NASA Says New Plan Needed To Return Rocks From Mars; Current Mission Design Can't Deliver Before 2040 (bbc.com) 65
SonicSpike shares a report: The quest to return rock materials from Mars to Earth to see if they contain traces of past life is going to go through a major overhaul. The US space agency says the current mission design can't return the samples before 2040 on the existing funds and the more realistic $11bn needed to make it happen is not sustainable. Nasa is going to canvas for cheaper, faster "out of the box" ideas. It hopes to have a solution on the drawing board later in the year.
Returning rock samples from Mars is regarded as the single most important priority in planetary exploration, and has been for decades. Just as the Moon rocks brought home by Apollo astronauts revolutionised our understanding of early Solar System history, so materials from the Red Planet are likely to recast our thinking on the possibilities for life beyond Earth.
Returning rock samples from Mars is regarded as the single most important priority in planetary exploration, and has been for decades. Just as the Moon rocks brought home by Apollo astronauts revolutionised our understanding of early Solar System history, so materials from the Red Planet are likely to recast our thinking on the possibilities for life beyond Earth.
Starship to the rescue? (Score:2)
Starship to the rescue? Itâ(TM)ll be going to Mars anyway, and itâ(TM)ll be able to carry plenty of payload, maybe they can get a cheep deal to collect the samples during SpaceXâ(TM)s ISRU tests.
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Given the rate of progress on starship I'm with the other people on here suggesting to send the lab to Mars.
Re: Starship to the rescue? (Score:2)
Huh? The current rate of progress on Starship seems just fine. Itâ(TM)s capable of reaching orbit and deploying payloads, which seems to be the measure of success for 90% of rockets. Theyâ(TM)re already performing fuel transfer tests (and the fact that they donâ(TM)t seem to want to do another one on IFT4 seems to suggest that it worked, even if it left them in an unrecoverable roll). To be able to reach Mars it seems like theyâ(TM)ll need to dock with another ship (so basically sort
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Starships are an expensive way to do interplanetary travel. It is like driving a big rig to the nearest convenience store next door. And they don't even exist.
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The big-rig is the only thing on the horizon. I know we all want the Martian Cycler to work, but that's even further away.
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The horizon is delightfully empty. No big rig, no Epstein express, not even snow in winter.
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I know we all want the Martian Cycler to work, but that's even further away.
I guess you mean this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
That is pretty doable with todays tech. But I wonder if Elon knows about it.
Re: Starship to the rescue? (Score:2)
What do you mean they donâ(TM)t exist? One launched successfully a few weeks ago.
As far as an expensive way to do interplanetary travel goes, no - theyâ(TM)re by far the cheapest way to do interplanetary travel that we have (though Iâ(TM)ll admit thereâ(TM)s some refinement to do to get to that point, but thatâ(TM)ll certainly happen before the timeline NASA are outlining here). Starship can (assuming that refinement work happens) deliver a launch vehicle, and 100 tons of rovers t
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but everything else is like driving a truck to the store, and then blowing up the truck and buying a new one. Falcon 9 only involves blowing up the front half of the truck, but itâ(TM)s still blowing up a chunk of it.
Correction: It's like using a truck to haul 40,000 lbs to the store and get back with the thing intact or get 40 passenger cars that each can carry 1,000 lbs, use a total of 5x more fuel and then blowing them up.
Re: Starship to the rescue? (Score:1)
Re: Starship to the rescue? (Score:4)
You mean like Boeing, who have yet to succeed in taking an astronaut to the ISS despite SpaceX having been doing it for years at this point? That kind of engineering?
Our obsession with not doing experiments to find the right way to do things is ridiculous.
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To be fair, you should be able to build a space capsule that's going to work without having to launch protypes to space repeatedly. SpaceX did that: the first Dragon 2 to go to space was an unmanned demonstration flight, then was destroyed during a static fire. The second one carried crew and is currently docked to the ISS.
You should also be able to bolt together long-used, very expensive parts and be pretty sure they're going to work. That's SLS.
If you're actually doing something new, experiments seem to b
Re: Starship to the rescue? (Score:2)
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Well, first moment some people would cheer!
