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

Late Breaking News:

[TripMaster Monkey]

Today the Council of Elders confirmed the rumours that the sinister blue planet third from our star is planning to send yet another one of its mechanical invaders.

K'breel, speaker for the Council, stressed that there was no cause for alarm:

"While it is true that the blue planet is sending another invader, we are confident that we can deal with the situation. This particular invader seems to be of the same design as the one we destroyed over one standard year ago, so it should be vulnerable to the same tactics. Even failing this, it should be no problem to isolate the invader and keep it from any contact with citizens...a policy we have developed and upheld ever since the blue planet initiated hostilities."

When questioned whether the rumours that the blue planet was almost covered in poisonous, corrosive di-hydrogen oxide, as many independent scientists have asserted, had any validity, K'breel declined comment.

Re:Late Breaking News:

[bonch]

In related news, local heretic Kal-El was arrested once more for conducting scientific experiments to determine when, as he believes, the planet will explode.

"If we don't fix this now, I have to fire my son through space at the blue planet, and I don't want my son living in a world of Clippy and BSD-is-dying jokes."

K'breel of the Elder Council denied rumors the planet was going to explode. "When has an Elder Council ever denied rumors of inevitable disaster, only to have it come true?" he laughed.

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.

Metric

[gspr]

Well, at least us Europeans won't have trouble with the metric system...

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.

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