Seems shortsighted to end this mission after 30 days.
I imagine it's purely for mission planning complexity reasons. But a more sensible approach seems to be to say "after 30 days you have to limit comms to 100 bytes/sec back to earth and stay 100 meters from the rover".
In the future I could imagine the more modern processor on the helicopter might become handy... Some neural network based navigation system might run on it but not the rover main cpu... Also the helicopter might be able to get very good aerial photos that could be turned into 3d models to figure out the best spots to do science. It should be able to see much better than orbital radars.
The official mission length is just how long they have to wait before calling it a success. They expect it to last much longer. Since this is primarily a technology demonstrator once it's a "success" more options open up for actually experimenting with tactics and the limits of the device. It's like how you wait until you've left the parking lot to do a big smokey burnout and see how fast a rental goes in 1st gear.
> Seems shortsighted to end this mission after 30 days.
At this point, NASA is getting rather famous for this. Opportunity had a 90 day mission that survived for nearly fifteen years. Curiosity, a much bigger and more complicated machine, is still doing science 8.5 years later.
I imagine it's purely for mission planning complexity reasons. But a more sensible approach seems to be to say "after 30 days you have to limit comms to 100 bytes/sec back to earth and stay 100 meters from the rover".
In the future I could imagine the more modern processor on the helicopter might become handy... Some neural network based navigation system might run on it but not the rover main cpu... Also the helicopter might be able to get very good aerial photos that could be turned into 3d models to figure out the best spots to do science. It should be able to see much better than orbital radars.