[extropy-chat] SPACE: where are we?

Brian Atkins brian at posthuman.com
Fri Feb 6 17:16:49 UTC 2004


I think there isn't enough data coming down daily to support more than a 
daily report at the most. The fastest data links they have are something 
like 128kb/s and only for apparently short bursts up to maybe 30 minutes?

So each day they are essentially performing either one movement of the 
rover or one set of science gathering, and then dumping some of that 
data back to Earth. In some cases they may not even be able to get back 
all the day's data for a few days if they have done a lot of imaging. 
Plus they have to be careful now not to overload the number of files in 
their flash mem because of buggy software.

I've been watching the live briefings on satellite (which now apparently 
only happen 3 times a week) and it really only takes them about 20 
minutes to run through a description of what they did the previous 
couple of days and show the data/images. Then the reporters usually run 
out of questions after about another 20 minutes. Just not a ton of meat 
there so far...
-- 
Brian Atkins
Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
http://www.singinst.org/



More information about the extropy-chat mailing list