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Have the rovers ever had access to the kinds of strata shown on the side of the hill/mountain in the video? If not, hopefully there will be some very interesting finds in there.
I've been following the wheel-wear issue with some interest. Curious what alternate wheel designs might prove more resilient under the off-road conditions found on Mars.
I'm supposing that any sort of rubber or similar material would prove prohibitively expensive in terms of mass?
There's some info and speculation here: http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/3187/curiosity-why-...
Thanks. Temperature range would definitely have an impact, and I hadn't considered that.
I was thinking something more like a silicone rubber solid tire rather than a pneumatic one. I do see mass mentioned as well.
The NASA article (referenced both in another comment here and in the SE post responses) cites landing shocks and wheel deployment specifically among mass constraints.
Also Emily Lakdawalla wrote up a nice article on the wheels for the Planetary Society:
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2014/0819063...
0.75mm wheel skin thickness? check. Machined out of aluminum? check. Punctures and tears in the wheel? check.
Surprised it lasted this long. I understand weight was a concern, but surely for $2B, there's some exotic, more resilient alloy that could've been used? Or maybe just make those middle wheels 1mm thicker and eat the extra 3 1/3Kg.
The wheels are much more of a challenge than I think folks expected (but this is just speculation). Interesting design box (weight vs resilience vs durability). They have all lived through the 'designed' in experiment length but one would expect that after Opportunity they would plan for a much longer activity period.
Is there any parallel set of videos where they actually convey more than 10 bits of information? I'm not interested in listening to a fun synopsis of next chapter of "The story of Curiosity and the mountain". Is anyone? "We found an important boundary, and the rover is now next to the important boundary." That's wonderful. I was expecting to hear at least 2 words on why it was important but it never came.
These update videos are a chance to also get technical, drill into details and explain the Curiosity mission piece by piece over a long period of time, perhaps in style of minutephysics. Seems to me as a bit of a missed opportunity.
All science news releases go through JPL: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/news/whatsnew/
But a science planning blog gets posted here: http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/
Also nytimes has a nice tracker. No science, but select raw images: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/science/space/mars-curios...
Sweet! Just wondering if there is any references to how the A.I onboard works? I have heard that the platform is semi-autonomous, with visual odometry for motion estimation, but could not find anything that describes the techniques in detail.
About time. The nominal mission was one Martian Year which ended in June. The NASA Inspector General recently criticized the Curiosity team for not meeting their main science goals which were based on climbing on Mt. Sharp. There were some interesting diversions like the alluvial fan. And sand dunes blocked a more direct traverse to Mt. Sharp. This not the first time Curiosity has been in the doghouse. They missed their initial launch data, with a 26-month delay, from falling behind on engineering of a new landing method and new power source. That put Curiosity nearly $2B over budget and almost ended the US Mars program.
Most of the instruments and the power source are expected to last ten years. The deteriorating wheels are a concern.
What type of mountain is this? When I think of mountains out here in the North Eastern US, most are not something a wheeled vehicle might easily summit.
I'd like a rover sent to snap Olympus Mons.