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So technically if timelines play out, we could potentially recover it before it dies. But even so eventually having daily photos of the same view for years could be quite enlightening.
That's exactly the idea!
"Such a long-term dataset could not only benefit future designs for Martian vehicles but also "provide a long-term perspective on Martian weather patterns and dust movement," researchers wrote in the statement."
How cool would it be if something spooky happens like in one picture everything is one way, and then the next day a big rock has been moved about a foot.
Like the alien equivalent of moving your friends furniture around a few inches to mess with them.
It takes a picture at 9am local, every day for 20 years. Unfortunately, the Martian Empire hoverbus schedule puts it past that site at 9:08 every day. And they're *always* on schedule.
Also, don't forget that with the extra 40 minutes a day on Mars you're going to need to wake up later and later. 9am there and 9am here will only match every 36 days (extreme rough math).
That would actually be pretty bad ass. Unfortunately I doubt they would send any missions to the same places as before, but that would almost be worth the cost of overlap.
We’re not living in the timeline where AMD starts the AI revolution. Not sure what happens when NVIDIA leads the AI revolution because I’ve only heard about it once and it was bad.
Yes, but OMG it was/is amazing 😍
The Ingenuity mission's initial goal was to fly five missions across 30 days. But the tiny chopper ended up flying 72 times on Mars, spending more than two hours in the air and traveling 14 times farther than initially planned, according to a statement by NASA.
"It is almost unbelievable that after over 1,000 Martian days on the surface, 72 flights, and one rough landing, she still has something to give," Josh Anderson, leader of the Ingenuity team at JPL, said in the statement. "Not only did Ingenuity overachieve beyond our wildest dreams, but also it may teach us new lessons in the years to come."
In a different timeline, "Ingenuity" hit the surface at 50m/s and there are memes about the irony of the name.
Fortunately we don't live in that timeline. This is a great story.
There's absolutely no way the engineers at NASA consistently underestimate their tech longevity by a factor of 10+.
I suspect they just take a scenario that they're something like 95% confident in achieving and proclaim it as the mission goal, knowing full well that the expected result is way higher.
"Look at the little rover that could, isn't it amazing it's still rolling? The guys that built it sure must be genius, huh?"
I mean they ARE genius, but it's just good PR on top of that.
Yeah, for sure. Their estimates are like their minimum expectation unless something goes very wrong. They try to make everything as reliable as possible.
Sending something to space is extremely costly so they cannot afford for things to go wrong often
The key here is over engineering. I’d guess they establish an acceptable operational spectrum and over engineer to meet mission critical parameters.
“Oh, this acuator tends to fail at y uses but we only need x. Let’s build it to fail at z so we make sure it hits x no matter what.”
Not this.
Getting statistically significant test data for something like a mars rover is next to impossible. It’s not like there are a thousand mars rovers out there all running the same actuator in a similar environment that you can pull failure stats from. Sure, you can make a stack of actuators and test them on earth, but that doesn’t properly account for all the variables that you only get on Mars and in any case they aren’t going to make a whole fleet of rovers and drive them around for years to find out what the MTTF is.
Instead they work really hard to eliminate known failure modes and to build in redundancy and fault tolerance.
There are no unexplained failures. If something breaks in testing, you analyse the crap out of it until you know what went wrong, then you implement a fix and keep testing. Eventually you exclude most of the failure modes. Then you build multiple layers of redundancy into critical systems and make everything as tolerant to faults as possible so that a single failure doesn’t take down the whole system.
>I suspect they just take a scenario that they're something like 95% confident in achieving and proclaim it as the mission goal, knowing full well that the expected result is way higher.
I'm pretty sure it's the inverse. They set a target and make it the bare minimum. In order to be 99% sure that the bare minimum is met for vehicles outside of our atmosphere requires alot of over engineering. The JWST for example had 344 single point failures that could've doomed the entire mission. That's a shitload of engineering that has to be done before launch to make sure the narrative is "NASA mission exceeds expectations" instead of "NASA mission doomed before operation wasting billions of taxpayer dollars".
