"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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Jan 29 2006, 11:18 AM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 1870 Joined: 20-February 05 Member No.: 174 |
Oh.. and Phoenix is not expected to have an extended mission. I assume they will try to place the lander in an optimized hibernation mode with software that will let it try to revive after the CO2 snow blows away the next spring, assuming battery failure and the like, but it's rather less than likely we'll hear from it again.
But.. the Surveyors mostly survived at least one lunar night and 3 of 5 transmitted pictures on later days, despite abundant damage from thermal contraction. On the other hand, They tried to revive NEAR after a polar winter on the asteroid, but they never detected a signal. |
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