Red Dragon Options

[Paolo]

'Red Dragon' Mission Mulled as Cheap Search for Mars Life
any opinion on this? would it really make sense adapting a manned spaceship to unmanned Mars landing? I am skeptical...

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[Astro0]

Of course thinking outside the box or in this case the capsule, who says that anything needs to be deployed from "inside" once you've landed.

With, I would think, small modifications to the vehicle, you could house a series of deployable containers that are released from the main fuselage during the last part of the descent. Possibly released through opened hatches or ejected compartments (like segments of an orange).
These individual components could then parchute (or parachute+bounce) to the surface over a wider area.

Think of the way that MSL's backshell and heatshield will drop off those weights during descent.

I imagine that during a parchute+powered descent by Red Dragon the descent velocity would be relatively low at the time you would 'deploy' these science containers which could house remote sensing gear, rovers, tumbleweeds etc and all of their data relayed back (intranet-style) to the main descent vehicle for store/relay back to Earth. The main lander has a stack of cameras and carries the prime communication gear (as backup, smaller UHF links on the components for bent-pipe relay via orbiting spacecraft).

Just about anything is possible here, after all, most of this conversation is based on a capsule that hasn't been finally designed or built to do the job of going to and landing on Mars. All we have is an idea, a video (so I'm told), a graphic and thankfully a whole bunch of people here with some imagination and an interest in exploration.