Inflatable optics are a huge new field opening up - the idea is you either send up an optical-quality film that you can stretch out into a nice, HUGE, easily-altered-for-adaptive-optics mirror, or alternatively construct one in space (so you don't have to ruggedize it for the high-G-force ride into orbit). Look at BAA03-24 for a quick glance at what the most recent round of funding was aimed at.
I work on Opportunity* (summer job), so I normally concentrate on Opportunity's side - and the rover literally opened up the lander right in front of bedrock.
Spirit is definitely a different issue - they're just starting on their first good outcrop of bedrock out in the Columbia Hills. Even so, no one sees any indication in the Spirit data to show that we're not looking at Martian rocks, but something else like a LOT of meteors.
*Insert Standard Disclaimer - my opinions, not [list of agencies affiliated with the rovers].
Prometheus and JIMO first. Prometheus and JIMO are two overarching names for two similar projects - Prometheus specifies the development of nuclear reactors for generating electricity in space for spacecraft. JIMO stands for the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter.
This is a huge development in interplanetary science, once they get it all designed - current technology can't begin to approach nuclear levels of power in space. The solar panels on the rovers bring in ~450watt/hr per day (up to 600 in the right orientation), but solar panels just don't give enough electricity once you start getting out away from the sun - Mars is about as far as you can practically go with solar panels. RTGs (radioactive thermal generators) provide power on the order of 1000-2000 watts for the newer ones, and notably less for the older ones - the 30+ year old Voyagers are running off of these, as is Cassini. Nuclear reactors are planned in the 100,000 watt range to begin with, scaling up to ~1,000,000 watts in the forseeable future.
Science, once Prometheus gets off the ground, is no longer going to be centered around minimizing power usage, but maximizing science return. Ion thrusters, which use very little physical fuel but massive amounts of electrical power, become significantly more feasible for very long trips.
And that leads to JIMO - Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter. Nuclear powered, ion thrusters, all the science you could ask for. Looking at Europa and more.
The only issue is to get Congress to stop cutting 100s of millions out of the Prometheus/JIMO budget - which they did for FY2005.
AFTER all of this, once we have nuclear and ion propulsion down, we can go out to Neptune. Neptune is a much greater challenge because its much further out - you need more efficient thrusters and more power, and you also need much more powerful transmitters to get enough data back to earth.
Sorry, but wrong - we're looking for life or possible life-sustaining environments on Titan with the Huygens probe on Cassini, since Titan has an atmosphere and possibly liquid methane. Places like Titan (methane) and Europa (water) are under investigation because they have liquids - and all life as we know it require some form of liquid - but we aren't ruling out non-water organisms.
Again, with the loose stones, many of them can be identified as non-foreign because they are too large to not have an impact crater, wind erosion or not - and yet they're still there by one process or another.
As for traces of the meteor being around - we'll never know for Endurance. The sand dunes in the middle of Endurance are far too soft and slippery for a rover to be able to drive out into them, and the furthest down we might go to the center will be to catch one of three very long tendrils of sand dune stretching out near Karatepe - a far sight from walking into the middle and poking about.
The Mars Odyssey mission found water within a meter of the surface in many places on Mars. Aeolian (wind) erosion processes are noticably different from water erosion processes (at least, that's what the geologists say - I won't pretend I can tell the difference myself just looking at something). Carbon dioxide freezes into a solid and then sublimes - liquid CO2 requires very high pressures, and the Martian atmosphere has a pressure some 1% of earth's. Other possible liquids such as methane require significantly colder temperatures to condense than what are available on Mars. Meterorite impact frequency isn't a function of atmospheric density - just they'll burn up less before hitting the ground, and then, yes, hit harder - but blast shockwaves aren't going to create the 'razorback' structures found in some of the cracks of the rocks at Endurance crater. Also, elements in the correct ratio to be particular salts are being found in the rocks, and some of these salts are known as ones that would be carried in water.
We can draw similarities to the moon, but not many - again, aeolian processes will influence martian geology strongly, and there is no atmosphere or carbon dioxide ice or water ice on the moon (minus some possible craters, look up DoD/Clementine's recent moon imaging).
