Space Nerds (Page 5 of 14)

Since manned spaceflight is a lot harder, rising to the challenges it sets and finding solutions arguably (or is that ideally?) leads to greater advances. It's also a lot more inspiring and exciting, meaning that it's more attractive to young scientists, engineers etc. to get into it.

You can only do so much with robots, and their limitations become more apparent the further away they are. So on Mars, where signals have about a 40-minute round trip, new instructions to the robot take up valuable time. Granted, you can just plan for longer missions but imagine a human just making that decision to go and pick up that specific rock right there spontaneously. The human, as trained geologist, can also recogise  which rocks are useful and more importantly be able to place them in their geological context. The best example is the moon Genesis Rock, would any robot have found that? Probably not.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1380406/

This has not changed, not today and not tomorrow.

Humans looking at a situation in person will ALWAYS be better than a robot. The amount of work that a robot with a human team back on earth can do in an hour compared to a single human with the training and skills. No question.

Last edited by BigDamnArtist (2012-08-01 22:54:41)

It's the fable of the tortoise and hare.

Sure, once you're on the surface, man craps all over robot.

But given the MUCH longer development time for manned over robots, Team Robot has already a 20 year head start.

And if each team had the same amount of money, then Team Robot can deploy 20,30,50 (some say 100) robots for every manned mission.

Name any budget - big or small. You'll get more science data from robots, not man. Manned missions waste too much budget on life support systems, redundancy, PR, and having to return to Earth. And the gap between capabilities is hopefully closing, despite the glacial pace of AI research. Robots can work 24/7 in extreme radiation environments with detectors that operate outside normal senses.

Yes, manned missions have political benefits. Sure, they're inspirational. And you can't put a value on that. But if you care purely about the science, then robot beats man when factoring in project time, safety and budget.

How much for one manned mission to Mars? $500B? Probably more. After all, look how much the ISS cost. For the SAME money, you have 10 x Curiosity 2.0 rovers on Mars PLUS major Cassini-class orbiters around ALL the planets and major moons, the Terrestrial Planet Finder, balloons in Titan's atmosphere & Venus' atmosphere, floating probes on Titan's lakes, ice-core driller on Europa and Enceladus, etc.

What'll it be? You can have one Chinese man plant a flag on Mars or you can flood the solar system with probes?

Obviously in an ideal world, it'd be nice to have both manned & unmanned, but given finite budgetary constraints, I'll take robots every time as you can have more of them deployed in more difficult, exotic and interesting areas.

Anyway, that's my little rant. And I'm a big AI skeptic.

All I want, really, out of a future space program, is for someone to come up with a way to get to Europa's ocean. Forget space stations, forget Mars landings, forget everything else. Let's see if there's fish down there.

Humans can only carry a limited amount of equipment with them. Less, actually because of all the weight they themselves take up, together with their bulky life support systems. So the same restrictions apply. All the best mass spectrometers and electron microscopes are going to be on Earth, so all Mars astronauts are actually doing is selecting the best samples. In principle a robot can do that too - controlled by humans on Earth examining the candidates. Sure, it's a slower process, but you do visit more interesting, more difficult to get to sites by sending robots. The best sample collections sites might be too difficult to land humans onto.

If humans are so great, why aren't we sending humans to Mars? 150lb sacks of water that need oxygen, whose bones disintegrate with protracted zero-g, vulnerable to cosmic radiation, the need to return to Earth, etc. Even if there was a manned program greenlit tomorrow, it'd be 2030 before we actually landed at a cost of many hundreds of billions. Curiosity took 6-odd years and a couple of billion. With mass production, that could be 1-2 years at <$1B.

What is it that humans are actually supposed to do in space? Surely more than collect rocks? Colonise? Not in our great-great-great grandchildren's lifetime. Not with the technology we have at the moment.

If your argument is that sending humans will develop new technologies, then so will sending probes to Titan, Venus, Enceladus, Europa, etc. That'll also entail new propulsion systems, etc.

Apollo took up a MASSIVE amount of USA GDP. Had the same resources been put into remote-controlled rovers, you could have got more samples for your buck. Much more.

That's not true. Most of our knowledge of the solar system has come from robots. Hubble is a robot. Viking, Voyager, Cassini, Galileo, Magellan, MER, and dozens more are all robots, all returning quality information. How long could a human last in Jupiter's radiation belt? Or on the surface of Venus? Even on the Moon they were restricted in how far they could venture from the lander and how long they could be on the surface. Bulky suits, limited 02, multiple visors, low gravity, and thick gloves restrict humans significantly.

Apollo astronauts were also lucky not to get hit by any CME from the Sun. Once we leave Earth's van Allen belts, we are sitting ducks to all the dangerous shit out there: high energy protons, gamma rays, micrometeorites, etc.

