ExoMars |
ExoMars |
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Aug 25 2005, 11:22 AM
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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. |
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May 22 2007, 12:32 PM
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The Poet Dude Group: Moderator Posts: 5551 Joined: 15-March 04 From: Kendal, Cumbria, UK Member No.: 60 |
I hear what you're saying, Analyst, I really do, but the problem here - and I think it's a basic one - is that we'tre preaching to the choir here. Everyone here knows this stuff already, you could say it's in our blood, so we don't need to be convinced anything that leaves Earth is "sexy". It's what we do.
... but the people Out There, the ones struggling to pay their rents or mortgages, or fill their cars with petrol, or pay for their prescription drugs, or buy a new pair of shoes for their kid to go to school in, don't see things the same way. Many of them completely disagree with spending any money on space travel, they just see it as a waste and can't be convinced otherwise. We'll never win them over, and I don't even try any more to be honest. The people I do work on are the ones who support space exploration but only if it results in scientific progress here on Earth, or, at the very least, provides us with something pretty or amazing to look at. Take DEEP IMPACT. In the build up to that I was giving lots of talks, and describing its mission. It soon became clear that if I told people how scientifically valuable the mission would be, how it would provide us with insight into the chemical composition and physical structure of a cometary nucleus, they would look at the walls and their shoes or pick their noses with an air of "So what?" about them. Ah, but when I told them that we were going to fire a copper cannon shell into a space iceberg, that would blast a great big hole out of it and let us look into a great big crater, well, they wanted to know more. That's not dumbing down, it's finding the right approach. (With them leaning forwards and not picking their noses any more I could hit them with the science...) So, we have to give them - the People Out There - space missions that will give them something back, and that means space missions that have a good chance of succeeding. In this modern visual age, "succeeding" really means - again, for non UMSF people - sending back lots of amazing pics. If the MERs had landed safely, with everything working except their cameras, they could still have done some science but there would have been zero public interest in them. So, ExoMars will only succeed if it "does a MER" and send back amazing pics. I think that, as it is, it is too complicated a beast to work, especially as it's a virgin design and being built and operated by people doing this for the first time, who are also leapfrogging less ambitious and challenging projects to get to Mars. It's all about maximising chances of success and building foundations for future programs. Take a shortcut and you risk getting lost. -------------------- |
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