Jammed drills aren't the least of the problems - both Spirit and Opportunity have been collecting sun-blocking dust on their solar arrays since Sol 1, and the available power is getting lower by the day.
To give a serious answer to a non-serious question, there will be a Mars Science Laboratory (rover) approximately the size of a VW bug landing on Mars in the 2011 launch window that is supposed to look for life in the ostensibly wetter northern areas of Mars, and a sample return back to Earth sometime in the 2013+ area. There is a window to send a mission to Mars every 2 years or so, since Martian years are ~2x longer than ours. This is actually an interesting problem, since Mars getting to be at its furthest point from Earth about now - and will be getting closer next year.
Yes, it is possible, but keep in mind that the vast majority of the rocks being observed by the two rovers are bedrock - very large underground formations that have an exposed surface at the surface. Therefore, the chances of bedrock actually being a buried-and-then-exposed foreign body are reasonably slim. If we do find a foreign rock on Mars, though, we would probably be able to tell because we have a general baseline for what the majority of rocks on Mars look like spectrally - and we can be pretty confident that the vast majority of rocks we're looking at on the surface are NOT foreign because there are no impact craters in the sand around them - and many of these rocks are far too large to not have a visible impact crater, if they really were foreign.
Opportunity is planned to go to its heatshield after it has finished geological surveys of the Endurance Crater and winter is over - the crater is shielding it somewhat from cooling winds, and since heating the rover to compensate for these winds is very expensive electrically, it is likely that the heatshield will only be seen if the rover survives the winter fully operational and something more interesting outside of Endurance crater hasn't been found.
Perhaps its hard to recognize, but the most exciting thing that has happened in terms of systems automation at NASA was a recent satellite picking up and then recording a geological event in Antarctica without ground instructions to do so. That's the kind of commanding they're talking about at this stage - if an interesting event occurs, the rover (or orbiter) can record it without the 24 hour planning latency that is unavoidable with the current system, and might cause the event to be missed.
Slashdot Mirror
Inflatable optics are a huge new field opening up - the idea is you either send up an optical-quality film that you can stretch out into a nice, HUGE, easily-altered-for-adaptive-optics mirror, or alternatively construct one in space (so you don't have to ruggedize it for the high-G-force ride into orbit). Look at BAA03-24 for a quick glance at what the most recent round of funding was aimed at.
I work on Opportunity* (summer job), so I normally concentrate on Opportunity's side - and the rover literally opened up the lander right in front of bedrock. Spirit is definitely a different issue - they're just starting on their first good outcrop of bedrock out in the Columbia Hills. Even so, no one sees any indication in the Spirit data to show that we're not looking at Martian rocks, but something else like a LOT of meteors. *Insert Standard Disclaimer - my opinions, not [list of agencies affiliated with the rovers].
Prometheus and JIMO first. Prometheus and JIMO are two overarching names for two similar projects - Prometheus specifies the development of nuclear reactors for generating electricity in space for spacecraft. JIMO stands for the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter.
This is a huge development in interplanetary science, once they get it all designed - current technology can't begin to approach nuclear levels of power in space. The solar panels on the rovers bring in ~450watt/hr per day (up to 600 in the right orientation), but solar panels just don't give enough electricity once you start getting out away from the sun - Mars is about as far as you can practically go with solar panels. RTGs (radioactive thermal generators) provide power on the order of 1000-2000 watts for the newer ones, and notably less for the older ones - the 30+ year old Voyagers are running off of these, as is Cassini. Nuclear reactors are planned in the 100,000 watt range to begin with, scaling up to ~1,000,000 watts in the forseeable future.
Science, once Prometheus gets off the ground, is no longer going to be centered around minimizing power usage, but maximizing science return. Ion thrusters, which use very little physical fuel but massive amounts of electrical power, become significantly more feasible for very long trips.
And that leads to JIMO - Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter. Nuclear powered, ion thrusters, all the science you could ask for. Looking at Europa and more.
