MTO Cancelled Options

[dvandorn]

I'm in complete agreement with the IAA. I think that manned expeditions to near-Earth asteroids are the logical next step in manned solar system exploration, and that Mars is better left to robots for the next 20 to 30 years.

But I'd like to see manned exploration and engineering evaluation of near-Earth asteroids starting in about 10 years. (At that rate, I may yet see another human being "set foot" on another world before I die...)

As for lunar exploration -- there is only one good reason for it, and that's because exploring new vistas is good for the soul. But I don't expect that argument to carry any weight on Capitol Hill, much less with the scientific rationalists that tend to populate this board...

-the other Doug

[dvandorn]

Reply to Bruce:

The technologies required for the types of life-support systems you'll need for deep space exploration is *already* being developed on Earth, at far less expense than testing it out on an orbital space station. It doesn't make sense to start flying such systems in space until you've developed one that works well in simulations on the ground. And the tests have been underway for years, now.

As for ISS being so unlike a deep space mission technologically (i.e., it needs resupply, it has no closed-loop life support system, etc.), that's not the point. Consider Gemini -- it contributed almost *nothing* to Apollo in terms of technology. Apollo was designed before Gemini -- and if you think NASA has a bad NIH problem in regards the Russians, you should have seen NAA in regards to McDonnell-Douglas when it came to taking advice from Gemini experience.

Gemini was absolutely essential to the success of Apollo because it taught NASA how to fly the missions. It taught NASA how to train the crews, how to train the misson controllers, and how to manage a real-time mission that lasted up to two weeks.

There was *absolutely* no other reason to fly Gemini than to provide the kind of real-world experience to the appropriate NASA centers and agencies that was required before they could even *think* about attempting the Apollo flight profiles.

I think that NASA could not have effectively *flown* a long-duration mission (of 6 months or longer) to deep space without having done it in LEO several times. Many, many times -- enough times to have encountered all of the various problems that can possibly come up due to the length of flight and the inevitable breakdown and servicing of the equipment.

The details of the equipment do not matter as much as the processes you develop, both in the crews and on the ground, to manage all of the contingencies. I simply do not believe that NASA could have transitioned straight from two-week shuttle missions into 9-month to 3-year deep space missions without flying some intermediate step, like a LEO station.

And face it, international or not, you have the same problems justifying *any* LEO station from a scientific standpoint. LEO stations are just not really justifiable from a scientific standpoint -- almost everything you can do on a manned LEO station can be done far more cheaply (and usually just as well) on an unmanned platform.

In my opinion, ISS is justified by providing the operational experience you need to consider mounting long-duration deep space missions. That is its only justification, just as operational preparation for Apollo was the only justification for the Gemini program.

And I do understand that long-duration mission management experience *did* exist, it was just all Russian. But I still insist that it is unreasonable to expect NASA to be able to learn the real operational lessons they needed to learn from Russia's operational experiences. When it comes to operational experience, it is almost impossible to learn from other programs, and especially from other cultures. You can codify that experience, turn it into management theory, create process specifications from it, and then teach it -- but even then, you don't really learn it unless you *do* it.

-the other Doug

[slinted]

Given both the dangers of forward and back-contamination, and the greater difficulty in developing spacesuits and backpacks that are easy to wear in the greater Martian gravity, any landed Mars crew will do as much of their work as possible, even after landing, using robots remote-controlled from their home base or from the pressurized cabins of their rovers.  Actually suited-up EVAs will be limited to the minimum necessary.  But you could run those robots just as well from Mars orbit.

It seems like this deserves to be taken one step further:
Why put people in orbit, to operate the robots? Unless you want to wait for ground passes to inform the orbiting crew of the robots' activities, you'd need a satellite relay network around Mars. And if this were in place, the necessity of having the crew in orbit to operate them is lessened since these relays could send to Earth with only the light delay to worry about.
It seems like the MERs are a well balanced routine, with little potential work lost to restricted sols and long delays in getting navigation data back, since they have many activities like instrument integrations that take long periods of time anyway. But in the future, when data bandwidth per satellite increases and we hopefully see some sort of relay network in place to handle more advanced communication with our robotic explorers, I think we'll find the efficiency of rovers to be greatly increased as well, when people here on Earth can interact with them more often.

[Roly]

Does anyone know if there are plans to optimize what resources there are now that MTO is cancelled? Could MGS, Odyssey, MEX all still be around? Is there enough fuel for station-keeping or even optimizing their orbits a little for relay duties (seems unlikely, especially for MGS).

