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RE: NASA is back on track to colonize the moon, by destroying some grains of moon material brought back by Apollo 17.
They are trying, but to date they are just bairly able to walk. We will need a lost more processor power, and a better power source first. A lot of today's robots are teathered for power, and some need charge after just a few hours. Tracked units have trouble with dust in bearings, even with sealed bearings.
Not hopeless, just an Inherent oroblem. They could recover the lunar rover for recovery use....
:)>
Don't they have robots that can run?
Not that I have seen, the ones that walk use almost all their processor power to do so. It is hard to balance and to walk, you have to actually fall forward (in a controlled way). We will get there, a lot of progress has been made already.
Progress is the sum of many small steps, and we are tallying up a lot of small steps! It will happen soon.
The power problem worries me more, especially in space. We need to find a power system with a significantly higher power density. Solar power, as a primary source, is what killed the Mars Rover. We need to do better!
If we had People local, we could recover and reset that robot. We also need satellites to allow remote reporting for the long range prospecting robots. I really would enjoy working up there, it would be exciting!
We are getting close!
:)>How did solar power kill the Mars Rover? Did it have no backup power in case there was no sun or was there some kind of surge, as in too much power all of sudden, like EMP or something that fried the power? Was there no like buffer or surge protection or what about solar power that would kill the rover on Mars? I'm asking because I love solar power and I hate to see it cause problems at all. If it was just a lack of sun, I'd understand.
I also love solar power, and I am building a full system for my homestead.
The problem was that the rover was stuck in a sand storm for over two weeks, and her onboard battery died. When sun returned, she undoubtedly recharged; but no longer knew where Earth was due to memory loss. Further communications are no longer possible without antenna alignment reprogramming.
She was a tough little rover that was supposed to only run for 90 days, and she hung in a little longer, LOL!
I wrote on herr about a year ago, a salute to a heroic little robot! They got weather data that changed some of the colony planning from this little beast. We really got our monies worth from this mission!
She should be recovered and placed in the first Martian Museum.
:)>Did you say she is still moving around on Mars but that we are not receiving a signal from the Mars Rover any longer? So, the memory was lost because it was not powered for the two weeks? Don't they have external hard drives that can retain memory like a DVD or how long can drives last without power? Did the sand storm create an EMP or something that would shock the memory? Did her program not have a if-then protocol for what to do if there are storms? Did she have the ability to scan the weather in order to attempt to run away from storms or to dig a hole and turn off to wait the storm out?
Likely she is moving again. Without the exact location of the Planet Earth, she can no longer point her antennae to report in. That storm was a long duration problem, and the reboot would go back to her original programming from a decade plus before.
She would "loose" Earth, having moved way past her originally intended location and mission time. A hard drive would be fine, as long as the seal was intact.
Storm covered a third of the planet, couldn't out run it. They should have used the watchdog timer to reactivate the processor after a hard shutdown; to save power. They could have doubled the memory retention time that way.
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