Respecting the admin teams wishes to not revert to the back and forth with vjkane....

Mars-Next? Really?

It's mentioned on an ESA website from 3.5 years ago, and nowhere else.
http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEMJA563R8F_index_0.html

That means it predates the 2016 EDL test being announced - thus the EDL test can not be considered a precursor to Mars-Next

Moreover - the possible post-2018 mission is mentioned here - http://mepag.jpl.nasa.gov/meeting/jul-09/0...ag_Coradini.pdf - in the context of a 200kg 2016 test of an appropriate net-lander sized vehicle... NOT a 600kg Phoenix sized lander that we now seem to be heading towards.

Mars-Next reappears at LPSC in 2008
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2008/pdf/1656.pdf

The 2009 LPSC paper is identical to the 2008 one in almost every way. Not a great sign of a project moving forwards. 'We need to submit an LPSC paper' 'Copy and paste last years'. Marching forwards, clearly.

Those documents wording describes this as a project to fill the gap between ExoMars and MSR....but it seems increasingly likely that ExoMars (2018) will become the first leg of a three-phase MSR project - so no such gap exists anymore.

Do the requirements of the Mars-Next landers match the abilities of the 2016 test lander? If it does, why is it just an EDL test. If you're about to build 4 of something.... then surely this test should be an end to end test of EDL AND the long life surface phase requirements.

If we assume that yes, Mars-Next IS a long life derivation of the 2016 test lander, then could an orbiter realistically carry four landers of this size? The 2016 test is a 600kg vehicle (neither small enough for realistic netlander, nor big enough for the sorts of payloads scientists want to send) 4 of those is more than twice the dry mass of MRO. It's more than the wet mass of MRO...just the carried payload. This would result in a spacecraft getting on for Cassini/Galileo/Phobos sized. Building and testing that much hardware would cost a FORTUNE. Can ESA realistically afford 4 landers of that size? It's easily an MER + MRO budget project. With the 2016 Orbiter and Lander, and a 2018 rover to pay for, there can not possibly be money for such a project.

Calling the 2016 lander a test-bed for an unfunded (and frankly unfundable) project that almost certainly wont take the 2016 lander design on is just a little bit of a stretch. At this point, the 2016 EDL test looks like an inappropriate test for an unfunded project who's Mars program window just vanished.

That 200kg EDL test proposed back in 2009 sounds awesome and could very well constitute the beginning of a Mars-Next style project in the future - the very Netlander project I've been bashing on and on about for years as a logical goal for ESA. Unfortunately, far from being a test-bed, it would appear to me that the new large 600kg 2016 EDL test actually kills any chance of Mars-Next happening.

I'd guess they'll mount it on the stand - bolt the wheels into the stowed position - then box it up for the flight to KSC.

There are 10,001 things that they need to 'remember' to do before launch. That particular thing will be on a job list, 15 check lists, a closeout checklist and 135 QA walkdowns. Probably

When the rover is not on its own wheels - then those parts are used to mount the suspension. They're not in the project animation or the artistic renderings (which were derived from CAD files) thus I don't expect them to be on the rover when it flys.

Oh sweet imagery

It's going to be great seeing these hints of pixels resolve into a whole swath of places over the next couple of months.

The Pancam tracking database holds that information. What's planned. What's taken. What's yet to be transmitted. What's received.

My advice would be to just enjoy the results of those who know where it is and how to use it. It's hard to use, slow, and a very constrained resource.

And we have the largest most capable rover nearly ready to launch - we have a flight project to show for it



They've been spending money for nearly a decade and have no flight hardware. Money has been spent - and now they have two large flight projects to pay for, they have to start all over again......and NOTHING to show for it after 8 years. Maybe a bit of budget creep over the past 8 years and we'd have something to show for it.



Rendering the lander useless



Rendering the lander test pointless as it's a test for nothing.



This is basically the only good bit of the entire mess.



Not slipped.... accelerated out. Every year that's passed, the project has gone more than a year into the future. They were not making progress, they were going backwards, spending money as they went. And the results..... an orbiter that carries a bunch of almost exclusively US instruments, and an orphaned, pointless lander.

Whatever the official 'strategy' for budget/schedule/scope... it's resulted in a complete mess. The strategy has failed.

And only slipped 2 years. It never accelerated into the future, every year.

And as a project it was started about the same time as ExoMars......

ExoMars has nothing to show for itself. MSL will launch in 5 months

How much has the ExoMars project spent, to date, without flying a single thing?

I appreciate your efforts to defend the program, but I'm afraid I simply don't agree with your reasoning.

ExoMars has not. As a rover project, it actually accelerated into the future as a series of consecutive and compounding delays and budget growths faster than time passed. It was a farce from the beginning.

http://twitpic.com/lacef

I would agree with the reasoning, were it not for the fact that the extra parts required to make this thing actually useful are available as flight heritage components. It's the EDL test that has all those problems - all new things for a new landing system.

Making it survive on the surface? That we can do.

Without breaking the politics rule, it's hard to discuss the justification of this project. ESA can and should, do and know better.

Same with twitter - which you can basically consider as a pseudo RSS feed if the entire social-media element isn't up your street.

ESA and NASA have made it abundantly clear that neither can afford to explore Mars without very tight collaboration in the future.



Great! What payloads? Where are the proposals for these payloads? Where's the queue of scientists specifying the instrument volume, mass and power requirements and landing-site constraints that can thus drive this 'testbed'?



