NASA Chooses the Landing Site For Its Mars 2020 Rover Mission (techcrunch.com) 58
Five years and sixty potential locations later, NASA has chosen the Jezero Crater as the landing site for its Mars 2020 rover mission. "Slated to launch in July the Mars 2020 rover mission will touch down at the Jezero Crater as NASA's exploration of the Red Planet enters its next phase," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The rover will be looking for signs of habitable conditions -- and past microbial life -- while also collecting rock and soil samples that will be stored in a cache on the Martian surface. "The landing site in Jezero Crater offers geologically rich terrain, with landforms reaching as far back as 3.6 billion years old, that could potentially answer important questions in planetary evolution and astrobiology," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, in a statement. "Getting samples from this unique area will revolutionize how we think about Mars and its ability to harbor life."
The crater is located on the western edge of Isidis Planitia, a giant impact basin just north of the Martian equator, with some of the oldest and most scientifically interesting landscapes Mars has to offer, according to NASA scientists. Mission scientists believe the 28-mile-wide crater once held an ancient river delta, and could have collected and preserved organic molecules and other potential signs of microbial life from the water and sediments that flowed into the crater. NASA thinks it can collect up to five different kinds of Martian rock, including clays and carbonates that may preserve indicators of past life. There's also the hope that minerals have been swept into the crater over the last billion years which Rover could also collect.
The crater is located on the western edge of Isidis Planitia, a giant impact basin just north of the Martian equator, with some of the oldest and most scientifically interesting landscapes Mars has to offer, according to NASA scientists. Mission scientists believe the 28-mile-wide crater once held an ancient river delta, and could have collected and preserved organic molecules and other potential signs of microbial life from the water and sediments that flowed into the crater. NASA thinks it can collect up to five different kinds of Martian rock, including clays and carbonates that may preserve indicators of past life. There's also the hope that minerals have been swept into the crater over the last billion years which Rover could also collect.
Nasa sending a dog to mars? (Score:2)
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humans (Score:3)
by the time humans ever get to set foot on mars, it will be already swamped by rover-robots.
martian dogs (Score:1)
How About All The Sites? (Score:4, Interesting)
Instead of spending 5 years trying to decide which of 60 locations to send a rover to, how about building 60 rovers and sending one to each site? Just getting cameras on the ground would help tremendously, as opposed to staring at vague pixels of satellite imagery, trying to decide if something is interesting like H2O, or an ordinary optical phenomenon. We really ought to be sending a dozen cheap rovers to Mars annually, the ongoing mission costs are minuscule. The amount of budget they (are mostly forced to) waste on rocketry annually would more than pay for it. Blue-sky rocket research, fine; paying $billions to develop a rocket that will be made obsolete by the competition by the time it flies, not so much.
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The cynical view might be that the job of nasa is space exploration, manned and unmanned, along with putting jobs in the towns that powerful senators and reps represent. There might be a few people who are doing useless work but that's not true across the large group of researchers.
At the danger of distracting the conversation, yes, free speech should be supported. The exception to me is if that free speech is saying that someone should be killed or hurt, that's now useful or helpful. Saying you want to k
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The weight at one location is triple weight of what you'd need at 60 static locations - not 60x. And getting to Mars is a 1/4-1/10 the cost of a Mars explorer. Better to have a light-weight single monolith that can move to various interesting places and perform science along the way.
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Better to have a light-weight single monolith that can move to various interesting places and perform science along the way.
No, because individual rovers cannot move very far or very fast. It takes them years to go a few kms.
It is much better to have a large number of small rovers distributed all around the planet in regions of varying geography.
Best rover is many powerful rovers. But think about how much overhead there is the heat shield and retro rockets. You can't have 60 small ones, cause the rocket overhead would be huge (ie each rover has a rocket and fuel and heatshield to slow down). There's not enough atmosphere to dro
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instead of total rover redesigns, make 10-20 rovers that are lighter.
Then use $1b to order 10x FH launchers from spacex.
NASA scientists need to think bigger for cheaper.
Re:How About All The Sites? (Score:5, Informative)
Because sending a rover costs far more than deciding where to land it. They only have the budget for one rover, so getting maximum value is rather important.
Cheap rovers don't really exist. Most of the cost is not building the rover, it's getting it to Mars, landing it and supporting it while it operates there.
Even sending multiple rovers a year doesn't make sense. The energy and time required to get to Mars varies based on its position relative to the Earth, so you might as well wait for it to be in a good location.
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They only have the budget for one rover
Because they decided to make it a 2.5 billion one instead of a 400 million one.
Most of the cost is not building the rover, it's getting it to Mars, landing it
The cost of the landing is a part of the cost of the building the rover. The landing equipment is a part of it. As far as getting to Mars is concerned, these days, you can send ten MER class rovers to Mars in a single launch on a Falcon Heavy for, say, $150 million or so.
and supporting it while it operates there
They kind of screwed the pooch when it comes to satellites at Mars. Once they fix that problem, things will get much easier for multiple rovers.
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the ongoing mission costs are minuscule
We don't have the bandwidth to support 60 rovers at one time, nor the manpower to look at all the data and decide where to send it next.
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"We should be acting like there's a mega asteroid hurtling toward Earth"
Why?
