...that is, the Nov. 2-4 meeting of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Lunar and Planetary Exploration which advises NASA on mission selection, to do a print article on it for "Astronomy" magazine.

The meeting's agenda is at http://www4.nas.edu/webcr.nsf/MeetingDispl...-D?OpenDocument ; it looks extremely interesting. Anyone have anything they'd especially like me to ask about while I'm there?

Bruce,

I can't pass up this opportunity! I have got so many questions, you would never have time to ask them all, but here are some, in rough order of priority for me. Any answers will be most welcome.

Mars - MSL:
What is the status with MSL? As fas as I can see, 2009 is still on, but I would also like to know:
What is the situation with EDL development and testing? Is Skycrane still the prime EDL method? Are test versions of Skycrane in the works?
What is the situation with the mobility system? Are test versions of an MSL-scale rocker-bogie system in the works?
How does the overall mass situation look, in particular the science payload?
Any decision on the launch vehicle yet?
With the cancellation of MTO, what is the real science return impact? NASA HQ assertions of no loss of science return seem a bit offhand to me.

Mars - Phoenix:
How is the "fouling the nest" problem (hydrazine contamination of landing site) being solved? Are the scientists satisfied with the solution?

Outer planet missions:
Is there any danger of a damaging fight starting over Europa vs Titan as destination for the next Flagship mission? For Europa, what was the overall mood about Orbiter only vs Lander only vs Orbiter/Penetrator vs Orbiter/Lander?
Are the current Europa Geophysical Explorer and Titan Vision Missions seen as practical/feasible by NASA HQ or pie-in-the-sky?

Aerocapture
Any concrete plans to actually develop this technology with a demonstrator. It would be insane to use it in a big mission without some kind of practical demonstration.

RPS
What is the status with the new RPS? Is development on schedule for MSL?

NGST
Will planetary exploration suffer from cost overruns on James Webb, since both are within NASA's Science Ops Directorate? If so, what is being hit?

Where on earth is the AO for Discovery 12? And any news on Mars Scout 2011?

Good questions, and I'll try to include all of them. (Most of them, but not all, were already on my list.) Any more?

I think they should be some discussion of the Falcon lauch vehicle. IF...IF it works, it would undercut the EELV's by a factor of 4. Are they being considered a serious prospect for future beyond-leo-missions if found to be a reliable platform. What impact might this have for Lo-Mart and Boeing.

Phoenix, MSL and MRO outreach efforts. Are they intending to exercise a similar system to that of MER, and with MRO, is the infrastructure in place to allow the promised online access to images very rapidly - what sort of turn-around-time will be expected for MRO images to get online?

Any end-of-life-predictions for MGS, MODY and MEX w.r.t. acting as a backup relay for MSL. I think the loss of MTO as you say Bruce - WILL impact MSL -without doubt. Some of the largest data products such as HDTV res des-movie, 5fps movies on the ground etc, will surely be lost.

Comments on the demo-transition of MER-A to UHF operations only - does this impact planning in any way? Are there savings to be had w.r.t. DSN requirements by doing this?

Has the recent JPL lay-offs impacted MSL development in any way?

To be honest, you're a harsh bastard, so I cant think of anything scathing that I know you wont have thought of already

Doug

We have no intention of losing the descent movie. It'll just take somewhat longer to send back. Assuming that the total downlink time was even being limited by orbiter downlink rate -- it could just as easily been limited by rover uplink rate or rover power constraints. (Just because it has an RTG doesn't mean it can't be power-limited in some situations.)

It's not obvious what 5 fps movies would be worth taking on the ground and what their data volume will be -- this is still a subject of ongoing analysis within the Mastcam team -- but again, we have a lot of buffer space so it's just a question of somewhat extending the downlink time.

For what it's worth, I remain of the opinion that MTO was not an appropriate way to spend the large amount of money it would have cost at this stage of martian exploration.

And with all due respect to the COMPLEX membership, I doubt they have deep insight into the details of ongoing mission development.

