Of course NASA knows. For every mission extension a detailed plan and budget has to be written and reviewed by HQ. I've never seen one of these publicly released, but you could always file a FOIA request if you really care (instead of relying on what was put in wikipedia, as this discussion appears to be doing

There isn't even a breakdown of how much the MER mission will cost in the 2010 NASA budget that I can see, but perhaps I missed it.

I think you guys are overreacting to some natural curiosity about DSN costs. As with so many other things, DSN costs could be lowered and efficiency increased; DSN isn't perfect. That said, I'd tend to believe that DSN costs are not the majority, or even a very large fraction, of ongoing mission ops costs, except maybe for extremely-extended missions like VIM.

It turns out that LRO doesn't use the DSN, it uses a Ka-band system that GSFC built in White Sands, NM.

http://cio.gsfc.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/p...main_GV3_16.pdf

Some proposed lunar missions I know of planned to use Universal Space Network's system -- http://www.uspacenetwork.com/index.html -- obviously lunar missions don't need big antennas.

From http://discoverynewfrontiers.nasa.gov/news...ews_051509.html

"Discovery Program investigations may propose the use of Advanced Stirling Radioisotope Generators (ASRGs) for missions enabled by radioisotope power systems. If selected for flight, NASA will provide up to two ASRGs, including the services associated with their provisioning on space missions, as GFE, and their costs will not be included in the cost cap."

ASRGs don't use as much Pu as thermocouple systems. NASA doesn't say where it's coming from, but presumably there is a source (I had thought that production was going to be resumed.)

As for skepticism about cost, IMHO the cost/risk pendulum has now swung to the extreme end of risk aversion and high cost, so anything that might help it swing back is a good thing.

What's the relative mass fraction of aluminum and water in this? I can't get to more than the first page of the AIAA paper.

Manufacturing nanoscale aluminum in situ seems fairly difficult. For that matter, even extracting aluminum in situ would be challenging.

I don't think that taking the aluminum to Mars and using in situ water would be a viable approach, but I could be wrong.

Yes. http://target.lroc.asu.edu/output/lroc/lroc_page.html

If you're asking if upcoming attempts to image these targets will be announced in advance, then I don't know, but I would doubt it.

It's hard to know exactly where they went wrong, but there haven't been a lot of low polar orbit missions (I can't think of any before the most recent batch, except for Lunar Prospector, which was a spinner so the thermal design was much simpler.) Also, it's more likely to be more a case of not modeling the specific spacecraft response correctly than not understanding the basic environment. Low polar lunar orbit is a very challenging set of cases; it can be both really hot and really cold on the same orbit, the sun direction varies over all angles during the mission, etc, etc.

PLSS, pronounced "pliss" -- Portable Life Support System.

Perhaps slightly less awe-inspiring in 2003 when every house in my neighborhood in suburban San Diego was burned to the ground, and CDF refused to allow the Navy to drop on it.

I'm certainly glad the outcome in Pasadena was better.

http://historicspacecraft.com/Photos/Probe...M_RK_2008_3.jpg is a nice view of the cavity where the SRM went, and http://historicspacecraft.com/Photos/SRM/S...I_RK_2008_2.jpg a reasonable picture of the motor itself.

Thanks, Stu. Frankly, if I were moderating I would ban this topic, because the debate is not going to reach closure in this forum.

Note that LRO is not scheduled to be put into the circular 50 km mapping orbit until 15 Sept. I haven't worked out the ground track speed in the present orbit, but it may exceed the max clock rate of the NAC for square pixels.

More or less the exact same thing I said in post 166, no?

The "nacl" and "nacr" files use the convention that the LROC hardware uses, where are images have an arbitrary 32-bit ID, reported in the file names as 8 hex digits. You can't glean anything more from these filenames without having access to the commands.

Obviously the PDS releases will be cleaned up and conform to the EDR documentation; it seems these public releases are using various naming conventions. (I'm just speculating, I have nothing to do with this stuff.)

