Quote from: Space Ghost 1962 on 01/01/2015 07:06 pmSo by "predictions" you mean "rate of progression of travel". Took it to mean "science predictions".These were absurdly high to begin with, to justify the "nuclear" power instead of solar. At one point banking much on driving through the night. How do you do science while driving through the night? Personally expected a fractional improvement over Opportunity/Spirit, while also a decrease due to a more elaborate science package requiring more "non driving time". There are political aspects to missions that intrude on reality. I would class this under that. They were absurdly high in retrospect, but they were widely believed. These illustrate much of the absurd expectations people have of robotic surface exploration. Political aspects should not lead to people lying. I would go to self deception or simply being wrong. And it should be a lesson for the future. Robotic rover missions, especially future ones, will be oversold. It’s happened with the 2020 rover already and continues to happen with Curiosity for the extended mission
So by "predictions" you mean "rate of progression of travel". Took it to mean "science predictions".These were absurdly high to begin with, to justify the "nuclear" power instead of solar. At one point banking much on driving through the night. How do you do science while driving through the night? Personally expected a fractional improvement over Opportunity/Spirit, while also a decrease due to a more elaborate science package requiring more "non driving time". There are political aspects to missions that intrude on reality. I would class this under that.
QuoteQuote from: Dalhousie on 01/01/2015 12:01 am...although the Moon has been doing quite well in the past ten years or so!Hardly - cheap missions. No American lander/rover. Chinese with Yutu rover best example. "Precision bombing" didn't yield as much science product as humor... I don’t care whether a mission is American or not. The mission may have been cheap, but have been enormously successful and transformed many aspects of lunar science.
Quote from: Dalhousie on 01/01/2015 12:01 am...although the Moon has been doing quite well in the past ten years or so!Hardly - cheap missions. No American lander/rover. Chinese with Yutu rover best example. "Precision bombing" didn't yield as much science product as humor...
...although the Moon has been doing quite well in the past ten years or so!
The “Precision bombing" didn't yield as much science product as humor... completely missed me, I’m sorry.
Ames Research Center is go for the first precision bombing run on the moon.
If you want high-powered instruments on Mars, then send high-powered (and less-flimsy) instruments to Mars. There is no need to send people to operate them - the cost would be many orders of magnitude greater because the people would probably want to come back, require lots of Oxygen and Food and DVDs of "Three's Company" while they are there, etc etc.
Quote from: ThereIWas3 on 01/01/2015 05:18 pmIf you want high-powered instruments on Mars, then send high-powered (and less-flimsy) instruments to Mars. There is no need to send people to operate them - the cost would be many orders of magnitude greater because the people would probably want to come back, require lots of Oxygen and Food and DVDs of "Three's Company" while they are there, etc etc.No way is it many orders of magnitude - once you add in the greatly increased power budget and thus greatly increased mass... the far less capable Curiosity is already like $2.5 billion and I don't think a manned mission would cost $250 billion if done sensibly. (Possibly quite a lot less.)
As I keep asking, come up with numbers that show what is required to provide equivalent science return unmanned to what a crewed mission can do. Numbers, please, not invocation of fantasy robots.
Quote from: Dalhousie on 01/01/2015 09:18 pmAs I keep asking, come up with numbers that show what is required to provide equivalent science return unmanned to what a crewed mission can do. Numbers, please, not invocation of fantasy robots.Fantasy robots vs fantasy ECLSS with fantasy rockets with fantasy SEPs with fantasy MAVs and ERVs and NTRs and cryo prop management and nuclear surface reactors and a looot of other pixie dust. Its all basically a good hard sci-fi story.Because its an interesting thought exercise, at some point i'll probably write up my ideas what a technology capability driven Mars exploration program would look like but you will be disappointed - couple of first launch windows would go to 100% enabling technology development with absolutely minimal science returns.
Quote from: savuporo on 01/02/2015 03:37 am Quote from: Dalhousie on 01/01/2015 09:18 pmAs I keep asking, come up with numbers that show what is required to provide equivalent science return unmanned to what a crewed mission can do. Numbers, please, not invocation of fantasy robots.Fantasy robots vs fantasy ECLSS with fantasy rockets with fantasy SEPs with fantasy MAVs and ERVs and NTRs and cryo prop management and nuclear surface reactors and a looot of other pixie dust. Its all basically a good hard sci-fi story.Because its an interesting thought exercise, at some point i'll probably write up my ideas what a technology capability driven Mars exploration program would look like but you will be disappointed - couple of first launch windows would go to 100% enabling technology development with absolutely minimal science returns.If you are not prepared to do the work then I suggest you stop arguing a position for which you have neither the evidence or the wiliness to defend . I suggest you defer to those who have the numbers and the experience from both the human and the robotic end. If you are not prepared to do the numbers then I suggest as a minimum you come up with three Mars or lunar scientists who think that crewed missions are not desirable or needed. With either links or references
So according to this, a spacesuited human is 25x more effective than a robot controlled from Earth. Of course when making a comparison to manned Mars exploration one has to take into account that robots can be operated for several years and multiple robotic missions can target different sites of interest on the planet.
