Nasa to send new rover to Mars in 2020
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Mars is certainly critically important, but the solar system is a massive place, and with such limited budgets why wouldn't you spend at least a chunk of your resources on explorations that have the potential of finding life in our solar system? We've known about these options for decades, and yet each mission gets scrapped at the last minute. I don't get NASA's priorities sometimes.
Also, in that time frame Elon Musk, China, and even NASA have bounced around various plans for getting humans to Mars. I'm usually an advocate for robotic exploration, but for the deep digging you will probably have to do to find something interesting, it may be better to have boots on the ground (for example exploring for microbial life or fossils below the surface.) It really seems like we're at the beginning of a Mars space race anyway, and this rover will inevitably be cancelled 5-10 years from now in order to focus on beating the Chinese there.
> In April 2011, ESA stated that it seemed unlikely that a joint US–European mission will happen in the early 2020s given NASA's budget, so ESA is investigating the possibility of proceeding with a European-led mission.[3] The ESA-led mission is called the Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer (JUICE) and will be based on the JGO design. Selection of JUICE for the L1 launch slot of ESA's Cosmic Vision science programme was announced on May 2, 2012.[4]
It always comes down to budget. There's only so much you can do with $n billion, and NASA gets less money each year.
Billionaires and governments are free to declare that they'll do it faster and cheaper, but NASA has a head start on science and engineering. It's easier to believe NASA's timetables and budgets because it has the experience.
And I don't see how a one way trip would be politically/ethically possible.
edit: This sounds negative. All things considered; We have to try though. But perhaps knowing that we can have a sustainable settlement have to be the step zero of space colonization.
In-situ production or not, any sane humans-to-Mars mission is going to involve landing a bunch of equipment at the landing site ahead of time. The marsnauts are going to have very complete maps of their new home before they even launch from Earth.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Design_Reference_Mission_3...
Enceladus seems a lot easier, just fly through the volcano plumes and/or land on one of the tiger stripes. I mean, we've got water, heat and organic compounds. What are we waiting for?
Or are they still stuck on "We must make a final, irrefutable conclusion on whether life has or has not existed on Mars prior to introducing organisms to the planet"? Am I the only one who thinks that the search is kind of, well, silly at this point? How much of the surface have they covered with rovers? I'd imagine it would take much longer, and a much more exhaustive search to come to any sort of definitive conclusion.
Having said that, I'm all for being a lot more ambitious, and sending people to Mars instead. But that's a different discussion.
Oh, right about 0%. And that was with rovers not properly equipped to find microscopic life.
Couldn't Curiousity have had some agar plates and just dragged them through the dust, for subsequent observation over weeks? (Even if any organisms detected were eventually suspected to be earth-originated contaminants, their growth details would be new info, right?)
And how do easy surface tests contaminate things any more than all the earth-originated equipment we've already dropped there?
They've landed four successful rovers on the surface. One the size of a microwave oven, two the size of small golf carts, and one the size of a BMW Mini.
Meanwhile, Mars has approximately the same land area as all the continents of earth put together. It's a big place.
Feel free to do the math to answer your question, but there'll be an awful lot of zeros after the decimal place.
We really need to have humans on Mars to search for life.
Humans seem to require much more onsite support infrastructure, including for activities (eating, sleeping, remaining social and sane) that are tangential to most exploration and life-detection experiments. Such an infrastructure also increases the magnitude of Earth-contamination of the Martian environment.
I'm all for having humans on Mars so we're a two-planet species... but I don't see boots-on-the-ground as offering a faster/better/more-complete search for life than the same resources sent as robots.
Such robots should be available in the same timeframe as a human-supporting infrastructure could be delivered to the Martian surface. (In fact, building that infrastructure might require similarly-advanced robotics.)
Back in the days of Apollo, they risked a hell of a lot in the name of exploration. It'd be nice to see the same spirit applied to Mars.
In reality, I don't have a strong opinion on this. It would be amazing to see humans reach Mars in my lifetime, but I can see why governments aren't pouring money into it.
* From the Wikipedia page Moon Landing: "Mindful that the Apollo Program would economically benefit most of the key states in the next election—particularly his home state of Texas because NASA's base was in Houston—Johnson championed the Apollo program."