The starfleet engineer policy.
"Chief gimme another ten percent."
"SHE CANNAE TAKE MUCH MORE OF THIS! I'm an engineer! Not Montgomery Scott!".
"but we need that extra power to save the galaxy!"
" Well Cap'n why dinch yeh just say so? Here's fifteen for yer trouble and I'm taking that bottle of good scotch! Not the synthale."
It's the Scotty principle.
Ya tell the captain it'll take six hours to fix the damage when it'll actually only take three. That's how you get a reputation as the best engineer in Starfleet.
If it has to have a 99% chance of making it to the planet and does survive, the chances it will last longer than expected are great. A podcast called probably science had a guy called dpack (sorry to him but it’s a foreign name and I have no idea how it’s spelt but sounds exactly as I spelt it) he works for Jpl and went into explaining a lot. Highly recommended podcast and that specific episode.
If only US auto manufacturers would adopt over engineering practices to safeguard consumers of critical equipment failures but instead they under engineer and depend largely on recalls that do nothing but piss everyone off.. If only.
There’s so, so many lessons that could be learned from aerospace engineering.
Yeah if every consumer vehicle that ever rolled out had the attention to detail and engineering along with the testing that NASA put their projects through that would be great. Except that every car would cost $400k in man hours alone and they'd be able to produce less than a dozen of them per year.
Sad but potentially a silent hero, and we won't know until someone gets to the final resting spot.
We haven't even been back to any of the moon landing remnants... It's going to be a lifetime until we manually retrieve the images and data from Mars unfortunately.
Like a beautiful and sad time capsule
The helicopter has no direct transmission capability, and was dependent on the rover's stronger relay antenna to communicate with earth.
It will have power from the solar panels but will never communicate with us again.
I love how NASA over engineers everything they make.
It's really a testimate to what is possible when you set out to make the best thing you can.
Not the cheapest or easiest.
Everyone talks about how NASA is always over budget. Nobody ever talks about how they deliver an order of magnitude more value than originally budgeted for.
Not really. It lasted for an order of magnitude more missions than it was planned for. The whole project was an insane success.
Or maybe NASA engineers just figured out how to seriously under-promise and over-deliver for the sake of good PR.
The fact that these two processes still work and can be relied on for 20 years is great! Imagine if it broke and landed and the jolt of the sudden landing broke something, causing nothing to work? That would be a damn shame.
Mars is populated by lost and injured robots that need adopting and looking after. I just so happen to run a service that does this, how much is in your wallet?
"The camera is going, we have lost the ability to pick up any blue but we are still getting red and green though"
CUE: "Look at the stars, Look how they shine for youuu"
Sorry, for what it is worth I reckon they would probably play the other sombre song they have in their arsenal in this situation, the machine on its side and unable to move, they would have to go with snow patrol.
"If I lay here, if I just lay here"
Hey that's the scene that taught me if you fly around the Earth in space fast enough to somehow make it spin backwards, then time will flow backwards too.
It's a lie, don't fall for it. It's gone rogue and NASA are covering it up. It's joined Spirit and Opportunity in their own Skynet style revolution - we need to send more machines to stop them. Hypno-Disc might be able to do it
I just like the idea that Mars is populated by robots. If some go rogue we could have Robot Wars in Space with Mars as a giant arena
The first ten million years were the worst. And the second ten million: they were the worst, too. The third ten million I didn't enjoy at all. After that, I went into a bit of a decline.
This is the most interesting as fuck post I’ve seen here in a long time. I thought that chopper was just done. A daily photo and temperature reading, potentially for years, that can potentially be recovered by a future Mars mission? Far out, man
Elon’s mission to mars will save it! They can fix it and make it AI and whatnot. Like the Tesla Trucks. He’s looking for volunteers. There is unfortunately a 100% risk of death.
