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Mars Space Science

ESA Aiming for Martian Probe in 2011 131

Posted by Zonk from the round-trip dept.
allanj writes "According to the BBC, the ESA is set to send a robotic probe to Mars around 2011. They apparently want to return samples of Martian soil with the probe - cool idea if it works better than Beagle 2 did..." From the article: "They still require a great deal of further detail and the agency's member states will also have to sign off the mission. Ministers will have their say when the Esa Council meets in December."
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ESA Aiming for Martian Probe in 2011 More

ESA Aiming for Martian Probe in 2011

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  • Late Breaking News: (Score:5, Funny)

    by TripMaster Monkey ( 862126 ) * on Sunday April 10, 2005 @06:31PM (#12196341)

    Today the Council of Elders confirmed the rumours that the sinister blue planet third from our star is planning to send yet another one of its mechanical invaders.

    K'breel, speaker for the Council, stressed that there was no cause for alarm:

    "While it is true that the blue planet is sending another invader, we are confident that we can deal with the situation. This particular invader seems to be of the same design as the one we destroyed over one standard year ago, so it should be vulnerable to the same tactics. Even failing this, it should be no problem to isolate the invader and keep it from any contact with citizens...a policy we have developed and upheld ever since the blue planet initiated hostilities."


    When questioned whether the rumours that the blue planet was almost covered in poisonous, corrosive di-hydrogen oxide, as many independent scientists have asserted, had any validity, K'breel declined comment.
    • Thanks, you made my day

    • Re:Late Breaking News: (Score:5, Funny)

      by bonch ( 38532 ) on Sunday April 10, 2005 @06:36PM (#12196379)
      In related news, local heretic Kal-El was arrested once more for conducting scientific experiments to determine when, as he believes, the planet will explode.

      "If we don't fix this now, I have to fire my son through space at the blue planet, and I don't want my son living in a world of Clippy and BSD-is-dying jokes."

      K'breel of the Elder Council denied rumors the planet was going to explode. "When has an Elder Council ever denied rumors of inevitable disaster, only to have it come true?" he laughed.
    • If I hadn't spent my modpoints in Atlantic City, Vegas, and that one Indian Reservation. I'd mod this up, right about..... now.
    • "When questioned whether the rumours that the blue planet was almost covered in poisonous, corrosive di-hydrogen oxide, as many independent scientists have asserted, had any validity, K'breel declined comment."

      Moments later, the phrase "I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle" mysteriously drifted across the chamber where the Elders met. Before Earth could send another one of its mechanical invaders, all life on Mars was exterminated when war broke out...
    • One Martian newscaster had this to say:

      I, for one, welcome our new Earthling overlords!

  • sharing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sfcat ( 872532 ) on Sunday April 10, 2005 @06:35PM (#12196374)
    why does NASA and the ESA (and other space agencies) have to each send their own probes. Due to the cost of space missions, wouldn't a more sharing of resources be useful. For instance, one agency pays for the ground control, another for the rockets, another for the actual probe. Sharing of costs and resources would allow for more missions and less parnoia about how one nation uses space.

    • Re:sharing (Score:4, Funny)

      by Orgazmus ( 761208 ) on Sunday April 10, 2005 @06:43PM (#12196418)
      Sir, are you or have you ever been a member of the communist party?

    • Re:sharing (Score:5, Insightful)

      by John Seminal ( 698722 ) on Sunday April 10, 2005 @06:44PM (#12196424) Journal
      why does NASA and the ESA (and other space agencies) have to each send their own probes. Due to the cost of space missions, wouldn't a more sharing of resources be useful. For instance, one agency pays for the ground control, another for the rockets, another for the actual probe. Sharing of costs and resources would allow for more missions and less parnoia about how one nation uses space.

      Different ideas, different builds. Why do we have Windows and Linux when the programmers could work together? And the ESA and NASA are very different. I remember in Industrial Psychology we studied different systems of buisness. In Europe, they work as a team and are credited as members of a team. In the USA people get credit for outstanding work individually, not a team. So it is interesting to see how this plays out. The motivations are different, the dynamics are different, and the probes that are built will be different. I think there is something to be learned here.

