Mars Rover Fills Up Whole 2-Gigabyte Memory Card

[madfranks]

Barely 72 hours after the landing of its Mars rover, NASA officials announced Thursday that their mission had ended, as Curiosity's two-gigabyte memory card was now filled to capacity. "Well, that's that, folks," said chief scientist John Grotzinger, explaining that after Curiosity's Mars Descent Imager took an especially high-resolution JPEG of the Aeolis Mons mountain, the $2.5-billion rover’s SanDisk card only had 0.03 GB of space remaining. "Honestly, we thought two gigs would be more than enough. That's like a 1,000 pictures, right? I guess we probably should have deleted those old Hubble photos off there before the mission." Grotzinger confirmed that even if the rover had been equipped with a larger memory card, it likely would have had only enough power for a few more hours of exploration before it had to return to Earth to have its battery recharged.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/nasa-calls-it-a-mission-as-curiosity-rover-fills-u,29115/

[Gaillo]

I read this with all seriousness, thinking it was about par for a .gov project, before figuring out it was an Onion article.

What a world we live in...

[sirgonzo420]

I read this with all seriousness, thinking it was about par for a .gov project, before figuring out it was an Onion article.

What a world we live in...


The plus side is that this world we live in makes for some really good satire.

[mamboni]

Brilliantly funny because it contains more than a dab of truth. When you consider the months and years involved with inter planetary travel, technology lags will be the norm. My first hard drive in 1984 was 20 MEGABYES (!) and when I got it I thought I was in Mac heaven. My first WIN95 PC had a 1 GIGABYTE hard drive and I remember thinking "this is all the space I'll ever need." Now we have 3 TERRABYTE hard drives and 32 GIGABYTE flash drives are commonplace and inexpensive. The march forward in technology never ceases to amaze me. I imagine in a few years a TERRABYTE will seem small and confining.

[sirgonzo420]

Brilliantly funny because it contains more than a dab of truth. When you consider the months and years involved with inter planetary travel, technology lags will be the norm. My first hard drive in 1984 was 20 MEGABYES (!) and when I got it I thought I was in Mac heaven. My first WIN95 PC had a 1 GIGABYTE hard drive and I remember thinking "this is all the space I'll ever need." Now we have 3 TERRABYTE hard drives and 32 GIGABYTE flash drives are commonplace and inexpensive. The march forward in technology never ceases to amaze me. I imagine in a few years a TERRABYTE will seem small and confining.

yeah but by then we'll all be in FEMA camps


:D

[iOWNme]

;)No offense to the OP, but who reads the Onion? It's a fucking joke.... That's not even funny.

There are so many REAL world issues to write about, yet they always resort to kindergarten stories. At this exact moment in time humanity hangs on by a thread, and these clowns can't find anything to write about besides practicing 'Idiocracy' style journalism.

REALITY is much more interesting than satire. FACT.

[palani]

I used to work on controls that used delay lines for memory. Each contained around 4k. A delay line was a hex shaped piece of crystal with a crystal bonded on two of the six corners

You took a bit stream and fed it into one of the two crystals. Converted the bit stream to mechanical pulses. They would bounce around and come out at the other crystal and get converted back to electrical.

[Neuro]

I used to work on controls that used delay lines for memory. Each contained around 4k. A delay line was a hex shaped piece of crystal with a crystal bonded on two of the six corners

You took a bit stream and fed it into one of the two crystals. Converted the bit stream to mechanical pulses. They would bounce around and come out at the other crystal and get converted back to electrical.
What was the purpose of that?

[Glass]

What was the purpose of that?

high speed data comms, perhaps fibre optic or similar

[palani]

The mechanical pulses took time to transit the main crystal. Hence the term "delay line". Storage capacity was 4,000 bits. Individual data could be picked off on a scope by bit time, word time and several other synch pulses. The serial bit stream was directed into a 1 bit ALU where sums and differences were integrated and the output of the ALU (arithmetic logic unit) was fed back into the delay line.

The control was a GE 7500 control. Not a CNC but merely an NC. The data stored was commanded and actual position for 4-5 axis of a machine tool.

[palani]

high speed data comms, perhaps fibre optic or similar
Fiber optic would not even be invented for 20 more years.

[Horn]

Each contained around 4k.

Is that like 500 punch cards, over the top!

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-TE6D1JsrwZY/T_yNAaM1GMI/AAAAAAAAFzE/7MUY3Eg4Cho/s1600/punchCard.gif