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Phoenix Headed for Martian North Pole in 2007
jschuur writes "After narrowing down the selections to 4 finalists, NASA has chosen the Phoenix Mars lander design for its 2007 Scout Mission to the planet Mars. Phoenix, a joint project between the University of Arizona and Planetary Laboratory was designed after the doomed 1999 Mars Polar Lander and recycles much of its design and instrument ideas. A staggering $325 million grant was awarded to the University of Arizona for the project, which will also include Canadian participation. Phoenix is scheduled to land on Mars in May of 2008."
I hope they haven't recycled the imperial to numeric conversion code.
Somebody want to contribute an open source alternative to them?
When are we going to see a sample return mission?
That will be a big advance...
A staggering $325 million grant was awarded to the University of Arizona
I don't see what is so staggering about this amount. For example, I'm guessing hundreds of millions of $ are spent every year designing cars. Cars that are never more than a few miles away from a local garage. If your sending a device a few million miles away you'd want to be pretty sure it's going to work. Not a inexpensive proposition. There are no Pep Boys on Mars
To what end though? Do we need to go to Mars? It's essentially an illogical folly, so it we're going to do it, let's do it right and let astronauts get back to being explorers rather than truck drivers.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
However, they are still hampered by the fact that they are essentially "dumb" implements. They can't say, by themselves anyway, "Hey, that mountain over there looks like a good place to look for fossils. Let's hop in the rover and go take a look." No, they have to wait for human operators to decide for them, then tell them exactly how to get there, all with a 40 minute round trip communication time. Most of the time in a robotic Mars mission is spent sitting on the surface, waiting for orders.
Humans can, should, and will go to Mars. Hopefully in my lifetime, but definitely in my children's. Anyone who's read The Case for Mars knows how easy and cheap it can be.
Someone once said "Once you're in orbit, you're halfway to anywhere." We've been halfway to Mars for almost 50 years. Let's get there.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Why? What is there that we can't have better and cheaper on Earth? Mars is a rock, frozen day and night, baked by solar radiation; its atmosphere, what little there is of it, is poisonous, the soil is just plain weird - why would we want to live there? It would make Antarctica look appealing.
Back here in the Sol system we'd set up a big solar collector that would focus a laser at the ship, pushing and powering it all the way to nearby stars.
And how much would this cost? When the US is tanking a $400 billion deficit this year and every other country is running c. 3% fiscal deficits who would pick up the bill.
Perhaps a tiny fraction of the expenditure you are calling for would be better spent on reducing our addiction to fossil fuels which is going to end up killing us. Not as sexy as going to the stars, but it is one real problem that we have to confront now - the stars will always be there waiting for us, a habitable world back here on Earth might not be.
Best wishes,
Mike.
And they could sit there for months or years whilst we make up our minds. Not like the astronauts who would be dependent on their air supply. The lunar explorations were always curtailed by the fragility of the men.
What if they could make all the air and fuel they'd ever need? Mars Direct calls for the production of methane, oxygen and water on Mars, as opposed to taking it all with us. The exploration of the world would probably never had happened if they had to bring everything they needed with them.
We've done the easy bit. We haven't done the bit that involves spending months in microgravity, slowly cooking in solar radiation before attempting to live on a planet with a radically different environment.
The amount of radiation, barring a solar flare or coronal mass ejection is well within tolerable limits. Russians have spent years in orbit, and though they were not able to function, we're only talking about three months tops. This is, of course, not including the possibility of using a tether to create gravity. And the environment on Mars is much more temperate and friendly than the environment on the moon, and we've been to the moon.
If we only did what was easy, none of us would get out of bed in the morning.
It's a sales book, of course it says it will be cheap. My Windows XP manual told me that my life would be much easier after installation. Experience of all high tech projects shows the opposite.
Even if we TRIPLE the cost of the proposed plan, it's still less than what we just spent on a war. ($150 billion.) And that gives five 1.5 year missions covering thousands of square km of the surface, establishing outposts, making discoveries, and learning about how to survive there.
We must take the initiative to go to Mars and stop fearing what might happen.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
In "The Case for Mars," Zubrin talks about the court bureaucrats in China. The emporer had opened up china in the late 1300s and sent treasure fleets to Indonesia, India, Arabia, and even the west coast of Africa. They had seven masts when European ships had at most two.
Then the emporer died. The bureaucrats though he had wasted funds on a folly of an idea (exploration) when more important things needed to be done at home, like irrigation projects. They ordered the fleets destroyed just as they were about to enter the Mediterranean, and China was subjugated by Europeans who had the will to explore and the courage to accept the risks.
Why do I bring this up? Because it's ideas like yours that poison exploratory programs. Instead of grand gestures, you want small cheap steps. You speak of needs at home when they can be solved by innovating for the world. Material hyper efficient fuel cells and computers, inexpensive access to fusionable materials, and cheap metals and chemicals are all available in space. We must have the courage and conviction to simply reach out and grab them, and this can be done for a small percentage of the GNP. Merely increasing NASA's budget to the same percentage of the federal budget as it was during the Apollo era and providing a lofty goal will be enough for NASA to land several humans on Mars and more (like develop an economical heavy-lift launch vehicle). We simply have to want it enough.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
I don't have the time to go around and around on this, so this will be my last reply.
Fortunately, they could be pretty sure that they would have fresh air, water and food in the New World. None of those are found on Mars, you are reliant on the technology you bring with you to keep you alive.
