Imagine building a car-sized-rover, shipping it 225 million kilometers away, and landing it on its wheels - on Mars! This is not science fiction. It is precisely what NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory did with the Curiosity Rover. Armed with a nuclear power plant and lasers, this magnificent vehicle drives autonomously on the rough martian terrain. The onboard processor is a 200 MHz RAD750, a radiation hardened version of what you would find in an Apple computer from 1990s.
This keynote explores the essence of bold, calculated risks. We’ll discuss why taking these risks is often safer than playing it safe, how to identify and mitigate potential downsides, and the characteristics of good risks. We will also cover how to identify the risks that we take inadvertently and how being deliberate about those can change your outlook on being more innovative in your daily lives.
We'll delve into NASA's bold move to put a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip on a helicopter on Mars. If you are using an Android phone or tablet, you likely have the same ARM chip in your pocket. The amount of science this chip can do compared to the RAD750 is astounding - and it is a clear example of why this leap in technology wasn’t just a risk but a necessity to advance our understanding of the universe.
Speaker
Khawaja Shams
Co-Founder & CEO @Momento, previously @NASA and @Amazon
Khawaja is a passionate QCon advocate. He earned the NASA Early Career Medal for his contributions to the Mars Rovers, from the cameras to the image processing pipeline. At Amazon Web Services, he ran DynamoDB and was subsequently the VP of Engineering for AWS Elemental. Now, as CEO and Co-founder of Momento, he's leading a team that's building serverless platforms to empower developers with caching and pub-sub.