The only issue is to get Congress to stop cutting 100s of millions out of the Prometheus/JIMO budget - which they did for FY2005.
AFTER all of this, once we have nuclear and ion propulsion down, we can go out to Neptune. Neptune is a much greater challenge because its much further out - you need more efficient thrusters and more power, and you also need much more powerful transmitters to get enough data back to earth.
Sorry, but wrong - we're looking for life or possible life-sustaining environments on Titan with the Huygens probe on Cassini, since Titan has an atmosphere and possibly liquid methane. Places like Titan (methane) and Europa (water) are under investigation because they have liquids - and all life as we know it require some form of liquid - but we aren't ruling out non-water organisms.
Again, with the loose stones, many of them can be identified as non-foreign because they are too large to not have an impact crater, wind erosion or not - and yet they're still there by one process or another. As for traces of the meteor being around - we'll never know for Endurance. The sand dunes in the middle of Endurance are far too soft and slippery for a rover to be able to drive out into them, and the furthest down we might go to the center will be to catch one of three very long tendrils of sand dune stretching out near Karatepe - a far sight from walking into the middle and poking about.
The Mars Odyssey mission found water within a meter of the surface in many places on Mars. Aeolian (wind) erosion processes are noticably different from water erosion processes (at least, that's what the geologists say - I won't pretend I can tell the difference myself just looking at something). Carbon dioxide freezes into a solid and then sublimes - liquid CO2 requires very high pressures, and the Martian atmosphere has a pressure some 1% of earth's. Other possible liquids such as methane require significantly colder temperatures to condense than what are available on Mars. Meterorite impact frequency isn't a function of atmospheric density - just they'll burn up less before hitting the ground, and then, yes, hit harder - but blast shockwaves aren't going to create the 'razorback' structures found in some of the cracks of the rocks at Endurance crater. Also, elements in the correct ratio to be particular salts are being found in the rocks, and some of these salts are known as ones that would be carried in water. We can draw similarities to the moon, but not many - again, aeolian processes will influence martian geology strongly, and there is no atmosphere or carbon dioxide ice or water ice on the moon (minus some possible craters, look up DoD/Clementine's recent moon imaging).
Jammed drills aren't the least of the problems - both Spirit and Opportunity have been collecting sun-blocking dust on their solar arrays since Sol 1, and the available power is getting lower by the day.
To give a serious answer to a non-serious question, there will be a Mars Science Laboratory (rover) approximately the size of a VW bug landing on Mars in the 2011 launch window that is supposed to look for life in the ostensibly wetter northern areas of Mars, and a sample return back to Earth sometime in the 2013+ area. There is a window to send a mission to Mars every 2 years or so, since Martian years are ~2x longer than ours. This is actually an interesting problem, since Mars getting to be at its furthest point from Earth about now - and will be getting closer next year.
Yes, it is possible, but keep in mind that the vast majority of the rocks being observed by the two rovers are bedrock - very large underground formations that have an exposed surface at the surface. Therefore, the chances of bedrock actually being a buried-and-then-exposed foreign body are reasonably slim. If we do find a foreign rock on Mars, though, we would probably be able to tell because we have a general baseline for what the majority of rocks on Mars look like spectrally - and we can be pretty confident that the vast majority of rocks we're looking at on the surface are NOT foreign because there are no impact craters in the sand around them - and many of these rocks are far too large to not have a visible impact crater, if they really were foreign.
Opportunity is planned to go to its heatshield after it has finished geological surveys of the Endurance Crater and winter is over - the crater is shielding it somewhat from cooling winds, and since heating the rover to compensate for these winds is very expensive electrically, it is likely that the heatshield will only be seen if the rover survives the winter fully operational and something more interesting outside of Endurance crater hasn't been found.
Perhaps its hard to recognize, but the most exciting thing that has happened in terms of systems automation at NASA was a recent satellite picking up and then recording a geological event in Antarctica without ground instructions to do so. That's the kind of commanding they're talking about at this stage - if an interesting event occurs, the rover (or orbiter) can record it without the 24 hour planning latency that is unavoidable with the current system, and might cause the event to be missed.