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posted by n1 on Thursday June 08 2017, @03:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the robots-take-our-jobs,-who-takes-the-robot's? dept.

Announcing a New Paper on NASA's Mars Exploration Program: Not all is well with the future of Mars exploration

NASA's robotic Mars Exploration Program is on a troubling path of decline—and decisions must be made now in order to stop it. This is the conclusion my colleague Jason Callahan and I reached as we prepared a new report for The Planetary Society: Mars in Retrograde: A Pathway to Restoring NASA's Mars Exploration Program (pdf). I urge you to download it and read it yourself.

[...] [We] found a fundamental contradiction in NASA's extant Mars plans: there is not much of a program within the Mars Exploration Program. Currently, NASA has a single mission development—the Mars 2020 rover (InSight, which launches in 2018, is part of the Discovery program). There have been no new mission starts for Mars since 2013, one of the longest droughts in recent history.

But the existing Mars missions are aging and won't last forever. A new orbiter is badly needed to relay high-speed communications with ground missions and to provide high resolution mapping of the surface to support landing attempts by NASA and others (not to mention provide important science). Yet the latest budget release for 2018 contained no new start for this critical mission.

Also at The Verge.

Other upcoming Mars missions include SpaceX's Red Dragon lander, the Emirates Mars Mission, the EU's ExoMars 2020, a Chinese orbiter, lander, and rover mission, Japan's Mars Terahertz Microsatellite, and India's Mangalyaan 2.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @02:28PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @02:28PM (#522592)

    In a way I think that's why testing it is so important. Right now there is no real bounds on what could be happening. If it fails to work in space then we have radically limited the search space of possible explanations since it's clearly interacting with something on Earth. If it does work then we might need to repeat experimentation one more time in deeper space away from our magnetosphere and maybe even shielded behind a planet relative to the sun to try to minimize any possible sort of external influence.

    In any case at some point why it works becomes less relevant than the fact it does work from an immediate utility point of view. Even before being scaled up it could be immediately used to enable orbital corrections for satellites indefinitely with 0 fuel and I imagine the cost of building one is substantially less than the ion thrusters currently used.

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 09 2017, @02:57AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday June 09 2017, @02:57AM (#522910) Journal

    In any case at some point why it works becomes less relevant than the fact it does work from an immediate utility point of view.

    If you can't explain it, then there's a good chance that you don't actually have an effect to explain.