      Plus, if it was just NASA, we would have a space shuttle that never changes. Maybe some new ideas would make NASA reconsider their designs.

      • Competing missions to Mars may not be such a
        very bad thing. NASA has has spectacularly
        disasterous luck with its contractors (mixing
        up ISO & Imperial measurements cost a Mars probe),
        while the ESA nearly lost all data for their piggy-back
        probe to Ios (due to uncalculated doppler effects
        on data baud rates).

        Seems to me that combining efforts may more likely
        combine the worst failures of their perspective
        contractors, rather than cancelling them out.

      • In Europe, they work as a team and are credited as members of a team. In the USA people get credit for outstanding work individually, not a team. So it is interesting to see how this plays out.

        A sweeping and absurd generalization. Consider the wildly successful Spirit and Opportunity missions. Are you suggesting that anything other than excellent engineering teamwork and program management have made these missions what they are?

    • But if you had more missions, you would end up sending more probes anyway.

      For the most part, they do seem to share resources; different countries/universities can install their experiments onto whatever device is being launched. And there is collaboration on the use of radio/optical telescopes - there are early warning networks for important events like supernova.
    • First you'll have to get different countries to agree on exactly what to send to collect what, won't you? As well as who to hire - what staff, from which countries. As well as the budget, who's responsible for what parts, where the parts are being purchased/made, what data's being collected, who this data will be shared with, and on and on and on.

    • Re:sharing (Score:3, Informative)

      by NoseBag ( 243097 )
      You might check out the details of the Casini/Huygens probe (US mothership/UK Titan probe daughtership), telemetry transmission of the Mars Rovers via the EU Mars Surveyor(?), and others. This (sharing of resources) has been going on for a while. Oh, yeah...and the space station. Seems everyone has a piece of that puppy.

      Good idea though.
      • That would be telemetry through Mars Express (MEX), which is ESA. It worked fine because they're both communicating with the Proximity-1 protocol.

      • Re:sharing (Score:2, Informative)

        by drachton ( 673697 )
        Cassiny/Huygens [esa.int] isn't a US/UK mission, it's a work of collaboration between NASA and ESA, and it says here [esa.int] that the European contribution is led by Alcatel Space [alcatel.com], a French company. You can find more details regarding each agency's contribution here [esa.int].

    • competition (Score:1, Insightful)

      by antiaktiv ( 848995 )
      Competition between the US and USSR is what started space exploration and put man on the moon, not to mention uncountable other scientific achievements. Even though there isn't nearly as much money being put in to it now as there was forty years ago, competition will, as always, lead to innovation.
    • My guess is that the ESA doesn't trust NASA.

      We Americans have a pretty interesting history regarding disclosing facts about basic science, research and non-terrestrial activities (at least when such science, research and non-terrestrial activities occur within the event horizon of the US blcack budget).

      A more interesting question than the ESA doesn't work with NASA may be, if the ESA finds anything interesting how will NASA respond? Will it be, "Wow, why didn't we ever notice that?
    • Great, just like ISS, the biggest boondoggle yet.

      -molo

    • There is a weight[1] limit on all current rockets, which depends on the destination, how fast you want to get there, other such factors. Thus if the ESA and US consider a mission that needs and entire rocket launch itself, there is no point in coperating because in the end much will need to be duplicated.

      Another reason to not coperate is it makes for fault tolerance. Most missions are one offs that will never be run again (sometimes two are three offs). It takes to long to get a mission going and so l

    • To tell you the truth, it's probably a good ides that this occurs. I will try not to reiterate what others have said in response to your post. In my opinion, the more probes sent, the better the chances of getting good data. In other words, if they got together and made one probe, and it crashes (no matter how well-built it was, it's still possible), both parties lose out on a significant investment and data opportunities. On the other hand, if they each do their own thing, the one that succeeds can sha
    • The very thought of sharing is impossible, since from every nations leaders' point of view, the space exploration is simply politics and race against other countries. I'm sure the scientists would love to co-operate on every level, but since the goverments fund the projects...

