2/15/2006: Data transfer via snail

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by mlandman

I can GUARANTEE you that implementing (a) and (b) cost hundreds of thousands of taxpayer money.

Almost certainly not true for (b), since it had to be designed on a microscopic level anyway, and putting it in one pattern is equivalent to putting it in another.
The cost for (a) would depend entirely on how much of that capability was already there for mission-critical applications. When you say "play a wake-up song", I'm guessing you mean on its radio link to NASA, so sending MP3 or WAV data isn't particularly different from sending any other data.

[mlandman]

Know why one of the rovers was down for a week after it got there?

Ran out of storage space.

I'm not kidding.

I work in very high tech, believe me the MANPOWER associated with the countless hours of Q&A to insure that every feature works properly is astounding for what we do, I can only imagine that NASA is much more stringent.