Q & A With Steve Squyres, Coming in September Options

[Harder]

I´m not too confident my question about money & future missions will cut the grade amongst the many experts chipping in here. (Although I am not a "beancounter", honest!).

But my ten cents: I feel that the continuous presence of daily live data from Mars, near enough anyway, have substantially enlarged my world. What CNN did in the past to bring the world news into every house so to speak, did Steve & his team in making Mars a permanent feature in my daily news uptake. I watch less "old fashioned" TV these days, much less in fact, and instead I check the latest from Mars, Titan, various comets, and more. Not to mention the continuous pushing of the technology envelope whilst thinking about new opportunities & challenges for solar system exploration.

Think about it... our lives have been enriched tremendously.

Thus for me the big thing is: is how can we make the daily news from Mars a permanent thing?

3 Cheers for Steve!

[dilo]

Harder, you are the first (I don't want to violate your copyright/priority ), but this is very close to the question I would like to ask!
Also my life has been enriched tremendously, thanks to the wide, fast data availability from this successful mission (thanks, NASA!)...
So, in order to make this live-update permanent, why not to send within few years a half dozen MER rovers in other exiciting places? (eg inside Valles Marineris...).
I know, NASA has other plans (MSL or sample return mission), but the opportunity to capitalize a such tremendously successful space technology is really exciting!
I didn't make figures, but I immagine that sending 4 new MER rovers (with only minor improvements over original design) would cost like sending fist two and, for sure, probability of success is high, contrary to the new planned missions like MSL which will use innovative but risky technology.
I know, this "soviet"-like approach may appear conservative, but I'm convinced is the best way to widen sampling of Mars geology while keeping excited audience on Earth...

[ilbasso]

For Steve: "Have you ever browsed the unmannedspaceflight.com bulletin board and seen some of the amazing imagery interpretations done by its members?" I guess this is like asking the Rolling Stones if they ever visit their fan websites!

[lyford]

My humble offerings - more project based than science I think:

1. How do you see the current anti-intellectual political climate in the United States affecting future “big science” projects like planetary missions? As one of the most public science figures today, have you encountered any of this opposition in your travels?

2. MER has been quite successful in terms of balancing public relations and
real science. Do you find that others share your zeal for public outreach? Do you think this will be the standard for future planetary missions - a policy of near real time access to imagery? Or is this something unique to the team assembled for this project?

3. Has the team considered any long term “hacks” of the rovers in order to continue to do science? Or would these only be considered as needed? If mobility goes first, are there contingency plans for seasonal site observations, or even something "crazy-go-nuts" like a full MI panorama of the entire area accessible by the arm?

[brianc]

Doug

A couple of questions for Steve

1) Does he see any value in farming out research to this or other mars forums' enthusiasts, I can't imagine 100,000 images could be adequately evaluated by such a small team at JPL. e.g looking for certain rock types / distributions / clouds in images

2) Any possibility of a competition ( say schools / colleges / Mars Forums ) the prize being to 'Drive' one of the rovers on mars

Regards


Brian

[Gsnorgathon]

I've got a couple of questions that are really variations on a theme. If I were clever, I could think of a way to phrase them as one question, but I'm not feeling clever today.

Given the constraints of money and mass, would you fly the same instrument package again? If not, what would you fly?

And related to that one: If you could add one more instrument (or maybe, a tightly coupled suite of instruments) to the MER package, what would it be?

Operationally: what would you do differently if you had to do it all over again? I'm especially curious to know what's tops on the "definitely wouldn't do it again" and "should have done it from the beginning" lists.

[odave]

...[NPR] interview with SS...Too bad some of us didn't manage to call in

I wanted to, but unfortunately I don't have a cell phone and the show was over by the time I got home

It's just as well, though, since I would probably have gushed like a 13 year old girl meeting her favorite pop star

I did come up with one more question for SS, but maybe y'all have the answer:

* Is Sprit's RAT totally shot, or does it have a grind or two left in it that you're saving for a really interesting, high priority rock?

