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

sharing

[sfcat]

why does NASA and the ESA (and other space agencies) have to each send their own probes. Due to the cost of space missions, wouldn't a more sharing of resources be useful. For instance, one agency pays for the ground control, another for the rockets, another for the actual probe. Sharing of costs and resources would allow for more missions and less parnoia about how one nation uses space.

Re:sharing

[John Seminal]

why does NASA and the ESA (and other space agencies) have to each send their own probes. Due to the cost of space missions, wouldn't a more sharing of resources be useful. For instance, one agency pays for the ground control, another for the rockets, another for the actual probe. Sharing of costs and resources would allow for more missions and less parnoia about how one nation uses space.

Different ideas, different builds. Why do we have Windows and Linux when the programmers could work together? And the ESA and NASA are very different. I remember in Industrial Psychology we studied different systems of buisness. In Europe, they work as a team and are credited as members of a team. In the USA people get credit for outstanding work individually, not a team. So it is interesting to see how this plays out. The motivations are different, the dynamics are different, and the probes that are built will be different. I think there is something to be learned here.

Plus, if it was just NASA, we would have a space shuttle that never changes. Maybe some new ideas would make NASA reconsider their designs.

You obviously don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

They tell subscribers they can alert them to dupes, but when subscribers do, they're often ignored. Yes, they're ignoring the people that PAY THEM REAL MONEY.

If they dupe, then they should suffer all of the comments about the dupe. They not, under any circumstances, delete a story after it has gone live and people have commented on it. It's not just gone from the front page, it's completely inaccessible.

All of the comments made are gone, too, yet they remain in people's profiles. Slashdot used to claim (and the FAQ still does) that they won't delete comments unless facing legal action. Well, there was no legal action here and Zonk just deleted several dozen comments.

Re:Is it me, or are we as humans wasting time...

[Decaff]

Is it me, or are just wasting money and time looking for the meaning of life when we could better spend the time and money helping folks on this planet?

What a boring world it would be if we did not explore!

As for the time and money - do you realise that the amount spent on space exploration is a tiny fraction of defense spending?

competition

[antiaktiv]

Competition between the US and USSR is what started space exploration and put man on the moon, not to mention uncountable other scientific achievements. Even though there isn't nearly as much money being put in to it now as there was forty years ago, competition will, as always, lead to innovation.

It's about propulsion, propulsion, propulsion

[ChiralSoftware]

I'm sure we could learn many useful things from a sample return from Mars, and we might even make some breakthrough discovery, such as discovering microbes, but is this an optimal way to spend money? It seems like there are two very important technologies that we need to develop more of in order for our space efforts to "scale": better propulsion technologies and better autonomous vehicle technologies. Any expenditures that don't help those two goals is just a one-shot benefit, rather than a real contribution to making us a space-capable species.

On the propulsion question, it seems like their plan is to get enough fuel to achieve Mars escape velocity up to Earth escape velocity to get it to the surface of Mars in the first place. It sounds like this is heading towards being just an enormous amount of rocket fuel moving back and forth. I don't see any real advancement in science in us trucking around gargantuan loads of the same old fuels. Sure, it's very expensive and takes a lot of resources, but it's still just rocket science, something we've been doing for decades.

It also doesn't get us any closer to manned missions. It seems like to do a manned Mars mission you need to get enough fuel to the surface of Mars to a) support all the surface activities there and b) lift the astronauts back off the Mars surface and c) lift the astronauts back off the Mars surface. Yes, b) and c) are the same; I don't think anyone would propose sending astronauts over there without a backup lift-off plan. But anyway, when you add up all the fuel in a, b, and c, plus crew habitations and science gear, you end up needing many tons of stuff on the surface of Mars, and it costs something like $10,000/pound to get stuff off of Earth so just the fuel costs alone are going to be mind boggling, and in the end we haven't developed anything new. Just more big rockets.

It seems to me that the whole thing is a pointless waste unless we develop methods of producing fuel on Mars itself, so round-trips can become a more routine thing and we can start thinking about larger probes even further afield.

NB, I am not a rocket scientist.

-----------
Educational software

Re:It's about propulsion, propulsion, propulsion

[DerekLyons]

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.

In theory, yes. In practice, there are many unanswered questions about how the hardware will survive the dust in the atmosphere, how trace contaminants will affect the process, etc... etc... The words 'atmospheric processing unit' conceals a thorny thicket of these unsolved problems, and conceals the fact that the unit isn't actually yet developed.

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

But please do so with a largish grain of salt handy. Robert Zubrin has a habit of presenting paper concepts and not-quite-fully-baked ideas as if they were developed hardware or fully fleshed out plans that only need a little funding to bring to fruition.

Depends on your goal

[StefanJ]

The equipment required to extract fuel from the Martian atmosphere will necessarily be pretty hefty. You'd need a nuclear reactor or a really large array of solar panels.

It would cost a fair amount to develop, manufacture, and transport this equipment.

If you are only planning a small sample return mission, it would be a waste to heft all that stuff there.

BEFORE we can plan a Mars mission, especially one that will depend on locally extracted fuel, we're going to have to know a lot more about Mars' surface conditions. I think it is entirely justified to send a whole bunch of relatively low-tech probes first.

As for the general idea of propulsion research, sure. But there is no real reason to wait until we have plasmonic hyperdrives to check out the territory

Re:Is it me, or are we as humans wasting time...

[VanillaCoke420]

It annoys me so much when people complain about something so fantastic, marvellous and even useful as space exploration, while they almost never point out the fact that a lot more money go into the military budget every year.

How is researching for new weapons a way of helping people on this planet? Or funding the armies, navies and air forces that use them, how does this help anyone? Here's another question: If we stopped doing what some people think unnecessary, would we then begion to help the poor and the sick and the homeless? Of course not, because less money for peaceful science and colonisation means more money for military actions and other bad things.

Why do we do it? Why do we wish to explore beyond our horizon, why do we wish to find new worlds to colonise? Maybe it widens our horizons. It gives us answers to ancient questions, it tickles our imaginations, it gives us hope. Should we rather stay here, to stagnate?

I'm certainly not saying that we shouldn't solve our problems here too. We should. And I believe that to do so we need to stop living in fear of each other and ourselves, we need to stop fighting each other and start to cooperate for the good of everyone. Sadly not enough people in power want this to happen.