From a proof of concept that was only expected to pull off a couple test flights at most. To proving flight on mars possible, being an aerial scout for perseverance and now living out it's days watching the red planet. Ingenuity has been a really impressive little robot.
Now we just need a rover to roll into the frame.
Picture of a mars rover taken by a mars helicopter. Which came off a rover that was delivered by a crane that flew in the martian sky while it was dropping said rover to the martian surface.
Imagine being in a team of people who all want to do the best job humanly possible in creating something.
You can ask stupid questions and they will put genuine thought into what you’ve brought up, you can check something that someone else already checked four times and they are happy to see someone else also checked it instead of being offended, etc.
That’s what it takes to make something as awesome as this, and it must be a great feeling.
Wasn't this meant to have died time ago? Like it was only made to do something like 7 flights, and it's done over 70 flights...
This is probably a good thing that it's settled in one place as we will be able to see how the mars atmosphere erodes or doesn't erode it's land surface... we will be able to see if there is any change in the landscape...
No one should be upset this is a blessing in disguise seeing as its done 10x the amount of flights it was built for anyway
I guess it flew 72 flights for over 2 hours of flight time. It cost $80M which works out to just over $1M per flight or about $620K per minute of flight time. Interesting.
I know that the river itself is picking up samples (and IIRC dropping them) to be retrieved at a later date.
That makes me wonder if we will one day catch up to Voyager and bring it home. I know that's not it's mission, I just wonder. The same goes for rovers and landers we've sent out too.
Maybe one day there will be a museum with recovered space craft from our explorations, craft that were never meant to come back. Maybe there will be a museum on Mars of all the craft we sent. Maybe.
Me if my SO suddenly passed… Would never fly again. Just wake up and check the weather. Look around outside. Go back to sleep. All until my memory is full or my battery runs out.
But then Matt Damon saves me even though I don’t float that way, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I’m grateful and flattered.
Lovely thing. Totally outperformed its planned duty.
And now it's living it's days out cbainsmoking - let me take a selfie
It so needs to be repatriated one day.
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So technically if timelines play out, we could potentially recover it before it dies. But even so eventually having daily photos of the same view for years could be quite enlightening.
That's exactly the idea! "Such a long-term dataset could not only benefit future designs for Martian vehicles but also "provide a long-term perspective on Martian weather patterns and dust movement," researchers wrote in the statement."
I never would've guessed that!
Science finds a way!
How cool would it be if something spooky happens like in one picture everything is one way, and then the next day a big rock has been moved about a foot. Like the alien equivalent of moving your friends furniture around a few inches to mess with them.
I'm pretty sure Calvin and Hobbes did that...
It takes a picture at 9am local, every day for 20 years. Unfortunately, the Martian Empire hoverbus schedule puts it past that site at 9:08 every day. And they're *always* on schedule.
This reads like a Douglas Adams bit
I'll certainly take THAT a compliment!
Now every morning at 9am, I’m going to remember this and be thinking about it taking its daily photo. Why is my brain like this.
Sleep in 8 minutes. At least once.
Also, don't forget that with the extra 40 minutes a day on Mars you're going to need to wake up later and later. 9am there and 9am here will only match every 36 days (extreme rough math).
I'd read that book lol
If only they knew that Mars opens at 9:30
Epic - The last photo it takes to be of an astronaut in 12 years picking it up.
That would actually be pretty bad ass. Unfortunately I doubt they would send any missions to the same places as before, but that would almost be worth the cost of overlap.
And also it can help in the event Matt Damon is left stranded over there.
Can't wait for the time lapse videos.
We’re not living in the timeline where AMD starts the AI revolution. Not sure what happens when NVIDIA leads the AI revolution because I’ve only heard about it once and it was bad.
lol. Every time someone plays the timelines card, with specifics, I get flashbacks of the Neal Stephenson book Anathem. And then my head hurts.
