SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The Airbus team is training a prototype rover to recognise and pick up small cylinders off the ground. It's a rehearsal for a key part of a multi-billion-dollar project now being put together by the US and European space agencies - Nasa and Esa.
Returning rock and dust materials to Earth laboratories will be the best way to confirm if life exists on Mars. It is, though, going to take more than a decade to achieve.
The small tubes - about the size of whiteboard markers - being manipulated by the Airbus prototype represent the Martian samples.
The idea is that these will have been selected, packaged and cached on the surface of the Red Planet at various locations by the Americans' next big rover, which launches in seven months' time. It would then be the job of a later European robot, launching in 2026, to run around and pick up the cylinders. This "fetch rover" would deliver the tubes to a handling station, from where they could be despatched to Earth. They would arrive home in 2031.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday December 06 2019, @05:27PM (4 children)
Further space exploration is going to require patience. Lots and lots of patience. This is pretty cool, planning on bringing samples to Earth, in 12 years. There is some precedent: the Moon landing missions, and a few missions to return samples of comets.
But this is a bit more challenging. Mars has a lot more gravity than a piddly little comet, and it's a lot farther away than the Moon. How are they solving the problem of getting out of Mars gravity well, with no people around to be on top of things? Sure can't do a launch in a traditional Mission Control style from Earth, not with that minimum 3 minute lightspeed communication delay.
The cost of putting a rocket and sufficient fuel on Mars to liftoff and return rocks to Earth could be prohibitive. The article doesn't give any details on how that would work. Zubrin proposed using a chemical reactor to wring rocket fuel from the Martian atmosphere, thus saving hugely on the payload that has to be delivered to Mars. Would take about 6 months to produce enough fuel. As for the trip from Mars to Earth, are they planning to use this "interplanetary transport network", which will take years, but save big on fuel?
If there is a Planet 9, we may not get a close look at it for decades. As for other stars, it could easily take centuries to get a close up peek at the nearest ones, as well as more decades to conceive, design and build probes that can make such a trip and still be operational.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Friday December 06 2019, @06:13PM
No worries. When governments and their related big business finally manage to get fuel-less return gear to Mars, they can just land at "Elon's Rocket Fuel Garage" at the base of Mt. Olympus for a top-up. Also, nuclear fusion will be a readily and cheaply available power source by then.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday December 06 2019, @06:18PM
Starship will lower travel times (higher delta-v) and mission cost.
Right now we have to wait years or decades for cool missions (such as Uranus/Neptune orbiters). That will change once we can just spam probes of all sizes. Since the launch prices will be in the low millions, each flyby/orbiter/lander doesn't have to be treated with the utmost care. Some failure can be tolerated, instead of letting mission costs balloon up to $10 billion to get everything just right.
Take a nice mission like Dragonfly, which will send a rotorcraft to Titan. That's a $1 billion mission ($850 million for development and build costs) with a launch date of 2026 and arrival at Titan in 2034. So we have to wait another 15 years to see high quality drone footage of Titan. I bet that mission could be cloned for under $100 million (after technologies have been developed and can be reused) with a 3-4 year travel time instead of 8 years. Note that a refueled Starship gets more initial delta-v, could allow more ion engines + propellant to be added, and cutting the travel time means the radioisotope generator can produce more power and last longer at its destination. Or less plutonium/whatever can be sent, leaving more for other missions.
It's possible that NASA could eat the entire cost of a cancelled Atlas V launch, switch to Starship, and save money on personnel costs.
A Starship landed on Mars might have enough propellant to return some tons of material back to Earth. If not, then a propellant plant would be needed to manufacture methane and refuel. Or larger rovers could be sent with heavier and more sophisticated instruments.
Some sort of fusion or ground-based laser/microwave propulsion could be used to get probes fast enough to travel up to 1,000 AU in years or decades instead of centuries. Decelerating is the tricky part if we want something better than a flyby. This is something that needs to be figured out if we want to have a gravitational lens telescope [wikipedia.org] at 550+ AU away. Worst case scenario, we build a giant modular space telescope to get a better look at a Planet Nine.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by istartedi on Friday December 06 2019, @09:28PM
Mars gravity is approx 38% of Earth's. We're talking about some small samples here, without any of the stuff required to support humans. Lunar gravity is approx 17%, which helps a lot but we got samples *and* two humans blasted off the Moon safely. Mars has an atmosphere, but it's really thin so the aerodynamic stress on the rocket is nowhere near as bad as blasting off from Earth.
Mostly this boils down to it being small and un-crewed. They'll do everything they can to make the rocket smart enough to blast off without any help from Mission Control. If it fails, they lose a lot of time and money; but no lives.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by Muad'Dave on Monday December 09 2019, @01:54PM
> How are they solving the problem of getting out of Mars gravity well ...
As I understand it, the problem is getting down to the surface, not leaving it. Mars' atmosphere is too thin for effective parachutes or lifting bodies. That's why they've used the Franken-solution of hypersonic 'chutes, retros, and the space crane.