A Virtuous Cycle For Rovers on Other Planets

OK I know I promised to start writing posts that were more accessible, but right now I just want to get this idea properly sketched out and for that, I need to use engineerese

First and foremost, I think Curiosity is one of the coolest pieces of hardware that humans have ever built, we have a nuclear powered robot massing in at 900 kg wandering around the surface of Mars, that is effing awesome (if you don't think so I don't know how you got to this blog post).  One of the challenges in the design of Curiosity, or any of the rovers on Mars is having sufficient power to move around.  Currently all of the rovers still active on Mars carry their power supplies with them.  What if instead of carrying their solar panels/nuclear generators , rovers operated similar to how the US Navy uses air-craft carriers and smaller planes, ok not a perfect example.

With this new approach the emphasis on rovers would be mission flexibility, each rover might only come with a small number of sensors and an electrical contact to allow them to receive power from the command pod.  The command pod would most likely carry the bulk of communications, power production(duh), and processing.  The individual probes receiving power from the mothership could be much simpler affairs, with relatively standard parts aside from their specialized sensors.  Each machine would have a very limited amount of on board power storage and production, this would be as a means of redundancy, as well as provide flexibility.   Assume rover A needs to get to a location that is too far away to get to with just its own tether, well rover A and rover B could roll out in the general direction of interest, once B and A have gotten to the maximum distance that their tether will allow, B parks in place, A connected to the mother ship through B, can continue the mission until it gets to the target.  This daisy chaining of mini-rovers could go for a decent amount of distance, of course there would be a limit, either by the number of rovers sent in the mission, or by voltage losses over the distance of transmission.

 There are some inherent trade offs from the maximum area of investigation, to potential mechanical complexity, etc....
The total mass of the mission devoted to all of their little motors will probably be slightly higher than what a larger multi-use rover would use.  You would need to be careful to not let the electrical tethers of the rovers get tangled with other rovers.   This isn't a mission that you do when it still costs $10,000+/kg to get something to Mars, this kind of mission makes sense when launches are 1/10th that (or hopefully less).  As time goes on scientists will want clearer details on areas for future landing sites, governments are going to be interested in quickly confirming whether a region has sufficient resources for larger manned missions.  Smart mission planners would have fall back projects, when the rovers start to fail, the mothership could still do activities, ranging form refining fuel for future missions, to weather research stations,  to acting as a data backup system for orbiting satellites (I know this is a stretch, but who knows).  The Viking probes operated on the surface of Mars for over 6 Earth years, considering Opportunity is still working (12 years passed its original mission length) who knows how long the mothership could do useful science/fuel production.

Any thoughts or alternative approaches are welcome please leave a note.

Utilitarian Philosophers Annoy Me

So I just read an article about the ethical questions associated with the safety goals of autonomous cars.  Generally the question is, "do you want your autonomous car to minimize casualties?"  People generally say "Yes I want an autonomous car that does what it can to minimize how many people die in a car crash" This opinion changes when people are told that this prioritization might mean that their car would end up letting them person die in a crash to save a bunch of toddlers (I'm adding that last bit).  The debate is based on a philosophy question, you are standing next to a switch that controls which path a trolley will take, for some bizarre reason their are people on both paths that the trolley will follow, on one track five people, the other there is one person.  If you do nothing, the trolley will remain on its path and kill five people, if you pull the switch it will go down the path with the single individual.  What do you do?  (this question doesn't need to be answered by you, unless you want to leave a comment)  My answer, who cares, the scenario is so abstract and unrealistic, why does it really matter in real terms?
The likelihood that you or an autonomous car are going to run into a situation where the option is kill a passenger or a group of pedestrians is negligible.  I am more likely to win the lotto, while I am being launched into space on my way to visit my empire of sexy cyborgs (okay maybe not that last detail).  Why can't I shout at the lone person on the track, or the people on the other track.  If a car suddenly finds that their are people in its way, why can't it lay on the horn?  I don't want to get pedantic, that's wasting everyones time, but I have a hard time envisioning a scenario where the options are so binary.  Instead of ethicists telling researchers to build around a one in a billion freak occurrence.  While I do believe engineers have a responsibility to make products as safe as they can, and ideally to the greatest benefit to society possible, we should not ignore solutions that are better than our current options 80% of the time and the rest of the time no worse than what we current have.  History is more impressive with really radical changes, but that doesn't mean we should ignore slow and iterative improvements.

Please feel free to leave a comment, if you agree or disagree please say why.

White Envelopes

After tragedies involving airplanes, news reporters will highlight the details associated with finding the "black box" more properly referred to as Flight Data Recorders and Cockpit Voice Recorders (the black box is in fact two different pieces of hardware).  These two pieces of equipment are vital in determining what led up to the incident.  What is unfortunate about the use of FDRs and CVRs in an air craft is the challenge of finding these pieces of hardware after an event.  Imagine if there was a technology platform that would augment the black box, something that fully embraces how small and robust electronics are.  They could be nicknamed "white envelopes" (you are now welcome to groan at this terrible attempt at a joke).  White envelopes would be a small collection of chips that would receive the same telemetry as the FDR and CVR, but instead of being in a single location, the white envelopes could be spread out through out the aircraft.  Now after a crash, pieces of debris can provide critical data that would improve the likely hood of finding the actual black box.

