A design problem in Curiosity’s drill makes it a threat for shorting out the electronics of the entire rover at some point in the future.
Oy. A design problem in Curiosity’s drill makes it a threat to short out the electronics of the entire rover at some point in the future.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Oy. A design problem in Curiosity’s drill makes it a threat to short out the electronics of the entire rover at some point in the future.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
What, did NASA assign a couple of interns to design the power bus? I can see the advantages of using a percussive drill as opposed to a rotary one (fewer worries about keeping the bit sharp, more flexibility, more robust design), but the tradeoff is increased vibration at the drill mount. For $2.5 billion (that’s billion with a ‘b’), one might reasonably expect that the design engineers would include ways to electrically isolate the drill mount from the rover (circuit breakers, perhaps?).
And that sounds like what they did, but only on an ad hoc basis. The spokesman in the video sounds like someone who knows they cut corners, and now that it might bite them in the rear, has to BS their way through it. This reminds me of the problems with the Hubble mirror and Space Shuttle tiles. And then there was the loss of a Mars craft because someone got English and Metric units mixed up. NASA has had stupendous successes, but they’ve also had phenomenal screw-ups. I realize that what they do is often on the cutting edge, but there appear to be systemic problems in project management and execution that decades of experience aren’t addressing.
With a hundred years of drill design to draw from they went their own way again and bucked it up.