There is no money to do such a thing in the future. Pathfinder, for example, was a testbed for a future network of landers. It was already approved and in-work when the network was cancelled. As a testbed - it had a purpose.

The REAL waste is spending all this money as a testbed to nowhere....without spending the minuscule amount of money required to make it last more than a week.

This is very nearly the most stupid thing ever said on this forum.

If you want to have a fact and evidence based discussion - have one.

If you want to play pin the probability on the rover, or other pointless guessing games....please find another forum.

Such discussion are not welcome here.

We knew this a couple of years ago. I was flabbergasted then, I remain so now.

Moreover, it's an EDL test for....nothing. There Mars scientific community has said via the decedal...after MSL and MAVEN... MSR or nothing. So what the hell is this a test for.

It's shameful.

Looking from the viewing gallery this evening - it's been boxed up for shipping.

http://twitpic.com/59rqb6/full

105 space enthusiasts were at the JPL TweetUp

38,000 members of the general public were at Open House


The TweetUp generated more traffic to websites and more mentions of projects out in the wild.

It is Stefan. We were told that images were not being released because they were not pretty, not suitable for the public.

And now, they are.

And yet we have Russell on record (see Emily's blog entry) saying



Releasing a pretty movie on Monday, whilst taking images 'not for making pretty picture'..... that's a direct contradiction.

Let's take a step back here. The rather degraded discussion (which is frankly disappointing for UMSF) splits three ways

Chance of success:
I don't know how to land something on Mars. If I wanted to do so, I would find the most successful team in the world to do it. That's the MER and MPF team. I would ask them to do it. Calling out numbers or opinions ( 50%, or 'pessimistic' ) are totally and utterly meaningless unless you can actually say ' I think it will fail because of THIS'. You have to prove you have a grounds for such sentiments before it's worth presenting them. The MSL team will have to prove they're ready to fly before they do...as does every mission that launches. Are our memories so short as to have forgotten all the troubles with MER pre launch and pre landing? Finding pyros in drawers, launching a rover without surface phase software onboard, go re-read Roving Mars people..seriously. And 'Sojourner'. Learn from history. I trust the guys tasked with doing this thing because common sense dictates I have no choice but to do so. Even from the outside looking in, I held this view. Being in the very very lucky position of having had meetings with the EDL team and others (as part of the MSL animation team) my confidence in the team and what they have built has only increased.

Choice of vehicle:
I'm not a geologist, planetary scientists or exobiologist. But if I wanted to know what science to go and do on Mars, I'd ask people who are. It's the scientific community consensus opinion that comes up with such missions, and moreover, the same community proposes and builds the instrumentation onboard it. I don't presume to know better than them. SAM, Chemin, these are astonishing instruments that don't fit inside vehicles smaller than this. If you want to do that class of science, your options are a vehicle like MSL, or sample return.

Budget:
Big government projects go over budget, they go late in schedule. That's just the grim reality of doing very very hard things that have not been done before. Expressed in very approx 2010 dollars, Cassini cost about $1,900M more than MSL. Galileo about $200M more. Viking $1,500 more. This is a flagship class mission, and it's cost flagship class money. Why are we surprised? Is it disappointing that we still don't know how to better estimate these costs? Sure. This, like it or not, is how these things go.

FWIW - in terms of driving visitors to a website.... which do you think did more to promote Eyes on the Solar System

The 2,500 people who saw a demo, the thousands who walked past a stand out of the 38,000 who attended the JPL Open House

Or

The 105 people who saw a demo at the TweetUp?


Yup - the traffic bump from the TweetUp is slightly larger.

Just goes to show the power of social media. It's efficacy in getting what we do out to the public is, per person, more than an order of magnitude more effective than your average person out there.

They struggled to find 2 safe and scientifically interesting sites to land MER's. Safe and justifiable landing sites for 6 more? Good luck

Yes - MSL has cost approx the cost of 6 MER's. That doesn't mean that building six MER's would have, in any way, been a better idea.



The MSL team is 3/3. Pathfinder, Spirit, Opportunity.

ALL the landers that have worked, ever, have come from NASA.

The blot on the copy-book for NASA is MPL, which was designed and built by LoMart, and then fixed for PHX.

Trying to compute failures of Russian landers from 40 years ago as part of the statistical probability of MSL landing is just silly.

Moreover, what justification can you give for assuming that the performance of previous vehicles can forecast the performance of the next one?

Norm - you're being inflammatory and misleading.

Starting with Edwards post and a few thereafter about RSS feeds - moved to http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...ic=6757&hl=

Tosol will thus be a runout, I presume...with the drive getting an uplink tomorrow.

How hard? Not very. No one's mentioned such a thing in years and years.

Because you asked so very nicely - here's an RSS feed of the 10 threads most recently posted in
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...rssout&id=2








Marc was indeed a superb presenter - his talk is here at about 32 minutes : http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/15208876

Just as it would be exciting to see Vesta getting ever closer.



It was cancelled. Twice. Public reaction to that cancellation will have had no small part in its reinstatement. Frankly - I think the PI owes the public. Without them, he would have no spacecraft and no images.



Clearly they're not, or they would be doing it already. It's non trivial to set up such a pipeline, but it's not a hard or expensive process. A young intern with some python skills would have it done in a week.
It's been done for NEAR, MER, Cassini, EPOXI, Stardust and others. That's not the reason we're not seing Vesta images more regularly.