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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, @02:49PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @02:49PM (#522598)

    Same AC here. Another thing I'd also add is that it may be, even if it does work, that we could spend years and years of man hours without managing to discover why.

    Astronomical spectroscopy [wikipedia.org] was discovered and used to make further new discoveries many centuries before quantum mechanics began to be discovered offering an explanation to what was being observed to happen. They were, initially, so far removed from the answer that I think it would be safe to say it would have been literally impossible to discover the underlying functionality given that they would have been searching in directions that made sense given the cutting edge of understanding at the time.

    The rate of revolutionary discovery has slowed, but that means relatively little. Many physicists thought physics was, at least on a fundamental level, mostly finished in the early later 19th century as the pace of revolutionary discoveries had similarly slowed. There were some kinks to work out, but many felt that the fundamentals has finally be more or less solved. Then came pesky relativity, quantum mechanics, the dissolution of the luminiferous aether, the complete explosion in atomic physical structures, and much more. The point is, I think it's always wise to remain some degree of humility as it relates to our level of understanding. In every generation you have countless individuals, otherwise extremely intelligent individuals, that become overly secure in their (speaking of humanity as a whole - not just the individual) capacity for progress and understanding.

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 09 2017, @03:03AM (4 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday June 09 2017, @03:03AM (#522915) Journal

    Astronomical spectroscopy [wikipedia.org] was discovered and used to make further new discoveries many centuries before quantum mechanics began to be discovered offering an explanation to what was being observed to happen. They were, initially, so far removed from the answer that I think it would be safe to say it would have been literally impossible to discover the underlying functionality given that they would have been searching in directions that made sense given the cutting edge of understanding at the time.

    Except that effect was obvious and easy to generate in the lab. The EM drive apparently is not. That's a strong indication that maybe our ability to explain things is not in peril and there isn't actually an effect to explain (or an explanation involves rather mundane effects (like the consequences of a lot of wishful thinking) which don't generate a novel propulsion system).

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 09 2017, @05:21AM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 09 2017, @05:21AM (#522938)

      Well you're simply wrong there on both accounts. This effect is obvious and easy to generate in the lab. One of NASA's first steps was to have three independent organizations also build and measure the apparent thrust of the device. They all achieved identical results. And the effect of spectroscopy is not obvious by any means at all. It took thousands of years relative to the point that we began some degree of scientific exploration to discover, and hundreds of years after that before it was able to be sufficiently explained. And even going from a prism splitting light to spectroscopy requires instrumentation that, by the standards of the time, was quite sophisticated. You're certainly not going to just crack open a quartz and start measuring out the elements.

      It's abundantly clear there's already something to explain - and we have completely failed to do so. Our ability to explain things is obviously failing here. For that matter, I am half wondering if you may not be aware of how ignorant we are in science in general. There are countless open questions in science we have not even begun to be able to explain. Dark matter and dark energy are the two most pop sci culture things you would be familiar with. These may or may not exist but are simply placeholders to describe other unexplainable effects that contradict the state of the universe as we understand it. Not all that different than the luminiferous aether which was though to be an invisible goo through which all things in spaced traversed. It was created as another patchwork explanation to something that contradicted knowledge of the time.

      Much of science as we currently know is contradicted by results in one way or the other. That doesn't necessarily mean we're wrong, but it certainly does mean we're not even remotely capable of explaining our universe. Science is an ongoing and fluid process. Thinking we know how to explain all things known is simply ignorant. It is absolutely the message taught at undergraduate level and I believe it's wrong. The best way to open your eyes to the beauty of our universe and of the scientific process is with an appreciation and understanding of how little we truly are capable of understanding. In spite of this, our minuscule grain of knowledge has been able to provide immense and marvelous gains to society.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 09 2017, @11:16AM (2 children)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday June 09 2017, @11:16AM (#523003) Journal

        One of NASA's first steps was to have three independent organizations also build and measure the apparent thrust of the device. They all achieved identical results.

        Perhaps it is time then to discuss those results? Supposedly there is a minute amount of thrust for an extraordinary amount of power. That's not useful territory for a propulsion system and still leaves open a lot of room for error. And once again, it may be a more mundane propulsion method, like a crude electric drive combined with wishful thinking, masquerading as something more exotic.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 09 2017, @06:12PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 09 2017, @06:12PM (#523184)

          I'm not sure you understand the scope of what's going on here. Something generating thrust without expelling 'normal' matter is HUGE. As in that would be likely the greatest single discovery in human history to date - and likely for many centuries to come. Energy is infinitely available. The big thing that constrains us in space is the fact that in order to move in space you generally need to expel something. That something being fuel of some sort. So for instance when you see a rocket, somewhere around 97% of its mass is fuel. That 3% that remains is the payload. For the Falcon 9, which is quite efficient - it manages to get 4.1% of the rocket to actually be payload. Even getting a feather of thrust for a mountain of energy would be an enormous game changer. Not only would it completely reshape physics as we know it, but it would would dramatically reshape space travel. Going a step further it even means you could reach relativistic velocities. The implications there are absolutely stupefying.

          In any case 'Crude electric drives' cannot generate thrust suspended in a vacuum. There is no 'masquerading.' I don't think you understand how ridiculously absurd it is that it's DOING what it's doing is. Nothing, so far as we know, ought be able to do what this device is doing.

          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 09 2017, @06:25PM

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday June 09 2017, @06:25PM (#523190) Journal

            Something generating thrust without expelling 'normal' matter is HUGE.

            And something which doesn't do what is advertised is NOT HUGE. Let us also note that flashlights generate thrust without expelling 'normal' matter either. There are plenty of mechanisms for generating thrust in this situation that we still need to rule out (eg, photonic propulsion, ionization of exterior of microwave cavity).

            Even getting a feather of thrust for a mountain of energy would be an enormous game changer.

            No, it wouldn't. For example, it wouldn't help get payloads off of Earth. The reason why terrestrial rockets to orbit has such a vast portion of their mass as payload is a combination of the extremely high thrust to mass ratio of chemical propulsion used, combined with the low exhaust velocity of the propulsion. They need the former in order to escape into orbit. And they have the latter because of the inefficiency of the propulsion system.

            Ion drives and other electric drives don't have this problem. They aren't intended for high thrust to mass ratio work and their efficiency means that they can generate a lot of delta-v (such as for changing orbital trajectories) using a lot small mass fraction than chemical engines would under the same circumstances.

            In any case 'Crude electric drives' cannot generate thrust suspended in a vacuum.

            Yes, they can. The thing you're missing here that the wall of the microwave cavity may be the propellant of the system, being ionized on the outside and ejected by the tremendous energy input in the interior. It does however rule out a fair number of other experimental failure modes.

            Nothing, so far as we know, ought be able to do what this device is doing.

            Which should be a warning sign to you that the device may not be doing what you think it's doing.