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Space

NASA To Launch Dual Mars Probes 168

Posted by timothy from the both-named-after-famous-donuts dept.
GoBamaRollTide points to this MSNBC article, writing: " OK, so NASA wants to launch two identical probes, with different targets, about a week apart. Theoretically, this will allow a mission to continue, even if one has a "Major Malfunction." So, what do you think? Good Idea, or just crashing probes twice as fast? Two craters for the price of one!" Besides some interesting information about the benefits of a 2003 launch date, the article says: "Each spacecraft would be launched on a Delta 2 rocket for a 7½-month cruise to Mars. Upon entering the Martian atmosphere, a parachute would deploy to slow the spacecraft down, and then airbags would inflate to cushion the 50-mph landing."
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NASA To Launch Dual Mars Probes More

NASA To Launch Dual Mars Probes

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  • ...considering that all NASA/JPL "dual-missions" I remember right now have been great successes (Pioneer 10/11, Voyager 1/2, Viking 1/2). I guess "doing things twice" leads to better quality.
  • You only build two because you aren't going to learn enough to justify launching three. The purpose of the probes is to learn what they can, but especially learn what the next set of probes is going to have to deal with in order to get more data.

    I think we should be sending a different mission to Mars, like the balloon mapping scheme proposed by Zubrin (used to be detailed at http://www.nw.net/mars/docs/maphunts.txt, but the entire docs directory is gone now).
    --

  • This is a great idea, assuming we then *leave* the senators in orbit...
  • I've always had difficulty with the "offtopic" moderation since it seems so nebulously defined. When the beer guy or the penisbird guy posts the moderation is easy, but what is a moderator to do with a tangential, non-flame post that generates two dozen followup messages? He can choose to flag the original post as offtopic, but I contend that he cannot, in good faith, flag the followup messages since they are topical relative to the thread if not the story. (No consensus on this exists, however, and we still see instances of people burning all their points in vain attempts to stifle these threads). Even with a full cadre of moderation points a single moderator cannot hope to stifle a thread altogether.

    Is "offtopic" intended to mean "in the context of the larger discussion" or does it mean "in the context of the given thread?"

  • Is Jesus on Mars? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I don't want to sound like one of these kooky Bob Larson-style conspiracy nuts, but with all of the recent talk of there having been life on Mars at one point, it is at least plausible to assume that there is some form of life there now. I think we need to consider the very real possibility that Jesus is on Mars, particularly if we assume that Sin is not a concept that is limited only to Earth (and there is definitely no reason to assume that!) If all forms of life (not just Earthlings) are sinners, then it becomes necessary for all forms of life to be saved and accept the free gift of eternal life. To suggest that the Lord only cares about saving life on this planet from damnation is shocking, xenophobic terracentrism at its worst.

    Back to the point: Can you imagine what would happen if NASA hit Jesus with a rocket? I'm sure there would be no permanent damage (the Lord is, after all, more powerful than a government agency or a few puny Delta 2s.) Still, if I were the Lord and someone started shooting rockets at me, you can bet that there would be a little bit of wrath aimed at the responsible parties. I think that if we hit Jesus with a probe the entirety of humanity would be responsible in one way or another (after all, most people tend to endorse missions like this.)

    I realize that the chances of us actually hitting Jesus are comparable to the chances of winning the lottery or getting hit by lightning, but keep in mind that Mars is a much smaller place than Earth. It only has about half the surface area. My suggestion to NASA would be to hold off on any further ground missions until we get remote sensing satellites in place with enough spatial resolution for us to confirm that the Lord is not there. If we can confirm that, then fire away! In the meantime, we don't need to be doing things that will provoke some sort of theological retribution aimed at humanity.

    Just some thoughts.
  • With one mission, you basically have a useless probe

    No, you have a second probe which can explore a different region of the surface, and therefore somewhat greater chance of finding something really interesting.

    I would even favor a "shotgun" of probes to explore first-hand a much larger selection of sites.

  • That sounds right. Thanks for looking. funny how wrong I got it. oh well.

    ________

  • NASA's problem is schizophrenia, not heat (Score:3)

    by Tau Zero ( 75868 ) on Friday August 11, 2000 @05:08AM (#863320) Journal
    NASA is a deeply divided organization, whose purpose depends on who you're talking to:
    1. To the pols, NASA is a way of distributing federal pork.
    2. To the State Department, NASA is a way of targeting foreign aid at Russian rocket designers to keep them from selling their skills to Iraq or North Korea.
    3. To the career bureaucrats, NASA is a way of keeping themselves employed until retirement if they can only avoid big screwups.
    4. To the investigators, NASA is a way of developing new technologies and doing science. This is the only legitimate purpose of NASA, but it often gets swamped by 1-3.
    When NASA is throwing away billions each year on the aging and obsolete Space Shuttle, and billions more on the station-without-a-mission ISS, it's not likely that they're going to be able to take on a manned Mars project. The pork money is already allocated and the good personnel are probably spread too thin.
    --
  • I agree
    Did the imperial army send out only one probe when serching for the rebels base?
    No, he sent out two.

  • Doesn't it seem like only about a week is too short a time between probes? You don't have much time to make adjustments to the second probe if the first one goes down.

    Though I suppose they could alter the burn parameters to make the second one arrive later if they needed to.

  • "NASA lost a $125 million Mars orbiter because a Lockheed Martin engineering team used English units of measurement while the agency's team used the more conventional metric system for a key spacecraft operation..."

    This quote is from http://www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric. 02/index.html

    See also http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98/news/mco990930.html where NASA tactfully avoids pointing the finger at Lockheed Martin.

    Anyone who bothers to check would find that NASA has used only metric units for decades.
  • Well, not so much anymore. The public at large is getting kinda bored with shuttle missions. Its a "been there, done that mentality".
    The only time anyone gets interested is when something new and out of the ordinary happens: John Glen becomes the oldest man to orbit the Earth, Mars Pathfinder (which was a huge success, PR-wise) broadcasts what were essentially live images from another planet, people walk on the moon (even this got boring to the world... by the time Apollo 13 launched, no one cared.... and this was the 3rd mission to the moon!).
    Its unfortuneate that the public doesn't understand how unbelievably cool (not to mention complex and hard) every single venture we make into space is. But I guess thats the nerd in me talking :).
  • You assume a failure would be due to a flaw in the design. Wrong. It could just as likely happen because a specific instance of a design element (i.e. a specific part) fails, and if that element, a valve or whatever, is localized to an individual probe, then only that probe would fail. This is why redundancy can be useful in this kind of mission. Doesn't remove possibility of failure, just reduces it somewhat.

    It sure would be funny if the probes both landed in the same area, though...
  • Two craters for the price of one!

    No, that second crater's gonna cost us $200 million more!
  • First of all, it's longer than five years: all the russion missions to Mars failed. But: not *all* missions failed. The viking missions where succesful, the pathfinder mission was succesful. So that's another theory floating away (they just as much float as the people who invent them, mmmkay?). And about the face on mars: every year there are newsitems about potatos with 'faces' in them; probably aliens as well?
    How to make a sig
    without having an idea
  • The last two missions were comparatively low cost. They failed because they tried to accomodate stingy tax payers and cut corners. Obviously, not a good decision by NASA. NASA apparently forgot the engineering principle "pick any two" in their "cheaper, faster, better" motto.

