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NASA Plans On Bringing Back Martian Rocks
FortKnox writes: "In this Y! article, NASA is planning on sending a robotic mission to Mars in an attempt to bring back Martian stuff (rocks, soil, etc...). Looks like its a tough mission to plan for; they are calling it 'Apollo without the astronauts.'" I would like to go to Mars in person, but if they're spending my money already, I'd like them to please use robots for a while.
I like NASA's new approach to things. My primary concerns about the mission though are the following:
... this doesn't even include shooting things back.
1) What can we do by inspecting the rocks in person we can't do remotely? We should be able to do everything except touch it.
2) What other benefits do we get out of the mission?
3) Will there be additional scientific study accomplished on the ground? I mean NASA's track record on landing things on Mars hasn't been great
Can't they just analyze them there and send the info back? How much extra money is it going to cost to get a couple of rocks that will end up being a paperweight?
I would like to go to Mars in person
I'd like Jon Katz to go to mars in person. 3 years w/o Katz.
And then I wake up...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Those who would trade mars rocks for earth rocks deserve neither mars nor earth rocks.
I support an unmanned mission to Mars and back. I think the costs of sending men now versus 20-30 years from now are out of proportion with the results. Twenty years hence we may have lighter, faster propulsion technology and better materials for the ship. The ISS will certainly provide additional research that will be directly applicable to such a trip.
Robots are the way to go!
Here is the lab of Jet propulsion labs that does the robot thingie. This is the software to test the robustness of the robots. NASA has learnt from several failures apparently.
A picture of martian rock with some explanations, if you're interested. Along with some interesting rock with bug patterns!
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Here is the link of the actual Mars mission along with the status and risks. And check out all the robotics projects behind the scene. Cool...
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So it's going to be an unmanned mission.
Just wondering who is going to sign the ever-present forms then. Look at www.slashdot.org/articles/01/03/19/2049249.shtml and tell me the bureaucrats will let them get away with just a single form today.
I doubt it...
+++ath0
People are asking why go all the way to Mars and then bring stuff back when we can analyze it there? I think people are missing part of the point. If you're going to send people there eventually, you'd like for them to have a way to get back. There are all kinds of tricky things involved with leaving a planet. Heck, landing on the moon and reaching lunar escape velocity was hard enough!
Part of the goal is to examine rocks from Mars so that we get a better understanding of Mars, our solar system, and space in general. I think another part of the goal is to actually land a craft on Mars and then bring it back. Carrying all that extra fuel to reach Martian escape velocity is going to be expensive, but we need to know that kind of stuff.
Where the wind blows, the tumbleweed goes.
Really, with all the cutbacks in NASA, you would think that they would want to make a mission like this more popular - think about it - battlebots on Mars (just think of the lag time) - the suspense as pictures come back, the contestants make their move - and wait....
On a more serious note it would be neat to have hobbyists designing bots for mars on a competitive level to see who can come up with the most efficent/reliable/lightweight etc design. The guys at NASA have great ideas and implementations - but I think that the bazzar vs cathedral idea could help here.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
As long as they don't bring back any of those Instant martians. One accident and we would be up to are eye balls in matians!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Can't find terrorists
Search earth, then the red planet.
They hide under rocks.
NASA, and other international groups, has already thought of that and long ago addressed it. Even the Apollo missions were carried out so that the Moon rocks were kept in a quarantine, at negative relative pressure. Scientists worked with them via those glovey things you see in labs. Admittedly, the Apollo mission's planetary protection was done rather half-heartly (I won't regale you with stories, here). But Mars is taken a lot more seriously, as is Europa (Europa is the reason that Galileo is being sent to crash into Jupiter while we still have control of it, rather than let it continue to orbit indefinately). Any Mars mission has be decontaminated to where they're gauged as having less than 1 change in 10,000 of contaminating Mars. Martians samples are to be treated as hazardous until we are certain they are not.
This should be a job for the ISS to collect the samples from mars. Then when the next resupply mission stops by the station it isn't leaving with an empty hold.
Why do they send the space shuttle up say to fix hubble, why don't they move the hubble into the same orbit as the space station and to the eva's from the station.
Maybe the ISS isn't into the right orbit todo this but its something they should have considerd. The ISS should be the center of all low earth orbit activity. Maybe a little unit could be built that could go out and grab satlights and bring them to the ISS's orbit where they can be fixed and upgraded.
IMHO the ISS in its current state is not much good for anything useful.
God, root, what is the difference?
People today don't have the stomach for what it would take to set up a sustainable colony on Mars with today's technology. In the 1700's when europeans crossed the Atlantic they lost numerous colonists and expiditions before one took. And that was going to a place on the same planet where they know had to potential to sustain life. Without further information do you really think we could make a perminantly sustainable Mars colony with todays technology, and not loose a single person? Imagine how fast people of today would can the project after they saw the deaths of the colonists on TV a few hours later.
Yeah, it would probably be difficult to find the needed materials. Either wait while the robots explore and find what's needed or redesign to use what gets found. Power shouldn't be a problem; use solar power.
Okay, so maybe this isn't likely for another 10-20 years. It may be slow to start with, but long-term, it would end up being a lot faster than express-mailing more robots out there every time we think of yet another task to do.
