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Comment by bigbillheck | Hacker News Reader

Designed for five, lasted 72, not too shabby.

Extraplanetary missions are almost always many times longer than initially designed because the initial mission is largely limited by the budget which includes the price of the people here on Earth and the time available on the Deep Space Network. Building a rover robust enough to last way longer than the basic mission is a blip in the budget when you include that and the launch costs so they keep being run until they're surpassed by another mission, they run out of some consumable (on Curiosity for example there's a limited number of times they can run some of the internal equipment), or they're out of new things to find to justify the cost of going on.

With the rovers its pretty much a given that they'll out last the initially stated 90 day mission. They're much more expensive and carefully crafted for the task.

Ingenuity is special because it's commercial off-the-shelf parts put together on a low-ish budget. It (as well as various other aspects of Perseverance) has shown that Mars can be tolerable for off the shelf hardware, rather than needing bespoke million dollar projects for everything.

Generally they're either run until there's not much science left to do so funding dries up or there's some catastrophic failure of the rover itself. I'm not sure how much COTS you can actually do for future missions for flying rovers. A demonstrator is easier because it doesn't need the specialized scientific equipment that comes with doing science beyond looking at something from ground level.

The point is that you can reduced costs for some things via COTS, and if COTS stuff can handle the rough environment, there's also the possibility of reducing costs by further ruggedizing those parts.

Of course the mission critical stuff will still have to all be the usual expensive purpose built stuff, but like with Perseverance, some scientific instruments can use COTS computing hardware (IIRC one of the instruments on Perseverance has two Intel Atom SBCs, which were used to compress the landing footage before sending it back to Earth) and can have stuff like a bunch of non-essential but nice to have cameras, microphones and other sensors.

Since they were cheap and non-essential, it's no big deal to add them, no big deal if they don't work, but if they happen to work you get great PR and data, like proper video of a spacecraft autonomously landing from a rocket powered crane on another planet). Same with prototyping ideas. Maybe the success of Ingenuity will encourage the inclusion of other similar "pie in the sky", extremely low cost experimental components.

I dunno, feels like they overshot it. They should talk to the engineers that made my washing machine. That thing was designed to outlast the warranty and, I'll be damned, they nailed it.

Only so much genius to go around.

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