    They know how to get probes to other planets pretty reliably. If they go back to the tried and true, but expensive, methods, their missions will likely work as well as they used to.

  • ...and when was that? Better, faster, cheaper, oops. Recently, airbags are the only things that seem to work for them.

    --- Never hold a dustbuster and a cat at the same time ---

  • the airbag landing is the only one that has worked for them.
    Not true. The Viking probes in the 70's landed conventionally. I suspect that in real terms, (i.e. adjusted for inflation over the last 20-30 years) they cost more than the last Mars probes did.
    "Better, Faster, Cheaper" is all very well when it works - Pathfinder was a great success, which is presumably why they're returning to the bounce method of landing - but when the probe fails because it's been rushed to save time and money, then it's neither better nor cheaper.
    NASA seem to have been going backwards since the 70s, really.

  • 2 IS BETTER THAN 1 (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    2 probes are esential. The cost of sending 1 rover is 70% - 80% that of sending 2. It is sheer good math and economics to send 2. The statistical failure rate IS there. If you buy 2 you are paying for: (fail%/fail%) exponentiallly decreasing failure by a factor of 2 therefore buying a greater likelyhood of success. NASA aren't dum, just acting sensibly to achive their goal.

  • Re:Identical probes? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward


    2 probes are esential.

    The cost of sending 1 rover is 70% - 80% that of sending 2.

    It is sheer good math and economics to send 2. The statistical failure rate IS there. If you buy 2 you are paying for: (fail%/fail%) exponentiallly decreasing failure by a factor of 2 therefore buying a greater likelyhood of success.

    NASA aren't dum, just acting sensibly to achive their goal.

  • Re:Wrong target, wrong reason. (Score:3)

    by jetson123 ( 13128 ) on Thursday August 10, 2000 @11:01PM (#863333)
    NASA is "building the highway to the stars". They are developing and deploying new propulsion technologies and new computer technologies. The cheapest and quickest way of doing that is with unmanned probes. If we ever want manned space travel, that will require a lot of additional work, risk, and expense.

    The shuttle seems like one of the worst places to put money. It was expensive and questionable technology even when it was originally developed. NASA (and other space agencies) have already found better ways of lifting both objects and people into orbit. Hopefully, we'll see that kind of new technology deployed soon. But then, we still have the choice of using the launch capacity for glorified space tourism (shooting senators into orbit) or actual scientific purposes (unmanned probes, space telescopes, etc.).

  • NASA seem to have been going backwards since the 70s, really

    Too right. The problem with NASA now is that it has to fight for good public opinion to guarentee funding. In the old days the government could just throw money at it and everyone went "Wow Space travel" and didn't ask questions. Now they have to look like they are doing something with their money, which means more missions, more often.
    Its like the old adage about if you have nothing to do, make sure you have something in your hand (like a clipboard), else someone will start asking questions.

    It is no longer what NASA does that counts, it's what it appears to do. Which is unfortunate because they are doing some brilliant work but none of it is as high profile as their failures.

    Mabey they should shift their PR more over to these things and away from the more risky end of the business, I think sometimes that they underestimate the public's interest in science.

  • Value for money (Score:3)

    by ectoraige ( 123390 ) on Thursday August 10, 2000 @11:10PM (#863335) Homepage

    I can't decide which thread to put this in.

    For roughly each dollar invested in NASA, 10 dollars are returned to the US economy. Actually, I think that value has increased since the eighties, but NASA has always been of benefit to the US. But because you can't SEE the results, your apparent narrow-mindedness gets the better of you, and your senators. If only my bank gave such a return for money.

    The only time I wish I was a US citizen, is to support NASA with my vote.

    "A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"

  • Many successful probes were sent to Mars

    Actually, only about 33% of everything the US and the USSR sent to Mars was deemed "successful". Most of the rest either missed their mark completely, exploded, or was lost or stopped working once it reached Mars.

    Here's [cmu.edu] my source, since anything contrary to the opinion of the status quo on slashdot needs backing up, but "what feels right" never does.

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • I take it you never make mistakes?


    Mine tend to cost less than $100 million.


    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad


  • This used to be NASA's standard policy from the Pioneer, Mariner, Viking missions, to basicaly launch in pairs. Mariner 9 took on an extended mission when it's sister ship Mariner 8 woundup in the Atlantic Ocean instead of Mars Orbit.

    For even two of these probles the Titan would be an overkill anyway compared to a pair of Deltas. Mars doesn't require the same level of Delata V that a reasonably quick mission to the outer planets would call for.
  • I'd rather watch a rover landing on Christmas Day than 1..n stupid parades.
  • But you still have to shoot the fuel up there in the first place. This is another reason Mars is so good: you can make your own fuel when you get there(or before you get there, actually).
  • Robert Zubrin created a workable baseline for human exploration and settlement of Mars in his book "The Case For Mars". His proposal does not rely upon a 30-year $400B Space Exploration Initiative as did the 1989 proposal which was DOA.

    Zubrin's proposal uses resources available on Mars to bootstrap the operation efficiently. Although I was skeptical when I started reading it, he convinced me that there is nothing we need from ISS or the Moon if we want to go to Mars. He estimated a cost of around $30B for all hardware development and 3 manned missions to Mars. Best of all, his proposal scales well to colonization.

    As to patience -- it is patience which has resulted in so much money having been wasted on ISS. The original plans were pretty bold (remember the solar concentrators and liquid sodium turbine power generators?). In the 16 years since ISS was started, we have retreated from creating bold new technology to integrating obsolete off the shelf components (80386 computers form the data management system backbone). ISS has survived on promises of cancer cures, on pork-barrel politics, and on foreign policy considerations, but survival is not the same as vitality.

    Zubrin and his collaborator, David Baker, make a case that their program would succeed because it would go fast, not slow. On p. 55 (paperback version):

    I felt very strongly that a humans-to-Mars program had to be done on a rapid schedule. Fast schedules reduce program cost: cost equals people multiplied by time. Moreover, every year any major program has to go before Congress for continued funding where it faces risk of termination, often caused by deals or interpersonal frictions that have nothing to do with the program itself. Every time a program goes before Congress for funds it is forced to play another game of Russian roulette. You can only expect to be lucky so many times.

    ISBN 0-684-83550-9 (softbound) 1996, Touchstone Books. Robert M. Zubrin with Richard Wagner: "The Case For Mars"

  • Public opinion has always been an issue. Back in the late Fifties, every time a rocket failed to launch, the newspapers would write it up as though it were a catastrophe, when in fact it was just normal learning curve. "Our rockets always blow up" they wrote, in comparison to the apparently infallible Soviets, who never pre-announced flights and covered up all their own failures.

