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NASA Announces Mars 2020 Rover Payload
An anonymous reader writes with news that the Mars 2020 experiments have been chosen: In short, the 2020 rover will cary 7 instruments, out of 58 proposals in total, and the rover itself will be based on the current Curiosity rover. The selected instruments are: Mastcam-Z, an advanced camera system with panoramic and stereoscopic imaging capability with the ability to zoom. SuperCam, an instrument that can provide imaging, chemical composition analysis, and mineralogy. The instrument will also be able to detect the presence of organic compounds in rocks and regolith from a distance. Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL), an X-ray fluorescence spectrometer that will also contain an imager with high resolution to determine the fine scale elemental composition of Martian surface materials. Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals (SHERLOC) — This one will have a UV laser! The Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (MOXIE), an exploration technology investigation that will produce oxygen from Martian atmospheric carbon dioxide. Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA). This one is basically a weather station. The Radar Imager for Mars' Subsurface Exploration (RIMFAX), a ground-penetrating radar that will provide centimeter-scale resolution of the geologic structure of the subsurface.
Can't decide if the UV laser or the ground radar is the coolest of the lot.
Can't decide if the UV laser or the ground radar is the coolest of the lot.
To me, the MOXIE experiment is the most interesting. It would lead to future colonization since all of their oxygen wouldn't need to be brought with the space-goers.
Where's the seismometer? Three would have been nice. It could have dropped them off at three different places.
Jesus weeps for your ignorance: NASA spinoffs
There's one thing I don't get about that, though. From what I've read, they've found ice on Mars. What's stopping them from simply making a robot dedicated to harvesting and melting the ice into an artificial "lake" and introducing photosynthetic bacteria to It to get oxygen?
Mars atmosphere is too thin to sustain a lake. Any unfrozen water will evaporate or refreeze. //Interestingly enough, its thin atmosphere is mainly due to it not having a liquid core anymore, its core cooled and stopped spinning, so it no longer has a magnetic shield against radiation. The solar wind has wisked away the majority of its atmosphere.
So steps in terraforming mars would need to start with creating an artificial magnetic field to block the solar wind.
Are you joking, or just straw-manning? Space exploration has forced humanity to come up with new and useful technologies. Try something hard, and you will inevitably make other things better. Nasa spin-off technologies have built the world.
They include:
Enriched Infant formula and other foods - which has probably done more for the collective intelligence of mankind than almost any other single effort in the history of humanity.
Water purification advances
Solar power
Firefighting advances
Safety grooving on highways
Aircraft Anti-Icing
Those ones are obvious, and easy to trace in their benefits, long term and short. See Wikipedia for a more complete list
But more important than any one single benefit, eventually we will run out of room. This is not some abstract theory. Sure, we can populate the desert and the ocean, sure we can die from disease and war, but eventually, Earth will not be enough. Betting on exploration is betting on humanity, in the long, long haul.
Our ancestors built dugout canoes 40,000 years ago. If dugouts had been a waste of a good axe-stone, when there were rival tribes to murder, Columbus would have never found the new world. I am betting that humans are a viable species. I am betting that mankind has nowhere to go but up. Look to the future, embrace exploration, it is the only way that mankind can last another 40,000 years.
I think that you underestimate the techinical challenges to do what you are suggesting! There is not quite as much ice as you might expect, nor is there heat to melt it, nor are there nutrients for the bacteria. Ecosystems take eons to develop.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
GPS is a technology in Earth orbit. Plenty of critics of space exploration are fine with technologies in orbit, where they have obvious military uses, but they may not see any purpose in going further afield to other planets at this time.
I am not saying there's no advantage to space exploration, but I simply wonder why we continue to do these things yet we have a very big [budget] deficit. Why?
Apart from knowledge of how space works, what has the ordinary American gained from the billions spent on the space program? Can anyone point me to any tangible or intangible goods resulting from space exploration?
Because each time we overcome a monumental challenge for the first time, we expand the frontier of human knowledge and endeavor.
As our frontier expands, that which was undone becomes possible; that which was possible, replicable; that which was replicable, automatable; that which was automatable, trivial; that which was trivial, obsolete.
Just over a century ago, tinkers managed to propel a glorified kite a few feet through the air. The tangible benefit of this flight of fancy is that today, we complain about the comfort of the seats in mass-produced aircraft that can send us around the globe for a historically infinitesimal cost in time and money.
