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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 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]