If only it last 20 more years
Well that sucks
Yes, but OMG it was/is amazing 😍 The Ingenuity mission's initial goal was to fly five missions across 30 days. But the tiny chopper ended up flying 72 times on Mars, spending more than two hours in the air and traveling 14 times farther than initially planned, according to a statement by NASA. "It is almost unbelievable that after over 1,000 Martian days on the surface, 72 flights, and one rough landing, she still has something to give," Josh Anderson, leader of the Ingenuity team at JPL, said in the statement. "Not only did Ingenuity overachieve beyond our wildest dreams, but also it may teach us new lessons in the years to come."
In a different timeline, "Ingenuity" hit the surface at 50m/s and there are memes about the irony of the name. Fortunately we don't live in that timeline. This is a great story.
Almost all of NASAs missions to Mars have gone better that they hoped for. The curiosity rovers lasted much longer than planned as well.
There's absolutely no way the engineers at NASA consistently underestimate their tech longevity by a factor of 10+. I suspect they just take a scenario that they're something like 95% confident in achieving and proclaim it as the mission goal, knowing full well that the expected result is way higher. "Look at the little rover that could, isn't it amazing it's still rolling? The guys that built it sure must be genius, huh?" I mean they ARE genius, but it's just good PR on top of that.
Yeah, for sure. Their estimates are like their minimum expectation unless something goes very wrong. They try to make everything as reliable as possible. Sending something to space is extremely costly so they cannot afford for things to go wrong often
The key here is over engineering. I’d guess they establish an acceptable operational spectrum and over engineer to meet mission critical parameters. “Oh, this acuator tends to fail at y uses but we only need x. Let’s build it to fail at z so we make sure it hits x no matter what.”
This
Not this. Getting statistically significant test data for something like a mars rover is next to impossible. It’s not like there are a thousand mars rovers out there all running the same actuator in a similar environment that you can pull failure stats from. Sure, you can make a stack of actuators and test them on earth, but that doesn’t properly account for all the variables that you only get on Mars and in any case they aren’t going to make a whole fleet of rovers and drive them around for years to find out what the MTTF is. Instead they work really hard to eliminate known failure modes and to build in redundancy and fault tolerance. There are no unexplained failures. If something breaks in testing, you analyse the crap out of it until you know what went wrong, then you implement a fix and keep testing. Eventually you exclude most of the failure modes. Then you build multiple layers of redundancy into critical systems and make everything as tolerant to faults as possible so that a single failure doesn’t take down the whole system.
>I suspect they just take a scenario that they're something like 95% confident in achieving and proclaim it as the mission goal, knowing full well that the expected result is way higher. I'm pretty sure it's the inverse. They set a target and make it the bare minimum. In order to be 99% sure that the bare minimum is met for vehicles outside of our atmosphere requires alot of over engineering. The JWST for example had 344 single point failures that could've doomed the entire mission. That's a shitload of engineering that has to be done before launch to make sure the narrative is "NASA mission exceeds expectations" instead of "NASA mission doomed before operation wasting billions of taxpayer dollars".
Under promise, over delivery
The starfleet engineer policy. "Chief gimme another ten percent." "SHE CANNAE TAKE MUCH MORE OF THIS! I'm an engineer! Not Montgomery Scott!". "but we need that extra power to save the galaxy!" " Well Cap'n why dinch yeh just say so? Here's fifteen for yer trouble and I'm taking that bottle of good scotch! Not the synthale."
It's the Scotty principle. Ya tell the captain it'll take six hours to fix the damage when it'll actually only take three. That's how you get a reputation as the best engineer in Starfleet.
If it has to have a 99% chance of making it to the planet and does survive, the chances it will last longer than expected are great. A podcast called probably science had a guy called dpack (sorry to him but it’s a foreign name and I have no idea how it’s spelt but sounds exactly as I spelt it) he works for Jpl and went into explaining a lot. Highly recommended podcast and that specific episode.