      Also the "private/corporation funded space exploration" (no, nothing pervert in that, just your imagination, Sonny) doesn't help much since then we propably start to see spaceshuttles and probes filled with ads and get to see which ce
    • Since when do Americans share in glory?

  • Is this it? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by QuantumG ( 50515 ) <qg@biodome.org> on Sunday April 10, 2005 @06:37PM (#12196386) Homepage Journal
    Is our current level of technology the end state for space probes? It seems we hear about a new mission every week built with the same old technology. I mean, SMART-1 was a different story, it was new technology and the mission was simply to test fly it. That's what we should be doing isn't it? Flying new technology so we can get to Mars in two weeks instead of two years.

    • Yep, that's it. (Score:2, Informative)

      by nc_yori ( 870325 )

      The problem, QuantamG, is that beauracracy is typically unwilling to explore new methods when old, proven methods are available.

      Compounding this problem is the fact that American politicians/higher-ups seem to lack the ability to say, "I'm sorry, I screwed up. Everyone makes mistakes," so possibly funding a program that fails in the public eye is a non-option.

      It is true that the government has programs that fail [computerworld.com] all the time [computerworld.com]; it's just that something like space travel is more suitabl

    • Getting to Mars in two weeks would require godawful amounts of fuel, first for accelerating to such a ridiculous delta v (squishing any live occupants into gooey puddles, and requiring ridiculous tolerances for all hardware), then for decelerating for Martian orbit capture.

      The main reason it's done the way it's done now has nothing to do with technology and everything to go with the laws of gravitation and economics.
      • Umm no. If you accelerated as 9.8 m/s^2 to the midpoint between earth and mars and then decelerated the same until you got to mars the entire trip would take *hours* not weeks and the human occupants would experience a standard gravity.. much more confortable than zero gravity. And yes, it would take vast amounts of fuel to do this with existing space propulsion technology.. but that's the whole point of my post! We should be testing new technologies. For example, something we could do right now with to

        • Re:Is this it? (Score:2, Interesting)

          by fsh ( 751959 )
          If you assume that you're going from Earth's orbit to Mars' orbit (1AU to 1.5AU) straight out (about 75 million km), then it would indeed take about 48 hours the way you describe.

          In the real world you also have to get out of Earth's gravity, fight against the Sun's gravity, and then push against Mars' gravity to avoid crashing.

          You also have to consider that when leaving Earth, you still have Earth's tangential velocity, which is much greater than Mars' (via Kepler's third law). The best way to go fro

          • "While NASA hasn't launched an ion-drive mission they most certainly *have* tested such engines" You wouldn't call Deep Space 1 a mission? That is pretty harsh. I don't know if you are playing semantics and call that a test, but I consider it a mission even if it have experimental technologies on board.

        • Re:Is this it? (Score:3, Informative)

          by FireFury03 ( 653718 )
          If you accelerated as 9.8 m/s^2... ...in space with an ion drive

          Unfortunately current ion drives are *nowhere near* powerful enough to do this (Wikipedia mentions accellerations in the order of a milli-G). So the current ion drives are a really efficient way of moving stuff very slowly, but a lot of work needs to be done improving the amount of thrust they produce. Ion drives are certainly well worth thinking about for interstellar missions though since they are efficient enough to be run pretty much no

    • Is our current level of technology the end state for space probes? It seems we hear about a new mission every week built with the same old technology.

      There's two reasons for that:

      • 1 - Most real world technology isn't driven by the must-beat-xcompany paradigm that drives the IT and consumer electronics world. (And many technological 'advances' are just marketing hype anyhow, especially in IT.)
      • 2 - It takes a long time to qualify new stuff for use in space. Since the old stuff works just fine, there's les
      • Flying to Mars in two weeks needs a miracle, not technology development.

        It does with that attitude.

        • Flying to Mars in two weeks needs a miracle, not technology development.

          It does with that attitude.

          It's not an attitude,it's a simple physical fact. To traverse even the shortest trajectory (in terms of miles traveled) in two weeks requires accelerations (energy)10-20 times greater than currently achieved.

          Even the mighty Saturn V couldn't toss a BB into a two-week trajectory to Mars.

