Mars Rover Opportunity Turns 8

I think it is great that the device was design to last max a year or two, and lasted 8, but on the flipside, this means they aren't really good engineers.

First of all it was engineered to guarantee to work for 3 months which was the allotted project objectives. Based on the budget and capability, this is what NASA had designed the rovers to do. Surviving for years is a bonus.

Just because they erred on the side of a good result doesn't mean the estimates are better. It means their methodology is HEAVILY padded, or if we assume +/-400~800%, they were just lucky that it didn't swing the other way. Given Phobos-Grunt, perhaps space engineering margin of error really is +/-400~800%. Although I suspect huge margins of error were thrown about in NASA>

Of course they padded their estimates and erred on the side of caution. 1) There is no way to retrieve or repair this rover. 2) NASA knew about the sticky dust from previous missions, but they didn't have omnipotence when it comes to the Mars climate. They didn't know that windstorms were capable of cleaning said dust. So you would have rather just wing it and not pad their estimates. So when the rover failed, they can tell NASA "oh well, try again in two years."

If that's the case, huge design buffers, that means they don't understand the underlying physics/materials engineer, and had to heavily overdesign, which means there is a far more efficient design out there.

I don't think you understand that there are different goals in engineering. One goal may be efficiency. The goal in this case was absolute reliability despite any unknowns the rovers may have experienced on Mars.

I'm not knocking NASA engineers, I'm just exploring how to shave down this margin so that they can make more efficient designs at lower cost that behave as expected.

Again efficiency is not as much a priority as reliability in these cases.

Building something that behaves as expected is far, far, FAR more important than building something that blows away expectations by orders of magnitude. The former is good engineering, the latter is waste, or worse, dumb luck!

The engineers never worked on the expectation that you ascribe. People outside of NASA have placed it on them. For them, the mission was successful when the rovers completed their objectives after 3 months. All these years afterwards are bonus.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/faYZ7wTveBs/mars-rover-opportunity-turns-8

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