Mars Sample Return |
Mars Sample Return |
Apr 7 2006, 07:32 AM
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#1
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Member Group: Members Posts: 370 Joined: 12-September 05 From: France Member No.: 495 |
Next phase reached in definition of Mars Sample Return mission
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMJAGNFGLE_index_0.html |
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Jul 15 2008, 05:59 PM
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#2
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Member Group: Members Posts: 220 Joined: 13-October 05 Member No.: 528 |
I agree that the 5 billion plus price tag makes this a very tough sell. I get the same sinking feeling when I read that NASA is considering delaying the Outer Planets Flagship by up to 4 years, and possibly raising the price to 3 billion in the process.
You compare that to MSL's budget busting 1.9 Billion, and it gets even scarier. I'll believe in MSR when I see us 5 years and a billion dollars into this project, and not before. - but .... On the flip side, far from this mission not having any political appeal, I think it actually has a lot of appeal. The general public doesn't really 'get' the science side of planetary exploration, but they get interested when we really go somewhere they can relate to. And generally that means landers. Ten years ago Mars Pathfinder swas a media sensation, yet if I were to compare the relative contributions of Pathfinder vs. Mars Global Surveyor, I'd say MGS learned a lot more. Yet who remembers MGS? Everyone knows about the MER rovers, but how many people even know that MRO, Mars Express, or Mars Odyssey exist? And how much would we really know about Mars if we only had done MER? Especially if we had used Viking data to select a landing site? The public hardly noticed NEAR for the year it orbited Eros. But when it was gently set down, and spent a couple weeks gathering data (from only one instrument), it made headlines all over the world for being the first spacecraft to land on an asteroid. Probably less than 1% of the value of the NEAR mission came from that week on the surface, but it got 90% of the attention. But even though MER excited the public, after we fly MSL, and then likely fly another rover in 2016 or 2018, just how excited are people going to be about rovers? They will be old news by then. I think the public would be far more likely to get excited about actual samples returning from Mars. |
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Lo-Fi Version | Time is now: 26th June 2024 - 03:41 PM |
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