Sounds like the difference between UT and MST where the LROC operations center is. Maybe some time system confusion there. Presumably somewhere they have documented the definition of MET 0 in UT (or better, ET.)

I'm a little surprised they used MET; we usually use some arbitrary time like 0 Ephemeris Time ("epoch of J2000").

The first digit is probably what they meant by "a single digit for partition which denotes a reset of the MET".

I've seen clearer pieces of PDS documentation

I think he was asking about the naming convention. See http://geo.pds.nasa.gov/missions/lro/docs/...lroc_av_sis.pdf

Individual EDR files will follow the naming convention:
[TARGET][MET][INSTRUMENT][PRODUCT].img
Where [TARGET] is a single character denoting the observation target [(M)oon, (E)arth,
( C ) alibration or (S)tar]; [MET] is a nine digit number reflecting the Mission Elapsed Time of
acquisition (with a single digit for partition which denotes a reset of the MET); [INSTRUMENT]
is a single character denoting the instrument, e.g. ( R )ight NAC, (L)eft NAC, (M)onochrome
WAC, ( C)olor WAC, (V)is WAC, or (U)v WAC; and [PRODUCT] is a single character to
denote (E)dr.

Question 7 is basically "what was recently discovered on Mars?" and the answer is water, despite the fact that there was clear detection of water on Mars in the 1950s from ground-based spectroscopy.

Unfortunately I blame this on the Phoenix team for overhyping their results; this is clearly based on their press releases.

I was not aware that the PFS results were in good agreement with the ground-based results anyway; as far as I know PFS, to the extent it saw evidence for localized methane, saw it in Arabia, Elysium, and Arcadia (http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMAK21XDYD_Life_0.html ) whereas Mumma's plumes were in Syrtis and Nili Fossae.

I'm pretty skeptical of these results at the moment.

With all due respect, it's not like this guy is a materials scientist or anything -- I doubt he has much idea of what vacuum exposure and temperature extremes will do to nylon (and I don't either, but I suspect the lunar environment is more benign than one might think -- most degradation of nylon on LDEF was from atomic oxygen, which is totally absent on the Moon.) We use nylon tie-wraps on instrument cables routinely.

Fading of the flag from UV exposure seems almost inevitable, though.

Though the article doesn't say, I'm fairly sure that interview occurred before the images were taken, if not before the launch of LRO, and probably refers to expected image quality from 50 km. From a higher altitude the resolution will obviously suffer.

You realize that MER cost over $1B, right? MSL is bigger, but only by about 2x.

(I've seen cost estimates for MER as low as $800M, but I don't think that's a fair accounting of various "slush fund" sources.)

Relative to the original 2003 proposal, it was probably more like 3-4x. Even more relative to the original Athena proposal. Not that a final cost accounting for MER is easy to come by. That's why I can only sigh in frustration when someone suggests that flying copies of MER would be cheap and risk-free.

Almost certainly the first one. These are total energy problems, not instantaneous power problems. As such there are most likely operational workarounds, though they may not be very attractive.

No, they are talking about the secondary batteries (I forget if they are using Li-ion or something else.) The RTG doesn't provide enough peak power to run the systems directly, so it has to be used to trickle-charge the batteries.

As for mass, I expect that they have enough mass margin to add batteries if there is no operational workaround. At least our cameras are coming in well under on both mass and power relative to predictions (not that we were very big either way.)

And for JPL bashers, note that SAM is provided by GSFC, not JPL.

Obviously, they would only produce power when the sun was near the horizon and when they were on the sunlit side, assuming the rover was always parked with the panel pointed east or west. If the panel was pointed west, they wouldn't produce anything in the morning.

Fixed near-vertical panels have some use at higher latitudes, but not really near the equator. You can work out the math for various latitudes and orientations, but the cosine losses are quite dramatic, to the point of unworkability.