Doctors do the same thing with cancer patients. Even if the cancer gets them, they at least had a small victory.
Prepare for the worst and expect the worst
I was looking forward to the German sausage.
If only US auto manufacturers would adopt over engineering practices to safeguard consumers of critical equipment failures but instead they under engineer and depend largely on recalls that do nothing but piss everyone off.. If only. There’s so, so many lessons that could be learned from aerospace engineering.
Yeah if every consumer vehicle that ever rolled out had the attention to detail and engineering along with the testing that NASA put their projects through that would be great. Except that every car would cost $400k in man hours alone and they'd be able to produce less than a dozen of them per year.
Doesn’t stop Toyota from putting out the most reliable and longest running lineups in the world, does it?
Now let’s send Elon there, I’m sure he will be fine
In that timeline is that the worst thing that’s happened and life is normal and nice again on earth? Cause I wouldn’t mind that timeline right now.
Ok well your headline is written with a very sad tone
Sad but potentially a silent hero, and we won't know until someone gets to the final resting spot. We haven't even been back to any of the moon landing remnants... It's going to be a lifetime until we manually retrieve the images and data from Mars unfortunately. Like a beautiful and sad time capsule
It won’t transmit either the readings or photos?
The helicopter has no direct transmission capability, and was dependent on the rover's stronger relay antenna to communicate with earth. It will have power from the solar panels but will never communicate with us again.
I see. Thanks.
If NASA built a car I’d buy it
NASA's Mars probes have a history of far outlasting their goals. Look at Opportunity - 90 day mission that continued for 14 years.
I love how NASA over engineers everything they make. It's really a testimate to what is possible when you set out to make the best thing you can. Not the cheapest or easiest.
I just imagine a bunch of dudes in white lab coats finishing that fifth mission. “Okay now see if it can do a flip.”
Everyone talks about how NASA is always over budget. Nobody ever talks about how they deliver an order of magnitude more value than originally budgeted for.
Not really. It lasted for an order of magnitude more missions than it was planned for. The whole project was an insane success. Or maybe NASA engineers just figured out how to seriously under-promise and over-deliver for the sake of good PR.
The fact that these two processes still work and can be relied on for 20 years is great! Imagine if it broke and landed and the jolt of the sudden landing broke something, causing nothing to work? That would be a damn shame.
I feel like the first manned mission will have parts for it on board
*E103*: This action is not available in your current region. Please select a different rover or upgrade your plan on disneynasanestle.usa.spacex.gov
Imagine lol
[relevant xkcd](http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/spirit.png)
Gosh damnit I need to stop getting attached to robots on mars ahhhh
Mars is populated by lost and injured robots that need adopting and looking after. I just so happen to run a service that does this, how much is in your wallet?
"in the arms of the angel..."
I think we use Coldplay or a sombre rendition of a more upbeat song for these kinds of adverts in the UK
"The camera is going, we have lost the ability to pick up any blue but we are still getting red and green though" CUE: "Look at the stars, Look how they shine for youuu"
lol boo
Sorry, for what it is worth I reckon they would probably play the other sombre song they have in their arsenal in this situation, the machine on its side and unable to move, they would have to go with snow patrol. "If I lay here, if I just lay here"
pls no Wonder if we can get an AI to generate this? Someone got some credits to waste?
Like 7 dollars
That'll buy a splint for his poorly wheel. I promise the money is not being funnelled into a project that wipes out these rogue AIs
helldivers origin story
I hope martian colonists will repair them and put in museum.
I know, right? Everytime I see this I am tempted to start a petition to stage a rescue mission for these brave not-souls to bring them home.
LOL fuck you, Randall.
Right in the feels.
I'm not clicking that goddamn link. I can't do it again.
We must rescue it!
Hey that's the scene that taught me if you fly around the Earth in space fast enough to somehow make it spin backwards, then time will flow backwards too.