    Keep in mind as well that the early manned missions were basically PR stunts; there was little scientific value to sending a man up there in a "capsule", but there was tremendous publicity payback. Of course, each mission added knowledge of human survival techniques in space, but it was orchestrated very much for the public's consumption. See Tom Wolf's book "The Right Stuff" for some interesting insights.

    A big difference today is that NASA has spread its facilities around the country to get more Congressional support. In doing so, unfortunately, they lost the cohesiveness of the Sixties and Seventies efforts and greatly politicized their operations.

    Then there's the dumbing down of scientific and mathematical standards in secondary education, with the resulting reduction in a supply of competent technicians. Happily, non-US citizens are flocking in to fill this need in colleges and graduate schools, but of course lots of them get kicked out of the country soon after graduation.

    Luckily, all the money that would have gone to NASA has been very well spent. Just look at all the great public housing and well fed poor people and gleaming interstate highways, and... and... happy federal pensioners? where DOES all the money go, anyway?

  • The guy was pretty clear in recognising that he was generalising and that some people without degrees were likely smarter than many people with.

    However, I think we can all agree that level of education is probably a good predictor of intelligence. One that will be wrong at times, but more often right.

    Lighten Up!
  • yeah! let's spend $10 billion and scatter the planet with 1500 of these things! Imagine what our great great great grandkids would think when they continue to find them 150 years form now.... WTF?
  • Your analogy of 3000 palms vs an Enterprise server does not really apply. The task at hand is not a computation intensive task, it's a data collection and communications task. Which would help 3000 explorers mapping the amazon more, 3000 satelite phones or a Sun Enterprise server?

    And the redundancy is key. You lose your Enterprise server and you're dead. You lose half of your multitude of probes and you still collect a ton of data.
  • If the probes are too simple, though, they won't survive long enough to actually send back any data at all. 3000 explorers mapping the Amazon aren't going to get much benefit out of 3000 analog cell phones that don't work in humidity over 75% -- and that's the basic equivalent to the kinds of probes described.

    Yes, if your one big probe dies, you're toast. However, it's got the almost the same amount of redundancy as those little probes you're so fond of, without the bugginess and quirks that come from making something out of cheap, compact parts when you really need industrial-strength tools.

    There are some basic subsystems of any space-worthy equipment that just don't scale down to the levels you're talking about. Most probes or staellites are actually a very compact bundle of electronics, with a much more elaborate network of mechanical supports, power supplies, and propulsion units. You can't strip all that gear off them and have it work -- there are no conveniently located power outlets on Mars to keep you LiIon batteries charged, and solar cells can't supply nearly enough power to keep that complex a device running for more than a few minutes a day.

    Redundancy is a great idea, but in this case, you're taking it too far. In safer environments, you can get away with cutting corners on durability and qulity, but if you want to get anything useful out of an interplanetary probe, you had damn well better spend the time, effort, and money on some reliable systems. Otherwise, you're just oging to end up with a shitload of dead rover carcasses being shot into the surface of Mars.

  • I stand corrected.. I would however say that NASA should demand all subcontractors to use Metric as well :)
  • I should qualify my original suggestions. When I say "cheap" and "simple" I mean by NASA standards. I don't mean send $10 Radio Shack gizmos.

    You make a good point that they have to be sturdy, able to handle space, low temperatures, radiation, Mars conditions, debris, etc. Then they have to communicate, be mobile, have info collection capabilities, and power gereration.

    So I'm not saying this is something easy. What I'm saying is that it is possible, and it's the direction NASA research should be moving in. Anything they design could be mass produced at a fraction of the cost of the first.

    You've got to admit, with all the expense of design and transportation of the mars rover it sucks that we only get to see and explore mars as long as that one machine works, then it's all over. Wouldn't it be great to have dozens of them? Pathfinder lasted ~three months. Was that a short, average, or long lifespan? We'll never know.
  • Even if it leaks oil, I bet it corners better then those nasa ones.

    Bob.
  • We dedicated substantial company resource to considering the whole NASA thing, a couple of nights ago, on the executive conference bench of the Tanners Arms ... came away wondering what exactly their motivation was ... and with the conclusion that they really should give this business of folding a piece of paper in half fifty times in order to span the distance between the earth and the sun. British inventiveness, at its best...
  • Please put onus where onus belongs. Do you think japan or china spend half as much as we do on defense? No? Why not?? Because they are not policing half the freaking world with aircraft carriers. They don't have forward deployed troops in 30 countries.

    It's time for us to pick our battles. One carrier battle group off of Iraq, one off of Taiwan (I want my Crusoe's dammit, and I don't want Taiwan semiconductor to get sacked!) and bring everybody else home.
    Not everybody has the same priorities as you. That is why we need to police the world. Our interests are all over the world, not just Iraq and Taiwan. If we took a less active role in the world, Oil and semiconductor prices could be much higher ( Saddam with 43% of the world's oil and China with a significant portion of the semiconductor manufacturing base. ) So you can pay taxes to the US govt ( which really are not that high ), or you can pay to line the coffers of some regieme in another part of the world. I don't know about you, but I'd rather keep my money here in the States.

    Also, notice that your taxes are significantly lower than in other developed nations, but we still have the leading economy ( stable and growing ) and the ability to enforce our policy worldwide. I'd consider that a pretty good deal.

    If you think that all the money goes to defense and contractors and other fat cats, just remember that the defense budget is only about %35 of the budget. The largest draw on the budget is all of the entitlement programs ( Social Security, Medicare, etc ). Check out the budget website [gpo.gov].

    Bottom line: Defense pays for itself by protecting the most stable economy in the world. Japan doesn't need to spend on defense because the U.S provides it for them. China relies on conscription and slave labor to keep costs down. US troops in other countries are usually there to keep them from openly obliterating each other. We gave the Europeans 4 years (1992-1996) to stop the Balkan wars and they couldn't do it. We had many debates about getting involved in these foriegn brushfires. Only when the U.S. stepped and bombed everything, did things calm down.



  • Surprisingly enough, isn't this exactly what they did in Contact (movie with jodie foster)? "Why build one when you can build two for twice the price?"

    NASA has had its share of failure lately and the only mass-media publicity they've had in the past few years has been discoveries on Mars. If it takes two probes, they'll send two probes. If it takes twenty, they'll send twenty. Simply put, NASA's looking for some 'wow factor' in their discoveries; after all, who's going to willingly fund an organization whose most recent news has been burning a few hundred million dollars (note: i said organization not corporation(sic))? Personally, I'd like to see it work. Whatever works. Send something out there, grab all the dirt you like and go back to sitting on your hands for a couple decades - because if two probes don't work, the budget for the next mission will most definitely be their next big news flash.
  • Redundancy is ALWAYS good. Kinda like RAID systems, but with space travel.

  • The last two were dismal failures, and each one cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build and launch. Now they wanna launch a pair of them?

    If there were a way for taxpayers to specify how much of their tax dollars went to which area of the government, you'd see about $0.00 for NASA from me, at least until they figure out how to better their aim.

