MSL schedule delay? |
MSL schedule delay? |
Sep 9 2008, 08:10 PM
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#1
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Member Group: Members Posts: 706 Joined: 22-April 05 Member No.: 351 |
The most recent Aviation Week and Space Technology (9/8) has the following tidbit in a piece on NASA schedule delays:
"On the robotoic front, the testing schedule for a critical instrument for the Mars Science Laboratory -- dubbed SAM for Sample Analysis at Mars -- may delay launch of the advanced rover from its 2009 planetary window into 2011." -------------------- |
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Oct 4 2008, 06:21 PM
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#2
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 3419 Joined: 9-February 04 From: Minneapolis, MN, USA Member No.: 15 |
If you have a reliable committment to fly a rover mission every 'n' years, it does make sense to design a standard rover "bus" that can be mass-produced.
Things that can easily be standardized and identical on any rover mission you'll want to fly over the next 20 years would include: - suspension, wheels, motors, and the standardized data connections for the engineering functions of steering, moving the wheels, etc. - power generation and distribution. - descent stage / EDL technology. - standardized data paths to all engineering controls. This gives you a rover with (after MSL flies) a proven EDL architecture, a demonstrated ability to deliver and provide power to a given instrument suite, and a design lifetime, range and landing site accessibility around which individual missions can be structured. Every PI bidding for the next rover mission would simply need to design an instrument suite that connects into the existing power supply and that is capable of operating the standardized engineering controls used to drive and manage the rover. Your computer power and control architecture, which would be part of each individual mission proposal, can be upgraded on every mission to keep up with current technology. So, for example, if the MSL team had been given the task of creating a decent and well-defined hardware interface between the science/control functions and the main engineering functions, they could have built a dozen of the standardized pieces in about the same amount of time it's taken to build one. But if you're going to spend the money to build all that hardware, you have to be sure it's going to work the way it's designed, and you have to be sure you'll have the money to fly the follow-on missions. Make no mistake, designing the rovers the way I describe *would* be more expensive than it has been to build a single MSL, we might have spent more than $2 billion by now, with more to come. The only way to justify the extra expense is if you know you'll be able to amortize these costs over a series of missions. Without the firm committment to fly as many missions as the number of rovers you build, it gets really hard to justify the expense. -the other Doug -------------------- “The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right.” -Mark Twain
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