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A probe buit to land on Mars is built with considerable "Artificial Intelligence" in its onboard software, so that it doesn't need control from earth for every move ... it's capable of some autonomy, i.e. making some of its own decisions as it goes about its business. In order to control it when necessary ... and also to get ahold of the probe's reports, data, pictures etc. ... comunication is by radio. The peculiar thing about it is that the radio signals take more than a minute to travel between the controller on earth and the probe on Mars; so if the timing of a command is critical, the command has to be sent more than a minute before the probe needs it, and for the same reason, the result can't be known until almost three minutes later.

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16y ago

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