Seventy years ago, the US government was one year into the construction of ENIAC, one of the first general-purpose digital computers ever created. Upon its completion two years later, it would occupy 680 square feet, require the power of roughly six modern households, process up to 500 operations per second, and spend roughly half its time being repaired. The tangible benefit of this monstrosity is that today you likely carry, on your person, roughly 25 million times more computing power than ENIAC. It is quite likely that use the bulk of this computing power primarily for your own personal entertainment.
45 years ago, after years of research and significant government funding, ARPANET was launched. Not many people expected it to be of any significant practical value; in fact, the first message ever sent over ARPANET only managed to deliver two characters before crashing the entire network for an hour. The tangible benefit of this boondoggle is that today, we have the Internet, the direct descendant of ARPANET.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Pursuing the desire that many people share to learn and explore and to push the limits of that new knowledge does not require a balance sheet justification.
If you feel the goal of life is to balance the short term budget of america (even though the nasa budget has essentially no impact on this at all) you should probably spend some time thinking about the fact we are all going to die, the earth will die, the universe will die, and when the last human dies, do you think they will wish we could have siphoned off some more money from nasa's budget to pay some some tiny fraction of the 2014 deficit off?
I am sure the crew at JPL is rolling their eyes about the MOXIE CO2-->O2 "experiment". Here is an experiment that could easily be done at any of, say, a hundred universities here on Earth. What is the point of taking up valuable space, electricity, and engineering effort just to shlepp this stunt to the surface of another world? The point is that JPL was probably forced to do this by the Human-exploration Directorate weasels that run NASA or JPL is doing it to appease them so they don't get their funding cut when their asteroid-capture stunt goes over-budget as it surely will. And why split CO2 for rocket fuel when there is nothing to burn. Wouldn't be easier to split ice/H2O and you get H2 for fuel if you want, but, of course it is harder to gather and purify the ice. But anyway I am all for it if that is what it takes to get another rover to Mars....
The "eventually we will run out of room" argument doesn't make a lot of sense to me.The cost of, relatively safely, putting one human on even another planet in our solar system, let alone an unknown planet in another solar system in our galaxy, is enormous. Yes, the cost will come down, but seems unlikely to ever be less than several times the average person's lifetime net contribution to mankind unless that net contribution increases incredibly (which, in turn, seems unlikely to happen if we are suffering from overpopulation - as resources become scarcer, more effort is consumed extracting those resources -- but these high extraction costs don't translate into a better life for the average person -- it's just increased overhead).
Birth control and education is a much cheaper and sustainable solution to the "eventually we will run out of room" problem. Barring that, mass famine, war, genocide and natural selection will take care of the the problem quite efficiently.
If the concern is to address the "the Earth may become inhabitable to humans and we want to preserve the species" problem, space exploration could be a component of a strategy to address the concern. Except for a cataclysmic event such as multiple strikes from many very large asteroids, that concern is unlikely to need an answer for many millions of years. But, in any event, the answer to that concern almost certainly will not be to ship billions of humans off the planet (due to the expense and resource consumption of that activity). Instead, sets of breeders (either select humans or, more likely, a few caregivers along with artificial wombs and a diverse set of human genetic material to create a decent sized first generation of humans) will likely be sent to various promising celestial bodies in hopes that a few communities can be established and survive propagating whatever the "human" species is at that point (of course these communities, as well as those that remain on Earth, will independently evolve and probably would not recognize each other as "humans" in a few hundred thousand years -- so it's not clear what the point is).
Both of these concerns are, of course, predicated on an assumption that the human species is somehow special enough to the universe to bother to preserve except in an archeological record. I'm doubtful this is the case myself. However, I support NASA because it's got good spinoffs and, at least in the past, motivated kids to go into the science and engineering fields which is generally helpful to society. Space exploration may also help inform the answer to the question of if the human species is worth going to great effort to sustain past its natural (probably short compared to many species that surround us) extinction on Earth.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Those ones are obvious, and easy to trace in their benefits, long term and short.
The spin off argument is deeply flawed. For example, every single one of these technologies would have been developed anyway. NASA is just a flavor of funding.
But more important than any one single benefit, eventually we will run out of room.
That's an argument for long term population control, not space development. After all, the Earth isn't actually getting any smaller. And if you don't mind the occasional mass die offs, you don't even have to care about population control.
As an experiment, it is close to pointless. As a technology demonstration it has somewhat more value, though perhaps not enough to justify its inclusion. You could do this a hundred times in those basements and it would still not be done on Mars. For a technology to be demonstrated in a particular unusual situation or environment, then it sooner or later has to be deployed in that situation or environment.