          • The whole point of my post was to say that chemical rockets are a dead end. NASA should be flying new propulsion technology like nuclear fission powered plasma rockets and M2P2 engines. Instead, these technologies remain purely hypothetical. There's hope that the later will be tested by commercial space industry but there's no hope of the former.

  • ESA Aiming for Mars (Score:4, Funny)

    by nastyphil ( 111738 ) on Sunday April 10, 2005 @06:39PM (#12196394)
    Well, we're pretty sure that they know how to hit Mars!

  • Metric (Score:5, Funny)

    by gspr ( 602968 ) on Sunday April 10, 2005 @06:41PM (#12196409)
    Well, at least us Europeans won't have trouble with the metric system...
  • The "ESA Aiming for Martian Probe" makes it look like the ESA is sighting targets on a probe from Mars....

  • Martian probe? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's about time we probed them back.

  • The next logical step (Score:5, Informative)

    by FuturePastNow ( 836765 ) on Sunday April 10, 2005 @07:24PM (#12196582)
    The next logical step for Mars is sample return. According to this [nasa.gov] page NASA expects to do a sample return in 2013. I wonder if an earlier European mission will change that plan any?

    • Re:The next logical step (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Seumas ( 6865 )
      The next logical step is to just close the space agencies and start worshipping sun-gods. Seriously, we went to the moon in 1969. As of almost 36 years later, we haven't touched won on any other surface again - including the moon.

      Thing of all the advances we've made in 36 years. And in 1969, the advances we'd made since 1933. Sure, we've advanced a few other aspects of space and astronomy - but not the most basic of exploratory measures. Man.

      I was born after the moon landing. I currently wonder if I will

  • Finally (Score:4, Funny)

    by jluebke ( 865638 ) on Sunday April 10, 2005 @07:41PM (#12196674)
    At last we're probing the Martians for a change. I say they had it coming.
  • I'm sure we could learn many useful things from a sample return from Mars, and we might even make some breakthrough discovery, such as discovering microbes, but is this an optimal way to spend money? It seems like there are two very important technologies that we need to develop more of in order for our space efforts to "scale": better propulsion technologies and better autonomous vehicle technologies. Any expenditures that don't help those two goals is just a one-shot benefit, rather than a real contribution to making us a space-capable species.

    On the propulsion question, it seems like their plan is to get enough fuel to achieve Mars escape velocity up to Earth escape velocity to get it to the surface of Mars in the first place. It sounds like this is heading towards being just an enormous amount of rocket fuel moving back and forth. I don't see any real advancement in science in us trucking around gargantuan loads of the same old fuels. Sure, it's very expensive and takes a lot of resources, but it's still just rocket science, something we've been doing for decades.

    It also doesn't get us any closer to manned missions. It seems like to do a manned Mars mission you need to get enough fuel to the surface of Mars to a) support all the surface activities there and b) lift the astronauts back off the Mars surface and c) lift the astronauts back off the Mars surface. Yes, b) and c) are the same; I don't think anyone would propose sending astronauts over there without a backup lift-off plan. But anyway, when you add up all the fuel in a, b, and c, plus crew habitations and science gear, you end up needing many tons of stuff on the surface of Mars, and it costs something like $10,000/pound to get stuff off of Earth so just the fuel costs alone are going to be mind boggling, and in the end we haven't developed anything new. Just more big rockets.

    It seems to me that the whole thing is a pointless waste unless we develop methods of producing fuel on Mars itself, so round-trips can become a more routine thing and we can start thinking about larger probes even further afield.

    NB, I am not a rocket scientist.

    -----------
    Educational software [chiralsoftware.net]

    • Depends on your goal (Score:3, Insightful)

      by StefanJ ( 88986 )
      The equipment required to extract fuel from the Martian atmosphere will necessarily be pretty hefty. You'd need a nuclear reactor or a really large array of solar panels.

      It would cost a fair amount to develop, manufacture, and transport this equipment.

      If you are only planning a small sample return mission, it would be a waste to heft all that stuff there.

