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"Search for life on Mars is frozen", Interesting article by Colin Pillinger.
ugordan
post Nov 20 2008, 08:30 AM
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What's to say, it will have taken 17 months from launch until the Mars flyby and it was directly boosted into a heliocentric orbit by the Delta II. No spinning around in Earth orbit for months.

One definitely needs patience if one's primary means of transportation is an ion engine.


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sci44
post Nov 20 2008, 08:00 PM
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QUOTE (Del Palmer @ Nov 19 2008, 11:33 PM) *
With all this talk of ion propulsion and Mars, I'm surprised no-one has mentioned Dawn...


Its a good point - Dawn is a larger vehicle (1250 kg) with a much more ambitious mission (orbital insertion around 2 targets). The Solar arrays provide 10kw power (at Earth orbit, I assume) so would be much larger than the 1.2 kw arrays used for SMART. However I see that they plan to use 275kg of xenon for the phase upto orbital insertion at Vesta - admittedly with a big boost from a Delta-II to start. So 180kg might not be completely wrong for fuel upto just a Mars flyby for a smaller vehicle. SMART had some left from its 100kg, and that included moon orbit insertion, not just flyby. As you know bigger solar arrays make no difference to actual fuel efficiency, just the time taken!
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sci44
post Dec 6 2008, 11:41 PM
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QUOTE (ugordan @ Nov 20 2008, 08:30 AM) *
What's to say, it will have taken 17 months from launch until the Mars flyby and it was directly boosted into a heliocentric orbit by the Delta II. No spinning around in Earth orbit for months.

One definitely needs patience if one's primary means of transportation is an ion engine.


True enough. Since this thread was started, MSL has been delayed 26 months, and NASA and ESA administrators have agreed in principle to cooperate on future Mars exploration. So, why not start with this modestly funded proposal - an enhanced Beagle-3 with an SEP first stage (say 500 kg), launched some time between MSL and ExoMars. Cost - well if Beagle can be done for $60m, and $40m for a Smart-style SEP stage and a cheap ride on a Falcon 9 to GTO?
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Guest_Enceladus75_*
post Dec 7 2008, 05:08 AM
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I would love to see a Beagle 3 fly to Mars in the next few years. Beagle 2 had some excellent experiments that just aren't on MSL or any other proposed lander mission. That said, the budget for a Begale 3 will need to be bigger than for Beagle 2 to allow for really thorough testing and comms are needed all the way through the Mars EDL phase.

I think one big reason why Beagle 2 failed was that it was too cheap, too rushed and not tested rigoruosly enough. The same could be said of Mars Polar Lander and much of the Soviet efforts to land on Mars.
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Doc
post Dec 7 2008, 08:35 AM
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Exactly, the mission was doomed from the start. If Beagle 3 ever becomes a reality 2 things MUST be done:-

#1. Preserve the design, honestly I have never seen so small an interesting probe. This alone is a technological advancement.
#2. Concentrate on the EDL procedure & avionics. (No retro rockets?! What the hell! )
This can be the next scout mission! Better stop here, Im getting giddy;-)


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dvandorn
post Dec 7 2008, 02:46 PM
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I agree, the design of the Beagle package is ingenious. But so was Phoenix's, and it did not completely succeed. I think perhaps *any* design that requires transport of samples into a test chamber of any kind might need to be revisited, just in case.

-the other Doug


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