No Mars sample return.

On Sat, 22 Nov 2008 18:17:15 +0100, "Bresco"
wrote:


These Martian missions keep getting more and more expensive. A decade ago
they could do a Martian lander for a quarter of a billion,

And it died after 100 days. The second quarter billion lander (MPL)
vanished without a trace. You get what you pay for.

I'd rather sse them revive Beagle II,

Which failed because they cut too much redundancy.

Brian

Bresco wrote:

These Martian missions keep getting more and more expensive. A decade ago
they could do a Martian lander for a quarter of a billion, MSL is already in
the multi-billion range.

I think that they should have built some more MERs, now that we know how
well they work and the R7D for them is already done. We'd still be very
limited as to where we could land them on the surface due to sunlight
and altitude above mean Martian ground level for the parachute to work,
but you could get a lot of info that way for a moderate-sized investment.
Our problem is that we don't standardize on a particular lander/rover
design like the Soviets did with their later Venera spacecraft.
As soon as we build something that works, we go onto a new design with
all the risks and R&D costs that go with it.
Note that MSL is a one-off spacecraft unlike the MERs... if it fails,
there is no back-up for it.
That's a throwback to the "better, faster, cheaper" way of doing things
rather than "let's send two, and hope at least one works" approach that
proved successful in Mariner 8/9 Viking 1/2, and Spirit and Opportunity.
In the case of Mariner 8, we did lose one, but Mariner 9 was able to
replace most of its lost mission.
But in the other cases, having two successes greatly increased science
return while not adding to R &D costs.

Pat

Pat Flannery wrote:


Bresco wrote:

These Martian missions keep getting more and more expensive. A decade
ago they could do a Martian lander for a quarter of a billion, MSL is
already in the multi-billion range.

I think that they should have built some more MERs, now that we know
how well they work and the R7D

That's "R&D", not some new version of the Semyorka.

Pat

Pat Flannery wrote:
I think that they should have built some more MERs, now that we know how
well they work and the R[&]D for them is already done.

Good luck telling the engineers "you did such a good job that we're not
going to let you touch the next generation". They'll be rioting in the
streets...
--
Kevin Willoughby lid

It doesn't take many trips in Air Force One
to spoil you. -- Ronald Reagan

"Bresco" wrote in :

These Martian missions keep getting more and more expensive.

They also keep getting more and more *capable*. They cost more, but they do
more.
** Posted from http://www.teranews.com **

Bresco wrote:
Neither do I. It's wwwaaayyyy too expensive ($5 billion projected) for just
a couple of hundred grams of Martian dust. I personally don't think it's
worth it. Let them do research on Mars, it's a lot cheaper. I'd rather see
them minituarize an electron microscope or STM, that way we'll at least have
some ROI (return on investment).


That's exactly my thoughts on the matter, although getting a _really_
high powered microscope on the Martian surface might be a pretty
daunting operation.
You probably want to go with a optical system rather than anything
really fancy (gold plating the samples for the electron microscope is
going to get mighty involved), but if things like this start showing up
in the soil samples at several hundred magnification:
http://biology.unm.edu/ccouncil/Biol...s/diatom6.jpeg
(fossil diatom shells)
or this:
http://jolisfukyu.tokai-sc.jaea.go.j...onbun/2-12.jpg
(fossil pollen)
....then things get _really_ interesting.
It shouldn't be any problem to build an optical one that can hit 1,000 x
magnification that is light enough to land.
Soil samples could be rolled under it via a small conveyor belt and the
microscope's optics be designed to track across the sample belt with
very fine aim control and focus.
Use polarized light in various optical frequencies via filters for the
illumination source, and even if no fossils were found, you could learn
a lot about the crystalline make-up of the soil samples by their optical
backscatter at various wavelengths and orientations.
This would be a ideal mission to do with something like a small-scale
rover of around the size of "Sojourner Traveler" that could go out and
bring back small samples to the microscope on the lander proper.
The whole works might be light enough to launch aboard a Delta II using
or present MER landing technique.
I don't think we are making anywhere near enough use of what that
rocket/basic landing bus design can allow us to do on a budget.
We could do fairly low cost missions that perform a single task, like
say drilling out a core sample from under the vehicle and bringing it up
for examination aboard it.

Pat

Bresco wrote:
These Martian missions keep getting more and more expensive. A decade ago
they could do a Martian lander for a quarter of a billion, MSL is already in
the multi-billion range. I'd rather sse them revive Beagle II, which can be
sent for $150-$200 million. MSR is simply too expensive and a multinational
effort will run into all kinds of political problems.


http://www.space.com/missionlaunches...rs-lander.html

The bit of news that the sample cache hardware had bit the dust was
vetted at a recent NASA Advisory Council Planetary Protection
Subcommittee meeting held earlier this month at NASA Headquarters.

According to one source at the meeting: "It's outta there...For only $2
million, a very nice basket was made."

--
jacob navia
jacob at jacob point remcomp point fr
logiciels/informatique
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~lcc-win32