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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.
Jesus weeps for your ignorance: NASA spinoffs
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 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
Absolutely everything in space travel is about 'legacy' - "has this part, flown and operated, in an actual space mission before?"
Everything about space travel requires testing because you can't properly test anything on Earth. Not really, not as good as actually sending it up there and checking it works in the real environment. One of the fun things people do with Cubesats at the moment is build them with all sorts of random components, because a cubesat is so cheap you can afford and expect to lose it, but if it works, you can put a big tick on "yep, operates for X hours in low earth orbit".
You absolutely would not want to send a CO2 -> O2 device to Mars, to supply humans with O2, that has never been into space or onto Mars before. Do we truly understand Martian dust environments? Chemistry at extended periods of time (months) of catalysts at low pressure/temperature?
Developing the space legacy of components like that (and it's not just a CO2 -> O2 converter it will be many individual component designs) is staggeringly important. Not to mention, that it means in the future you can more reliably design experiments to go to Mars which depend on an oxidizing atmosphere, if you can reliably make it and purify it in situ. But you wouldn't want to put a chain of stuff like that on a probe, and then discover none of it will work because your oxygen maker breaks down after a few hours.