You might be interested to read what I believe is the current data release policy for the Mars Exploration Program:

http://pds-geosciences.wustl.edu/missions/mep/mepdmp.pdf

It specifies a six-month data validation period, encourages but does not require more timely release, but does require that "each Principal Investigator will also release a significant subset of data earlier as a form of public outreach and education. These releases will typically be available within a week of data receipt."

Actually implementing this is the responsibility of the individual instrument team.
I don't know the specifics of any of the MRO teams' plans, and it's too early to say for MSL.

I don't see all that much science value in high-speed movies, either -- too much overlap between frames. As for the effects of MTO's loss, there's a half-hour report on the new MEPAG report, followed by a 1-hour report on the current form of the Mars program from Doug McCuistion, and rest assured that I intend to try to get some firm answers as to just how much science loss WILL result from the elimination of MTO. Given the huge amount of additional data that would have been returned by it, and the fact that it would have allowed very prolonged daily periods of radio contact with MSL for command purposes, I find it impossible to believe that the loss won't be serious -- but that of course is a separate question from whether the cancellation was necessary. NASA's space sciences division, as I noted once before, was up against it financially; something had to give.

And, really, the value of the COMPLEX meeting lies not just in whatever decisions they reach -- they've screwed up badly before (as in their approval of Goldin's ridiculously optimistic plan for a 2003 Mars sample return) -- but in the reports and presentations on the current state of affairs that they receive, which are likely to be the bigger focus for my article. Even the science data from Huygens -- given the maddening delays in the official "Nature" issue on the subject -- is likely to get important coverage at this meeting (I've written about two dozen questions on that alone).

Hi MC, I appreciate your comments, and it's good to know that the Des movie is something that WONT go, BUT....

End of the day, MSL will return less data to earth because of the loss of MTO, or to put it another way, the potential to return more data is not there, and a price will be paid for all MSL data in the loss of potential MRO data.

Once could draw a comparison between MSL with MTO+MRO and MER with MODY+MGS, MGS was dropped from the MER relay for reasons that havnt been publicly explained, but there's two I can see. 1) Not as efficient or productive as MODY, and 2) MOC science is more valuable given the MGS downlink rates.

The question is - what potential data will go and what impact will it have.

I agree - MTO was looking very very expensive, and there's a case to be made for dropping it to plough the funds elsewhere, but if there's no impact from it's cancellation, then why was it planned in the first place MTO was too much, too early. I think an Odyssey+ platform, i.e. Odyssey's infrastructure, but larger arrays, more powerfull transmitter, and you could have something that would be very valuable in a medium altitude orbit. The limiting factor that I can see in the current on-orbit comms infrastructure is the short duration of each UHF pass.

Doug

Yes, that's a point -- could such a less ambitious but still extremely useful Mars comsat relay be incorporated into the 2011 Mars Scout mission, perhaps by raising its orbit after the science mission is completed? Something else for me to ask about at the meeting.

I'm trying to think what it might be able to do. I think the HGA size is probably limited by the fairing size of the Delta II, but advances would surely allow more bandwidth from a similar dish. Perhaps it could be tied in with the SAR mission that has been proposed on the Odyssey platform. Heaven forbid we have another Galileo incident, but a deployable large HGA ( much like the TDRS design ) could probably fit under a Delta II fairing (it did under an Atlas 3 iirc ) and offer something fairly large that could be used both in a Cassini/Magellan way, AND for high bandwidth earth comms.

Doug

One more question, Bruce. If I understand this right, the Delta II will soon be phased out, and unmanned launches will be moved to EELVs. (This was part of the deal to get DOD on board with NASA's VSE.) So future missions will have to fly on a more expensive (by at least $20m) but much more powerful rocket. My question is, what is the likely impact of this on the Discovery and Mars Scout programs? Are there any thoughts on what this tradeoff means? Do some missions become newly feasible and others not?