Okay, tell us some practical realistic things humans can do on the surface of Mars that robots can't in principle also do? Remember, Apollo astronauts deployed experiments on the surface and collected rocks - they didn't actually perform any experiments themselves. The labs back on Earth are where the real testing actually takes place.

Agreed. I don't think we'll be getting autonomous robots anytime soon. Better resolution cameras, more instruments, long-life power supply, more communications bandwidth, etc. My arguments are not based on impending AI, but robots as remote-controlled sensor platforms with humans making all the intellectual decisions back in the office at JPL.

For the best chance at life detection we need the TPF mission to examine exoplanet atmospheres (NASA cancelled it due to lack of funds from Congress), an ice-drilling rig on Europa, a few rovers & drilling platforms on Mars, ice drilling on Enceladus and a return to Titan can't hurt either.

It's unclear whether faint spectral signatures from exoplanet atmospheres can definitely pinpoint the presence of life. We can see trace amounts of methane in Mars, but there could be an inorganic cause. And that's next door. So seeing a few photons that may be methane or oxygen around another star will be tantilizing at best.

As for Europa, NASA would probably need to first send an orbiter. Then a lander. Then a driller. And each one would take 10-20 years. It's so frustratingly slow. I can remember when MER landed on Mars in 2004, JPL were saying that they were only geologist rovers but the next generation of rovers would look for life. But Phoenix didn't look for life. And Curiosity is not looking for life either...

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/video/index.cfm?id=1095

What's the optimism / pessimism here on the forums on it landing safely?

Odds on a perfect flawless landing? Like MER Opportunity.
Odds on something going wrong with the sky crane? Back-shell?
Cables don't detach cleanly? Sky crane lands on top of the rover. One descent rocket malfunctions?
Rover's wheels don't deploy and MSL lands on its belly? Lands on rock? Over-turned?
Lands but software fault (like MER Spirit's landing) causes communications black-out?
Total black-out from entry onwards - no one knows what happened (like Beagle II in 2003)
Lands but can't move? MSL is now a stationery weather platform. Like Phoenix?

At least MSL is big enough that if something did go wrong, MRO should be able to image it.

But I'm hoping it lands perfectly and starts climbing that mountain. Maybe NASA will then greenlight several more v2.0 rovers using the same landing system, for half the price.

Of course, I'd love to send both robots and humans everywhere. Once you're on the ground, humans can collect an interesting rock in 10 minutes that would take a robot 3 days. But the development times and opportunity costs are so prohibitive that you sacrifice so much science when you send a fragile human in a big capsule & cumbersome suit.

My argument for robots over manned are predicated on two assumptions: (1) all we care about is science data, (2) the current level of technology. Given these two assumptions, we will get more science data from robots than from humans on ANY given budget.

If it's a small budget, then you can't even send humans. If it's a massive $Trillion budget, then you can flood the solar system with probes around every planet/moon, atmosphere, lake, major asteroid, etc. Three astronauts on ONE safe location on Mars collecting rocks OR 100 probes throughout the solar system investigating all sorts of environments? Surely if you care about the science and your recognize the opportunity cost i.e. what you COULD HAVE sent for the same cost as a manned mission, there is no contest.

If the objective is something OTHER than science i.e. national prestige, inspiration, leaving Earth due to ecological catastrophe, etc, then sure, I agree.

And if there's a radical breakthrough in technology e.g.. artificial gravity, some exotic anti-matter propulsion system that enables us to reach Mars in days not months, or perfect shielding, etc, then sure I also agree, that could swing the equation in humans' favour.

But to paraphrase Mark Zuckerberg in Social Network, "...you really don't need a forensics team to get to the bottom of this. If humans were better than robots, we'd be sending humans"

NASA re-Tweeted this...

"Life is about movies; anything else is a bonus!"- Me   

An AMA with a 97to that worked all the apollo missions and a bunch of other stuff. Thought you guys would like.

(I haven't had a chance to actually read through any of it, so if it sucks, sorry )

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/x … issions_1/

Last edited by BigDamnArtist (2012-08-05 01:20:15)

Not exactly. Because of the precision timing necessary of relaying the confirmation signal through Mars Odyssey  and then back to earth. It's possible for the landing to be off by a couple seconds and the two will miss each other. They've said, that if after 24 hours after landing they still haven't received the signal, that's when they start thinking about failure scenarios, until then it's just a waiting game for the satellite to come back around to pick up the signal.

KurtJMac has actually done a pretty in depth walkthrough of the whole landing procedure and what we can expect for the landing.

Last edited by BigDamnArtist (2012-08-05 23:33:23)

Woohoo! Cowabunga etc.

They landed ok (as most folks in the US timezone are probably already aware!)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19144464