Curiosity Rover/Robotics special interest

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I am a developer by trade, but I've always dreamed of working for NASA or MIT working with robotics. I've constructed small robots before, but never anything extensive. I'm almost on the brink of being obsessed with Curiosity and find myself on the NASA website constantly! anyone else fascinated buy the rovers/robotics?

if i were a trillionaire i'd commission a flight to the moon and mars to recover the older defunct vehicles we left there, to bring back to earth, refurbish and place into a museum.

I was thinking the exact same thing! I wish we could see the previous Rovers in a museum.

i wonder exactly how much it would cost to do stuff like that?

I would guess it at several hundred million dollars per rover/other object. This is based off of the cost of several sample return missions to the moon, mars, and asteroids, which all cost 100-200 million dollars, and I figure because of the added complexity of getting to the precise locations of the objects, and carrying them back to earth (the rovers all weigh quite a bit), at least a few hundred million dollars more would be needed. Not to mention the cost of actually restoring them to good condition for use in a museum, which would probably be quite a bit as well. It would be cool to do, but unless space travel gets considerably cheaper, I doubt anyone would do it. For the cost required, about a hundred replicas could be made, or even buy one from NASA (I think they typically make a few extras/prototypes, which they could probably be persuaded to part with for enough money).

i suppose a trillionaire could swing it, though. if they spent on nasa as much as is spent on the whole military industrial complex, great things could come about. as it is, nasa's flea-sized and shrinking budget is increasingly fit mostly for subcontracting small jobs to private enterprise.

I did robotics in school. It was the only extracurricular I didn't feel like a total outcast in.

Dunno if you're in high school, and if you are, you might already know about this, but FIRST Robotics is the s**t.
I recommend it to everyone. Seriously, flying home from a competition, I started enthusiastically talking to the stranger sitting next to me about it. And I am so not the kind of person to strike up a conversation with anyone.

how much harder would it be, to retrieve curiosity than to have deposited it there?

First you would have to get to Mars.
Then you would have to land near the rover.
Then you would have to move to the rover and contain it.
Then you need to escape the gravity well of Mars and get back to earth.
Then you have to re-enter Earth's atmosphere.
Finally you have to land safely somewhere.

If you read up on proposed sample return missions for Mars it is hard, really hard. Some of the mission designs need five different spacecraft to pull it off. Recovering a rover weighing a ton would also be a lot harder than retrieving a few kilos of dust and rock samples.

so it's safe to say it would be at least an order of magnitude harder than the apollo missions.

But very, very cool to have a mars rover sitting in your living room.

How long until Elon Musk does it do you think?

that depends on whether humanity survives and in what form it eventually takes. i am not an optimist on this point.

The particular rover that I really like is Spirit. It was the most resilient rover as of yet. It overcame all sorts of obstacles throughout it's functionality/mission (compared to it's sister, opportunity) and continued despite one of it's wheels seizing up. It of course eventually got stuck in some iron sulfate and wasn't able to get out, but still was able to carry out some mission objectives despite it's setbacks.

In 2010, NASA received it's final communication from Spirit. It is assumed to be fully functional (via solar energy) and is stuck in hibernation mode awaiting mission objectives. I must say, I'd love to see it in a museum!

Iv'e been folowing the mars rover programs. Something occurred to me recently; I'd be a whole lot sadder if Curiosity suffered a terminal malfunction than the smaller rovers. Spirit, being smaller and less instrumented didn't seem like such loss. Now it's often said that the public won't be as engaged with robotic missions as with human ones, but I see it differently. It takes very little for us to treat things as though they were whos rarher than its. People readily ascribe personality to Roomba vacuum cleaners for example (guilty m'lud).

Now Curiosity tweets (no doubt only from Earth, thanks to a college intern) but there are autonomous AIs around that tweet. If an expert system was tweeting geological updates with a crafted persona, direct from the planet surface, I think I'd be even more engaged with the program than if a bunch of humans were there instead. Could this be just an aspie thing I wonder? I am a bit of a misanthrope

Our next two rovers to Mars will be named Rape and Plunder.

ruveyn

it is dying a slow death from suffocating mars dust which is coating its solar panels in an inpenetrably opaque layer of gunk. if i were a trillionaire i'd go up there and bring it home, fix its wheel, give it a bath and let it rest in a museum.