[Grey Wolf]

I mean it. There was an article in the newspaper today, that stated that the reason that the Mars rover stopped responding was an insufficient amount of RAM for the number of files stored on the flash memory and running the operating system at the same time. That's what they get for only having 128MB of RAM....

[Knight Templar]

So it stopped working again?


Well ****.

[Grey Wolf]

I'm talking about the first time. They just happened to have an article in the tech section of my paper today explaining it. First decent article I've read in that section for quite a while....

[phreak]

Murphy's law of space exploration:
your planetary rover was made by the lowest bidder

[an0n]

That's what they get for using XP.

[Liberator]

[mikhael]

The rover ran out of memory because of some changes they made immediately after launch. An upload failed and had to be restarted, and some stuff from the first upload hung around. There's a couple articles out there on the net explaining the problem in excruciating detail, written by the project members who diagnosed and fixed the problem.

[Rictor]

Yu have got to be kidding. Billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of man hours, the best technology this Earth has to offer and they couldn't buy a $100 stick of RAM. If it was me, oh hell I'de splurge on the RAM. Who knows, maybe even buy 512 MB. I guess after all those fancy lunches and gold toilets, there simply wasn't enough money left over for oh, say, a mission critical piece of hardware.

You know, with this sort of thing happening, humanity doesn't deserve to land on another planet.

[an0n]

What, like the wars, crime, biggotry and senseless murders aren't reason enough?

[Bobboau]

no

[kasperl]

dude, ****.

only 128 meg? i could have donated my PC and they'd have more.

[Martinus]

Originally posted by Rictor
Yu have got to be kidding. Billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of man hours, the best technology this Earth has to offer and they couldn't buy a $100 stick of RAM. If it was me, oh hell I'de splurge on the RAM. Who knows, maybe even buy 512 MB. I guess after all those fancy lunches and gold toilets, there simply wasn't enough money left over for oh, say, a mission critical piece of hardware.

You know, with this sort of thing happening, humanity doesn't deserve to land on another planet.

[color=66ff00]I seriously doubt it was a $100 stick of RAM:

1. It would have to be at the very least a military grade component to function in the quite remarkably low temp. on Mars, that alone would make it expensive.

2. Each component has to be completely sterile IIRC; it woud be dumb to have a probe find microscopic life on Mars just to realise that it's the life a probe brought with it, also this avoids contamination of the Martian atmosphere. The sterilisation is costly and the device must be able to withstand the procedure and still function obviously.

3. The RAM itself would most likely have all gold contacts to improve the quality of electrical connections. More expense.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head ATM but rest assured there's most likely a handfull of other factors (weight? size?) that would also have limited the amount of RAM onboard. Also note that it was more an excess of redundant software than a deficiency in the amount of memory available that caused the problem.
[/color]

[kasperl]

so they filled it with bloatware.

that should be calculated in the design, every software dude knows any program will take up at least twice the size needed for the exact same functionality if done right.

[Setekh]

Are you serious? Man, that thing ought to have gigabytes of memory at its disposal - not like it would add that much to the flight weight.

[diamondgeezer]

Well you say that, but these guys have to calculate stuff to a fraction of a gram. More memory hardware = less scientific payload. But of course when it comes back and bites them in the arse you think maybe they should have swapped the furry dice for more RAM after all...

[Kazan]

God you are a bunch of ****ing newbies

1st) The computing compartment is heated with radioisotope heaters

2nd) You cannot go to radioshack and buy ram for space exploration computers - The ram has to be RADIATION HARDEND - We cannot have  bits getting scrambled by the hard radiation it is exposed to

3rd) They picked a poor choice of RTOSs buying from Wind River, but that's because they're been using wind river for a long time, when they started using WR they had no problem because it was fine, but WR's RTOS technology is 20 to 30 years out of date.

4th) Because of the rigorous testing involved in making sure computer hardware is stable enough, radiation shieldable, etc for space NASA will always be about 10 years behind in core computer technology

5th) "Should have Gigabytes" - NO harddrive and I mean NO HARDDRIVE would survive the hard radiation it would be exposed to

6th) POWER CONSUMPTION CONSTRAINTS

[Kazan]

Not to mention that this was known a week days after the rover started acting up


welcome to last month

[diamondgeezer]

We have been educated

[01010]

I wish all my teachers displayed such tact and elegance though.

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by 01010
I wish all my teachers displayed such tact and elegance though.