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
Sweet, now they won't even have to kill anybody to stop them blabbing about the fact the entire mission has been manufactured in a film studio out in Area 51 :)
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
- The California 210/30 freeway extension costs approximately one billion for 28.2 miles of freeway. [The Big Dig in Boston is over 10 times more expensive, for you easterners.]
- The federal government spends about one billion to pay interest on the federal debt each day.
Really, one billion dollars isn't as much money as you think it is. It's enough to pay 1,000 people $100,000/year for 10 years...and you have to figure that it takes at least 10 years and 1,000 people to build, support, and fly a spacecraft to Mars and back. Not to mention materials costs.[www.dot.ca.gov]
[www.publicdebt.treas.gov]
"Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want."
I know those failed, but I thought we learned why. Wouldn't it be cheaper to "fix" the bugs in the prior mission and re-send? Just because we found a bug in something when it went into deployment doesn't mean we should scrap the project and re-architect it with different goals. Surely this would be cheaper, and a great way for NASA to way off the nay-sayers.
Someone please explain why they do not do this.
It seems like every 6 months now they some out with some new "discovery" that turns out to be just a rehash of old science with a new twist. Truth is, if you think along the lines of timothy here, you could also say that:
- NASA Plans on Sending Astronauts Back to the Moon
- NASA Plans on Sending Satellite Fleet to Jupiter
- NASA Plans on Searching For Life on Titan's Oceans
- NASA Plans on Tripling Space Station Size
- NASA Plans on New Hubble Replacement
The list goes on and on. I love NASA, don't get me wrong, but the only serious stories worth looking at are the ones that start with NASA Receives Budgetary Committment From Congress For [insert project here]. That's the point where any serious planning really starts.I recall the Russians had a couple of successful lunar rock retrievals in the early 1970s. When they felt they couldn't get men to the moon first, they tried to beat Americans to rock samples, but lost that race too.
Perhaps there are lessons from the Russian lunar missions.
There's a limit to how much experimental equipment you can shove onto a Mars probe.
Of course the price of one manned mission would equal hundreds if not thousands of probes which could cover many different parts of the planet with different objectives. A manned mission would be very limited in scope and certainly not worth the price.
Personally I think we should be colonizing the moon right now.
Once we've got a solid production/launch facility on the moon then we can start sending dumb little probes out to pick up rocks on mars.
I'm gonna be dissapointed if space ships arent commonplace by the time I'm old. Bah!
First it was feet and meters. Now it's ounces and grams...
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
its a much better idea to bring back a near earth asteroid (NEA), or mine a near earth asteroid and bring back the good bits.
Why?:
a) NEA's are nearer
b) mining asteroids can turn a profit (Mars probably can't)
c) we can use ION drives to get there (like Deep Space 1 used), but they don't work to-from Mars due to the gravity of Mars
d) there's no chance that we catch the never-get-overs (the asteroids should be dead)
e) they contain useful stuff like water (steam is a fairly good rocket fuel in fact)
f) getting lots of stuff from NEAs to orbit is looking cheaper than getting it from the earth, therefore it may be possible to send people to Mars using the fuel collected from NEAs; in the meantime we can turn a profit boosting satellites into GEOsynchronous orbit and such like...
g) Basically Mars would be a white elephant right now. Cool as heck, but pointless.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"It's important to keep in mind that the money doesn't just vanish. It's not like NASA has a huge furnace that they shovel money into while they work on the spacecraft.
Most of the money ends up paying people's salaries and buying components from aerospace/electronics companies. A portion of it will end up right back in your hands as the recipients spend their money on other things and it circulates back to you. Government projects like this usually create value, rather than destroy it, because these people might not have jobs or be producing anything without taxpayer dollars, and there wouldn't be as much money in circulation. Generally, everybody benefits.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
Paying PhD engineers to build custom parts.
If you're going to build something where you only have one and it has to work the first time, then you pay for experienced people to do the best job possible. Or so the theory goes. In reality not everything needs to be the very best imaginable, but do you want to be the guy they point to if the cheap alternative fails?
For example NASA was doing a robotics project for one of the missions, and a particular section was budgeted at a little over $1 million. A group of poorly paid students at my university built equipment to the same specs for around $50,000. It may be cheaper, but without the serious credentials no one is going to want to use it.
NASA would love to do a Mars sample return. However in reality no such mission is going to happen anytime soon. Last October NASA outlined its long term plan for Mars exploration with a sample return slated to start in 2014. However recently it became known that the October plan is now more or less dead. The only Mars mission not touched at this time is the 2003 twin rover mission (MER 2003). The 2005 orbiter mission is still a tentative go, however everything after that is up in the air.
NASA's budget is being used to pay for the ballooning space station cost overruns which means other programs get the axe. The space station is at least 4 billion over budget. NASA's budget is about 14 billion. Do the Math. The Bush administration has told NASA to get the station budget under control. So NASA has to cut a lot of programs including Mars. Look to the Europeans to potentially do a Mars sample return first with some NASA participation.
Useful Link: A Year of Mars News: It was the worst of times; it was the best of times.