And if this were true, it would still be easier to survive 100ft below the surface of the Atlantic/Pacific ocean than anywhere on Mars. There is water, food, easy access to air, gravity we are accustomed to and more. And even if an asteroid the size of the Yucatan impact were to happen, many underwater facilities scattered around the world would likely survive. I have much less faith in a Mars colony being self sustaining without pu
Curiosity V2? (Score:2)
Is this planned to be another large-scale rover like Curiosity?
Current rover paradigm is obsolete (Score:3)
Legacy launch costs were so high that Size, Weight and Power (SWaP) was everything. Putting cutting edge computing technology on a rover has never been a priority. These things are designed for reliability in harsh operating conditions and high radiation environments. Thus, to date rovers have been little more than marginally autonomous remote controlled science experiments.
The James Webb Space Telescope [wikipedia.org] could have been made out of machined billets of stainless steel and use a concrete heat shield, launched on a Falcon Heavy, and been cheaper and faster than the current program - all due to legacy SWaP limitations. I'm not suggesting JWST is poorly designed. Congress and NASA have mangled the budget and timeline of JWST to the point that it's become an unmanageable nightmare.
Current planetary exploration missions like the Mars rovers have been designed around the SWaP available on the legacy launch platforms. It takes two Delta IV Heavy launches at $435 million each, or $870 million total, to put as much into orbit as a single $100 million Falcon heavy launch. BFR is just going to improve this calculation. Blue Origin will hopefully be successful in their reusable and low cost technology as well. A comparison of launch vehicles can be seen here [wikipedia.org].
What this means is that we should be able to litter the surface of Mars with more capable rovers in the not too distant future. More capability may come with shorter lifespans - or with service intervals. Why spend a fortune making something that will last a decade when a more capable system can be deployed and replaced for a fraction of the cost?
A human settlement on Mars will be able to make repairs and provide services and interact with rovers in ways that have never been possible, which will magnify the capabilities of both the rovers and the humans. Rovers send image and preliminary sensor data to the humans, who then request that the rovers return samples. The humans follow up with more detailed, harder to obtain samples, and perform analysis at more capable laboratories.
What people lose sight of is that rovers are highly specialized, and specialization is for insects. [wikipedia.org]
Within one year on the surface of Mars the permanent presence of humans will yield orders of magnitude more scientific data than has been gathered in all the 42 years since the Viking program.
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In a future where rovers of any level of sophistication capable of surviving in a harsh environment are cheap... Sure. We aren't headed towards such a future.
Why? Because even with newer, cheaper, launchers - size, weight, and power are still everything. The cheaper launchers are just that, cheaper. They aren't noticeably more capable. It's still going to take years to decade
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In a future where rovers of any level of sophistication capable of surviving in a harsh environment are cheap... Sure. We aren't headed towards such a future.
I disagree. Falcon Heavy can loft two third's as much into orbit as a Saturn V. A Falcon Heavy is more than an order of magnitude less expensive in today's dollars than a Saturn V. It is also important to note that the Falcon Heavy will likely be a brief stepping stone to the much more capable BFR.
We've not seen the results of these drastically lower costs and faster launch turnarounds in the market yet, but we will. Soon.
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I disagree. Falcon Heavy can loft two third's as much into orbit as a Saturn V. A Falcon Heavy is more than an order of magnitude less expensive in today's dollars than a Saturn V. It is also important to note that the Falcon Heavy will likely be a brief stepping stone to the much more capable BFR.
We've not seen the results of these drastically lower costs and faster launch turnarounds in the market yet, but we will. Soon.
In an apples-to-apples comparison is looks like the Falcon Heavy, once it flies, will be able to lift less than half what the Saturn V could lift:. 64 tonnes vs 140 tonnes.
But more importantly tech nerds have a fixation on LAUNCH COSTS!!!, as being the great obstacle in all space flight, when it is space flight hardware itself that dominates the cost of nearly all missions. The Mars Science Laboratory mission, of which Curiosity was part cost $2.5 billion, but the Atlas V launcher only cost $109 million, or
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In an apples-to-apples comparison is looks like the Falcon Heavy, once it flies, will be able to lift less than half what the Saturn V could lift:. 64 tonnes vs 140 tonnes.
Ah, correct. Good catch. I botched a kg/tonnes/lbs conversion. Still, as I stated, Falcon Heavy is likely to be a short-term stepping stone to BFR, which is a much better comparison.
But more importantly tech nerds have a fixation on LAUNCH COSTS!!!, as being the great obstacle in all space flight, when it is space flight hardware itself that dominates the cost of nearly all missions.
I also disagree with your assessment. When launch costs are so high and margins for SWaP are so tight, space flight hardware cost goes way up. Any time NASA/JPL/LockMart make something, it's very, very expensive, and not likely to ever be a real, flexible, market-competitive product line - everything deployed so far have be
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Yes, that very same Elon Musk.
There will be no $35k Model 3 while the demand is much
higher than the supply. Production goals are being met, but the backlog is not declining significantly. Economics is a thing, and Tesla is not a charity.
If you think the $54k+ Tesla Model 3 is not competing or doing well in the market, then you really need to get out more. I saw several on my bike ride home this afternoon. Also, despite the market downturn TSLA is doing rather well, so your negative sentiment is not wide
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In a world in which we're hurling rovers around on Saturn V equivalents, that's relevant. We don't live in such a world.
Still waiting on you to produce a mechanism by which this takes place. Not gonna hold my breath after noting how you dodged actually addressing the issues I raised in my first reply.
Let me guess ... (Score:2)