NASA To Send Two More Helicopters To Mars For 2033 Sample Return (iflscience.com) 9
NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) hope to take custody of the samples Perseverance has been patiently collecting and return them safely to Earth, and they'll need the help of two more helicopters. IFLScience reports: NASA and the ESA are collaborating on putting a lander on Mars that is capable of taking off again and making a rendezvous with an orbiter which will then bring the cargo back to Earth. Rather than collect its own samples, the return mission will take over those collected by Perseverance, and the biggest change to the plans lies in how that transfer will occur. The project has not got funding yet but the space agencies are refining their plans. In a quest for the backing they need new details have been announced, along with a return date -- 2033 -- only slightly further off than 1969 was when Kennedy promised a Moon landing "before this decade is out."
Previously the Sample Return Lander was planned to carry a Sample Fetch Rover and its associated second lander. Instead, NASA and the ESA are now proposing to equip the lander with two helicopters based on the phenomenally successful Ingenuity. They will be able to traverse the gap between the Mars Ascent Vehicle and where Perseverance left them much more quickly and having two offers redundancy if one fails. There's also a possibility that Perseverance could deliver the samples directly to the Mars Ascent Vehicle if it is still operating when the ascent vehicle lands.
If everything goes to plan the Earth Return Orbiter and Sample Retrieval Lander will launch in 2027 and 2028 respectively. Although delays are common for space missions, the fact Ingenuity has continued to operate -- and even set records for its flights -- well beyond its anticipated mission time has increased the sample return team's optimism.
Previously the Sample Return Lander was planned to carry a Sample Fetch Rover and its associated second lander. Instead, NASA and the ESA are now proposing to equip the lander with two helicopters based on the phenomenally successful Ingenuity. They will be able to traverse the gap between the Mars Ascent Vehicle and where Perseverance left them much more quickly and having two offers redundancy if one fails. There's also a possibility that Perseverance could deliver the samples directly to the Mars Ascent Vehicle if it is still operating when the ascent vehicle lands.
If everything goes to plan the Earth Return Orbiter and Sample Retrieval Lander will launch in 2027 and 2028 respectively. Although delays are common for space missions, the fact Ingenuity has continued to operate -- and even set records for its flights -- well beyond its anticipated mission time has increased the sample return team's optimism.
Consumer electronics (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Consumer electronics (Score:4, Informative)
But a lot also depends on the launch vehicle used. Like at a previous job I designed a couple of PCBs for a satellite that's scheduled to launch on a Vega C, and I can tell you that the shock and vibrations coming off that thing are not for the faint of heart. As a result we had to test a lot of components to levels far beyond the military standards, which had the funny result of actually breaking the test setups themselves. I would suspect the Atlas V is quite a bit nicer, and Ingenuity wasn't built to fly more than a few times, so they probably deemed it an acceptable risk to just go with tested commercial hardware.
And redundancy (Score:3)
That being said, many space-grade electronic chips are the same as the commercial ones, but packaged differently and tested to hell and back according to various military or agency standards. {...} For example, you could just as well build the same system to industrial ruggedized specifications - with some radiation hardening by circuit design - and try to qualify the whole shebang for flight.
That and redundancy.
Having three or four redundant system doing the same thing and majority voting is yet another strategy.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes and no, modern CMOS process nodes are inherently less radiation sensitive because the active device area of the chip has less depth and is smaller, and the silicon tends to be thinner, which translates into less bulk. So there's less chance for radiation to interact with the chip.
It is not just having less capture volume. Smaller process sizes require gate insulators with a higher dielectric constant to control leakage, and this also results in more charge stored in a smaller volume, so the charge deposited by a radiation event has less effect. Soft error rates in DRAM leveled out a couple generations ago, and maybe even improved, instead of increasing as originally predicted.
still risky (Score:2)
While the current mission really has deserved the title "phenomenally successful" the investment and tradeoffs for flight vehicles in your mission still involves pretty high tradeoffs and rather high risks.
We still should probably bank our expectations of such systems with a pretty high chance of failure.
Re: (Score:3)
We already have Mars samples (Score:1)