An average space probe nowadays costs about $350 million, and we can do it right now. NASA has firm plans to launch one or two Mars probes every two years, with the design of the 2003 and 2005 missions already well under way.
Manned space flight , in comparison, is still hideously expensive. The final cost of the ISS will run into the many tens of billions of dollars in order to keep 6-7 people in low Earth orbit. A permanent Lunar base capable of supporting a similar sized research crew would be comparable in cost, at the very least. As for Lunar production/launch facilities, check back in a few decades.
Don't get me wrong, I would love to take a Lunar holiday one day. But putting everything on hold until that remote possibility becomes a reality would hinder the very real and immediate science we can do for comparatively little right now.
1) The discussion is about returning 500g of samples for scientific purposes, not stripmining other planets for profit.
2) Who says mining asteroids would be profitable? It would cost at least billions of dollars to undertake such a mining mission to a NEA. We are still capable of mining ores here on Earth much more cheaply, and we aren't going to run out any time in the next few decades.
Guess you better tell NASA that. There are several exploratory design concepts that would utilize ion engines to get probes to and from Mars. You would need a complementary conventional engine to leave Mars orbit, but you would still make overall weight savings by using ion engines for the cruise phase.
Actually, it's a fairly crap rocket fuel as H2O. It's cheap and plentiful, which is why some concepts bother with it at all.
Its 'cheaper' in terms of fuel expenditure. In the real world of today, however, you would have to factor in the many billions of dollars that setting up your NEA fuel depot would cost. One day it will be the way to go, but your argument is like saying that we shouldn't spend millions on developing better silicon chip lithography because one day quantum computing will be much better.
There is exploration and research that many people would like to see undertaken right now, rather than wait for Buck Rogers to do it for us when we are all old and grey.
Pet martian rocks would be cool. Bring one back, paint a clown face on it, and use it as a paperweight
Which is fine and dandy until the Martian clown rocks start eating the children.... For God's sake, won't someone please think of the children???
NASA should be focusing on things that the private sector can't do, like expensive R&D, non profitable science missions, going to mars, etc. They need to stop competing with private companies and start working with them. NASA has something like $13.6 billion a year to play with. The reason they only have a couple of hundred million left over for mars missions is that they are currently building a white elephant in low earth orbit.
NASA has screwed up priorities. Here is what I would like to see them doing:
- Help fund private missions that look promising.
- Do R&D on new propulsion, launch mthods, etc. Think long term. Asteroid mining is something that will probably be important in the future so do more NEAR style missions.
- Lead operations to go to Mars and other interesting places. Design and fund them while relying on other companies to build everything and launch them.
NASA needs to approach space the way the NSF approaches science, grants etc.Another thing, try to make some money out of space. Put advertising on the side of spacecraft, etc. Install HDTV cameras everywhere. Strap IMAX cameras to the side of the shuttle and get some fantastic footage that could help make space interesting again.
Right now if you do a word association test with someone on the street and say "NASA" and they will probably say something about the recent Mars probe losses. We need to get that back to being "Cool!!"
It would be nice to leave it unsterilized. We could then do things like amplify the DNA
IANAB (I am not a biologist, but while it is reasonable to assume that et life would use the same (ie only known workable) chemistry of carbon, it is unlikely that exactly the same molecules, ie DNA would be used, in the same way. If Martian life used DNA in the same way as earthly life instead of some other possible encoding mechanism, it would be a very very strong indicator that the two shared a common ancestor. Likely? I don't know.
But anyway, mars is barren So these guys are coutning thier chickens way before they are hatched.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Reuters attributes Mr. Gates wishes to a long standing competition with Larry Ellison of Oracle. Ellison in 1998 purchased the bones of Stalin from the state of Russia for $60 million dollars under the condition they were petrified via harsh ionization by direct extended storage on the outside of the Mir space station. The bones spent about 18 months in space with direct exposure to solar radiation. Ellison took posession of these rock hard space petrified bones of Stalin in early 2000 and has since used them as the stones for his private sauna.
In the best American spirit of oneupmanship, Gates and Ellison have both agreed that sending a multibillion dollar space probe round trip to Mars, to retrieve rocks for your sauna, is extreme. The only thing more bizarre is Ellisons planned comeback.
I think you are looking at the problems and the failures and ignoring the successes completely. Sanity lies somewhere inbetween.
- the cable didn't snap, it burnt through due to high current flows. These current flows do not exist at asteroids (no magnetic field)
- I don't agree that that his way of despinning an asteroid is necessarily a good one, but I think that there are other techniques that will work, particularly with small asteroids that you can drag back whole (there's more small asteroids than big ones anyway).
- ripples in mirrors degrade their efficiency, they don't stop them working.
- return missions from small (meter size) asteroids are much cheaper than returns from Mars, and we get more stuff back.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!">Recent investigations have called into question whether inflatable mirrors would
>be ripple-free enough to use as space telescopes or antennas.
Irrelevant. We are talking about solar ovens. Space telescopes and antennas have to be accurate to a fraction of a wavelength. Solar ovens do not.
I take it you've never built a solar oven? You should try it, it's not hard...
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.