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."

Comments

Economies of scale

[DigiShaman]

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?

Re:Economies of scale

[physicsphairy]

It's more cost effective if they make it to their destination. Keep in mind we are still at the "will it explode?" and "if it doesn't explode, will it avoid crashing?" and "if it doesn't crash, will it keep working?" part of the technology. So if the Mars rover works out, that's great, and in fact is a valuable enough confirmation to justify trying to do something similar again.

But it's really better right now to have each rover be a stepping stone to the next. The sort of answers Curiosity gives us will tell us the sort of questions we want to design the next rover to resolve.

Re:Economies of scale

[FleaPlus]

I really hate when people take that "Why build one when you can build two for twice the price" quote from the film adaptation of Contact and try to be clever by quoting it as if it had any bearing on reality. In the real world, the per-unit cost of building multiples of the same thing in parallel costs considerably less than building a one-off.

Re:Economies of scale

[khallow]

No, it's not. Those highly specialized pieces of equipment have high development costs. Making just two of them means you have half the development cost per unit.

Look as much as I like Mars

[Dyinobal]

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.

Re:Look as much as I like Mars

[MightyMartian]

The problem with the interesting moons like Callisto and Europa is that the liquid water oceans are dozens or hundreds of miles below the surface. Sure we might be able to sniff some pretty interesting stuff from ejected water, but the big finds on these moons are going to have to wait for future generations of equipment that can drill through kilometers of ice.

Mars is a reasonably good testing ground for this kind of tech. Not only is it an interesting body with a unique geology and a history that to a point wasn't so different from Earth's and at least a moderate candidate for some kind of life, but it is also considerably closer than Jupiter or Saturn. It serves as a great test bed for the kinds of probes we will likely end up sending to other bodies in the solar system.

I look at the Mars rovers as the best possible test bed for these new technologies, not only in building rugged mechanical systems that can survive intense temperature differentials, dust storms and climactic changes and even hard radiation, but also in the software. I expect with some of the major advances we're seeing in neural net development that by 2020 not only will the next rover be a more sophisticated machine, but it's brain will be considerably smarter too.

When you really think about it, NASA's Mars program is leading the way in highly sophisticated semi-autonomous probes. In a generation, we'll probably be able to launch the grandchildren of Curiosity to places like Titan and give them a far wider range of tools to explore.

Re:Look as much as I like Mars

[dgatwood]

As a country, the US stopped giving a shit a very long time ago.

The U.S. general public has never cared about space exploration; the public has only cared about beating someone else. Want to get a team of U.S. astronauts on Mars by 2019? Convince the Chinese government to announce to the world that they intend to land humans on Mars by 2020.

I guarantee you that if the Chinese said they planned to establish permanent settlements on Mars in ten years, the U.S. government would move Heaven and Earth to get us there sooner, and they would succeed. Getting to Mars is easy. Convincing the bureaucrats that it is more important than building their little war machines to blow up countries with oil is hard.

Penny Wise and Pound Foolish

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Do we need more Mars rovers?

[Pausanias]

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?

Re:In other words... NASA (and Uncle sam) says...

[Seumas]

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

[DiSKiLLeR]

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.

Re:What I want to know is

[Isaac-1]

Because when it comes to rovers the technology is already advancing at such a rate that by the time they are flight certified and ready to go they look like a model T Ford in comparison to the stuff being played with in the development labs.

Re:Launch is eight years away

[Anonymous Coward]

According to NASA, the landing system used for Curiosity was still not enough like a Wile E Coyote cartoon. Apparently the new landing system will involve a giant slingshot, a red boxing glove on a spring, an anvil, and several sticks of dynamite. The landing itself will be referred to as the 'seven minutes of hilarity' and will end with a perfectly rover-shaped hole being cut into the martian surface.

Re:In other words... NASA (and Uncle sam) says...

[serviscope_minor]

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.

Neil deGrasse Tyson says

[Geoffrey.landis]

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