They only dropped ten out of 43 - the rest are stored on-board, including duplicates of the ten.

They store most of the samples on-board - ten out of 43 were dropped off as a backup.

That’s not what Perseverance does - I don’t know how so many have this misconception about the mission.

Did you forget the first Falcon Heavy launch? Obviously it can do it. Also, Falcon has been used to launch missions to other planets.

You're right I was forgetting the Falcon Heavy. But it's certainly not cheap when the government is footing the bill. The Nancy Grace Roman launch cost NASA $255m, far above SpaceX's prices for even an expendable GTO launch.

Not true - only ten samples were dropped off at a “depot” close to each other. The rest are on-board Perseverance and can be picked up all at once, which was always the primary plan.

The point is that they’d have to be picked up and retrieved at all, even from Perseverance.

That alone is a separate multibillion dollar program just to do that.

That’s not quite true - Perseverance has tubes for every tube (10) it left behind. The tubes left behind are the backups in case something happened to Perseverance- the main tubes are on board and can be collected all at once when from the rover.

The point is that they’d have to be picked up and retrieved at all, even from Perseverance.

That alone is a separate multibillion dollar program just to do that.

Substitute for em dashes the inaccurate AI signal du jour. Then consider not posting about whether something is AI or not.

I found C# exciting when it was new and adding features that were important to me, but now it feels like it has become bogged down with chunks just abandoned on the alter of backwards compatibility (Expression, anyone?) and adding features I couldn’t care less about (null safe code, pattern matching, etc).

I worked with C# for a decade around the transition from .net to .net core to .net. I've come to really dislike it as a language because of it's implicity and abstractions but I'm surprised that you're not finding the new features intereting. All the work on immutability seems pretty awesome to me at least. Sure it's still this bastard version where you build "readonly" objects and put them into immutable collections, but I assume they'll work on this going forward.

I'm never going back to it, but I do think it's the best it's ever been.

I seemed to have been through this pattern in my interests multiple times and just wait in the between times for something of interest. For hobby/interests I started with programming languages and then moved into understanding hardware and then mobile devices. I wrote HP 41 s/w, HP 48 s/w, the first public dethreader for HP 48 ROMs, Newton s/w, Windows CE s/w, jailbreak s/w and on device iPhone 1.0 s/w (pre App Store), but have been waiting for the next thing since iPhone 5 or so. In languages I went through a lot as well and now am waiting on C# to be improved.

Making allocators part of a type or scope instead of in every function call might be a start.