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NASA: New Mars Rover By 2020
coondoggie writes "Looking to build on the great success and popularity of its current Mars Science Laboratory mission, NASA today announced plans to explore the red planet further, including launching another sophisticated robot rover by 2020 and widely expanding other Mars scientific projects. The plan to design and build a new Mars robotic science rover — which will mirror the technology employed with the current Curiosity rover — will advance the science priorities of the National Research Council's 2011 Planetary Science Decadal Survey (the report from the community and team of scientists that help NASA prioritize space missions) and further the research needed to send humans to the planet sometime around 2030, NASA said."
Wouldn't it be more cost effective if they launched multiple vehicles at at time instead of just one? Perhaps NASA could work with other nations by building more rovers and letting them launch their own. If it's going to be in the name of science, why not?
Life is not for the lazy.
Mars is nice guys but lets go a place a little more interesting with our unmanned probes, like one of the interesting moons around our solar systems Gas giants.
Lets send a manned mission to Mars, and send our robots places that have a higher chance of yielding some really interesting data. Data that even use armchair geeks can get excited about.
The biggest Government expenses are Medicare and the interest on the current debt - a lot of that debt is because of two very expensive useless wars. We could eliminate NASA completely and it would have a negligible effect on the US budget.
Then there's the social costs which Neil DeGrasse Tyson has explained better than I ever could.
Yeah, yeah yeah - Taxed Enough Already - blah blah blah. And I'm a tax and spend dreamer who still remembers when we, the US, sent people to the Moon and little kids wanted to be astronauts and not stupid things like: Wall Street parasites, ball players, hip hop stars or some other type of entertainer.
And I'm already worried about the landing.
I think we pretty much established that there's nothing but rocks on Mars.
Yes the rover flight and landing are marvels of engineering. There's no denying that. But can't we go somewhere new?
In all seriousness, I feel like geologists have taken over NASA and these rovers are their way of bringing fame and power to the discipline of studying rocks.
Let's take the first steps to go drilling into a subsurface ocean instead, shall we not?
You realize that NASA has averaged only about $18b/yr for the last 56 years -- in current dollars, right? In more than half a century, they haven't even crossed the trillion dollar mark -- a thing we've done with the "war on terror" many times over. It accounts for something like 0.008% of the budget. While I'm all for needless small things getting cut (and big ones), the return on the trivial amount spent is massive and responsible for much of our economic and technological advancement of the last forty years.
What I want to know is.. when are they going to send a rover or lander which can test for biology? Like the viking landers from the 70s.. since then they've completely avoided sending any biology experiments to mars... despite finding water and other organic chemicals?
And yes, as someone else pointed out, why not make use of economics of scale and make multiple identical rovers and send them to multiple different places on the planet? It worked for Spirit and Opportunity, and instead of wasting so much money designing and building a new rover from scratch every time, build a more modular one and send many of them... even 1 every few years if 2 at once is too expensive. Modular so different experiences can be swapped in or out thus creating slightly different configurations or upgraded models ?
Why design and build from scratch every time and not just design a reliable base model, a lot like the Soyuz, and just slowly evolve it over time or fly it in slightly different configurations? I know a Soyuz capsule is nothing like a mars rover, but a soyuz capsule is human rated and still cheaper than a freaking rover. The same concepts could be applied.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
Please refer to http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/12/05/0122249/in-the-world-of-big-stuff-the-us-still-rules
Instead of sending rovers, NASA could have gotten Komatsu or Caterpillar to build some really useful "built-in-America" stuffs to send to Mars for heavy lifting jobs.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Just rocks, along with water ice, CO2 ice, permafrost, and most and more hints of past liquid water. And dust devils. Also, far more detail about the formation and evolution of Mars (geologists do a bit more than say "that's a rock", they say "that's a rock from x years ago that was formed at y pressure and z temperature and its existence implies that processes a, b and c happened on this planet").
Though I disagree that there's nothing but rocks on Mars, I agree it would be more interesting to send probes elsewhere, such as Titan or Europa.
Wouldn't it be more cost effective if they launched multiple vehicles at at time instead of just one? Perhaps NASA could work with other nations by building more rovers and letting them launch their own. If it's going to be in the name of science, why not?
With all the self driving technology we have now, (and will have by 2020), why not make it faster, and give it a capability to cover 20 or 50 miles a day or some such.
The rovers we've sent really don't have the capability out of sight of their landing zone. That makes picking landing sites a huge challenge.
With a slightly taller vehicle with a wider stance (bigger wheels) you could probably cover most of the martian terrain at substantial speed, totally autonomously.
It could map as it went, and pick up soils samples and process them on the run, or pause to do so.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Before ever considering other technological issues, you still need to ask the same questions for that robot.
send people
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Let's remember that this second mission is sort of a freebie.
Certainly they have a COMPLETE second mockup of the rover at NASA for troubleshooting, and *often* they have a third unit because in the development stage building a third is almost cost free (generally multiple copies of each component are made as backups, if they're never used you have essentially a full third device waiting in parts bins).
So aside from the launch costs, the equipment is PROBABLY already paid for.
Further, it's not a bad idea to throw another rover out there if we can, to cover more ground as a prep for a manned mission. If you can have 2 rovers crawling over Mars for 2 years, that doubles your chance they they find something interesting to both be WORTH investigating with a manned mission, and (if you're really lucky) find something that radically increases public (congressional) interest in sending that mission.
(Meanwhile, we're continuing to explore the rest of the system with, for example, a planned mission to Titan's ocean IIRC - http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/ )
-Styopa
a thing we've done with the "war on terror" many times over.
And don't forget the Quixhotic war on drugs too. Scrapping that would have a double whammy improvement. Not only would about $40bn/year be saved in police and prison costs but also probably $10-20bn woulb be raised in additional taxes.
Scrapping the war on drugs would probably pay for NASA 3 times over and might go someway to moving the USA from the world #1 position in terms of number of incarcerated people.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
http://www.space.com/15310-nasa-budget-future-space-exploration.html
http://thechrissanchez.com/journal/2012/3/11/the-reality-of-american-space-exploration-why-we-should-imme.htm
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
If current technology allows them to include suitable test equipment right ON the rovers themselves, it seems silly to work around a premise of collecting samples with one missions device, and then working out a means of sending a SECOND device to not only be able to escape Mars' gravity well but also re-enter the earths atmosphere, land, get collected, and be secured by the mission planners to THEN do tests on. OR only slightly better, send a secondary lab rover designed to retrieve the samples and be able to perform tests on them there with the potential of failure of either device pooching the entirety of both mission segments.
I would call the idea of two probes, one to collect samples and one to ship them to Earth, a brilliant, well-thought division of labor. Testing Mars samples on Earth will be a huge advance in science and worth the complexity and risk of this mission. Please keep in mind that one can make multiple copies of both sorts of probes and resend either one, if it fails.
~...Is this right? Why does it have 3 inch armor plating, a 5000hp rock drill, and, what are these, missiles?
. ~ Ah, yes, well, when we did that "big reveal" this week, we didn't reveal everything. Loose lips and all that.
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Just to clarify, 2020 is only eight years from now.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
And how far apart are those existing vehicles? What's between them? How hard is the terrain to navigate? Are the components of one system compatible with another? It's cheaper and much more viable to just send fresh units, targeted for specific purposes and specific locations.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011