2009 Or 2011 ?, 1 or 2 ? |
2009 Or 2011 ?, 1 or 2 ? |
May 3 2005, 11:11 AM
Post
#1
|
|
Member Group: Members Posts: 290 Joined: 26-March 04 From: Edam, The Netherlands Member No.: 65 |
Does anybody know when and how many MSL will go, or when the decision on this will be made ?
|
|
|
Jun 21 2005, 11:40 PM
Post
#2
|
|
Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 1870 Joined: 20-February 05 Member No.: 174 |
They *SHOULD* build a flight vehicle and a "refurbishable" engineering test vehicle. Ideally 3 MSL's should fly at successive opportunities.
Flying 2 identical vehicles in one opportunity increases chances for success, but also for identical failures. The Soviet Venera 11 and 12 landers both had essentially perfect missions till touchdown... and never activated their surface science payload. All they did for the hour plus <I think> they survived is transmit brief batches of descent science from surviving descent instruments <some only returned valid data at higher altitude before frying, as designed>, inbetween long periods of nothing from the inactive surface science payload. If *I* had 3 MSL's, I'd put one down in Melas Chasma, one down in the geologically most complex and most exposed part of the Meridiani sedimentary complex, and a third down in the deepest part of the Hellas impact basin, where there's complex layered sediments that seem to show plastic flow patterns. There's just too much geologic variety on Mars to fly one and "be done with it". Essentially identical vehicles could fly the first two missions, the third could have a major update of it's instrument package. If the first fails, it's likely that any simple fix to the design could be done to the second. If we had built 2 Polar Landers, a simple software fix would have probably resulted in a successful second mission. Granted there were additional design deficiencies, like no descent communications, but that could have been patched. A "parasitic" payload could have been attached to the 2001 lander relaying data to an orbiter as during the MER Landings, even if it was only accelerometer data from the parasitic status monitor. |
|
|
Lo-Fi Version | Time is now: 5th June 2024 - 11:13 PM |
RULES AND GUIDELINES Please read the Forum Rules and Guidelines before posting. IMAGE COPYRIGHT |
OPINIONS AND MODERATION Opinions expressed on UnmannedSpaceflight.com are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of UnmannedSpaceflight.com or The Planetary Society. The all-volunteer UnmannedSpaceflight.com moderation team is wholly independent of The Planetary Society. The Planetary Society has no influence over decisions made by the UnmannedSpaceflight.com moderators. |
SUPPORT THE FORUM Unmannedspaceflight.com is funded by the Planetary Society. Please consider supporting our work and many other projects by donating to the Society or becoming a member. |