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • Re:Wrong target, wrong reason. (Score:3)

    by hollo32 ( 213966 ) on Thursday August 10, 2000 @11:11PM (#863355)
    As cool as this may be I think they would be better of plowing more money into a replacement for the shuttle, possibly a return to the moon, and the ISS. I know that alot of people consider the ISS a wast of money but with a bit of work it could really achieve something. All three of the above might act as stepping stones to future exploration of the solar system, providing cheaper lifting and bases from which cheaper missions can be launched.

    Both the moon and ISS have serious problems as stepping stones. The ISS is in a nice low orbit because otherwise the shuttle wouldn't be able to reach it, but ideally a set off point for solar system travel would be in a much looser orbit so that it would be easier to leave earth's orbit from it. Also it is all very well to say the ISS is useful as a stepping stone, but what would you actually do there? It could be used to assemble huge ships that were too big to be launched from earth, but quality control in an orbiting space station is going to be far worse than on the earth, and if your ship is that large then costs will be prohibitive anyway. It doesn't make a difference that you can leavefrom the ISS with very little fuel because you still need to get up there in the first place.

    The moon is generally put forwar as a stepping stone because it is close to us, has a smaller greavity well than earth, and would therefore be easier to launch large ships from, the idea being that these would be constructed on the moon. The only problem is that the moon does not have an atmosphere, so you need almost as much fuel at the far end of your journey to slow down as you do at the start to speed up. Mars on the other hand has an atmosphere, and so you can use aeorbraking (orbit around the outer reaches of the atmosphere and slow yourself down with atmospheric drag). The result is that, sounterintuitively, you actually need less fuel for a trip to Mars than you do for one to the Moon. Granted the trip is longer and windwos for return less frequent which bring out other complications, but as a base for futher solar system exploration the moon is not a good idea.

  • The Brits Could beat the Americans to it ! (Score:3)

    by vapour ( 102049 ) on Thursday August 10, 2000 @11:12PM (#863356)
    The English may well beat the Americans to be the first to discover if water exists on Mars.

    The Beagle 2, named after the ship used by Charles Darwin, is due to travel to Mars aboard the European Space Agency's Mars Express mission, also planned for 2003.

    The 60-kg, clam-shaped probe is scheduled to land on the surface of Mars on Christmas Day 2003. It will drill into the surface to extract soil samples which will be scanned for signs of water and life.

    An artists impression of the probe can be found here [astronomynow.com]
  • For all of its technical wisdom, and fascination with space exploration and science fiction, I am very surprised how clueless most Slashdot folks (including the poster) are on this one.

    First, NASA has sent redundant probes before. Many times. Consider : Viking 1 and 2 to Mars, Pioneer 10 and 11 and Voyager 1 and 2 to the outer solar system... the list goes on and on.

    Second, the cost of the second mission is far less than the first. The bulk of the expense of a space mission is sunk into the research and development of the probe, and subsequent mission support over its lifetime... not in the material manufacture or in the launch (though these are substantial in and of themselves).

    In sum, two missions can be done for less than twice the cost of one mission, and you gain enormously by redundancy. Random catastrophes are unlikely to strike both probes simultaneously, and system difficulties with the first mission can be detected and solved in the intervening time before the second probe arrives.

    This makes "faster, cheaper, better" missions more feasible. These missions are being launched on mere dimes where dollars were spent before. The problem is that they have suffered from reliability issues. Two missions for the price of 1.5 missions gives one _both_ reliability and low cost.
  • The thing about ISS as a stepping stone was metaphorical. Personally I think the ISS was not thought out properly from its inception (partly because it was a political decision as much as a scientific one) and has fundamental flaws.
    What I was trying to say (and failing rather badly) was that that they should be concentrating their efforts less on rather etherial aims such as the search for evidence of past life on mars and more on building practical technologies and an infrastructure for the future exploration of space.

    I believe that NASA would be better off ditching all its long distance landers (orbiters don't seem as much of a problem), especially the Life on Mars ones for a decade or two. In that time it could plow some serious investment ,together with the private sector, (space needs more mass production and commoditization to drive down prices) into better propulsion technologies and single stage, fast turn around mass use, cheap, reliable lifters (all relative of course) to make future space travel easier.

    For the past fourty years NASA, and the other space agencies have been throwing money away in one shot missions (mostly). By putting money into building for the future they will be making a real investment that will save money and make space travel easier and faster in the long run.

    The search for life on mars can wait, lets start using space for more real world applications and get the costs down. My tupence

  • Re:Probably due to University graduates. (Score:4)

    by cot ( 87677 ) on Thursday August 10, 2000 @11:51PM (#863359)
    Just from the title of this, I have to take offense.

    > it's really dim to show bias towards someone because they have a degree

    I'd say it's really dim to hire someone without a degree, at least in this field.

    Sure, it's ok to hire some IT guy that doesn't have a degree but has been playing with computers all his life. I'm sure there are lots of qualified people in those fields with no degree. Besides, CS degrees are about programming, not setting up firewalls and replacing motherboards.

    But we're talking about Aerospace Engineering, Physics, etc.

    Here, your "screw the degree" idea fails in two ways.

    First, how many people are self taught to the equivalent of a PhD level in these fields? Not very many I can assure you. At least not nearly as many who are self taught to be the equivalent of an MSCE (I'm guessing 95% of /.'s readers would qualify for that).

    Second, if you look at what it takes to get a PhD in one of these fields, you would realize how poorly your own experience maps onto this group of people. Getting a PhD is NOTHING like getting a BS. Most of the time spend in graduate school is spend doing research towards your thesis. Completing your thesis shows not only that you are capable of research, but you took on a long term project and were able to complete it.

    Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying every PhD is good at real world problems. But if I had to choose between a PhD and someone who is "self taught", all things being equal I'd go with the PhD to design the next space shuttle, thanks.
  • /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
    (Score: -1, Wiseass)
    Ryan
  • Oh, wait, he said "in half." Doh!
    /\ \/ /\ \/ /\ \/ /\ \/
    There we go.
    Ryan
  • Lets just take this one thing at a time.

    1) I did not criticise university degrees. I just stuck up for those of us who for what ever reason never got round to getting one.

    2) I don't see that my grammar was all that bad. A few spelling mistakes and some flakey punctuation here and there, but hey this is a bulletin board, not a job application.

    3) Brit's don't like English lessons from Americans. You don't even speak the Queens English. ;-)

    Lang may yer lumb reek.
  • I get the idea that many people think the airbags are very simple compared with "rocket science". Keep in mind that the development of the airbag landing method was far from a no-brainer. Donna Shirley, the manager of the successful 1997 Mars Pathfinder project, wrote about the development of this technology in her book "Managing Martians". They had many tests and some failures, resulting in making the bags thicker and heavier.

    ISBN 0-7679-0241-6. 1998, Broadway Books. Donna Shirley with Danielle Morton: "Managing Martians".

  • A tiny move, in the right direction (Score:3)

    by kryzx ( 178628 ) on Friday August 11, 2000 @05:47AM (#863364) Homepage Journal
    I've thought for a long time, ever since NASA started this "smaller, lower cost" strategy, that they had the right idea but didn't take it far enough.

