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.

[ljk4-1]

British Scientists Unveil Latest Craft To Search For Life On Mars

London, England (AFP) Jun 12, 2006

British scientists on Monday took the wraps off a prototype craft to search for signs of life on Mars, hailing it the smartest piece of equipment ever designed for exploration of the red planet.

http://www.marsdaily.com/reports/British_S...fe_On_Mars.html

[ustrax]

British Scientists Unveil Latest Craft To Search For Life On Mars

London, England (AFP) Jun 12, 2006

British scientists on Monday took the wraps off a prototype craft to search for signs of life on Mars, hailing it the smartest piece of equipment ever designed for exploration of the red planet.

http://www.marsdaily.com/reports/British_S...fe_On_Mars.html

Bridget?!?

[ljk4-1]

Bridget?!?

British scientists are apparently very lonely.

To quote from the article:

"They have done maybe 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) in total," Healy said. (The actual total, according to NASA, is 14.86 kilometers, or 9.23 miles.) "The rover here (Bridget) will have done that within four to six months at the most. It's got to go to 10 sites that are up to one kilometer (0.6 miles) apart."

To echo Analyst, of course a rover one decade from the time of the MERs is
likely going to do better. But I am not impressed that it will do things faster.
It's the quality of the data I care about. If you want faster and better (but
not cheaper), send humans.

[RNeuhaus]

"They have done maybe 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) in total," Healy said. (The actual total, according to NASA, is 14.86 kilometers, or 9.23 miles.) "The rover here (Bridget) will have done that within four to six months at the most. It's got to go to 10 sites that are up to one kilometer (0.6 miles) apart."

To echo Analyst, of course a rover one decade from the time of the MERs is
likely going to do better. But I am not impressed that it will do things faster.
It's the quality of the data I care about. If you want faster and better (but
not cheaper), send humans.

These improvement will depend upon to a much improved microprocessor. The vital brain to direct as fast, as smart and as efficiently all Mars' operations.

That part, MER is lacking that much power since it depends very much from Earth remote commanding.

The know most powerful microprocessor that is going to send along with MSL: RAD 750, alike to IBM/Motorola PowerPC 750 dated on the year 1998 which is still very much lagged to our present technology. (Third Generation and now the latest ones is of 5 Generation with 8.125 times faster).

Maybe, one of the most noticeable bottleneck of the space exploration advancement is the radiation-hardened process done by the BAE Systems, isn't?

Rodolfo

[helvick]

The know most powerful microprocessor that is going to send along with MSL: RAD 750, alike to IBM/Motorola PowerPC 750 dated on the year 1998 which is still very much lagged to our present technology. (Third Generation and now the latest ones is of 5 Generation with 8.125 times faster).

You are right that the RAD-750 represents the best current hardware that is rated for missions like these but it's worth pointing out that the RAD-750 is closer to 20x slower than current generation hardware (whether x86, Power, ARM, Niagra (SPARC) or Cell). More importantly the MIPs( or FIPS)\watt numbers for some of the current gen hardware beats the RAD-750 by almost 200x. The latest 1Ghz ULV Core Duo has an average power consumpton of 0.75watt. Benchmarking comparisons are hard when the CPU architectures are as different as the Power architecture of the RAD-750 and the x86 Core Duo are but the former is rated at ~240 VAX Mips while the 1 Ghz ULV Core Duo is about equivalent to a 2Ghz P4 which is ~4500 VAX Mips. That's just shy of 20x the processing capability while eating 7.5% of the power.

It's also worth pointing out that the RAD-750 has about 20x the performance per watt of the RAD6000 that the MER's use (22 Mips peak @ 20 Watts) which makes the MER on board compute capability about 4000x worse than the current "state of the art" here on earth. For me that just shows how extremely hard space exploration actually is.