NASA's Next Mars Lander to Begin Construction

http://news.discovery.com/space/insight-nasas-next-mars-lander-to-begin-construction-140522.htm

by dsil • 12 years ago

48 22 12 years ago

news.discovery.com

trose• 12 years ago

Dear NASA, Can we get some of this instrumentation in Kerbal Space Program ASAP?

orenmazor• 12 years ago

Is there anywhere I can go to actually see NASA's (or CSA or ESA)'s "Lessons Learned"?

I'd love to track how they've evolved different characteristics of spaceflight/rovers.

to improve my KSP game, obviously.

markbnine• 12 years ago

Beyond Apollo: http://www.wired.com/category/beyondapollo/

Jemaclus4• 12 years ago

Serious question that people here may or may not know the answer to. They keep making Mars Landers. With all the tech advances in the drone world, what are the pros/cons of a Mars Drone that flies around instead of rolling around on wheels?

Gravityloss2• 12 years ago

The air is very very thin. It could not dig or brush or use a microscope or put the samples in an oven or chemical analyzers. Also we already have good overhead images from satellites. Planes have been proposed nevertheless.

jk4930• 12 years ago

Zeppelins and balloons have also been proposed.

Jemaclus4• 12 years ago

Sure, but I mean, images from 50 feet away are gonna be higher resolution than images from 2 miles away, yes? So it seems to me that if they could get some drones flying around, they could do some cool things like collect samples for a regular Mars Lander to process or get higher res photos or do some spectrometry or something over a wider range than a lander can do... right?

DanBC• 12 years ago

They have sent a bunch of satellites. Don't they count?

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Derelict_satellites_...

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Artificial_satellite...

Jemaclus4• 12 years ago

Well, we have a lot of satellites around earth, but we still have a lot of uses for drones, right? So I guess the answer is no, they don't count for this particular question... :)

Serow225• 12 years ago

Have I got a link for you, my friend! :) http://x-plane.com/adventures/mars.html

neurobro• 12 years ago

I think flying drone explorers would make more sense on Venus instead of Mars. They could spend most of the time connected to solar-cell-covered balloons 50km above the surface and occasionally dip down into the oven for a brief look.

curtis3• 12 years ago

There was at least one serious proposal for a Mars airplane:

Aerial Regional-scale Environmental Survey (ARES)

NASA link: http://marsairplane.larc.nasa.gov/

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_Regional-scale_Environme...

Robert Zubrin also wrote a proposal for a nuclear powered "hopper" that would use CO2 from the Martian atmosphere: NUCLEAR ROCKET USING INDIGENOUS MARTIAN FUEL [http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov]/199200...

Gravityloss2• 12 years ago

Providing energy for the aircraft is a problem as well. Satellites just can keep going on, but a hydrazine fueled or battery powered plane would have a mission length counted in hours. With 1% air density and 40% gravity, I get about a factor of six speed requirement compared to earth. Have to stay below the 240 m/s speed of sound.

If you had a battery plane with solar panels that could land to gather energy, then it could fly again, but the landing and takeoff might be extremely hazardous, with rocks and very high speeds.

Edit: Here's a good pdf presenting calculations about these issues, it also looks at pixel smear because of the high speed: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.78....

mturmon• 12 years ago

Good search terms for this would be "mars aerobot". This turns up lots of good links for LTA (lighter than air) mission concepts, and a couple of offhand mentions of HTA concepts.

These are all separate from the ARES concept that is already linked nearby.

Here's some examples:

[a long time ago, but serious] http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/bitstream/2014/17308/1/99...

[Venus, or maybe Titan] http://www.astrobio.net/news-exclusive/up-up-and-away-with-a...

[Mars, with Earth demo] http://robotics.estec.esa.int/i-SAIRAS/isairas2005/session_1...

I learned that the Soviet Union used two small balloons to explore Venus in 1985.

edited to add:

I noticed a comprehensive design study for ARES which covers a lot of reasoning for tradeoffs:

http://www.cs.odu.edu/~mln/ltrs-pdfs/NASA-aiaa-2003-6578.pdf

BrandonMarc• 12 years ago

Randall Munroe has a nice writeup about flying on Mars, here. Short answer: the air is so thin, a drone would have to fly at Mach 1 just to remain airborne. Also, because the air is so thin, at that speed the plane would be darn near impossible to turn: the plane itself would rotate but not change course.

http://what-if.xkcd.com/30/

Now zeppelins, on the other hand ...

omilu2• 12 years ago

"Now zeppelins, on the other hand ..."

wouldn't zeppelins be disadvantage by the thin air as well?

Jemaclus4• 12 years ago

Awesome. I love Randall's stuff.

nsxwolf• 12 years ago

Why won't they send something that can directly detect the existence of microbes? It seems they're always after indirect signs. The focus this time seems purely geological in nature.

omilu2• 12 years ago

I'm assuming space x would provide the launch services? Does Nasa even do rockets to outer space anymore?

rzimmerman• 12 years ago

NASA doesn't do manned launches at the moment. There are several other providers for unmanned launches (including for Mars payloads). SpaceX has never done anything beyond Earth orbit, so they'd be an unlikely choice for this.

NASA's Next Mars Lander to Begin Construction

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