Voyager Probes Give Us ET's View

The only thing consequentially different is computer capability, but a faster/more complex computer would just as likely be a liability as a bonus. Software design techniques, if anything, have gone rapidly backwards for this sort of application since the late 70s/early 80s.

Thankfully, some of our/your assumptions about space technology are currently being proven wrong. For instance, take the Nexus One. NASA has been testing it to see if it could make cheaper smaller satellites with it, and its performance in that regard has been completely outstanding.

Granted, it hasn't survived 30 years in space yet, only time will tell on that one.

But it can survive in all kinds of extreme temperatures, all kinds of G forces, and it works perfectly well in a vacuum. And it's so small to begin with, the extra hardware it needs to power it, recharge it, move it, etc, doesn't have to be that big to begin with.

During one of its space test, the Nexus One was even strapped to the tip of a rocket and the rocket accidentally crashed back into the desert leaving a large crater, but the phone only got a cracked screen and was still fully functional otherwise.

And this is probably something that's not unique to that phone, or to Android, in particular. Consumer-grade devices, because they've been designed to survive actual consumers and sometimes even little kids, have come a long way in terms of reliability.

And granted, a Nexus One will still have bugs that would normally be intolerable in the older type of computers designed for space, but it has enough computing power to be reprogrammed remotely and compensate for most bugs that are found after the fact. And since they take much less space and weight, and are much cheaper to launch. You can launch half a dozen for a fraction of the cost it used to launch an older type of satellite, thus building a type of redundancy that we just couldn't afford to have with the older kind.

So if anything needs to improve, it's probably not our technology, but our mindset. We have good technology. That technology may not be perfect, but it should be more than good enough for unmanned space exploration at least. And it's grand time we start using it for that purpose.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/NricosgcZg4/voyager-probes-give-us-ets-view

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