If you spent half of the budget for a manned mission to mars on unmanned missions, I believe you would got many times more science for the money. Anybody can hand wave cheaper manned missions or more capable robots. The ISS cost what 100B dollars? I don't believe a mars mission could be done for five times that, not by government contractors anyway.
How long would this manned mission dwell on the surface, a few months at most?
Would science even allow a manned mission before we know what damage we would cause by contaminating the planet with humans and their byproducts?
Let's get back on to the subject of this thread, which is the article, which isn't a honey pot for the anti-HSF gang.
Well over 600 samples have been analyzed with the ChemCam; once a mineral has been identified the laser is apparently pretty accurate in identifying it without full analysis.
Signal latency is indeed a major limitation in both rover movement and sample selection. One way to overcome this obstacle without humans at Mars is with improved artificial intelligence to allow autonomous rover movement and sample selection. Curiosity's computational power, although impressive for a radiation-hardened spacecraft (400MIPS, 256 kB of EEPROM, 256 MB of DRAM, and 2 GB of flash memory), is minimal compared to a modern cell phone, let alone typical autonomous vehicles like the Google car, but NASA is the only government agency that operates robots at distances too great for teleoperation, and NASA should be leading the way in the development of AI for exploration. We will need it, unless we plan to send humans to Europa, Titan and maybe Pluto in the near future. If we achieve it, the productivity of all rovers on any celestial body will be greatly improved.
Quote from: Torbjorn Larsson, OM on 12/31/2014 03:10 amI have to disagree. The article is very astute.Interesting comment, thanks, although I am not necessarily convinced. The fact that life emerged very early is a good indicator, but statistically speaking doesn't say very much. Can you please write some references regarding what you says?
I have to disagree. The article is very astute.
I remember a paper some years ago (cannot find it anymore but I discussed about it very much) talking about the fact that DNA/RNA could be the only chemical mechanism available to guarantee certain characteristics of life. This is important because it means we could at least "recognize" alien life and apply standard tests to verify its existence.
Typically you don't use definitions to recognize life anymore than you do to recognize rocks or species. You have to differentiate, as Noffke does for fossils.There are more or less unique properties of life though:- Species are products of the life process (evolution; Darwin's definition). Therefore you can test populations (but not individuals) for that.- Organisms are persistent. (Schroedinger's definition; Pross's take on the topological stability that exponential replication confer.) You can test for that.- Organisms are irreversible. (Haldane's definition; Pross's take on the thermodynamics of replication.) You can test for that, but there are confusions.- Organisms are based on a genetic ancestry of RNA (most likely; England's research on the thermodynamics of replication). As I understand it, the variants of nucleotides are strictly set by RNA replication and catalysis to be 4 and those 4 out of 8 possible. [There is a good Quora response to that effect.] We happen to use the 4 that are more or less most easy to produce chemically I think.- Cells vibrate. (The new nano-beam test for collections of live cells. Bacteria use pumps in/out and flagella (some); archaea and eukaryotes use internal actins and tubulins to reconfigure, move (some species), divide, ... Of course some archaea has archella and some eukaryotes cilia to move.) Again: tests and confusions.
Quote from: Torbjorn Larsson, OM on 01/08/2015 11:45 amTypically you don't use definitions to recognize life anymore than you do to recognize rocks or species. You have to differentiate, as Noffke does for fossils.There are more or less unique properties of life though:- Species are products of the life process (evolution; Darwin's definition). Therefore you can test populations (but not individuals) for that.- Organisms are persistent. (Schroedinger's definition; Pross's take on the topological stability that exponential replication confer.) You can test for that.- Organisms are irreversible. (Haldane's definition; Pross's take on the thermodynamics of replication.) You can test for that, but there are confusions.- Organisms are based on a genetic ancestry of RNA (most likely; England's research on the thermodynamics of replication). As I understand it, the variants of nucleotides are strictly set by RNA replication and catalysis to be 4 and those 4 out of 8 possible. [There is a good Quora response to that effect.] We happen to use the 4 that are more or less most easy to produce chemically I think.- Cells vibrate. (The new nano-beam test for collections of live cells. Bacteria use pumps in/out and flagella (some); archaea and eukaryotes use internal actins and tubulins to reconfigure, move (some species), divide, ... Of course some archaea has archella and some eukaryotes cilia to move.) Again: tests and confusions.Spiegel & al. 2012 is a very interesting paper indeed. I was thinking to try something like that but had not enough understanding of the issue (and time) for that. Still reading... Those above are unique properties of life on Earth. But what let you assume this are also necessary to alien life? You write that RNA is "most likely" in particular. On what you base that? Any reference?