Re:Nasa’s Mars Rover Opportunity Concludes a 15-Year Mission
by Rebelgecko on Wednesday February 13, 2019 @08:28PM
(#19158901)
A small handful of people can still easily cost millions of dollars per year. And DSN time to talk to the rovers is expensive, probably in the neighborhood of $2,000 per hour.
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Re:Nasa’s Mars Rover Opportunity Concludes a 15-Year Mission
by gizmo686 on Thursday February 14, 2019 @12:50AM
(#19159892)
How much DSN time do you need. Given the deley, I assume the only use is batch transfers, so cost per bit seems like the more useful metric (along with how much data is involved)
Re:Nasa’s Mars Rover Opportunity Concludes a 15-Year Mission
by jessriedel on Friday February 15, 2019 @11:19AM
(#19172083)
$5M a year seems like it would be very reasonable. The original 90-day price tag was $820M, and they've spent an additional ~$200M over the past decade and a half. Maybe it's really not worth it to spend $5M/year to extend the life further, but the scientific returns would have to be quite severely diminishing.