It's obviously very hard to quantify the value of a given number of bits, or the impact of their loss. Based on what we can tell of the mission profile so far, the traverses will be leisurely enough, and the rover stopped in one place long enough to perform analyses, that we will have plenty of time to acquire the full-resolution, minimum compression, all color 360 degree mosaic from every location. Beyond that, what are you going to take? Video seqeuences of the sun coming up, monitoring the sky, phase angle studies, and the like -- interesting, but second-order science IMHO. And we'll still be able to do those, just perhaps at a lower frame rate or with more compression.

So it raises the question - why was MTO proposed in the first place, and why was it described as being so important only a few months before it was pulled.


Doug

It started out as an Italian Space Agency initiative, and when ASI couldn't find the money for it, specific engineering groups within NASA took over advocating it (laser comm, sample return canister tracking, etc.) In my opinion, at the current stage in Mars exploration, it was a solution in search of a problem to a significant degree.

Don't get me wrong, it'd be great to have that kind of comm infrastructure, but not at the cost of not having the money to fly science missions to use the infrastructure, which is what seemed all too likely to happen.

Its main benefit probably would have been in enabling multiple planning/commnand cycles per day, since it could have stayed in contact with the the MSL for a total of about 8 hours per day.

JPEG2000 versions of HiRISE images would be available on the web within a few days of being returned.

I'm back, and I do have news. I'd tell it to you all now, but unfortunately I'd have to kill you. (Either that or give up my $1500 from "Astronomy" -- and if murder is necessary for me to retain that, I am not going to let mere squeamishness stand in my way.)

I WILL say that the biggest news is that the first post-Griffin architecture for the Mars program was revealed, and that it has some intriguing changes which seem, at least to me, to make eminent sense -- although one lesser point puzzles me. There were quite a few other lesser tidbits, too -- some of which you can see for yourselves in the report from the OPAG October meeting, which was released while I was at the COMPLEX meeting ( http://www.lpi.usra.edu/opag/oct_05_meetin...ting_report.pdf ). As for the other stuff, I'll see whether I can safely leak any of it to you over the next few days. It contains at least two new scandals, but all in all the planetary exploration program seems to me to be adjusting pretty well to the new funding limitations. The fact that NASA now actually has an administrator with a 3-digit IQ has doubtless helped.

Meanwhile, I see that Hayabusa screwed up its practice landing (for reasons which JAXA has not yet seen fit to tell us), and that the PFS on Mars Express has been fixed (a pleasant surprise; I only heard a fuzzy rumor that the situation had "improved" while I was at the meeting). I can also safely tell you right now that there will be very interesting results from MARSIS released at the Fall AGU meeting -- I can tell you this because we weren't told anything else about those results.

As near as I can tell from the juxipositional interpretations, they do not know: They couldn't track altitude during the descent as well as expected, possibly because the software could not handle the unanticipated roughness of the surface. Ground control got jittery over the ambiguities, and aborted.



Interesting is good, as long as interesting does not include Coke cans and faces!


Did you get any explanations?

Any side discussions about the two year delay in the release of WMAP data?

Where's the data?

I'd already gotten the explanation for the "Nature" delay from Ralph Lorenz: they're delaying the issue until the very last team has completed its article. As for the WMAP data, I suspect it has something to do simply with the difficulty of completely analyzing it. We are talking about staggeringly small differences in microwave intensity, after all.

Thanks. I don't expect a lot of detail until the public release next June.

You shouldn't let them off that easy, they knew that going in. The first release was ~6 months late - now we are talking years. Ned posted a new presentation on his site:

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/CMB-MN-0...Nov05-clean.pdf


Is this a hint? Perhaps the WMAP team will come up with some surprises of its own.

bruce,

any idea in what timeframe the huygens issue WILL be finished?

Damned if I know. I'm getting pretty frustrated myself.

Bruce, how long until the Astronomy article shows up?

And can I press you on MSL? Green light, yellow light or red?

I don't think the "Astronomy" article will be in print for a couple of months, but I'll find out how much I can leak before then. As for MSL, it's still firmly on schedule for 2009. (One of the most interesting pieces of news out of the meeting was the official unveiling of what NASA intends to do about Mars afterwards; the plan has had to be radically reshuffled to deal with the funding problems, but it seems to me to make good sense.)

Soon.