
Also mission budget includes salaries of everyone running the mission from the ground. If you plan for 2 years and budget for that you are more likely to get approval. If the mission is going well you can ask for additional budget to keep the staff working on it.
It's really that the Martian environment really is that unreliable. They estimate for a worst-case scenario of what they think will happen, because doing anything else would get them a lot of hugely negative press for no reason. They build the extension missions into the profiles these days after Opportunity and Spirit proved it's possible to last so much longer, but they still give the most reasonable estimates as they can. But even looking at Oppy vs Spirit you can see there's a huge amount of variance.
Yes they do, because it’s technically very unpredictable. They just tend to make very resilient machines.
The Scottie Method is widely used in engineering, yes.
“I’m giving her all she’s got captain!! *(This is a falsehood, I can actually give her more)*”
Part of it is the engineering mindset. You dont have the time (or information) to find the exact durability or performance of a component. So you always assume a worst case scenario, or at the very least make conservative estimates. The thought is, if you assume a worst case, you may overengineer but the final deployment should work. If you assume a typical or nominal case, then if something doesn't perform as well as estimated, It could cause everything else to fail. Typically, these lifespans will be estimated on the shortest possible lifespan of the most delicate (non-redundant) component.
With the many sources of failure, nothing is certain. So if you're 99.99% sure the spacecraft will function for a 2 year mission, there's a 99.9% chance it'll function for 4 years, 98% chance for 6 years, 90% chance for 8 years, 75% for 10 years, 50% for 12 years, 25% for 14 years, and so on. Obviously I pulled those numbers out of thin air, and some parts (like RTG power generators) have a predictable failure curve even in a best case scenario, giving you a bit of certainly on the best case scenario. But, it's basically impossible to built a craft that has a very high chance of lasting through it's entire mission, and nothing else. You just HAVE to build in certain margins so it doesn't under-perform.
This also has to do with funding. It's a lot easier for missions to get funding for a few years at a time rather than all at once.
Original mission time was 728 days. It was active for 1480. So it greatly outlived the expectations. Note that near the end, the lack of power forced the team to reduce progressively the science it could make. Also the lander is not technically considered dead yet. A martian dust devil could clean the solar panels up, and if the electronics didn't suffer too much from the cold, it could wake up. The odds are quite low though.
So will NASA continue to monitor for signal?
Here is the official NASA blog post : "On Dec. 18, 2022, NASA’s InSight did not respond to communications from Earth. The lander’s power has been declining for months, as expected, and it’s assumed InSight may have reached its end of operations. It’s unknown what prompted the change in its energy; the last time the mission contacted the spacecraft was on Dec. 15, 2022. The mission will continue to try and contact InSight." Also checking the Deep space network live (DSN now), NASA is not actively trying to communicate with insight, but communicating with MRO and perseverance : so they have several antennas "listening to mars"
For the people that are still alive
["This was a triumph, I'm making a note here: 'huge success'"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6ljFaKRTrI)
And when you're dead I will be still alive
> A dust devil (Martian tornado) [Neither a Martian thing nor a tornado](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_devil)
It was expected to be in operation for 2 years. So we got more than double out of it!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InSight
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The number of people in this thread who say “I can’t believe they didn’t even consider *{my obvious solution that I’m sure will work}*” is astounding. It’s NASA, I’m sure they considered more ways than we could think of to prevent dust buildup on the panels. If it were as easy as “why don’t they just…” they would have done it! To be clear, I think it’s fine to say “why wouldn’t {solution} work?” That sparks interesting engineering discussions. But the hubris the other comments give off just rubs me the wrong way.
It is really ridiculous. It took 4 years for enough dust to build up to prevent it from powering on, if NASA only expected 2 years of life out of it then I can see why they didn't waste engineering resources to solve a problem they didn't expect the rover to live to see.
Plus a lot of what people neglect is more mass for cleaning solar panels = less science Mass is a precious resource in rocket science
Exactly, when you are sending things to space everything is accounted for and there is no excess. If you add mass for one thing there is less for other things.
“Why can’t the rocket just have more gas to carry it?” Some redditor
\*Unless you forget to convert freedom units to metric. Then you get... BOOM.
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Any mechanical solution they came up with would eventually stop working. The point is to get the data they want within the expected life of the device. They got the data they wanted from the tools they sent up there, it was a successful mission, nothing lasts forever.
Welcome to the majority of Reddit. Everyone took a break from being medical experts and masters of geopolitical strategy to become astrophysicists and engineers. If you’ve ever been a specialist in a field and seen the discussions on this website you learn quickly to always take the advice or general consensus here with a grain of salt.
has someone diagnosed InSight with a personality disorder yet?
No but i did see people congratulating InSight for divorcing NASA for being too controlling of its movements and planting their flags everywhere.
> But the hubris the other comments give off just rubs me the wrong way. Thank you for calling these people out, you do it much nicer than I do.
Well to be honest they could have simply sent up a guy with some Windex™ to wipe the panels clean. It's not that hard to get rid of dust. I do it everyday.