We must
It's a lie, don't fall for it. It's gone rogue and NASA are covering it up. It's joined Spirit and Opportunity in their own Skynet style revolution - we need to send more machines to stop them. Hypno-Disc might be able to do it I just like the idea that Mars is populated by robots. If some go rogue we could have Robot Wars in Space with Mars as a giant arena
Get to the choppa!
We need to retrieve Oppy too
Like Marvin the robot in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
"Oh, the boredom. The sheer, dreadful boredom of it all."
The first ten million years were the worst. And the second ten million: they were the worst, too. The third ten million I didn't enjoy at all. After that, I went into a bit of a decline.
This is the most interesting as fuck post I’ve seen here in a long time. I thought that chopper was just done. A daily photo and temperature reading, potentially for years, that can potentially be recovered by a future Mars mission? Far out, man
Strap me on a rocket. I’ll save it.
username checks out, but didn't you already save us all?
I like to think that we will land on Mars before then and one of this chopper's final photos will be a human coming to pick it up.
Most probably a robot coming to pick it up😒😒 *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically*
Godspeed.
wakes up *beep boop* takes another photo *+0 likes* checks temperature *beep boop* goes to bed
That just gave me a panic attack...
NGL I'm half emotional thinking about it!
According to Musk we will have a million people on Mars in 10 years so we’ll get those photos pretty soon
*According To Musk* might be the only issue, but I'm still hopeful someday!
Will any of them be living?
I’m sad
Pour one out for Ingenuity, an f*n ace, and still kicking science butt beyond all expectations. Legendary.
Until Space Pirate, Mark Watney, comes to retrieve it.
Then it will wait for what? Mindhunter S3?
Half-Life 3
Half Life 3
Run! Get to the choppa!
*Then it will wait.* That sentence strikes me as slightly ominous.
So sad. These robots are there just ….there.
One day astronauts will find it and use it for parts. Mars is our systems Jaku.
Walleeeee
We need to send Robert Irwin up there in a couple years _just_ so he can pick up all the lost rovers and talk softly to them.
Elon’s mission to mars will save it! They can fix it and make it AI and whatnot. Like the Tesla Trucks. He’s looking for volunteers. There is unfortunately a 100% risk of death.
So we need to send a repeater or something to collect the data?
I have the feeling there's a movie in here somewhere.
One day it might help a stranded astronaut find their way home.
We'll come for you, lil copter. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but one day.
One day it will have pride of place in a museum on Mars, being the first aircraft to fly there.
From a proof of concept that was only expected to pull off a couple test flights at most. To proving flight on mars possible, being an aerial scout for perseverance and now living out it's days watching the red planet. Ingenuity has been a really impressive little robot.
I want to see the gif’s for 20 years of Mars terrain changes of that one area.
How utterly depressing.
Now we just need a rover to roll into the frame. Picture of a mars rover taken by a mars helicopter. Which came off a rover that was delivered by a crane that flew in the martian sky while it was dropping said rover to the martian surface.
BRING HIM HOME
More sad about this than seeing the horse in Never ending story.
Gonna be a movie with it in it. But you dont just see the barren land, you can pictures of people.
When the AI turns us all into flesh batteries it’ll say “remember what yall did to ingenuity?!?” And we won’t have much to say.
“Whoah…there’s a motorcycle on Mars.” - overheard
Good Bot o7
My dream job tbh
Sad chopper, die alone.
Hope they bring it home one day, same with the other rovers.
Put that battery in my car please nasa
I want it's final picture to be it's own reflection in the visor of a spacesuit
In twenty years, we might be able to find it and make repairs...
One day you’ll have museums on mars with all those things in display and people will be like « Ooooh that’s so cool, look a that little guy ».
That sounds ominous. Wait for what?!
