The engineer(s)/tech(s) name was never mentioned or the group members who came up with this. Why no credit? I'd be nice to read about a human with a name, a history, a story. I see that a lot in stories.
It is actually quite deliberate. NASA and JPL are big on always communicating their work as a team effort, rather than highlighting individual contributors. As a practical example, notice how, during critical events (anytime you have a live-stream from Mission Control), everyone in the room wears the same shirt.
Another fun anecdote on the "one NASA" philosophy (albeit at a different scale) is that the Pathfinder lander (if memory serves me right) had a JPL sticker visible from the cameras at landing. NASA was not impressed: although designed, built and managed by JPL, this was a NASA mission. So Curiosity (also designed, built and managed by JPL) only has NASA stickers - but the wheels have a pattern that spells out "JPL" in Morse code and is visible in the rover tracks.
This is not true - their original (and current) purpose is to calibrate the distance travelled by looking at the marks the tracks make - you can look at the distance between marks and use the circumference of the wheel to determine the distance travelled.
The actual pattern meaning was snuck in by the engineers and the director was only told about it after he had approved the design.
I am ambivalent about this. You often see people getting public credit for something that was actually done by a lot of people working together which is also not good. Maybe a team photo would be nice. My favorite stories are where you hear the perspective of the different contributors.
But then that one very eloquent guy gets all the play in the stories and his contribution seems out-sized while implicitly diminishing the contributions of others, especially the really camera-awkward guy who made a huge contribution but no reporters can handle listening to him long enough to tell his story.
Personally that seems like a better alternative to the PR downplay of engineering accomplishments to make space for the praise and glory of managers and funders.
SpaceX and Tesla are good examples for this. If you read the news about them you could easily thing that Musk is pretty much developing everything in his basement.
A few links in from this article are one about the problem with cutaway drawings of the drill[1] and a more detailed article about developing the fix[2] which includes a video[3].
It never ceases to amaze me when I see pics that look like they could have been taken anywhere on earth, but no that's on another planet and humans put a little hole there!
I am amazed how quickly and how many images we get from another planet....
For those that might not know, http://www.curiosityrover.com is a great site for the image feed, if you scroll down you can see the CHEMCAM images of the most recent drilled holes.
It's a testament to humanity's ingenuity that we managed to put a rover on Mars. I sometimes wonder if in 1000 years we will look back and think how primitive we were and curiosity will be in some museum.
On the other hand, for all the marvel that Curiosity has provided, a human on the surface of Mars could have achieved vastly more and vastly faster. Rovers and especially probes are ultimately very limited technology. If we continued on the trajectory we were on in the 60s we'd likely already have human outposts, if not civilizations, on the Moon, Mars, and perhaps even some of the outer planets' moons.
Just imagine all the amazing discoveries and economic potential we've missed out on due to myopia mixed with a bit of conservatism. The entire space race was ultimately just a global level dick waving contest, and what space exploration we have had since has been hamstrung by fear of failure. That people will die in human space endeavors is hardly a reason to avoid them. Columbia was named after the ship that first circumnavigated the globe. And unsurprisingly that voyage came with immense risk. Nearly every seaman associated with that mission, though successful, would go on to die in sea related voyages and I doubt they would have had it any other way. Exploring new frontiers always comes with risks and it has never served as a deterrent to the right sort of people. That one of the biggest advocates for Martian colonization today is Buzz Aldrin, is not a coincidence.
The thing you overlook is, billions people mindlessly sharing their photo on phone, are the ones actually providing economical and in turn technological advances that enabled such high tech missions. I really doubt we could reach sub 10nm chips only with government funding without such strong demand for consumer products. So a bit late is much better because it gave us time to actually improve technology at micro level, instead of just building larger rockets.
I'd certainly agree in a way. Consumerism along with the backing of private telecoms is one of the big reasons private companies like SpaceX can even exist. And I do expect that the first rocket to land people on another planet will not come from a government, but a private company. Such a comment would have seemed quite sci-fi in the 60s when there was no private space industry to speak of.
But at the same time, these are tangential achievements. Miniaturization and greater processing speed will certainly be nice tools. But the things that are really needed are effectively 0 fail rate self sustaining habitation, life support, energy production, and food production in extremely hostile conditions. We still have not entirely solved these and they are things we could have been working on decades ago, but as human space flight died so did their necessity.
