"thor" Mars Mission To Seek Underground Water |
"thor" Mars Mission To Seek Underground Water |
Jan 26 2006, 03:46 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 1636 Joined: 9-May 05 From: Lima, Peru Member No.: 385 |
A new, low-cost mission concept to Mars would slam a projectile into the planet's surface in an attempt to look for subsurface water ice.
"I'm interested in exploring mid-latitude areas of Mars that look like they're made of snow and ice," Phil Christensen, the project's principal investigator, told SpaceDaily.com. Christensen, of Arizona State University, and colleagues at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, are proposing a mission called THOR – for Tracing Habitability, Organics and Resources – as part of NASA's Mars Scout program. Like last year's Deep Impact mission to comet Tempel 1, THOR aims to ram a projectile at high speed into the surface of Mars while a host spacecraft remains in orbit and observes the impact and its aftermath. If approved by NASA, the mission would launch in 2011. That mission would be after MSL's mission. Now it is still a proposal It would cost around US$ 450 millions More details: http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/THOR_Mar...ound_Water.html Rodolfo |
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Guest_BruceMoomaw_* |
Jan 29 2006, 03:41 AM
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Guests |
No seismometer on Phoenix or MSL; but there currently IS a plan to include one as part of a detechable package of geophysical instruments that will be left behind at the landing site by the ESA's ExoMars rover in 2011 -- the first of a hoped-for series of replacements for the Netlanders. if the ESA actually funds ExoMars and it lands successfully before the Mars Scout (which are very big "ifs"), it might be able to pick up the thud.
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Jan 29 2006, 03:48 AM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2454 Joined: 8-July 05 From: NGC 5907 Member No.: 430 |
QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Jan 28 2006, 10:41 PM) No seismometer on Phoenix or MSL; but there currently IS a plan to include one as part of a detechable package of geophysical instruments that will be left behind at the landing site by the ESA's ExoMars rover in 2011 -- the first of a hoped-for series of replacements for the Netlanders. if the ESA actually funds ExoMars and it lands successfully before the Mars Scout (which are very big "ifs"), it might be able to pick up the thud. I know the Viking landers' seismometers did not detect very many marsquakes (and in fact the Viking 1 instrument never got its pin out). Is this why they never put one on any Mars lander after that, if I am correct here? Will they change that policy in the future? I hope some day we can have a long endurance seismometer on Venus. And imagine one on Io: It would probably wear out in a month. -------------------- "After having some business dealings with men, I am occasionally chagrined,
and feel as if I had done some wrong, and it is hard to forget the ugly circumstance. I see that such intercourse long continued would make one thoroughly prosaic, hard, and coarse. But the longest intercourse with Nature, though in her rudest moods, does not thus harden and make coarse. A hard, sensible man whom we liken to a rock is indeed much harder than a rock. From hard, coarse, insensible men with whom I have no sympathy, I go to commune with the rocks, whose hearts are comparatively soft." - Henry David Thoreau, November 15, 1853 |
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