But for Moscow it would be a disaster.
And in some way: people with some human dignity would regret to kill so many innocent.
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Re: Starship to the rescue? (Score:2)
While thatâ(TM)s true, itâ(TM)s not without its own engineering challenges. You would need to design a fairing for starship that could open up to reveal your third stage. Thatâ(TM)s a lot easier than ISRU, but probably doesnâ(TM)t get you as cheep a deal on going. I suspect what would be easier still would be to design a literal third stage. Have stage separation happen just before landing, so that it burns only a tiny amount of fuel to set down. It could even be designed like ULA
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The cadence of orbital alignments between Earth and Mars is 2 years (actually, slightly over, IIRC), not 90 days. If you want to operate on a different cycle, you hugely increase your propellant costs, hence launch weights, hence overall costs.
You can fudge it to be a 21-, 22-, [...], 26- 27- month cycle at acceptable costs, but outside that, the planets, in a very literal sense, do not align for you.
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thus between 2000 and 4000 metric tons. This would easily be in the size range of the Saturn V (2200 to 2900 metric tons).
In fact, the Atlas Centaur which carried Mariner 6 and 7 to Mars, weighted 136 metric tons while carrying just 400 kg of payload. At this ratio, we would need more than 300 times the payload, hence a rocket able to carry an ICBM to Mars would weigh between 6000 and 12000 metric tons or four times Saturn V.
Luckily, Starship is 5000 tons. So we're already there.
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The samples have been dropped at several locations around the landscape, as the rover (I forget, Perseverance or Curiosity ; "Meh") geologised it's way across the scenery. You'd need to ship a "sample find and collect" rover to get them, and return to the launch vehicle.
Non-problem. The samples are stored in metal tubes which themselves should be an adequate last-guard to prevent their being contaminated i
Would it be cheaper to send a lab to Mars? (Score:2)
Do we really need to return samples all of the way to Earth in order to analyze them? That seems incredibly complicated. Wouldn't it be better to send all of the necessary lab equipment to Mars and perform the basic analysis there (and just send the data back home?)
Pandemic Russian Roulette (Score:5, Interesting)
I doubt a mobile lab could be as sophisticated as hundreds of Earth labs specializing in different procedures.
But a bigger problem is risk of a "Mars pandemic". There could be microbes on Mars that Earth life has no immunity to. The chance is small, but not zero. Why take a say 1 in 500 chance of doomsday? Nobody knows enough to definitively rule that out. We know almost NOTHING about astrobiology. I don't want to gamble my life on armchair theorists.
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There could be microbes on Mars that Earth life has no immunity to. The chance is small, but not zero. Why take a say 1 in 500 chance of doomsday?
What's the downside here? /s
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The Covid pandemic was already too stressful. Wait until I'm worm food before triggering the next, please.
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The Covid pandemic was already too stressful. Wait until I'm worm food before triggering the next, please.
So your transition to worm food takes place a few years earlier... what's the big deal?
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I plan to die from porn, not a pandemic.
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Picky, picky, picky.
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You mean sticky, sticky sticky.
Re:Pandemic Russian Roulette (Score:5, Insightful)
It's actually pretty darned unlikely, probably many orders of magnitude less likely than the 1 in 500 chance you suggested. The "has no immunity to" thing cuts both ways. The generalization of the statement is "has not evolved to affect" life from another planet. If Earth life hasn't evolved to defend against a Martian microbe, why would a Martian microbe have evolved to prey upon Earth life in the first place?
But we've already done sample returns from the Moon and asteroids, and we examine them in clean rooms with very tight controls. To be sure, the main reason is to keep Earth stuff from contaminating the samples, not the other way around, but there's still as complete a separation as possible in a lab. Scientists have read or seen The Andromeda Strain too.
It's way, WAY more likely that an existing Earth microbe would mutate into something we have no immunity to than it would be to find a random alien microbe that just randomly happens to be perfectly evolved to kill us while being able to completely dodge our immune systems.
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It may be "close enough" for Darwinian evolution to tune to eat Earth bugs more efficiently.