      BEFORE we can plan a Mars mission, especially one that will depend on locally extracted fuel, we're going to have to know a lot more about Mars' surface

    • Re:It's about propulsion, propulsion, propulsion (Score:4, Informative)

      by NardofDoom ( 821951 ) on Sunday April 10, 2005 @10:18PM (#12197476)
      We have ways of producing in-situ fuel on Mars. A small tank of hydrogen, a atmospheric processing unit and an RTG will provide enough fuel to launch back to Earth.

      You really need to read "The Case for Mars."

      • We have ways of producing in-situ fuel on Mars. A small tank of hydrogen, a atmospheric processing unit and an RTG will provide enough fuel to launch back to Earth.

        In theory, yes. In practice, there are many unanswered questions about how the hardware will survive the dust in the atmosphere, how trace contaminants will affect the process, etc... etc... The words 'atmospheric processing unit' conceals a thorny thicket of these unsolved problems, and conceals the fact that the unit isn't actually yet deve

    • Mars Society (Score:3, Informative)

      by fsh ( 751959 )
      This is precisely what Dr. Robert Zubrin has been advocating since the early 1990's. His plan would run about $2 billion a year, and was developed in response to President Bush Sr.'s $450 billion Space Exploration Initiative. The first year an Earth Return Vehicle would be sent over with a small amount of Hydrogen. When it landed, it would start processing the CO2 with the H2 to produce methane and water. If a decent water source can be found (which is becoming more and more likely), they wouldn't even
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Actually if there's any one factor that matters, it's not new propulsion technologies, but rather the cost of putting something into orbit from Earth. You can't run a Mars mission if everything costs $10,000 per kg to put it there. The key to solving that is launch frequency. The more often you launch, the cheaper each launch is. We need vehicles that launch hundreds of times a year. What was infeasible at $10,000 per kg becomes downright reasonable at $100 per kg.

  • whoops (Score:2, Funny)

    by ballsanya ( 596519 )
    Am I the only one that accidently read that as ESA Aiming for Martian Pope in 2011....

    • Re:whoops (Score:3, Funny)

      by johannesg ( 664142 )
      It would be interesting to know if you were the only one. We always hear that as many as 3% of the population are functionally unable to read or write in the western world, and I always found that hard to believe, but perhaps slashdot can now help us gain some solid numbers.

      So, if you, like the original poster, were unable to read the headline, could you just quickly reply to this? I'll count the number of replies and calculate the number of analphabetics here on slashdot.

      Thanks for your help. Remember,

  • One rover called the ExoMars, and a few years after that, the sample return mission. Two separate missions, as the article says.
  • How many examples can you think of?
    Mars Attacks!
    Species
    Species 2
    X-Files episode Tunguska, where the black oil comes from Mars

    How many times have we seen things from Mars attack us?

  • This article is interesting and worth reading:

    link [thespacereview.com]

    The author, Dwayne Day, is a highly recpected historian of space exploration. He concludes that Beagle 2 was a excellent example of how not to manage a space project. He appears to think that Professor Colin Pillinger should never again be put in charge of large amounts of tax-payers money.

  • Rover mission in 2011 not sample return (Score:3, Informative)

    by amightywind ( 691887 ) on Monday April 11, 2005 @07:27AM (#12199364) Journal

    According to the BBC, the ESA is set to send a robotic probe to Mars around 2011. They apparently want to return samples of Martian soil with the probe...

    You'd think the poster would RTA. The 2011 mission is a rover mission.

    In addition to the rover project, they also reiterated their support for an existing proposal - a "Mars return" mission, sketched for 2016, in which various space powers would pool their resources to send an unmanned probe to Mars, take soil samples, and bring them back to Earth. [spacedaily.com]

    NASA is already considering [nasa.gov] a sample return mission prior to the 2016 timeframe. I am not sure what plans there are for international collaboration. I would like to see the US work more closely with Japan.

  • the ESA is planning an new mars mission because of the new heineken H.E.L.L.O. mission
  • Spirit and Opportunity will still be there, they might put up a fight.
  • I thought Beagle II was a sample return mission... I just didn't impact hard enough. Thank you. I'll be here all week. Don't forget to tip your server.

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