ExoMars Options

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4180840.stm

Europe has fixed on a concept for its next mission to land on the Red Planet.

It aims to send a single robot rover to the Martian surface along with another, stationary, science package.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

I suspect ESA is not going to be able to come anywhere close to cramming all of their currently planned instrument payload onto that little rover. In particular, I suspect the drill may have to get the boot. By the way, I have found the text description of that drill, assuming that it is indeed the same one that Italy was originally supposed to provide for Dan Goldin's hallucinatory 2003 Mars Sample Return mission. (The previously included drawings, unfortunately, have been removed from the website.)

http://ars.asi.it/bandi/marte2003/drill-ao-pip.html

[Stephen]

I notice the ExoMars rover as drawn in those pics has got quite large cleats on its wheels. Would larger ones have been useful on the MERs as well (for getting more easily out of sandtraps, say)?

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Stephen

(The previously included drawings, unfortunately, have been removed from the website.)

http://ars.asi.it/bandi/marte2003/drill-ao-pip.html

Yes and no. The pics on that page do appear to be missing. However, there is a zip file here (about 850K):

http://ars.asi.it/bandi/marte2003/drill.ZIP

which contains an MS word document of the same article with the pics embedded.

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Stephen

EDIT NOTE: These were actually two separate posts!

[RNeuhaus]

I notice the ExoMars rover as drawn in those pics has got quite large cleats on its wheels. Would larger ones have been useful on the MERs as well (for getting more easily out of sandtraps, say)?

Nope.

The best "tires" or wheels for sandy terrain are ones with very wide and flat with octogonal strips. The cleats does not help anything but to worse the traction capability due to a lower contact surface area. The cleats are only good for firm lands.

Rodolfo