Quote:
Originally Posted by eagle33199
When dealing with something like the Mars Rover, NASA fully expected to have continuous contact with it, but they couldn't plan on it...
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No, not really. We knew that, at best, we would be able to converse with each rover twice a day and somtimes we wouldn't be able to converse for over a day. BTW, my wife lead the telecom team in flight operations for a few years.
Quote:
Originally Posted by eagle33199
So they have to have a certain amount of autonomy built in in case something goes wrong with the communications. If, for example, the rover landed and broke it's modem, NASA couldn't have communicated at all. But the rover could still go around and collect data and store it internally, which NASA could retrieve at a later time.
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Nope. The autonomous mobility software wasn't uploaded until after each rover landed (The first cut was still being worked on after they launched). Furthermore, there is no provision for either of them to go site seeing without permission from Earth
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-Kevin