    What they need is two or three rockets to go to mars and release a few dozen small communication relay satelites and several hundred (thousand?)surface probes, which can talk to any of the satelites. I'm talking about *real* redundancy, not just "let's send a backup".

    As has been previously pointed out, a huge majority of the cost is in the development of the technology, not the actual construction of the equipment. So develop something that can be produced on a larger scale. Maybe half will fail, but the ones that give us information will give us lots. And we'll have the option of sending more, improved, satelites and probes that can interact with the existing ones.

    And, as you make the equipment smaller you gain all kinds of advantages. What if we can send a four ounce probe that is mobile and can talk to the satelite? The task of landing a four ouncer gently is orders of magnitude easier than landing a twenty pounder gently. (I don't actually know how much that thing weighed, but you get the idea.) A look at our cell phone technology tells you these things are possible, and that's not even getting into the nano possibilites.

    A three tier system might be even more advantageous: A few dozen satelites, a hundred stationary surface relays that can talk to the satelites, and 20,000 tiny surface probes that only need to talk to a surface relay yards away.

    There are so many possibilities, if only they'd get a little creative. When we were all watching the exploits of the mars rover, and then it died, I thought, why didn't they just send a dozen? This seems so obvious to me that frankly I'm surprised NASA didn't go down this road years ago.

  • Let's think about that comment for just a minute, and then apply it to a mission critical server running two redundant hard drives. If both drives are the same model from the same manufacturer, then both drives are identical. Therefore, they have the same design bugs, manufacturing bugs, and control bugs. What on earth would lead you to expect that they won't fail in the same way? Oh my god, I can just imagine them both crapping out within minutes of each other. I guess you'd better buy drives from different manufacturers for your next system with RAID.

    Seriously, though, the reason to send out two probes is really to prevent against a single random event from destroying the mission. This way, if one lands in the wrong place and can't point it's antenna at earth, then the other hopefully won't have suffered the same fate. Just like two redundant hard drives, which are very unlikely to die on the same day, these two probes will provide back up for each other, and, if everything goes right, then they'll provide us with twice the data! I say it's a bargain.

  • Re:Feet and meters.. (Score:3)

    by Xenu ( 21845 ) on Friday August 11, 2000 @05:51AM (#863366)
    NASA tries to use metric when possible. The problem is that some things, like much of the aerospace industry and navigation practices, are stuck on the old units. For example, I fill my airplane with 50 gallons of avgas, set the altimeter to 29.92 inches of mercury, lift off the runway at 100 knots and climb to 10,000 feet. The whole US air traffic control system is based on English/Imperial units. How do you switch that to metric? It barely runs as it is.
  • More tangible results also come from investment into schools and child programs.

    Why does one have to come at the expense of the other - we can spend the money on the space projects, and also spend the money on schools, the arts and scientific research on earth.

    That's the great thing about money, it's divisible.

    Now of course the counter-argument that any first year economist will put to you is that every margnial increase in spending should be spent on the items that will bring the most benefit. This is true in a way, but ignores two important points.

    1. In a simple, "ceteris paribus", assumption-simplified economists world, you can measure everything, which is why the above advice on spending works in a model. In the real world, you have no certainty that your money spent on space is bringing in a lower or higher return, it is therefore good risk management to continue to explore that area of science in case that is where the most important discoveries of tomorrow will come.

    2. There's more to the equation than spending money for a fixed return. Just because you're spending money on schools doesn't mean that your children's children will have a better school system - take a look at the NHS, you could plough billions into it and nothing would happen - oh, hang on, they've already done that. What I mean is, you can probably do more by looking at how the money is spent and how you're doing things than by just using money to do more of them. In NASA's case, their projects require significant advances in technology to make them possible in the first place, and it's my (not necessarily shared) philosophy that the advancement of science, even without a directly applicable use for the technology outside of space exploration, is a good thing, because it feeds the thirst for knowledge.

  • Still, if I were the Lord and someone started shooting rockets at me, you can bet that there would be a little bit of wrath aimed at the responsible parties. I think that if we hit Jesus with a probe the entirety of humanity would be responsible in one way or another...

    Well, considering he was willing to forgive us for deliberately torturing and killing him, I'd tend to think he'd be more or less understanding if we accidentally hit him with a Mars probe.

  • Many sensors are complex and expensive. It isn't realistic to replace them with larger numbers of cheap sensors. Some things just don't scale.
  • No, no, no.....

    The IIS and Space Shuttle are a huge waste of money, about the only good thing they do is get NASA on television so that the proles think something good is happening. The science and value that comes out of these missions is pretty much zero.

    The big problem with these missions is that they include people. People are big, clumsy, need a hell of a lot of support equipment and if they as much as get a bruise then there is a outcry. The wet public is not prepared to accept that space exploration is difficult and dangerous.

    It would be far better for NASA to scrap these expensive white elephants and get on with doing real science (like more unmanned probes to Mars and other planets in the Solar System).

    I applaud this mission.

  • Re:Wrong target, wrong reason. (Score:3)

    by emerson ( 419 ) on Friday August 11, 2000 @12:04AM (#863373)
    On a solar-system-wide scale, the Moon and the Earth are really quite close together, so a scheme where you start at the Moon to take advantage of the lower gravity, but return to the Earth to take advantage of atmospheric braking and water landings could be the best of all worlds, pun intended.


    --
  • NASA employee's are human. Humans are fallible.

    Such is life. Tough shit.

    I take it you never make mistakes?

  • Re:Redundancy (Score:3)

    by pe1rxq ( 141710 ) on Friday August 11, 2000 @12:10AM (#863375) Homepage Journal
    You mean 'CRAP', Crashing Redundant Aray of Probes

    Jeroen

  • I don't believe that Artistic Impression is of a British probe.

    I mean, where is the mahogany casing, and the brass handles.
  • Too bad NASA didn't decide to send the second Lockheed-built Lander, almost identical to the MPL sent in '98. It was originally slated to fly in '01, and is now either collecting dust or dismantled. I thought the part of the philosophy of "Faster Better Cheaper" was to take risks and to learn from mistakes so that the next "cheap" spacecraft would stand a better chance of success.

    I'd say that it'd be better for both of em to get to fly. However, if I had to choose one, I'd go with Marsakhod (oops. renamed Fido...).

    The MPL was very limited in capabilities. It could go a little distance and look around, was not autonomous at all, and if I remember correctly did not have stereo cameras. Fido is a lot larger and more mobile, more autonomous, has better controls, and a good set of stereo cameras (don't tell me those aren't important when you're going up against a set of rocks like they've got on Mars!)

    So, my point is that I think that we need to get up to a certain minimum level of functionality before we start throwing a whole lot of the same thing there... and things like Sojourner just don't provide enough useful capabilities to make it worth it, long term...

    Lea

    Disclaimer: I used to work on this rover, so I'm probably biased. :)

  • I can't help feeling that NASA has got its priorities all mixed up. It keeps going for all these high cost, high risk mission to far flung places on the pretext of searching for evidence of life. As cool as this may be I think they would be better of plowing more money into a replacement for the shuttle, possibly a return to the moon, and the ISS.