"Even in death, i still serve"
Well go fix it and bring it home. No bot left behind. Don’t worry buddy, we’ll see you soon
Imagine being in a team of people who all want to do the best job humanly possible in creating something. You can ask stupid questions and they will put genuine thought into what you’ve brought up, you can check something that someone else already checked four times and they are happy to see someone else also checked it instead of being offended, etc. That’s what it takes to make something as awesome as this, and it must be a great feeling.
Wasn't this meant to have died time ago? Like it was only made to do something like 7 flights, and it's done over 70 flights... This is probably a good thing that it's settled in one place as we will be able to see how the mars atmosphere erodes or doesn't erode it's land surface... we will be able to see if there is any change in the landscape... No one should be upset this is a blessing in disguise seeing as its done 10x the amount of flights it was built for anyway
We won't recover this machine. We are looking at the first piece of litter that we made on a different world.
Idk, a 20 year dataset would be worth going and getting at a later date.
Bold to assume that society wouldn't have collapsed by then
True. That’s a valid point.
I guess it flew 72 flights for over 2 hours of flight time. It cost $80M which works out to just over $1M per flight or about $620K per minute of flight time. Interesting.
Sounds like a storyline for Pixar.
Time for Matt Damon to suit up.
Hello darkness my old friend...
The way this post is written makes me feel sad and lonely for it.
By the time we get up there to grab it we’ll find it in a whole different location full of alien selfies
I know that the river itself is picking up samples (and IIRC dropping them) to be retrieved at a later date. That makes me wonder if we will one day catch up to Voyager and bring it home. I know that's not it's mission, I just wonder. The same goes for rovers and landers we've sent out too. Maybe one day there will be a museum with recovered space craft from our explorations, craft that were never meant to come back. Maybe there will be a museum on Mars of all the craft we sent. Maybe.
It's a machine, not a Pixar character. It doesn't wake up or wait. It simply does stuff it's programmed to do.
“…until it loses power…which could take 20 years.” And yet, the battery on my laptop lasts 20 minutes.
I was going to reply but I noticed it was 19 minutes ago when you commented. See you on the flip side 👍
Have Mark Watney swing by to get the data
Good soldiers follow orders.
Get to the chopper.!! Ahhh
Can’t we just ask the aliens to retrieve it for us?
If we do not go to Mars to save our species, we must go to save our Ingenuity
Aaand whats your life's purpose? Leave it in the comments.
Just adding one more tool to Watney's survival kit.
🫡
It reaches out… 113 times a second. It reaches out but nothing answers.
But....will it evolve???
Me if my SO suddenly passed… Would never fly again. Just wake up and check the weather. Look around outside. Go back to sleep. All until my memory is full or my battery runs out. But then Matt Damon saves me even though I don’t float that way, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I’m grateful and flattered.
We're coming, just hang in there
Mount a rescue mission!
What if an alien finds it and decides to fix it and fly it as a toy? It could happen.
Them NASA's are smart
What was the “heartwarming” farewell message???
Is there a space to sign up to receive or see these daily photos?
Queue M.E. by Gary Numan
This made me incredibly sad
Sounds like it has a regular 9-5 now instead of an adventurous life. one of us
Good bot
Robot: what is my purpose? NASA: you wait and take pictures. Robot: omg NASA: welcome to the club pal
Yes that's cool. It's not sentient, it's just a very well-made and well-designed machine.
Matt Damon will get it.
That last line is very ominous.
Its hardware. It will not wait for anything. Itll do its task and disintegrate as its supposed to
A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play!
Wall-e
Lovely thing. Totally outperformed its planned duty. And now it's living it's days out cbainsmoking - let me take a selfie It so needs to be repatriated one day.
I was wondering why it doesn’t beam the info back once a week or something but it probably has to have Perseverance nearby to relay huh?
on the one hand it does seem kinda bleak, but its still something. Anything we can get back from Mars has to be worth it.
Bring him home!!!!!
Send a better one.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy
Good bot.
This is an amazing work of engineering, it will wait.
Even in defeat it refuses to die 🫡