It might be more like a High Noon standoff: the first org to gain an evolutionary advantage over the other wins. I will agree the odds are with Earth life, but not 100.0000% And remember it doesn't have to a permanent advan
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If Earth life hasn't evolved to defend against a Martian microbe, why would a Martian microbe have evolved to prey upon Earth life in the first place?
It turns out Earth life is made of piles of food -- proteins, carbohydrates, oils. If Mars microbes can eat that, but we or our tastiest plants can't defend against them, we're in trouble. Of course, maybe Mars microbes won't like that our atmosphere is 20% bleach, even some of the Earth microbes living like this for several billion years still require an anaerobic environment.
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But we've already done sample returns from the Moon and asteroids, and we examine them in clean rooms with very tight controls. To be sure, the main reason is to keep Earth stuff from contaminating the samples, not the other way around, but there's still as complete a separation as possible in a lab. Scientists have read or seen The Andromeda Strain too.
More relevantly, we have already identified a few rocks spalled away from Mars and captured by Earth. Plus how many more over the millennia that we don't know about? If deadly viruses existed on Mars, they are already here.
Re:Pandemic Russian Roulette (Score:5, Insightful)
Two, there are rocks small and large falling constantly from the sky, with remnants from comets with organic materials (not AFAWK microbes) on them, and no they don't all fry in the atmosphere on the way down, and no, they don't cause any contamination on Earth. Something from Mars wouldn't be much different; don't watch too much bad sci-fi.
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That's purely conjecture. I agree you are likely right, but likely isn't good enough in this case. Test on lab animals on the moon first.
In tech you know to always make a back-up before you try something even slightly risky. Earth has no backup, and God refused my request to make one (and also refused to give me a bigger wanker).
Re: Pandemic Russian Roulette (Score:2)
We already decided it was good enough when we went to the moon. We quarantined the astronauts for 30 days, and left it at that. Hell, their customs declaration even stated âoeto be determinedâ in the âoedid you bring any pathogens etc to the USâ section.
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> We already decided it was good enough when we went to the moon. We quarantined the astronauts for 30 days, and left it at that.
Just because you survive Russian roulette on the first round doesn't mean it's a smart game.
And we already knew the moon was quite sterile because we sent unmanned landers there first (at least near the equator). Mars is somewhat more Earth-like.
Re: Pandemic Russian Roulette (Score:2)
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I like your thinking! Musk, and bunches of lawyers and politicians could be sent there. I already have a list. Justin Beiber and Kanye's on it, by the way.
Re: Pandemic Russian Roulette (Score:2)
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Chance we find microbes: Low, but most certainly in the rocks a few hundred or thousand meters deep, there are some.
Risk that we are not immune: 100% Immune means the immune system had a chance to fight it once, and the human involved survived.
Microbes are microbes. A warm body is just a greasing field of food and food and food for them. Either they poo poo kills you, or they eat something important, or your immune system kills them.
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Meh.
If there is life on Mars, and if it can survive a few centuries/ million years in vacuum below the surface of a lump of rock, then samples have been raining down on Earth since the Hadean. Despite Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe's best efforts, nobody has yet been convinced of any cases of "Mars Flu", despite the constant (if thin) rain of such projectiles. We have found and ide
Re: Would it be cheaper to send a lab to Mars? (Score:3)
The point of the sample return mission is to do things that we discover we need to do only after the results of the first experiment. The current approach works like this:
1. Ask congress for the money to send a lab to Mars
2. Wait multiple years for funding to be given
3. Build an incredibly fancy, overbuilt lab to send that costs billions because it absolutely has to work or we lose face to political rivals.
4. Perform 3 or 4 experiments on Mars in our multi billion dollar lab.
5. Find out what the next quest
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The point of the sample return mission is to do things that we discover we need to do only after the results of the first experiment.
It's not as if each new discovery requires a new device. Looking for new things most often uses the same instruments--microscopes, spectrometers, etc.--pointed at a different target--which could be done remotely given a flexible lab design. And developing the gear to do it remotely will be a necessary advance anyway if we hope to establish science facilities on the moon, Mars, and beyond.
Even if it costs twice as much as sending another lab to Mars itâ(TM)s worth while just to perform 6 experiments instead of 3. In reality of course, weâ(TM)ll actually perform hundreds of experiments, making it enormously better value.
