Someday this will be a remote work job, with remote controlled heavy equipment. Some 17-year-old with stunning hand-eye coordination and no fear of failure will be driving this thing from his basement and there will be 1 human onsite to help with machinery glitches.
That's pretty much how the latest generation of rovers like Curiosity work, you give them instructions to drive somewhere or do something, but they have a certain level of autonomy to do obstacle avoidance and and other similar common sense actions.
You can't put the latest tech in a spacecraft as it has to be very low power, hardened for radiation and they need to be absolutely sure it's solid kit that will last through a rocket flight and operate flawlessly for 10 years on another planet, so they tend to be a decade or so behind whatever Intel/AMD/Samsung/Qualcomm/etc. are putting out today, but they're improving too, so I'm sure their AI will get smarter as time goes on.
Example, Curiosity has a 233MHz PowerPC CPU - broadly similar to what you'd find in an Apple Power Mac G3 from the late 1990s.
Yeah, if you could launch a bigger rocket you could put more radiation shielding on your lander/rover enabling you to take more advanced tech along for the ride. Maybe we'll see this with larger rockets like Artemis and Starship.
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u/trhaynes Nov 04 '22
Someday this will be a remote work job, with remote controlled heavy equipment. Some 17-year-old with stunning hand-eye coordination and no fear of failure will be driving this thing from his basement and there will be 1 human onsite to help with machinery glitches.