Potential Landing Sites for EU Mars Rover Selected

kfz versicherung writes "In 2013 the European Space Agency will launch its mission to Mars - ExoMars. The multi-million-euro mission calls for a rover weighing just over 200kg that can trundle over the martian soil in search of past and present life. Now prime landing spots have been selected. The list includes two sites at Meridiani Planum, the flat expanse near Mars' equator where Nasa's Opportunity found possible evidence for an ancient sea. Early in Earth's history, all the primordial biochemistry took place in phyllosilicates, some kind of mineral that is a good matrix for preserving organic matter. Scientists are guessing that a similar site is the best place to start looking for fossil life on the Red Planet."

Comments

Re:Maybe

[Harmonious Botch]

Hi-five? No, they will mug the Russian rover for batteries and spare parts.

Re:Multi-million euro?

[Ashran]

Mars Rover: According this article on space.com

The mission's total cost -- about $600 million -- may have to be deferred from NASA's budget, Weiler said, but would not cause the cancellation of any other mission at NASA. The Mars rovers are an "agency priority," he said. The second rover costs about $200 million, half of the $300 million to $450 million to build and launch the first.

Wikipedia on MER Mission

The total cost of building, launching, landing and operating the rovers on the surface for the initial 90 day primary mission was about US $820 million)

And according to the (Pathfinder site on wikipedia

Viking missions cost $935 million in 1974 or $3.5 billion in 1997 (not adjusted for inflation) Pathfinder mission $280 million, including the launch vehicle and mission operations.

Life with phyllosilicates?

[dhirsch226]

The posting states "all the primordial biochemistry took place in phyllosilicates, some kind of mineral that is a good matrix for preserving organic matter". This is partially wrong, partially misleading, and partially speculative.

• First, phyllosilicates are minerals whose structure is built out of SiO4 tetrahedra polymerized into 2-D sheets at the atomic scale. Examples are clay minerals and micas (biotite and muscovite, principally).
• Second, the "life began on phyllosilicates" is merely an interesting hypothesis, and has not made it to the stage of theory. The basis for this is that phyllosilicates have those sheets stacked up in a periodic structure, and the spacing can be on the order of the spacing in RNA (disclaimer: I'm no expert on this hypothesis, and I don't have the paper in front of me now).
• Finally, there's no way that phyllosilicates, or any mineral, are going to "preserve organic matter". Organic matter preservation is simply related to the history of the material (e.g., temperature, pressure, time).

-Dave Hirsch
Assoc. Prof. of Geology
Western WA Univ.

why not lots of rovers ?

[cats-paw]

Why does NASA have a fixation on sending single units to Mars ?

Why can't NASA work on a mission which will deposit 10's or 100's of rovers ?

Granted, there is a weight problem here, since each rover would have to be very light to carry that many of them to Mars.

However imagine the coolness factor of 20 or 30 sojourners running around the surface of mars. You could split modularized science experiments up among them, having a basic structure and each having a set of modular science experiment units.

With modularized components built in (relatively) large quantities the marginal cost of sending 30 rovers to Mars should be minimal.

Seems to me that your chances of finding something interesting go up dramatically.

Re:why not lots of rovers ?

[name_already_taken]

I don't understand why MSL will travel at an average of 30 meters per hour while the winner of the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge traveled at an average of 30 kilometers per hour.

There are no gas stations on Mars.

DARPA Grand Challenge vehicles were based mostly on normal motor vehicles with internal combustion engines and readily available fuels.

The Mars rovers are solar powered. The sunlight isn't very strong on Mars and the rover can't carry an unlimited amount of solar panels, therefore the speed of the rover is limited by the available solar energy it can store up in its batteries.

Re:why not lots of rovers ?

[fotoguzzi]

Do you mean like a beowulf cluster of rovers?

Re:why not lots of rovers ?

[Brett Buck]

Uh, yeah. I work in this business. . They cost what they cost, and the margin is already minimal - particularly on the Delta II, whose development cost was paid 30 years ago). Half the price *won't buy the parts and the labor it takes to assemble them*. The economies of scale won't cut the price in half, at most it will knock off 5% or so. Even during the idiotic "little LEO" era, no one thought it was going to be done with existing launchers. And no one involved thought it could be done for what you would require - about $5 million a pop. And you need another 7500 FPS over a little LEO launch.

        This is pointless argument - it's completely ludicrous. There's no particular value (scientific or otherwise) to sending 100 autonomous rovers to Mars, and it's going to cost on the order of 10 billion dollars that aren't and won't be available.

              Brett

Re:First time luck I hope

[antifoidulus]

Like the ESA's Beagle 2? This is not their first rover.

Fate of Beagle 2

[R2.0]

I'm telling ya', when we do finally get there we are going to find Beagle 2 with no wheels, the antenna busted off (used to smash open the camera lenses), and strange graffiti that translates to "All your rover are belong to us!" in Martian.

*EU* mars rovers?

[Anonymous Coward]

I may be nit-picking- but the ESA and the EU are actually rather distinct entities. The EU has no space agency.
Some ESA member states, such as Switzerland, are not EU members, and they usually become rather touchy if ESA and EU get too close for comfort.

EU institutions are all switching to .EU addresses. The ESA however will remain under .int in the foreseeable future (it has a redirect from esa.eu to esa.int though).

Re:Multi-million euro?

[iamlucky13]

Mars Rover and MER in your response are the same thing. The Space.com article is very out of date, and they had some cost overruns after that which pushed the mission to $820 million, which included I believe the first year of operations and science. I believe NASA has spent another couple hundred million on operations and science due to the extensions...a lot of money, but a lot less than equivalent new missions.

Also, the Mars Science Laboratory currently being built for a launch in 2009 is looking to cost around $1.8 billion USD (a little over a billion Euros, IIRC). It will be nuclear-powered, land completely ready to go instead of in those nifty airbags the MER's came in on, and is roughly the size of a Volkswagen (which is why the airbags won't work). It's supposed to last about 2 years, so if it runs the way the MER's have, NASA will still be trying to kill it off 20 years from now (just kidding...that's ridiculously unlikely).

MSL also ran into budget issues, and has increased in cost several times over the last couple of years, so NASA recently cancelled two rather fascinating instruments to keep the cost down. The first was the descent imager, which I'm not sure how much scientific value it would've had, but the time-lapse video of the descent would have been fascinating. The other was the ChemCam, a marvelous laser and spectrometer combo that would allow scientists to analyze the chemical composition of rocks from up to 40 feet away. However, the descent imager on the Mars Phoenix Lander currently en route turned out to have a fatal flaw, so the operations budget for that got switched to the construction budget for the MSL. Also, the Chemcam team realized that it had come down to defeaturing the Chemcam or not flying it all, and went with the former option to get back in budget. They got some extra money that was saved because Mars Phoenix launched on time. Unfortunately, the sweet zoom capability of the mast camera was cut out and not re-instated.