But it doesn't just cost double--it's using thousands of times more mass dedicated to fuel and transport hardware to reco
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It isn't really. There have been a bunch of proposals for stationary lander sample return missions in the ~10 tonnes in Earth orbit range, about half a Curiosity. China's and the various iterations of the NASA-ESA plans are a little heavier than Curiosity, but not twice and certainly not thousands.
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In an on-site lab, the amount and type of samples you can study is virtually unlimited. They could easily study hundreds of cores instead of the 30 that the NASA OS vessel could hold. The mission would also be simpler, and therefore able to carry out with less development and operational costs. I don't think a thousand-fold difference in costs per sample is at all far-fetched.
In order to bring samples back to earth, you need at least two dedicated rocket missions + advanced containment labs on earth. Even i
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None of those things are true. Labs go through consumables like mad. There's nothing unlimited about an isolated one. They're also not the least bit simple. Lots of the equipment is also bulky, delicate and needs very precise sample preparation. Electron microscopy, for a fairly mundane example. Do you seriously think every mission hasn't already been packed with as many instruments of as many different kinds as possible already?
We have lots of BSL 4 labs on Earth, if you're being paranoid. We also have lot
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That is not a recipe for launch from Earth, or the "Entry, Descent, Landing" phase of a mission, invariably described for Mars as "seven minutes of terror" (for the flight engineers).
JWST was on the drawing board for the thick end of a quarter century, and it only contains one cla
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Is that the Thelma and Louise reboot we've been itching for.
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My Director's Cut will have them slowly eaten by a Mars Fly Trap. Elon can post his final hours on X.com. His lips will be the last thing visible, spewing their final troll.
Send the lab... (Score:2)
What signs of life would require we bring the sample to earth? Why not send a remotely controlled lab to Mars which could manipulate samples and scan them the same way we would here on earth?
The advantage would be that the lab could sample many more sites (especially if additional rovers and rotary aircraft were sent to collect and transport samples from more distant locations), and all this tech would advance our progress towards future Mars operations more than the 'sample and leave' they planned.
Re: Send the lab... (Score:3)
Weâ(TM)ve already done that several times. It costs billions of dollars, takes a decade, and performs only a few experiments. Once you have samples on earth you can perform hundreds of experiments without any additional expense.
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> We've already done that several times. It costs billions of dollars, takes a decade, and performs only a few experiments.
Launch costs are not static, nor is the tech that we can send. What cost 10B years ago could be outperformed for less today. Nor have we tried to make a dedicated lab--opting instead for 'one machine do everything' due to launch costs. That means we have to settle for 'digital magnifying glasses' (Example: https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/miss... [nasa.gov]) instead of proper microscopes, etc... I thi
Re: Send the lab... (Score:2)
The idea that you need 1000x the mass of propellant to get home is false. The 1000x multiplier is true on earth, but not on Mars with minimal atmosphere and much less gravity. You need about 3 times less delta v to reach orbit from Mars than you do from Earth. That means you need 20 times less propellant, and thatâ(TM)s before taking account of atmospheric drag.
I know! (Score:2)
Just design a slightly augmented FOG-M so it carries a half-billion km of cable. Put a scoop on the end, and after it land on Mars, just reel it back into Earth -- or maybe the ISS.
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Thing is, we might end up strangling the sun because the string wrapped itself around the sun.
Just watch (Score:2)
that Jimmy Neutron film for ideas on how to launch differently from Mars surface.
Just Artemis it (Score:2)
If the existing Mars mission framework is too hard, just Artemis it. By that I mean construct a space station in Mars' polar orbit and then send the mission from there.
That fixes everything, right?
Too late (Score:2)
Competition to the rescue. (Score:2)
Need a prize approach in a set of objectives are listed and variable-level prize rewarded based on ranking. Get it done first, and you get $$$, with second getting $. Finally, upon successful return of Up to 1/2 of the samples, they get $ 3B/1B. Finally, limit this to 2-3 groups register for this.
With this approach, it will
Can't the Musk Ox (Score:2)
just drive a car there?