    An interplanetary mission will run for on the order of hundreds of millions (or less, during the Faster/Cheapter/Better bargain days.) On the other hand, Shuttle/ISS/Moon manned endeavors run out into the tens of billions of dollars. Look at the cost of a single shuttle mission. Ow.

    NASA is obsessed with shooting big, dumb rockets at long distance targets at hugh cost.

    There's a reason why they use expendable launch vehicles: Launching a spacecraft on the shuttle is just too dang expensive. Not just because the Shuttle is an expensive launch vehicle (it is), but because anything that is launched must be checked umteen ways to Saturn to make sure it's TOTALLY SAFE. Anything that risks astronauts' lives - even in the slightest - is a major, major no-no. Lower risk equals higher cost, of course.

    So in fact, in terms of return-on-investment, the missions to far flung places are really a small drop in the bucket compared with anything that has to do with the shuttle. And using the "big dumb boosters" (dumb?) really is the most cost efficient, reliable way to go (at least for now).

  • Wasn't it Lucas radios that got the last Mars mission in trouble?

    {grin - I'm *joking* you British car guys, put down your spanners. I'm an Italian car addict (it *is* a sickness), and Marelli isn't a whole heck of a lot better...]
  • Knowing what nasa are like with acronyms I wonder what they are going to come up with for this one.

    Redundant Array of Inexpensive Mars Probes?

    Actually you could give them raid like numbers depending on the redundancy. You could have mirrored missions where one takes over if the other fails. Striped missions where the work is split between them for better performance but if one fails you can limp along with the other until a replacement turns up.

    I guess 2 weeks should be far enough apart. Knowing their luck, any closer and they would end up bumping into each other.

    Bob.

  • Landing methods.. (Score:5)

    by Bowie J. Poag ( 16898 ) on Friday August 11, 2000 @01:15AM (#863386) Homepage
    I should probably chime in here.. We had a guy give a speech here at the U (University of Arizona, Tucson..big place for space research and all) back in 98 once all the data from the lander and the rover had been collected. This guy's job was to design and implement the cameras on both the lander (not the rover.) and clued us into the sorts of stuff they were doing with it.

    Part of his speech included materials he'd brought with him from other portions of the design team. One of those things were some films of actual test-drops of the airbag system done out in the desert. Its certainly not as elegant as a parachute+retro burn landing, but it works, and works more often in tests. Simply cushioning the hell out of the unit and letting it bounce to a stop is statistically the best method to use. He pointed out an example in one of the tests where one entire side of the airbag was left intentionally uninflated -- The unit successfully bounced off the earth, settled, and deployed just fine -- It was just by luck that during the bounces, the side without the airbag was never face-down. Thats opposed to having 3 rocket burns, where 1 rocket fails.. The damn thing will cartwheel out of control and crash.

    I guess it all sort of depends on how you think a landing should be done. Having it fall out of the sky on a parachute, and bounce for over half an hour (and a mile's distance!) before coming to rest can be thought of repeatedly exposing the lander to undue trauma. But it works.

    PS..Seeing an ultra-high resolution slide of the surface of Mars in color-seperated 3D with a pair of 3D glasses was unbelievably cool..Handed out little cardboard glasses to everybody, and sat back for half an hour picking out things in the landscape..hehe...was unbelievably cool.

    Bowie J. Poag
  • Remember. Hindsight is always 20/20. Every time a probe crashes, a week later someone comes out with a detailed reason for exactly why it happened. Well, now when we find out what the problem is, they can implement a solution for the next probe and hopefully fix the problem in time to prevent a second crash.

    -Restil
  • >The one thing I don't get it why they launch them seperately. Why not use a single Titan IV

    Two Delta II rockets are much less expensive than one Titan IV.

    Delta II rockets are the most reliable ones in the world, too. Titan IV's have a tendency to fly sideways, unfortunately.

  • Another direction... (Score:3)

    by mr.ska ( 208224 ) on Friday August 11, 2000 @03:02AM (#863391) Homepage Journal
    So, for US$ 600 million, we're going to get some good, hard data on Mars. Assuming everyone's using the right units, of course.

    Well, I think eveyone has got it all bass-ackwards on this. Looking for fossilized bacteria and water on Mars? Hoping for water on the Moon? Drilling through 10km of ice to see what might live in the ocean underneath Europa's crust [sciam.com]? If you're looking for new life and exciting, harsh environments, I'd say we look down instead of up.

    Don't get me wrong - I think the space program is entirely cool. But for billions of dollars less, we could effectively conquer the ocean floor instead of trying to escape gravity and get to space.

    Just think - our planet is 70% covered with water, and yet it's mostly unexplored. We still haven't explored a lot of it, and there's lots to discover. How about looking at life forms that life in 400F toxic water plumes on the ocean floor instead of looking for fosselized bacteria? How about catalogueing all the various life that we haven't yet even seen in the depths instead of searching for water on the moon?

    Space is cool - it's unlimited, which gives us room for our imaginations. The oceans are at a disadvantage due to that - they're finite. But I have a feeling it would be money better spent (and less of it, at that) exploring the depths of our oceans instead of the heights of our imaginations.

  • If they can build two, why not more? Why not mass-produce these probes, so the costs get lower each time, and small improvements can be made on the line for each successive "model." If Motorola can build 100+ Iridium satellites in Arizona (never mind the fate of those), NASA could shuck out the dough to build an interplanetary probe assembly line of sorts.

    Obviously they're constrained by cost and manpower, but why stop at just two? Eventually, the probe Mark IV would be manned, and from there it's another hop to setting up a permanent station on Mars. Sounds easy, no?

  • Re:Surprised how clueless Slashdot folks are on th (Score:3)

    by rotenberry ( 3487 ) on Friday August 11, 2000 @03:07AM (#863394)
    When I was working for NASA at JPL in the early 1980s the decision was made to send only one Galileo spacecraft to Jupiter instead of two as JPL orignally proposed. Most engineers believed this was a mistake.

    Several persons have mentioned the feet / meters error that caused the Mars spacecraft to fail. It should be noted that the error was found quickly, and, had there been a second spacecraft, there would have been time to correct it. In previous missions with dual spacecraft the two spacecraft have been timed to arrive months apart so that only one ground crew was needed for both missions (another reason why the cost is not doubled.)
  • Degrees do not in any way correlate to intelligence or mechanical aptitude.

    Case in point, a literally brilliant European educated PhD ME who was on the faculty at a respected engineering school. I respect the heck outta anyone that can work through pretty much any problem from first principles, but you could never let him touch the equipment. In fact, he once told me, "I hate monkey wrenches - monkey wrenches are for monkeys!" (It was a Crescent we were talking about, actually.) When I asked him why, his completely serious reply was, "because they always break when you hammer on them." From then on, I understood why it was best to keep him from actually working on equipment, even though he was a gifted designer.

    On the other hand, anyone who repeatedly reminds you of their credentials or capabilities is probably best avoided. This goes double for interviews. I will say that the absolutely most useless people I've known have been the most educated, just because they find it easier to keep going to school than deal with anything approaching the real world. Invariably, they fare poorly when they finally venture out into it.

