ESA Aiming for Martian Probe in 2011

allanj writes "According to the BBC, the ESA is set to send a robotic probe to Mars around 2011. They apparently want to return samples of Martian soil with the probe - cool idea if it works better than Beagle 2 did..." From the article: "They still require a great deal of further detail and the agency's member states will also have to sign off the mission. Ministers will have their say when the Esa Council meets in December."

Comments

Re:sharing

[NoseBag]

You might check out the details of the Casini/Huygens probe (US mothership/UK Titan probe daughtership), telemetry transmission of the Mars Rovers via the EU Mars Surveyor(?), and others. This (sharing of resources) has been going on for a while. Oh, yeah...and the space station. Seems everyone has a piece of that puppy.

Good idea though.

Yep, that's it.

[nc_yori]

The problem, QuantamG, is that beauracracy is typically unwilling to explore new methods when old, proven methods are available.

Compounding this problem is the fact that American politicians/higher-ups seem to lack the ability to say, "I'm sorry, I screwed up. Everyone makes mistakes," so possibly funding a program that fails in the public eye is a non-option.

It is true that the government has programs that fail all the time [computerworld.com]; it's just that something like space travel is more suitable for general public news consumption so it's more widely reported and therefore a touchy subject for most politicians.

I agree, we should be putting money into exploring better technology now, so space endeavors will be more efficient later. All the more reason to do things like voting and calling your congresspersons

P.S.- The above statement isn't an invitation to talk about how fucked up American politics are. Sorry if anyone views it that way.

The next logical step

[FuturePastNow]

The next logical step for Mars is sample return. According to this page NASA expects to do a sample return in 2013. I wonder if an earlier European mission will change that plan any?

Re:It's about propulsion, propulsion, propulsion

[NardofDoom]

We have ways of producing in-situ fuel on Mars. A small tank of hydrogen, a atmospheric processing unit and an RTG will provide enough fuel to launch back to Earth.

You really need to read "The Case for Mars."

Mars Society

[fsh]

This is precisely what Dr. Robert Zubrin has been advocating since the early 1990's. His plan would run about $2 billion a year, and was developed in response to President Bush Sr.'s $450 billion Space Exploration Initiative. The first year an Earth Return Vehicle would be sent over with a small amount of Hydrogen. When it landed, it would start processing the CO2 with the H2 to produce methane and water. If a decent water source can be found (which is becoming more and more likely), they wouldn't even need to take the H2 with them. A year after the ERV is launched, the Hab is launched with the crew (while the ERV is still on its way to Mars). By the time the Hab lands on Mars (as close to the ERV as possible), the ERV's tank will be topped off and ready to go.

Zubrin is president of The Mars Society where you can find all the details about his plan, called Mars Direct.

Re:sharing

[drachton]

Cassiny/Huygens isn't a US/UK mission, it's a work of collaboration between NASA and ESA, and it says here that the European contribution is led by Alcatel Space, a French company. You can find more details regarding each agency's contribution here.

Re:Is this it?

[FireFury03]

If you accelerated as 9.8 m/s^2... ...in space with an ion drive

Unfortunately current ion drives are *nowhere near* powerful enough to do this (Wikipedia mentions accellerations in the order of a milli-G). So the current ion drives are a really efficient way of moving stuff very slowly, but a lot of work needs to be done improving the amount of thrust they produce. Ion drives are certainly well worth thinking about for interstellar missions though since they are efficient enough to be run pretty much non-stop instead of chemical rockets which you fire at the start and the end of the trip and leave turned off for the rest of the time. (When you're talking about missions in the order of several years then leaving a milli-G thrust running non-stop would get you there faster than just a brief (but violent) accelleration.)

Use a nuclear fission engine (that the navy has years and years of experience running) to heat plasma and you'd have no problems completing the above scenario.

Nice in theory, but if you try and launch something the size of a submarine reactor into space and something goes wrong you could end up scattering an aweful lot of fissable material over a large area. I guess since the reactor will be brand new the vast majority will be Uranium (a lot less toxic than Plutonium) but it's still not a good thing.... Of course I have absolutely no idea how the amount of energy required to run a reasonably powerful ion drive would compare to the amount of energy required to run a submarine.

Using an electromagnetic plasma bubble it's possible to capture the solar wind to propel our craft.

I haven't been able to find any figures suggesting what kind of accellerations might be possible with this technology - how does it compare with (current) ion drives?

Rover mission in 2011 not sample return

[amightywind]

According to the BBC, the ESA is set to send a robotic probe to Mars around 2011. They apparently want to return samples of Martian soil with the probe...

You'd think the poster would RTA. The 2011 mission is a rover mission.

In addition to the rover project, they also reiterated their support for an existing proposal - a "Mars return" mission, sketched for 2016, in which various space powers would pool their resources to send an unmanned probe to Mars, take soil samples, and bring them back to Earth.

NASA is already considering a sample return mission prior to the 2016 timeframe. I am not sure what plans there are for international collaboration. I would like to see the US work more closely with Japan.