You will be amazed how much side effect / cross improvement this had created in. For e.g. Because Semiconductor industry need precise high vacuums, large vacuum pump companies invested in technology of high speed rotating device at near zero vacuum scale. Which in turn enabled them to create ultra compact flywheel technologies for transportation. Or on socioeconomic side, because of higher wealth and more leisure times, there are tons of nutrition research which in turn created single food all vitamin products and superfoods.
I doubt 10nm chips would be useful on Mars. These rovers use special chips that are shielded against radiation. Cutting edge chips are much more fragile. They only work in ideal conditions.
I doubt populating the moon or mars would have reached that level. Consider Antarctica, it is vastly easier and cheaper to live there than even in near earth orbit, and it has huge untapped natural resources, yet the population of Antarctica is only just over 1,000 people.
Rules and regulations [1] inhibit a lot of Antarctica's potential. In a nutshell you're not allowed to do much of anything in Antarctica. And what you do do has to be effectively 0 environmental impact, and leave no footprint whatsoever. So you're not going to be 'tapping that.'
And while we can breathe the air and not get radiated to death by the sun (during the times its visible) on Antarctica, it's in other ways much less hospitable than places like Mars. Mars has a relatively normal day/night cycle which [presumably] means no T3 syndrome like many suffer in Antarctic winters. It also gets warmer on Mars than it does on Antarctica. If not for the atmosphere, many days would be quite pleasant. The low density atmosphere also means you don't need to worry about things like storms (one of the main things that was completely faked in 'The Martian') - the most brutal storm on Mars would feel like light breeze. And it has to be said, even if for just an entertainment factor - low g!
There's also the drive for discovery. You may make some interesting discoveries in Antarctica (if you were allowed to engage in operations that would allow such) but they're going to generally be 'terrestrial' in nature. While this may end up being true of Mars as well, for now no one entirely knows. We're still making revolutionary discoveries on the Moon's composition and we have actually landed on it! It's very hard to know what you don't know, but the one thing that blazing into new frontiers has shown time and again is that there's an immense amount we don't know that we don't know - and I don't see any reason to think that this is no longer the case.
In many ways I think Mars has the potential to be another Earth. Different in many ways of course, but also similar in breadth and possibility. Whereas Antarctica's potential is something rather different, but altogether inhibited by rules and regulations in any case.
I would love to agree, since the pioneer spirit is wonderful. But Mars is a whole planet of freezing desert with unbreathable air and no evidence of life. How is that “similar in breadth and possibility” compared to our lush, beautiful home world?
Actually the Martian soil is loaded with water, one of the most relevant and surprising findings of Curiosity. That was another thing that 'The Martian' got wrong - that time by accident! Each cubic foot of Martian soil contains about a liter of water! At the same time that discovery, as fundamental as it is, really illustrates that we just don't know much of anything about Mars. The problem of probes and rovers is demonstrated by the RSL or recurring slope linea - that abysmal choice of nomenclature is not mine! We can't determine whether these mysterious streaks are surface level brine water as at one time announced by NASA, or indeed just sand formations as latest research indicates. What is the source of the methane that we've found in the atmosphere? I'm not suggesting there is life, but I would suggest that it's unreasonable to suggest that we have sufficient evidence to intelligently say that there is not. It's still a question.
That's an aside. With my point I was getting at two things. The first is literal size. Mars is smaller than Earth of course but it's actually near identical in size to the land area on Earth. It's really big. And there's no major obstacles in the way of exploitation. For instance like the ocean and weather irregularity on Antarctica. And there's also likely an extensive array of mineral deposits on Mars. The surface itself is red from iron oxide, aka rust. Basically if you can imagine it, you can build it. This really opens the door for entrepreneurship like nothing before. Would it be possible to have a domed forest on Mars, or eventually even domed outposts that begin to resemble cities? I don't see why not. There are also even bigger picture terraforming ideas. At one point in its history Mars likely very much resembled Earth. The loss of its magnetic field exposing it to radiation and stripping away it's atmosphere likely played a major role in its decline. It's possible that we could create an artificial magnetic field on Mars in a variety of ways. Again - potential.
Good point, but if Antarctica weren't protected by very strict environmental policies, there might be a lot more people there exploiting the resources.
> If we continued on the trajectory we were on in the 60s we'd likely already have human outposts, if not civilizations, on the Moon, Mars, and perhaps even some of the outer planets' moons.
I was amazed when I started looking at old maps of North America and realized how short a time it was between Columbus stumbling across the West Indies and a wave of explorers/exploiters mapping out the western hemisphere.
(Obviously it's a vastly different situation than we face in space, and based on what we're learning about biology in space we might well have abandoned any such outposts by now, but your lament is well-taken.)
