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NASA's NEXT Ion Thruster Runs Five and a Half Years Nonstop To Set New Record
cylonlover writes "Last December, NASA's Evolutionary Xenon Thruster (NEXT) passed 43,000 hours of operation. But the advanced ion propulsion engine wasn't finished. On Monday, NASA announced that it has now operated for 48,000 hours, or five and a half years, setting a record for the longest test duration of any type of space propulsion system that will be hard to beat."
So then those rovers on Mars are figments of my imagination?
Our space program since Apollo has gotten better. Unless you think their is some scientific value in sending humans to play golf on other worlds.
Our space program since Apollo has gotten better. Unless you think their is some scientific value in sending humans to play golf on other worlds.
Laugh and minimize all you want, but the one geologist to land on the Moon managed to learn more (and faster) in his one short trip than all of the Mars rovers combined. Why, you ask? Because he didn't have to waste time looking at a picture and speculating on what a shadow or shape looked like it could be. Instead, he just walked up to an item of interest, looked at it, and was able to discern in seconds something that, well, takes teams of scientists weeks on end to speculate over nowadays.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
It also sums up the fact that space is an enormous deadly vacuum with no real reason to send people there.
Hate to say it, but we already live in space - this big ball of mud and air that we call home happens to float in it. It'd be nice to get out in the neighborhood a little, no?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Don't know where you got these numbers from, but:
- There is no way this ion engine can produce 0.3g acceleration on 2000kg probe; something is way off.
- in addition to propellant, ion engine requires power - a lot of power ; you need to add weight of nuclear reactor on top of that (which is probably only thing able to produce enough power for long term with small amount of consumable fuel); for 2000N you would need something like 50MW of constant power supply
But yes, if you can create imaginary engine giving you even 0.1g of constant acceleration for spaceship over period of few decades, entire galaxy is yours.
My friend the amateur photographer could do much better with her DSLR.
Can your friend do better while fitting in a small box without life support? If we took the budget, both in terms of costs, volume, and amount of equipment needed to send a person there, that could buy a lot of cameras, and ones that could move around just as much as your friend could move them around.
The "Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons" sounds sexy as hell, but then you realize a person with a trowel could do the same job.
Not quite the same as a person with a trowel, considering neutron sources get used for analysis by geologists on Earth even where there are plenty of trowels. Even if you had a person on Mars, with a trowel or not, it would be quicker for them to drag a sled behind them with a similar instrument than to dig up the ground everywhere.
The other instruments are all spectrometers and a chromatograph. The means by which they work are novel, due to the aforementioned remote requirements, but the end result is not really different from what could be done in any decent lab 50 years ago. Honestly, a decent scientist with a shovel and a few thousand dollars in high school lab gear could do better than all the rovers ever sent.
50 years ago, such equipment was quite bulky and not very rugged. While you could do such work with a 50 year old lab, you wouldn't want to send a such a whole lab to Mars. Especially in the last decade or two, such equipment has become much more portable allowing for their use in the field, on Earth or not. There is plenty of equipment that went from, "I'll have to take these samples back to look at them," to "we could set up a large tent or shed to do local work," to, "I have one in the back of my truck."
So by all means, send what probes are needed to figure out how to get people there, but anything beyond that will just provide minimal information at enormous cost.
Because sending a person will provide slightly more than minimal information at an even more enormous cost? If you had the budget you would spend on such a mission spent on probes, you would quickly make up for a large part of the lack in versatility, and for most work surpass what the person can do in terms of speed by having many probes work in parallel.