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'Tis But A Scratch!
Still plenty of miles on these wheels
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this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2026
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NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover
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I would love to know the mileage! Keep on truckin' lil buddy!
37.5 kilometres.
Unless you include distance traveled while in storage, in which case 560 000 000.
Thats impressive to say the least! Keep on keeping on lil buddy!
For we Americans thats 23.3 miles (123031.496 feet).
I'm still one of the few Americans that wants us to convert to the metric system for measurement.
As an American who has lived in the UK, I too am for metric measurements for everything; except cooking.
Even after two years living in East Sussex and travelling throughout the EU for work, I could never get used to metric cooking. It's just weird, stressful and unintuitive to me...
A pinch of oregano vs 0.1 grams of oregano, but if I'm cooking for one more person than the box says, how many more grams do I add? Do I need an atomic scale and a microscope yet?
It will always be just nuts to me how anyone can find cooking with grams, trying to get exact every dang time is fun and relaxing.
I'll take all the metrics but that.
I'm from Europe and I've never heard of someone measuring herbs
It's usually also just like a pinch, a teaspoon or a buttload
Most of the ready meals tasted like moosh to me, so I never bought them. And I can't remember if they were asda or tesco brand, but there were a few prepackaged box meals I used to buy to make at home that measured herbs, which is where I got frustrated.
Ah, ok
I pretty much never buy anything ready made
I just look up a recipe, buy stuff and cook - and herbs and spices come in as we like
Usually I take a receipt only as an option and orientate myself with that. Like how long stuff needs to be cooked, and at what point which stuff needs to get added.
But I don't follow them on point - maybe the first time I'm trying something, but usually I already have an idea on what I like it to taste, and just follow it roughly
Takes some experimentation what works and what not, but imho that's exactly where the fun in cooking is
(And until the last sentence I wasn't sure, if you answered to the wrong comment, because ready made meals usually taste like shit and I never promoted them - not on purpose at least)
When you start using it to bake and you just set the bowl on the scale and just put all the (hopefully rounded) amounts of ingredients in there, it starts to feel so easy!
It even goes for liquids, because the volume difference for most is negligible
For baking metric is the only way.
Also you can tall the people that never did coke as they don't know what a gram of powder looks like... So I'm told...
It's not like I haven't found a very dusty tiny scale on the street that I still use to measure baking powder
Do you actually put herbs and spices in your cooking by measurement? No shade, just genuine interest.
When you grow up cooking a certain way and then get forced into doing it a different way, it's hard to just 'do' it without measuring first.
Growing up, I learned using imperial measurements and can eye just about anything needed. However, when I transitioned to living in the UK, I couldn't eye what was needed because my brain just couldn't measure it the same in my head, so yeah, I had to measure it.
The same holds true in reverse btw as my mates have told me when going across the pond.
Interesting
When I cook I barely ever measure anything and just cook by feeling. I read a recipe and then do what feels right for me with it.
Herbs and spices I add very little first and then taste it and add more and so on.
How many football fields is that?
410.104987 football fields
Just so little? Is Mars' surface so corrosive then or why are the wheels knackered?
The wheels are built extremely thin (0.75mm aluminium) to save on weight. The rover is incredibly heavy (340kg/750lbs in Mars gravity) on those paper-thin wheels, I'm really amazed it held this far.
Before the drive today it was
37.50 km - (23.30 miles)
Today's drive was around 30 meters
37.5km was what I was looking for considering the state of those wheels.
But lets be honest it's a rover on Mars we are operating 154 million miles (248 million kilometers) away. 30 meter is huge considering, the latency of the transmission/response must be mind blowing.
They send up drive commands for an entire drive. The onboard computer initiates the drive the next day, it has set parameters for tilt and roll as well as wheel slip, it stops on a regular basis and takes images to assess for hazards, if found it can drive around the hazard if the path is clear. if the hazard is too difficult considered to drive over or around it stops and acquires a complete set of images and calls home for a new set of commands. After the drive it sends home the drive data and a full set of images. The rover planners use the new images to plot the next drive