[djellison]

From a dribble - it's turned into a waterfall of good questions. Lots of duplication, and lots that I wanted to ask anyway - but I'll start collating them soon into an order

To give myself time to make sure I can sort thru all this lot - the submission 'launch window' will close on August 21st

Doug

[chuckyvt]

Come on guys! Haven't seen any activity here in a while, and there's less than a week left! My question to steve would be how suprised is he that the rovers have lasted this long, and how long did he expect the rovers to last. Obviously, the "warranty" was 90 sols. I remember reading an article before launch from one of the MER team members saying they were fairly confident they could get 4 months out of the rovers.

[ljk4-1]

Come on guys!  Haven't seen any activity here in a while, and there's less than a week left!  My question to steve would be how suprised is he that the rovers have lasted this long, and how long did he expect the rovers to last.  Obviously, the "warranty" was 90 sols.  I remember reading an article before launch from one of the MER team members saying they were fairly confident they could get 4 months out of the rovers.

May I suggest that it NOT be a question to ask Dr. Squyres? I get the feeling he has now been asked for his views/feelings/thoughts on the surprising longevity of the MERs about as much as the Apollo astronauts have been asked about what it was like to walk on the Moon.

I would ask him if he could place two more rovers on Mars, where would he like to put them?

[Marcel]

I want to ask him what it is like to be PI of the most succesfull scientific operation on Mars ever

And if he feels that he could have done any better

And what he would do differently on the next assignment, assuming he'll be in a similar position on a next project, investigating the surface of another world.

[chuckyvt]

May I suggest that it NOT be a question to ask Dr. Squyres?  I get the feeling he has now been asked for his views/feelings/thoughts on the surprising longevity of the MERs about as much as the Apollo astronauts have been asked about what it was like to walk on the Moon.

I would ask him if he could place two more rovers on Mars, where would he like to put them?

True eough, but I would like to get his perspective without any possibility of having to "eat crow", so to say. Early on, of course the only figure quoted is going to be the 90 sols figure. Now, with this mission being classified as a huge success regardless of what happens tomorrow, I wonder if he would be more forthcoming of his original expections of accomplishments and longevity.

[dvandorn]

Then go and buy his book... Squyres is very forthcoming in his book about his expectations; he was so tied in to the 90-sol projection that he got a bit, um, shall we say "high strung" whenever anything threatened to steal away even a single sol from the exploration program. He also said he was rather expecting Spirit to be on its very last legs by the time it reached the Columbia Hills.

He talks about getting more and more relaxed about things as time went on and it became apparent that the rovers weren't going to die anytime soon.

-the other Doug

[craigmcg]

I'm curious about the strategy behind building ever-more complex spacecraft. Given the high cost of creating new designs, what do we give up by, say, making "n" more rovers just like the current crop and sending them different places?

I guess my question nets out to the question of wider surface coverage vs. new types of data.

[Marcel]

I'm curious about the strategy behind building ever-more complex spacecraft.  Given the high cost of creating new designs, what do we give up by, say, making "n" more rovers just like the current crop and sending them different places?

Compare the science output of MPF with MER, and you know that technological renewal of spacecraft is important. I understand what you mean, because the output of MER we see now is absolutely astonishing and it would be great to see, let's say, 4 other sites with clones of Spirit and Oppy. But:

We need to move on. Considering the landing tech. (airbags) of MER, only a couple of % of the Martian surface can be reached (flat, low, near the equator). What we want now, is look somewhere else, and we want to look for other things. Higher latitudes, other kinds of terrain, maybe even polar regions. Also we want to follow the carbon (besides the water). And therefore we need a whole bunch of new things that can't be integrated in MER. RTG's, chromatographic columns, spectrographs, lasers, high def. video, maybe even a skycrane (or 2). Et voila: a whole new design is needed.

But believe me: We will absolutely not believe our eyes after MSL landed. It will be the same giant leap from MER to MSL, as it was from MPF to MER.

I can't wait.

PS: Another thought that adds up to it: The MER design isn't gone. It worked out as a great design and it learned a lot of people a lot of things. This knowledge is "in the pocket" and lot's of aspects will be used in new designs. It is not just sci. research on another planet, it is learning how to get there, how to squeeze out the optimum output of the project (people, limited amount of sols, route, etc.) AND, how to use this experience in making the next one even better.

People will never stop to improve technology.