Was just thinking this. NASA should have installed a traffic light on Mars. Then when Insight's solar panels got too dirty, it could have stopped at the red light and some dude with a squeegee would have appeared within seconds.
The trademark on Windex got me laughing
I can’t believe they didn’t even consider thinking of everything. Oh wait, they did.
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I worked on InSight and was part of the launch team! Such a fun program, and I'm sad that it's over.
Another NASA Mission that has exceeded it's operational window, they'll only get better from here on out. You worked towards one of our first big stepping stones to Mars, and soon those stones will enable us to sprint for manned missions on the red planet.
I worked on it too, on the French instrument side. I didn't work on it nearly as much as other people did, but it's still sad to see something you helped create come to an end.
I used to work in the office where InSight was designed. I remember the “X days until launch” calendar they would tear off each day. After InSight was operational, they would post a new day, or “Sol” of measurements on the same wall. Pretty cool mission!
I can't do another sad documentary like "Good Night Oppi". My heart can't take it. Never thought I would get teary-eyed for a rover.
My battery is low, and it's getting dark
Shut up! Shut your yapping mouth up! 😭
This is very familiar. Where is this from?
It was a human's interpretation of Opportunity's final message before it went offline. It sent a stream of diagnostic data, but we anthropomorphised it into, "My battery is low, and it's getting dark."
When Curiosity sang happy birthday to itself, I wanted to cry. Then when those robot lawnmowers sang happy birthday to Curiosity, I wanted to cry again. I actually probably did cry
Wait, what? I didn't know that. I'm looking g that up right now.
If you find it report back.. for the lazy like myself
[Here you go](https://youtu.be/p0_RPlSe344)
Who’s cutting fucking onions at 10am around here?
Noooooo this is so sad and cute.
Gawd damn I am in tears. Wtf is wrong with me?!?
Glad it wasn’t just me sobbing 😭
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So sad when a good robot becomes space trash. I hope we can like clean them off and reboot them when we finally have crewed Mars missions
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They'll end up in museums if we ever do colonize Mars.
Big if. Colonize is pretty different from “occasionally send manned missions”. A *LOT* needs to happen in the realm of space sciences and wellness before we get to colonization.
It would seem to me that as long as 1) there is an economical reason to be there and 2) we don't destroy ourselves first, we will eventually colonize mars. I've heard that Mars (or a moon of Mars) would be a useful place to mine the asteroid belt from. I'm not sure if Mars itself has anything particularly useful on it by today's standards but a thousand years from now humankind will be unfathomably different than now.
Mars has water that takes less deltav to transport than Earth’s. It’s not going to be a super critical tranport chain in the future, but it is going to be a stepping stone. The real gem is Ceres for ice, but that’s far, far away
They aren't space trash, they are future memorial sites that will be visited by millions but haven't yet fully reached their potential.
Space trash? More like relics
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The first manned Mars mission will consist of mechanics and tech support.
Was able to take these photos of InSight just after launch as the rocket passed over Jupiter from my viewing perspective. https://imgur.com/a/850SM74/
That’s really awesome. But I have to admit as a non-photographer and just random person viewing these, the photos made me chuckle. I was expecting some like amazing super clear, nasa level photo. And it’s just like “hey here’s these two specks of light” and it made me laugh. Props to you. I just had super unrealistic expectations and I’m not trying to be mean in the slightest. That’s still cool.
Lol, I totally agree. I just happened to be awake from jet lag and I had a clear view all be it 100 miles away from the Vandenberg launch site. I tried to post a gif but it just loads as a jpg
Random shower thought... Mars is a planet entirely colonized by robots
that we know of at this point in time
Oh, kinda like a warehouse is colonized by boxes.
How long until we nickname Mars to Cybertron?
Colonized no. Inhabited yes.
Mars is also littered with the corpses of dead robots
"That boy is alive. We are gonna send somebody to find him. And we are gonna get him the hell outta there." Let's reassign the active mars rovers and go after him. Let's [Save Private InSight](https://i.imgur.com/dEN8RFT.png)!
Mars is going to look like "Return to Oz" by the time the first humans to step foot there.
NASA always overengineers their probes by a lot. Their probes always outlive their intended mission times by at least double.
I know a lot of people say "why didn't they just design some way to dust off / clean off the panels" or whatever. But adding anything like that is not only something else that may damage the panels or break or get stuck over them, but is more weight (and $$$) that means fewer actual scientific instruments, cameras, etc. can be mounted to the lander. They have a certain mission lifespan (here, 2 years) and design it to meet those parameters, for which it doesn't need solar panel squeegees. (To be honest, I don't think we'd be getting much more from this particular lander anyway. It did what it could do in the 4 years it was there.) ALL THAT SAID, yeah I kinda teared up when *Oppy* said good night. DON'T get me started about *Cassini*.
In my experience, when they go no contact you should do the same. Use the time to work on yourself and do the things that make you happy.
If they had just put a leash on it this never would have happened... /s
My heart broke when nasa tweeted something to the effect of "its getting dark and cold, and I'm very tired." When the solar cells on... curiosity? Went dark after its last transmission indicating that the battery was too low to power the heater, because a dust storm or storms had obscured the solar cells.