Must not forget about Opportunity! Likely one of the only tings done by a government entity that actually worked for the money spent on it!
btw I’ve been wondering (and I saw it asked elsewhere) why doesn’t NASA ever put full motion 3D cameras on these rovers?
Can you imagine the money they could make back by recording a drive on Mars and putting it in theaters worldwide? They could make back 45% or more of the cost of the mission in ticket sales.
btw I’ve been wondering (and I saw it asked elsewhere) why doesn’t NASA ever put full motion 3D cameras on these rovers?
Bandwidth, storage, and equipment. Bandwidth between here and Mars primarily, but onboard storage and equipment are big factors, because what you see now was in testing back in 2007-2008 and even then that was based on older/proven technology and equipment. That kind of stuff is not off-the-shelf. They may have some off-the-wall solutions to things, but they like using proven technology that's been tested over several years.
Popular Mechanics has a
pretty good article about the problem with space hardware and how hardware limitations are actually good at times since it limits what can go wrong
But Massey said the hardest part about running Voyager 1 and 2, besides the great distance, is that most of the people who designed and operated the Voyager craft in the late 1970s have now gone. "New people have to learn old technology," he said. That turns off some scientists from working on the mission, he said, but it draws in others who are excited about the opportunity to work with the vintage computing systems that operate two of the most famous space missions in history.
Each Voyager has three computer systems, with a combined total of around 64k of memory. "The amount of computing power it has is far less that the two gig memory stick you carry around," he told PM. Sometimes, he said, he wishes that the Voyagers carried modern computer chips and memory. That would make his life a lot easier, he said, and the Voyager mission might have been able to take far more photographs if the crafts had more memory and could store images digitally, rather than on tape. But, he said, the old-fashioned computers get the job done, beaming the first close-ups of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune back to Earth.
Brissenden agreed: "Sometimes simple is good." Chandra's two-decades old computer system has only 768k of memory, he said, but with all the things that could go wrong with a machine in space, that's not such a bad thing. And Hendrix said the Hubble team is on the same page. Even though NASA can send astronauts up to Hubble, we can't exactly upgrade the system to 2008 computer and electrical technology. When the space shuttle Atlantis finally reaches Hubble, the crew plans to install a backup version of the Science Instrument Control and Data Handling unit (SICDH) and a slate of other upgrades, but the 486 chip will remain. While Hubble's dated hardware probably couldn't run World of Warcraft, Hendrix says that the telescope's computer systems do exactly what they need to do. "It's really reliable," she said. "There really is no need to upgrade it."