    I'm not at all opposed to advanced degrees, but I've found that their holders work out much better if they had several years of real work somewhere between their latest degree and their first.

    On the other hand, you have a point, modern university degrees are so content-free as to be nearly meaningless, and the big-name schools are among the worst offenders.
  • Those guys were all self made men, not the prefab pseudo intellectual "elite" we see nowadays.

    Surely they had some kind of degrees.

    In my experience, the most obnoxious members of the "pseudo intellectual elite" you describe, consist of twenty-something males who just got their B.Sc.'s (most likely satisfying the bare minimum requirements) and are yet to realize that the degree provides them only the necessary bits of formal training that allow them to easily learn more.

    They also fail to understand that knowing a bit more about their own, narrow field than a layman doesn't mean that they're suddenly jack-of-all-trades who know everything about everything.

    However, it works both ways too. Sometimes people without formal education in science propose something silly and mistake reasonable criticism of their ideas as "bashing from the nasty establishment brainwashed egomaniacs with degrees". Formal education system is there for a reason. It gets you quickly up to date on the subject, fills in gaps in your basic knowledge and provides at least some way (I'm not saying it's fair or not) of quantifying your skills. The most silly layman theories are borne out of a simple failure to get to know the basics before going to the bleeding edge.

    I'm getting my PhD degree in Physics next year, but it doesn't make me an expert in mechanical engineering or electronics. Even though I know the physics behind the both, I'm practically useless when it comes to milling metal into a specific shape or building a small signal amplifier. If I have to do metalworks or build electronics, I'll rather ask expert's (self made or not) help. At the same time, however, I would not pay much attention to a mechanical engineer who claims that quantum physics is bollocks. Why? Because most likely I know more about quantum physics than he does. It's not arrogance or elitism. It's a reasonable assumption unless he proves me otherwise.

    I like what Scott Adams said about idiots: we're all idiots when doing something for which we have no education or experience.

    Geniuses are spawned out of the cold blue air, not created in some school.

    Yeah, but that doesn't mean a university graduate cannot be a genius. Take Richard P. Feynman, for instance.

  • ...not only because of the recent failures, but because there's a possible deadline in sight. Early 2014 is the most ideal date in sight to launch a manned mission to the red planet, as reported today [bbc.co.uk] at BBC News [bbc.co.uk], years ago in an article [floridatoday.com] from Space Online [floridatoday.com], and many places in between.

    The basic idea is that a manned mission launched in 2014 would have the built-in safety feature of an easy slingshot return, which (if you're in a crippled ship) could make a big difference when it's the life of astronauts and not just their equipment at stake. If NASA can gather some reliable information in the meantime, they might just have a shot of making the deadline. It's probably too late already, considering how much time these things take (especially considering how much time these things take NASA) ...but it's a hell of an opportunity to just dismiss.

  • Re:Pissing our money away, IMO. (Score:4)

    by SuperCujo ( 151089 ) on Thursday August 10, 2000 @10:00PM (#863416)
    The problem is, without any resources they can't practice and improve their aim...

    You need to give them enough money so they get it right first time. If the US Government wasn't taking their budget away they would probably have already put a probe on the Mars.

  • Origin of the craters... (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 10, 2000 @10:02PM (#863417)
    I'm starting to get my own theory's here...
  • ...all the money in the world couldn't have prevented the loss of the first probe, and mistakes like that would be made at any price point.

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • No, but you *can* fix problems with software, or you can alter a trajectory if the first probe fails.

  • Webcast (Score:4)

    by Chairboy ( 88841 ) on Thursday August 10, 2000 @10:09PM (#863420) Homepage
    According to another story I read, the missions will be webcast as much as possible.

    I wonder if this means I'll have to skip watching Survivor IV to watch these rovers skitter across the surface?!

    Both probes will be searching for evidence of water, but neither of them will be landed near the place where the evidence of liquid water was found recently. In the article, a scientist said that area was too rocky and hilly, and they were worried about a rover flipping over.

    On the plus side, these two rovers will use airbags to bounce to a landing (like Pathfinder).

    The one thing I don't get it why they launch them seperately. Why not use a single Titan IV (or equivalent capacity booster) to inject both into a trans-mars orbit? If the concern is dealing with two landings at once, just perform an orbital correction on one of them to aerobrake twice, once at a shallow angle to bleed off speed, the second one as the money shot for entry into Mars' atmosphere. The other lander could perform a standard single aerobrake and land days before the second one came in for its second encounter with the atmosphere.

    The only reasons I see to using two Delta 2s are this:
    1. NASA doesn't want both eggs in one launching basket.
    2. NASA can more easilly get Delta 2 boosters than a bigger booster like the Titan,
    or
    3. NASA doesn't want to do something new like a 2 stage aerobrake.
  • The proposed landing system with the inflatable buffers sounds very similar to a design which shows up in the trailer for the movie "Red Planet" (site is here [redplanetmovie.com]). If you have a machine that can play QuickTime movies, go take a quick look at the trailer to see what I mean.

    As for the dual probes, well, NASA does have a large installed Macintosh base. Maybe they're taking a cue from Apple; if we can't get one probe working fast enough, maybe we can put two together and sell it as a better solution.....

  • Is 2 really enough? (Score:3)

    by ameoba ( 173803 ) on Thursday August 10, 2000 @10:11PM (#863425)
    I'm not sure if 2 probes is really enough. They should take more of a shotgun approach, and send several hundred probes in the general direction of Mars.

    Some of you might say "That'll cost too much". But if you really think about it, it'd be a way to cut costs. For one thing, if you send enough probes, the guidance systems on each individual probe don't need to be that good, only one needs to get there. The same goes for reliability and physical reliability of the system.

    I guess a shotgun's not the best analogy... perhaps ejaculation's a better model; Lots of poorly designed things set out in the hopes that one works. I'm sure I could somehow equate this to Microsoft; I'll leave that as an excercise to the reader.
  • The derogation of 'career bureaucrats' is the kind of stuff we used to hear from Newt Gingrich.
    Contrast the performance of NASA since 1971 with the performance of NASA 1961-1969. We went from never having sent a man to orbit to having people spend DAYS on the Moon in 8 years. That included 3 generations of launch vehicles. We haven't made a serious improvement on the Space Shuttle since it was built! The various factions which run the show find that it's not in their interest for us to get anywhere with large projects (it rocks the boat too much), so we don't. Careerists who can't do anything bold because they can't afford a failure are only one of these factors, and they come third on my list (in case you hadn't noticed).

    There are a lot of great engineers at NASA. There are some freaking amazing people on just the Deep Space 1 project (have you any idea what they've done to keep that thing alive, and the kind of miracles they've performed? No? I do). The problem is that they aren't calling the shots; the money interests who hold e.g. the contract for Space Shuttle maintenance (and make lots of campaign contributions) are calling the shots.
    --

  • Contrast the performance of NASA since 1971 with the performance of NASA 1961-1969. We went from never having sent a man to orbit to having people spend DAYS on the Moon in 8 years.