What Is The Business Model For Mars? Elon Musk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fS1FxBq64A
I don't see how people can believe in a long time prospect of Mars colonization as long as we shun deserts and polar regions. Seriously. Sure Mars would be fun to visit (at this point). But live there, with our current technological advancements in mind?
In the cities, you have to stay in a hotel because you're not allowed to pitch a tent: http://www.travelmarket.com/Gobi%20Desert/a-GOBI_DESERT/trav...
Colonies on Mars probably don't make economical sense currently, but the thing to keep in mind is that there are resources on Mars that no human or animal population is using. On Earth, it seems like anywhere you start digging you ruin someone's life.
With eventual terraforming of Mars, we don't have to worry about accidentally de-terraforming China and Mongolia. We would have a free hand to change the atmosphere, melt the poles, etc. But ultimately Sterling's point on terraforming is probably true. We'll probably beat desertification long before we have the ability to terraform Mars.
Most people will not choose to go to Mars. This is not a problem for settling Mars. Settling always happens via a very small fraction of the originating population.
The people who will settle Mars will do it because they want to settle Mars.
Unless we can show that we can have a working ecosystem in the least hospitable environments here on earth we aren't going to be able to set one up 4 light minutes away on a desert planet without an atmosphere. We are going to send those colonizers to a slow death.
Then again, sustainable colonies on the moon might be the most efficient way to establish that.
I don't understand the reason for such an extended timescale.
Most Americans think that NASA is 10-20% of the federal annual budget. Most Americans want NASA to have less funding, do fewer things, and take longer doing them. If you want to have NASA move faster, you have to spread the knowledge that NASA is cheap. Then NASA can move faster. See efforts like penny4nasa if you want to help!
As it says in the article, they will be leveraging proven technologies, but have not yet solicited proposals for instruments. This means they are still at the very beginning of the development process, and more money would only help so much. That's why the planetary.org post says that a higher budget would only move the launch date up 2 years. If they had started on a new rover 6 years ago with adequate funding, then we could be looking at a new rover in a year.
Which I disagree with as a result, because as soon as one of those few big things fails (which is inevitable no matter how smart NASA is), there are going to be massive Congressional investigations and talk about how NASA is wasting our money and how they need to be even more careful, which just means they have to build even bigger, even fewer, even more expensive things that just attract that much more attention when a failure happens.
On the other hand, they can lose a $300 million project entirely and no one blinks an eye.
* Operating their current missions http://www.nasa.gov/missions/current/index.html
* Designing and building future missions http://www.nasa.gov/missions/future/index.html
* Public outreach/education
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
It costs a lot to engineer and operate things that work in space.
"How cool is it that we've got an awesome rover on Mars! ...oh they're sending a new generation one there in 18 years time? Bah... now I have to wait for the good stuff to happen. Curiosity is already last generation gear."
That went away when the "real" pictures started coming back, but people definitely expect space technology to move as fast as consumer tech.
HN is a place where you shouldn't have to spell everything out or restate the context every step of the way. But here's what just happened:
1) panacea posited the idea, perhaps humorously, that the news of another rover on the horizon would diminish interest in Curiosity much like the announcement of a new phone diminishes interest in the current model.
2) I said I didn't think people thought of the rovers the same was as they thought of their phones.
3) You disagree with that in a completely orthogonal way.
Context is everything. If you read panacea's comment and then my comment you should not get the idea that I'm saying there can not be any congruence between rovers and smart phones in the public's thoughts. Obviously, if the pictures were not high res people would complain and the easiest reference point to hand would be a phone camera. That has nothing to do with what I was saying.
Again, this a pet peeve, but carrying on a discussion via medium such as this rewards a little carefulness.
Comparing the Mars rovers to phones made me think of the ways in which the public does in fact do that. There's interesting conversations to be had in that direction. Perhaps future shock has turned into future expectation. Or blase-ness. Or something.
This is personal for me, and I've been around long enough to realize I'm never going to have what I want in this regard, but I do wish conversations were more fluid when there are more interesting directions to pursue beyond the immediate context.
It would also try increasing atmospheric pressure, and sunlight to possibly speed up any biological reactions.