KennyR wrote:
Making something self-repairing is not the same as making something so simple it wouldn't (and can't) have had errors in the first place. Russian engineering was always clunky and simplistic, but always very sturdy and practical at the same time, from T-34s to rockets. In some cases adding self-repair is even a detriment, not an advantage.
I'm very skeptical at the introduction of high level operating systems to probes at all - these are basically for the human interface. Remove the high level stuff and you can make the chips simpler and sturdier - not to mention cheaper.
Interesting PoV, which I'm sure has been discussed to death in NASAs engineering labs. I think your approach has been rejected simply because the mission profile is too complex to be handled by what you call something 'clunky and simplistic'. It's simply an optimisation problem. Given a mission profile where small failures are a certainty, is a design made up from *lots* of simple, sturdy and stupid components better than a design made up from *a few* yet smart and self-repairing ones? Remember, lots of components weigh more than a few, and weight is an expensive commodity to carry around. And you are always facing the problem that in if in case of clunky and simplistic things *do* go wrong, you have just spent hundreds of millions of dollars to put some metal and advanced plastics on a big round rock.
My point: the problem is too complex to be dealt with by 'simpler is better' mantras.
