[sho_hn]

> This is what blows my mind. a 2015 smart phone has more power than everything else.

Not really. The things that regular end-users do on their smartphones are computationally much more intensive than what you deploy on the edge in space. I'll be the first to gripe about the inefficiencies of modern front-end programming, but the software on a Mars rover also just doesn't have that much number-crunching or throwing around ginormous assets to do.

A much more interesting question is to ask what you could do on Mars if you had that compute power. For example, how realistic is it to expand further on autonomous capability.

[zokier]

Percy has some degree of autonomous driving capabilities, requiring fair bit of image processing. I'm sure the autonav programmers would love more compute to be able to literally drive faster; the improvements from Curiosity to Perseverance already made huge difference.

[GlenTheMachine]

The question is whether you need to. Yeah, it would be cool. Yeah, you could probably go faster. But usually, none of that is worth it. The science can still get done without it.

[acdha]

I think it’s a bit more complicated than that - yes, a ton of great science has been done but there is also a considerable amount of time spent working around limitations, too, and some of those lead to less science being done over the life of the mission.

As a simple example, greater autonomy might allow the rovers to do more by avoiding the number of times where they have to wait for the speed of light (20 minute one-way latency plus annual blackouts) & bandwidth delays for someone at JPL to learn about an obstacle, decide what to do, send commands, and see what happens. They’ve spent a lot of time doing that cautiously because the failure mode of some outcomes is losing a rover, but there are other scenarios where the same is true in the other direction so I’m sure they’re keenly working on ways to make it better able to handle safety navigation and various recovery scenarios for things like losing communications, but I’d expect that might come in the form of a system which operates as they have but logs what it would have done so they can compare the human and robotic commands.