Currently black boxes mass in at around 4.5 kgs (10 lbs for those of us who landed on the moon) and generally two are required in commercial aircraft ( either an FDR and separate CVR or two boxes that have combined FDRs and CVRs).   The mechanical robustness of a black box is incredible, according to the NTSB an FDR needs to survive 3000+ Gs, being submerged in 20,000 ft of water, and being cooked at 1100 C for 30 minutes, that is frickin' nuts levels of hardcore engineering, part of the reasoning for this super robustness, you only have two eggs in roughly the same basket, the plane.  White envelopes could be far less robust, dozens or hundreds of small recorders don't need to be as survivable, a decent number of them are unlikely to face the same level of extreme circumstances.

The design challenges of the white envelope will be pretty tremendous, yeah you don't need to survive being baked at 1100 C but you still need to be passably strong, also what data is acceptable.  In the United States the transcripts of the audio on the CVR are generally extremely restricted, do you still include the audio?  Do the white envelopes record all of the sensor data provided by the aircraft? (which can mean you are potentially recording hundreds of sensors multiple times a second)   These are questions that engineering teams would need to discuss.   A minimum viable product might be around the size of multiple playing cards stacked on top of each other, this small volume would hold one or more memory cards (micro-SD would make the most sense under current technologies(in the opinion of the author, if you disagree please explain why other options make more sense)), wireless data recorders, and an on board controller.  The controller would ensure that sensor data is actually coming from the plane's computers.  In addition to this primary chip set, you would need small power packs, the reason for the power packs being separate from the data recorders stems from the mindset of maximizing system flexibility while minimizing the mass added to the plane.  For white envelopes inside the cabin of the air craft, power could come from any number of electrical systems, so why generate power.  Depending on where engineers decide white envelopes should be added to the plane that will dictate what the power packs would look like, ideally they would have a small battery and some kind of micro generator.  

Hopefully this idea or something like it, could help in improving our ability to understand what happened after the loss of an airplane much more quickly.

Any questions of feed back please feel free to write a note

A Better Cable Box

Recently the FCC ruled that cable companies can no longer restrict which cable boxes work on their network.  Now cable providers will, horror for them (sarcasm), actually have to compete on the quality of the cable box that they say you need to rent.  What if they decided to be proactive on developing a media box that actually benefitted both the customer and the cable company?   Currently my cable provider, Comcast, requires that I rent all of my equipment, modem and cable box from them, which honestly while annoying is not terrible.  What kind of annoys me, is the fact that they have a wifi module in my modem, that is used to provide random strangers access to the Comcast network.  (really I'm just annoyed that I am paying them for the pleasure of improving their wireless network, there should be some kind of discount for the power I pay for, anyways)
Let us look to the future of what ISPs can do for customers while benefitting themselves.  Cable boxes/modems that are rented, can be a lot more sophisticated.  Companies like Microsoft are already trying to turn their gaming consoles into the ultimate home entertainment hub.  A smart cable company or ISP could collaborate with console or computer manufacturers to create a box that is more than just the ability to channel surf and record content.  I would like to suggest a smart box that not only records my content, but also acts as a mini-server, distributing the data load across thousands of homes.  Now when you rent a movie from your cable provider's on demand service, the bits don't need to go nearly as far (while the distance the data moves is relatively trivial, the need for the discrete servers is a potential cost).
Potential features for the smarter cable box could include.
Localized server capacity for distributing media
On board game platform
Massively distributed data backups, you're data could be safely backed up and encrypted in multiple locations across the city.  Said service could be included in your monthly service subscription
A shared node for streaming users content to their individual smart devices
general purpose server capacity.
Home command center for smart home technologies.

Ideally users would not be charged for the full feature set, if the service provider was smart, the cable box would have tiered features.

Crowd sourcing better vacation photos

This idea came to me while walking past tourist taking their personal photos around MIT's campus, how often are your photos ruined by other people walking by, taking their own photos etc.. probably a lot.  Practiced photographers will take many photos to increase their chance of a great picture, but what about those of us with less time? What if we could pool our images, popular tourist spots could have a pool of hundreds or thousands of photographs that could be merged into a useful template.  Now if you want a romantic picture of you and your date, or to change the sky from overcast to true sky blue. A series of smart algorithms would allow you to easily change a seen, to just the people you are with, or the scenery around you.

Some examples to be added (6/8/2016).  Photoshop's tool that allows you to eliminate tourists, microsoft's photosynth.

Friends with photoshop skills if you would be willing I would love to collaborate on making a few mockup images

General Updates June 6 2016

After a chat with some family and friends, I will start going back through my post history and adding explain like I'm 5 posts (there were concerns that my posts were too engineering nerd focused, which is a totally fair assessment)  as there is a relatively small readership, I am happy to do start doing follow up posts requested by you the reader.