The processes that would be used to generate the materials needed for life support have been in use by industry since the 1800s. The reactors proposed are based on the ones used in nuclear naval vessels. Both are durable, reliable, and rugged.
Other systems, such as door seals, would only encounter one different element; dust. If we have all the water we could ever need, this won't be a problem because the seals could be cleaned very easily. They will not be exposed to a hard vacuum, but an atmosphere similar to the one that the SR-71 and U-2 fly in.
Not the same at all. The Soviet long endurance records all took place within the Earth's magnetosphere where they were protected from the majority of solar radition. The Apollo missions were so short that they are hard to extrapolate from and they all took place during times of low solar activity.
Then launch at low levels of solar activity. At any rate, microgravity is nothing we have not experienced before.
Mars astronauts would be exposed to solar radiation both during the transit to Mars and whilst on the surface.
In transit, yes. On the surface, no. While there would be higher levels of UV radiation than on earth (which have been dealt with in LEO), other harmful radiation is blocked by Mars' atmosphere. A simple solution would be to cover the top of the hab with sandbags to shield out almost all of the radiation.
There is a difference between doing something worthwhile that is hard and something that is pointless and hard. IMHO exploring Mars is firmly in the latter category.
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on this point. I feel that exploring space is key to the future of the human race, and that technologies developed in the exploration of space have great uses in terrestrial life.
So for $50 billion I could get 150 Phoenix missions (probably more once mass production cuts in), explore vastly more of Mars, land in places that are too risky for manned missions, spend far longer looking and not risk anyone's lives.
Let's assume for a minute that Phoenix can explore an area of 10 square meters. Let's also assume that you can get 500 missions for the cost of 5 manned missions. Let's also assume that, with the help of a pressurized rover, the manned missions have an effective range of 1000km (possible, there are cars that can go that far). This means that the probes can explore 5000 square meters, or 5 square kilometers. The manned missions can explore 5 x 3.14 x 1000km x 1000km (5 times pi times radius squared). The manned missions have an effective exploration area of 1.5 million square km, or about 300,000 times the area of the probes. Of course, that assumes that all they do is drive around. However, I think that each mission is capable of exploring both geologically and archeobiologically 10 square km (50 km^2 total), meaning that they still have 10 times the effective exploration capacity of 500 Phoenix missions. The very fact that the human crews can travel to newer and more interesting places as opposed to waiting six months for another mission to get there and having the added risks of 500 launches.
That is also not counting the value of the experience from living on Mars, the establishment of outposts on the planet for future colonization, and the increased amount of science able to be performed by humans because of their ability to act on their own to solve problems and explore new developments further.
Like I said, I can't go around and around on this. If you disagree, then we'll just have to leave it at that.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Why? What is there that we can't have better and cheaper on Earth? Mars is a rock, frozen day and night, baked by solar radiation; its atmosphere, what little there is of it, is poisonous, the soil is just plain weird - why would we want to live there? It would make Antarctica look appealing.
There are two questions here:
1: Why should we, humanity, go?
2: Why should anyone, as a single person, go?
The answer to the second one is easy. Because no one else has. No one else has seen the sky thousands of different shades of pink that we've never dreamed of on Earth, or walked in one-third G, or seen valleys so wide and vast that you can't see the sides because they're under the horizon, or an escarpment as high as Mount Everest. Don't forget, people live in extremely hostile environments all the time, and explorers go just about everywhere for the thrill of it. Earth is just as much of a rock as Mars is.
And hell, it'd kick to see Earth in the sky at night. Now *that'd* be beautiful.
So why would we want to live there? Well, for one, because it's not Earth. It's different. From a purely practical perspective, ignoring the radiation issues (which are not as bad as people think - bad, yes, and you'd have to take precautions, but not impossible), Mars is a healthier place to live, fundamentally, because of the lower gravity. It's just less of a strain on bones and your heart. Yah, you can't return to Earth. So?
The answer to the first one is a little more complex, but it's fundamentally the same as the second. We want to go to Mars because it's not Earth. Let me put it to you this way.
Take a hypothetical teenager, or very young adult.
Why would they want to leave their parent's house? They have everything they want there - shelter, a private space to themselves, and it's cheaper: don't pay for rent, utilities, food. It's perfect. Living on your own looks like hell in comparison. But they do it - why? Because 1) they know they have to, just like we have to get off this rock. Have to. Humans have to keep expanding, have to keep moving, have to keep learning. It's what makes us human - what makes us us, and 2) because fundamentally, in the long run, it's better for them. They learn more (how to manage a household, how to fix things), develop more, and grow extremely quickly. Again, likewise - it's better for us to go to another world, like Mars. We'll learn more, really quickly. Like how to survive in heavy radiation. Like ecology engineering, and closed-systems engineering, which we have no need to learn here on Earth, but we could DEFINITELY use the technology! Like automated factories, robotic construction equipment, atmospheric engineering. The list goes on. Yah, we could do it here on Earth - but we don't need to, and so we won't do it. Necessity is the mother of invention, and all that. How many examples in human history do you need to justify that?
Perhaps a tiny fraction of the expenditure you are calling for would be better spent on reducing our addiction to fossil fuels which is going to end up killing us.
This is the beauty of pure science. Go to Mars! Guess what? There are no fossil fuels there, so we'll learn really quickly how to live without fossil fuels real quick, and export that knowledge back to Earth.
Humans are getting lazy and complacent - things are too easy. "Well, we could reduce our dependence on fossil fuels... but why would we? There's no real need..." You have to keep pushing. Have to keep moving. Have to keep learning.