    There was much more money available in the Apollo era, both for equipment and people. The attitude was "What do you need to get the job done on a fast track schedule?" When Nixon became President, lots of people were laid off, many facilities were closed, the survivors took major cuts in pay and budgets were slashed. The budgets have continued to be squeezed since then. I tell the people that I work with that we are playing a real-life game of Survivor.

  • Oh ya, for those interested, the original (press-release) can be found at: ftp://ftp.hq.nasa.gov/pub/pao/pressrel/2000/00-124 .txt
  • Two identical probes for redundancy? Doh!

    Both probes are identical. They will be designed the same, manufactured the same, packaged the same and launched the same and controlled by the same people presumably. Therefore they will have the same design bugs, manufacturing in bugs and control bugs.

    What on earth would lead people to expect that they won't fail in the same way?

    Oh my god, I can just imagine them both cratering on Mars within meters of each other.
  • Since you seem to have some figures at your fingertips, what is the cost breakdown of a mission? For X million dollars total cost, how much is payload manufacturing and how much is deliviery? half and half?

    Would it make sense to put a big ass computer/communications relay in perpetual orbit around mars? One that could be reused from mission to mission? The idea is that you mount one big mission to deliver the relay with smarts into a near marssynchronous orbit. Then you just start trowing cheapo hardware at the surface. The hardware is cheap cause it has to be controlled remotely from the relay.

    This would only work if delivery was a lesser part of the cost of a mission, so it made sense to cheapen the payload.
  • The comedians are going to have a field day with this one. Dual probes. Heh.

  • I can't drive 50mph (Score:3)

    by Duxup ( 72775 ) on Thursday August 10, 2000 @10:27PM (#863454) Homepage
    50mph, dang that seems fast. Have past (successful) landings also been that fast?
  • "Apparently there is an endless supply of engineers willing to participate in the mass production of crap. Any given toaster is a piece of crap. Any given computer is a piece of crap. There are of course exceptions, but by and large the mass-produced output of engineers the world over is crap."

    Do you really think them are true engineers that designed them?
  • Space is a very hostile environment for electronics of any kind. Even in low Earth orbit, satellites can be (and are) rendered inoperable by cosmic rays, micrometeorites, solar flares, etc., etc. All it takes is hosing a single essential circuit board, or an attitude control jet, and a multi-million dollar piece of equipment instantly becomes floating junk -- and there's no real possibility of just swapping out parts, without a human being doing a spacewalk to make the repairs.

    When that happens to relatively close-in satellites, we can repair them, or quickly send up a replacement. Missions to Mars take months, and are really only feasible if unmanned. Trying to reliably launch and maintain a completely automated, complex communications system in Mars orbit would be a monumental undertaking, and given the current cost and sophistication of even "local" satellites, I don't think there would be much a sivngs to be had over sending the same gear in every satellite.

  • If you want to see how it works, a nice animation clip is here. (.mov, so need Quick Time [apple.com] or similar

    LinuxLover

  • You wouldn't try to use a 3000-node Beowulf of Palm Pilots to replace an Sun Enterprise server, would you? No, I didn't think so. It just wouldn't work -- each node faces too much overhead to contribute much if anything to the rest of the network. Similarly, you're suggesting that by simply spreading the burden of an interplanetary space mission out over a lot of independent, simple hardware, you could get impressive redundancy, and therefore, success? Sorry, I think not.

    Let me guess: it would work, so long as they all ran Linux on Crusoe chips, with Peltier junctions for temperature control once under the Mars heat?

  • There were no CS degrees in the glory days of NASA.

    The subcontractor for the Apollo computer software was the Math Department at MIT. They might have been called "applied mathematicians," but they were CS Majors in all but name. And they were pretty damned good, too. Re-writing Apollo 14's descent software in one orbit to overcome a piece of solder lodged in a sensor comes to mind, as does the heroics they had to go to adjust 13's programming to manuver the CSM/LM combo with the LM's guidance computer.

    Try looking for Chariots for Apollo at your favorite bookstore. It's a good read, even if does scrimp a bit on the development of the Saturn V.


    Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wagn'nagl dominos.

  • This should work (Score:5)

    by Richy_T ( 111409 ) on Thursday August 10, 2000 @10:29PM (#863473) Homepage
    The Martians probably figure they have a few months between missions to manufacture their surface to air (space?) missiles. This should catch them on the hop.

    Rich

  • Wrong target, wrong reason. (Score:4)

    by NoNeeeed ( 157503 ) <slashNO@SPAMpaulleader.co.uk> on Thursday August 10, 2000 @10:35PM (#863475)
    I can't help feeling that NASA has got its priorities all mixed up.

    It keeps going for all these high cost, high risk mission to far flung places on the pretext of searching for evidence of life.

    As cool as this may be I think they would be better of plowing more money into a replacement for the shuttle, possibly a return to the moon, and the ISS. I know that alot of people consider the ISS a wast of money but with a bit of work it could really achieve something. All three of the above might act as stepping stones to future exploration of the solar system, providing cheaper lifting and bases from which cheaper missions can be launched.

    NASA is obsessed with shooting big, dumb rockets at long distance targets at hugh cost. If only it could learn some pacience. If there is evidence of life on Mars it will still be around in fifty years time.

    I think that the search for life is a laudable aim, but there are more useful things NASA could be doing with all that money, like building a platform (metaphorically speaking) from which future generations might more easily explore the solar system, rather than wasting all that time and money on short term projects for now.

    NASA, and all the other space agencies, should be building the highway to the stars, not just driving to them in an offroader, year after year.

    My tupence (sorry about the bad metaphor at the end)

  • Re:Webcast (Score:3)

    by photon317 ( 208409 ) on Thursday August 10, 2000 @10:40PM (#863477)
    According to another story I read, the missions will be webcast as much as possible

    Maybe they should pay for the mission with banner ads :)

  • I love the line from the movie "Contact" something along the lines of "normal goverment thinking, why have one when you can have two at twice the cost"

    ________

  • Sure, Universtiy degrees are great for a lot of things, but just because someone has one, don't instantly think they're ultra-smart. I think that might be what's happening at NASA and a lot of places.

    I know a guy who had his BS(with Honours) in Computer Science. He's very shrill and if anyone questions whether he knows something or not, he screams: "I did C++ and Java and compiler theory and advanced blah blah blah!!!" One day I turned around to him and said: "Funny thing that you can do C++, but you manage to fuck up a simple shell script every week." It's true, he regulary manages to crash his firewall, he can't seem to get to grips with putting a motherboard in properly (always shorts them out), he can't really do much of anything... It seems that now that he has his HONOURS degree, he feels that he doesn't need to learn or do anything ever again. I have to go to his company's offices and fix their firewall, at least once every 2 weeks.

    I'm not saying that all University graduates are like this, what I am saying is that it's really dim to show bias towards someone because they have a degree. Candidates should be measured on what they know and what they can do, rather than what a peice of paper says about them. Because degrees, in the end, don't always mean their holders are smarter than people without degrees.

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