ExoLance: Shooting Darts At Mars To Find Life 50
astroengine (1577233) writes To find life on Mars, some scientists believe you might want to look underground for microbes that may be hiding from the harsh radiation that bathes the red planet's surface. Various NASA rovers have scraped away a few inches at a time, but the real paydirt may lie a meter or two below the surface. That's too deep for existing instruments, so a team of space enthusiasts has launched a more ambitious idea: dropping arrow-like probes from the Martian atmosphere to pierce the soil like bunker-busting bug catchers. The "ExoLance" project aims to drop ground-penetrating devices, each of which would carry a small chemical sampling test to find signs of life. "One of the benefits of doing this mission is that there is less engineering," said Chris Carberry, executive director of Explore Mars, a non-profit space advocacy group pushing the idea. "With penetrators we can engineer them to get what we want, and send it back to an orbiter. We can theoretically check out more than one site at a time. We could drop five or six, which increases the chances of finding something."
They will be performing a test run in the Mojave desert to see if their design stands any chance of working.
Well.. revived an idea (Score:5, Informative)
Just for clarification, the Russians and the US have launched penetrator missions before for Mars. They were unsuccessful. (The russians failed to achieve orbit insertion, IIRC and the US ones failed on impact).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_2
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=MARS96D
Re:Well.. revived an idea (Score:4, Informative)
The ExoLance folks don't seem to claim that the idea of going below the surface is novel, only the "news" article does that. It is apparent, however, that their ideas for the design are different from DS2:
http://exploremars.org/exolanc... [exploremars.org]
Additionally, their video mentions DS2, they themselves don't say that the idea of subsurface is novel, but that their implementation is.