An unrelated note, I have been meaning to link to my github account and various projects, the biggest is "RattleBoat"  a reworking of the classic boardgame Battleship, this game can be played within your computer's command line.  The version that this post links to is the most up to date as of today, and is more in debug mode than production ready, but I like feedback.  

For windows user, open your command prompt, drag the file into the cmd prompt, and press enter, it should run.

For mac users if the file is on the desktop, open your terminal and type "cd desktop" and press enter, after that type "ruby rattleboat661440.rb" followed by enter, the program should be running. 

Riding the Centaur (a long term plan for putting research satellites in orbit around Alpha Centauri)

Stopping when you are going really fast is hard, stopping or slowing down while going really fast while flying through the vacuum of space is really hard, slowing down while going really fast in space without using fuel wicked hard to do.

Breakthrough Starshot, the joint initiative between Stephen Hawking and Russian Billionaire Yuri Milner, discussed in the post Additioanl Uses for the Hawking Milner Interstellar Probes (sorry I didn't know the name of the initiative, if I had studied journalism or writing I would feel far more guilty about the mistake), is currently outlined as a fly-by mission, similar to how NASA's New Horizon spacecraft whipped past Pluto.  As stated before, the faster you're going in space the harder it is to slow down.  For an initiative like Breakthrough Starshot slowing down is probably right out off the table for the first generation of probes, the reason is simple, any fuel the probe would carry with it, would make the mission that much more difficult to get to a useful speed, and the amount of fuel you would need to slow down from .2C, well we won't be doing the math today, but it would be a poop ton (possibly quite literally).  

If mission designer's at Breakthrough Starshot can't use fuel how could they slow down their probes enough to achieve orbit?  

Quick answer, using probes to focus the star light of Alpha Centauri (this will not be as easy as it sounds)

The long answer:  The initial generations of Starshot probes will most likely be relatively simple in design, a large surface area solar sail attached to the actual sensor and communication suite, at least at launch, it seems (to this rather uninformed nerd) unlikely the space craft will try to remain attached to the solar sail once outside of the range of the laser propulsion system.  Why would the probe keep carrying something that can increase the likely hood of colliding with a piece of material that could throw everything off course?  As technology gets better it may become possible to create a solar sail material that can be manipulated in ways similar to how blinds can be manipulated to alter how much light can enter your home.  The ability to create a solar sail that can dynamically alter its shape after deployment would open up a world of possibilities, now the probe can protect their sails across the interstellar void, patiently waiting until the probe gets close enough to its target star and start to put on the breaks.  

(note to self add some drawings 6/1/16, dear readers please remind me to make some artwork)

Alas, as noted before, putting on the breaks when you are going at such extreme speeds would be difficult under even the best of circumstances.  In out solar system sunlight doesn't have sufficient density to provide any real pressure much past the orbit of Mars*.  With Mars having an average distance to the sun of about 1.5 AU, for sunlight to reach Earth at 1 AU it takes 8 min 20 seconds, or 12 min 30 seconds for light to reach Mars' orbit, this means if you are going at 20% the speed of light, that means you have just over an hour to use sunlight to slow yourself down, this makes it unlikely that your probe will sufficiently slow down before burning up.  

But we aren't thinking about the individual probes, Starshot probes are like ants in a colony individually cool but not super effective, but when they work together they can achieve wonderful things.  The probes that are able to control their sails will work together.  A simplified mission profile would look something like this.  Wave A is sent out, they are definitely all going to die horribly, when approaching their target stars, they reconfigure their sails to act as Fresnel lenses, focusing starlight towards those who will come behind them this focused light will increase the amount of breaking force supplied to the probes.  The waves will continue, some waves will be launched with lower initial velocities, the slower you are going when you leave the more time you will have to break on the other side, but it also means you are waiting that much longer to get results.  Eventually you will have a steady string of probes focusing the light of a far off star further and further out, providing a breaking zone for larger probes who come down the line.  Many years after the first wave of probes either burn up in the fires of Alpha Centauri or are left to wander the void beyond, a probe massing a whopping 10 grams slows enough to enter orbit.  This probe left Earth going a mere 5% the speed of light, but has now slowed to a much more manageable 22 km/s to begin its orbit around Alpha Centauri A.  

The advantage of this approach is that all of these probes could be made and launched incredibly cheaply, and if an individual probe is lost, no harm no fowl.

The negative, and it is potentially a big one, it will take at least 80 years for the suggested 10 gram probe to get all of the way to its target destination.  If we don't figure out how to make a space ship that can carry enough fuel to park itself in orbit or some truly sci-fi sounding propulsion method no big deal, humans weren't going to really be heading that way in the near term anyway.  On the other hand, if it turns out we can make some kind of FTL drive, or a fusion powered starship, we suddenly have a rather dangerous traffic jam of dangerous bullets on a potentially intercept course with your ships.  Who knows?

Another version of this idea, will be written about later, which will instead be optimized for helping really really big spaceships get into planetary orbit.

Any suggestions, questions, please leave a comment.

*citation will be added, as of June 1 2016 I am going off of recollection of some research I did.