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Comment by devsploit | Hacker News Reader

I suppose this is kind of a trivial question, but does anyone know if the last message was ACTUALLY the STRING: “My power’s really low. Don’t worry about me though…”, or was it some binary/hex code to represent that, like, "503 ERROR", and the PR department just tweeted its interpretation as “My power’s really low. Don’t worry about me though…”?

It raises more questions. Was this logging message decided by committee or a PM? Was it a dev easter egg? Do they have a writer?

Also, what conditions would trigger this "final" message?

Being a lesser engineer, my stuff just crashes unceremoniously and usually I am alerted not by a sweet note from my prod servers "Hey, looks like prod's going down, don't worry about me, though...", it's usually concerned phone call from a manager.

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You're overthinking this. They are literally just quoting the Twitter account which is written in first-person perspective: https://twitter.com/NASAInSight/status/1604955574659035136

It would have been a data packet containing the battery gauge and some other metrics, it wouldn't make any sense for the lander itself to waste precious bandwidth by spitting out human readable ASCII strings like that.

It's just PR like the last one

They sent two flash chips full of names with the lander, they are transmitting whole hi-res pictures and even Apollo missions already had at least 1.6 kbit/s, sorry but those 64 bytes would have fit everywhere.

But yes, that message didn't exist for other reasons.

My guess is that it's PR baked into the software -- at least the receiver software. It was a line written by someone who understood that just an error code is really bad for humans to read. So they humanized it a bit. They had time to plan this, not like they didn't know this was the likely outcome. Good product management to give the robot a voice.

> They had time to plan this, not like they didn't know this was the likely outcome.

Like the newspapers have obituaries for most important personalities prepared (and sometimes publish them prematurely)?

I’m especially curious whether it actually used the apostrophe, but I suppose the lander itself just sends its usual vitals and the first-person tweets are done by an on-world PR department.

Probably some bytecode representing an RPC enum variant

Yeah this sent me down a rabbit hole. Apparently "NASA had previously decided to declare the mission over if the lander missed two communication attempts" (https://mars.nasa.gov/news/9321/nasa-retires-insight-mars-la...).

Ah well, nothing wrong with a little space theatre!

So the message was no message?

How do we know the lander wasn't captured by Martians and locked in a faraday cage, in dire need of rescue?

We have other vehicles we could actually probably get cross checks from. Plus, that'd require some serious level of knowledge to fake a foreign species computational responses from little more than non-invasive scans of chips.

...Unless they are that good... and everything we've been sent is a cleverly constructed ruse.

It's clear, there is only one option. Who's up for an expedition?

heh it was probably a single byte with one bit signaling low battery and the other 7 signaling other things.

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