Berk Wrote:The main reason I've heard for not sending in a robot has to do with radioactivity doing nasty things to most modern electronics.Assuming you could shield the robot itself, shielding the control line is a whole different issue. The only transmission medium that's impervious to electro-magnetic interference is fiber-optic, which is rather too delicate for the task. Even the military's take on fiber-optic cable has to be treated gently.
At the risk of oversimplifing, a cable (or wireless through the air for that matter) provides a connection of the other side of the connection can reliably tell the 1's and 0's apart. As cables get longer, and the voltage of the transmission gets less and less (from resistance of the wire), it gets more and more difficult to tell those 1's and 0's apart. (There's always some level of 'white noise' in an electrical system, so that if the voltages get too weak, they get lost in the noise.)