/sci/ - Science & Math

>>15093289
I just don't understand this reusable rover meme.

The amount of money you can save from reusing rovers isn’t enough to justify how much harder it makes it to idenify the difficult rocks that actually matter in the geology world. I’m sure one day reusability will be more effective, but the truth is that when you have all the challenges that come with electrical science in general, it’s almost always much more effective to throw away the rover after it’s done its job than to figure out how to make recovery part of the mission. I know of no major technology on the near term horizon that would change that.

Even if reusable rovers are possible now, but when reliability is THE number one priority (in this case the mole probe is up 2/3rds of the cost and the actual rover only 1/3rd) it makes absolutely no sense. Like, look at this rover (pic related). This represents some of the most advanced technologies in the probes world. Do you honestly think that such a complicated machine can be made tough and reliable enough to be reusable? I doubt it. Best example in my opinion is condoms, sure you could reuse them but making sure that they do not suffer a drop in reliability will cost a lot of money and time.

Just because some company made reusing rovers popular, that doesn't mean that we will have the sci-fi future of dozens of rovers per year. We'll be lucky to see more than a couple dozen per decade. Dial down your expectations, don't buy into the 'reusability for rovers' meme.