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NASA Wants To Bring Back Hunks of Mars In Future Unmanned Mission
coondoggie writes "The space missions to Mars have so far been one way — satellites and robotic rovers have all gone there to stay. NASA, as part a of a new, ambitious Mars visit, wants to change that by sending a rover to the surface of the Red Planet which can dig up chunks of the surface and send them back to Earth for highly detailed examination. These plans were laid out in a lengthy report outlining mission plans for Mars that will be acted upon over the next decade. It says a retrieval mission 'could occur as early as the mid-2020s or wait until the 2030s.'"
Whaka Whaka
You can have your god back when you are old enough to handle the responsibility.
... they should bring back the Amazon Women on the Moon.
An instructional video.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
By that time, Mars One is scheduled to have people on Mars, so NASA can simply send a retrieval rocket and ask those people to collect some samples - for a reasonable fee, of course :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Bringing back material from Mars's moons may be an easier first step.
/. has a long way to go to match the double entedré abilities of the El Reg staff.
The Mars rocks will be brought back, at astronomical speeds, straight to the NASA budgeting subcommittee.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
It's a shame, however, that the load of rocks on board will have to be removed so that Val Kilmer can make it safely off Mars so he can get some sweet, sweet Trinity action. And remember, never send any military surplus drones to Mars!
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
That sounds like a satisfying project...
crazy dynamite monkey
There is still risk of Martian microbes that Earth life has no immunity too. Sure, it's a very small chance, but one that has potentially apocalyptic consequences if it happens.
Perhaps the samples should be baked at an intermediate station.
Table-ized A.I.
Those guys from rocksfrommars.com better get their shiz together.
Are they going to call the rover "Red"? I can hear all the school children singing "Red Rover, Red Rover, send Mars right over."
I will pay for a piece of Mars. Git'r Done.
in a future unmartianed mission.
I prefer a mission to Europa that includes a submarine to go into the water below the ice to take pics of the little fishies (if any). Yes, Europa is ****far more difficult**** than Mars. But a Mars sample would be cool, will provide excellent comparison to Martian meteoroids from Antartica. Now if we can also send somebody beyond LEO, then we can say (in the words of one of controllers at Houston MOCR after Apollo 8 TLI), "Finally we get to go someplace!"
mfwright@batnet.com
Don't we have to get the Jeddak of Helium's permission for something like this?
Only for fucking retards who think the government is chasing them in invisible helicopters.
Interesting - I always thought it was comparitively easy to return samples from the moon sue to the shallow gravity well, mars' is much deeper. How would we be able to lift off enough fuel from Earth (and safely land it on Mars) to return a rock sample from such a massive world?
Since when does the NSA do space travel?
I guess it makes sense. I mean, computers need metals that conduct electricity don't they? So it's in the NSA's best interest to have an R&D department that looks for new metals that could be superconductors, which supposedly play a part in quantum computing. Since we've found most of earths metals... it's time to explore further.
Or Martians took over our planet secretly.
The world may never know.
Or at least until it's too late.
Is it just me or does this sound like the pitch for a really bad horror or end-of-days B movie? Who would be the key cast members? Sounds like a really, really bad idea. LOL.
2030? They can just ask that Musk guy to send some by mail by then.
I wonder if there'd be a profitable market for chunks of Mars. Perhaps it could help fund further exploration.
Yesterday, I bought back an an entire *bar* of Mars(TM).
Yes , inspiring .. but ... It would seem to be a lot less expensive (think: orders of magnitude) merely to spend more time trekking the surface ice of Antartica where, we've been told, it's relatively easy to manually pick up rocks/meteorites confirmed to have come from Mars ... and no retro-rockets needed ..
Or, is there something about Mars that they're not telling us... something that would justify such enormous expense ??
Inquiring minds ... ...
are free to reject the absurd
After a lunar rover in the late 2010s.
China has had five manned space mission now. Even though they are doing things the US & Russia did in the mid 1970s, the are making about four years of progress for every two years of work. Their next space station circa 2015 will be larger than the largest Mir, but still smaller than the ISS. China has the advantage of current technology, $money$, and learning from the past.
How many people watched their two week, three [wo]man space station mission lat month?
The all-new 2014 calendar featuring Hunks Of Mars, photoshopped to add an extra set of arms, all aimed at the target market: geek women.
Yup, all 12 of them.