Could MGS and Ody be reprogrammed to use LDPC (?) or Turbo (unlikely) codes to squeeze a bit more out of their telecommunications packages? Can an uprated DTE package be put on the MSL itself? There must be some operations changes that can be modified to try and really minimize the impact of MTO's loss (though perhaps this will always be like Galileo LGA mission, wondering what might have been if everything had panned out perfectly).

Roly

[dvandorn]

All I can say about the need for a fatter data pipe than the MERs have enjoyed is what Steve Squyres said at an Ames Research Center colloquium, when asked what he wanted to do better or differently next time. In increasing order of importance, he said he wanted:

3 -- to fly the Raman spectrometer.

2 -- to have a more intelligent Rover that you could tell, in a quick interface, "Go over to that rock, give me a Mossbauer integration, then an APXS integration, and while you're doing that, tell me the atmospheric tau value and take a quick panorama." Rather than having to spend ten hours a day crafting the specific command strings to make all of that happen.

1 -- to have a much fatter data pipe from the rovers back to Earth.

Even though I know exactly why MTO got axed, I still think something like it is going to be needed at some point down the road... Maybe it's just that I'm getting older, and I want to see the high-definition video stuff from Mars before I die.

-the other Doug

[SigurRosFan]

MRO cancelled - okay. But was is this? MSTO (Mars Science and Telecommunications Orbiter)

- NASA MEPAG: Mars Science and Telecommunications Orbiter (DRAFT)

MTO reloaded??

<< The Mars Science and Telecommunications Orbiter (MSTO) is a major infrastructure component for the next decade of Mars exploration. MSTO, a Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) – class spacecraft, is proposed for launch in 2011 or 2013 ... >>

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

MSTO's existence was another thing first revealed at the November COMPLEX meeting that I attended. The original 2009 Mars Telecom Orbiter was cancelled, both because it had more communications relay capability than is really needed for the US Mars program in its current somewhat scaled-down form, and because its high-altitude orbit for comsat purposes kept it from doing much scientific study of Mars. But MRO -- which is thus now required to serve as the main com relay satellite for MSL, has a design lifetime of only about 10 years; another com relay orbiter must replace it for later Mars landers.

So NASA has decided on a new, more cost-effective strategy of launching, about once every 8 or 9 years, a replacement com-relay orbiter in a relatively low orbit which will allow it to also carry out detailed scientific studies of Mars, albeit also somewhat reducing its ability to serve as a relay satellite for Mars landers. MSTO is the first of these, set for 2013. The scientific subject settled on for it is detailed studies of Mars' atmosphere.

Its replacement will presumably have to be launched around 2022. This is a bit awkward schedule-wise, because in the current plan this is the launch year for the orbiter which will be the first part of the long-delayed sample-return mission -- and that orbiter, as soon as it has retrieved the little sample container launched into Mars orbit by the sampling lander set for launch in 2024, will have to blast out of Mars orbit and back to Earth. So either a second pretty big Mars orbiter must also be launched in 2022 as the new long-lived com relay craft, or the current schedule of US Mars missions will need to be modified yet again. (There's also the need to come up with a good scientific subject for that next big orbiter -- SAR mapping of the old geological features underneath Mars' windblown soil, maybe?)

[Guest_Analyst_*]

This sounds like a solid plan. But they need more delta v capability than MRO because of the orbit raising after 2 years. Two missions per window are gone forever now:

2007: Phoenix
2009: MSL
2011: Scout
2013: MSTO
2016: MSL 2 (?)

Analyst

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

The nature of the 2016 mission is now hotly debated. (See the November MEPAG report: http://mepag.jpl.nasa.gov/reports/Mars_Pro..._SAG_Report.doc ). It will probably be a follow-up on the MSL, but there are several radically different possible types of that. MSL's single most important goal (although it has many) is to try to locate places on Mars' surface where there are traces of organics that might perhaps be biological in origin, so that the first sample-return mission can then be dispatched to that same place to allow Earth labs to examine samples from that place for actual evidence of chemical or microscopic fossils.

What will be done in 2016 depends largely on whether MSL succeeds in finding trace organics. If it does, then it's quite possible that NASA, instead of sending a large follow-up in-situ lander in 2016, will save the money from that and utilize it to speed up the pace or increase the scope of the later sample-return mission. (In that case, the seismic/weather/heat flow "network mission" currently set for 2020 might be moved up to 2016 -- which some scientists would very much like to see done.)

But if MSL comes up empty in that regard, then 2016 will probably be devoted to looking elsewhere on Mars' surface for organics -- and there are several strategies for that. We might dispatch a more sensitive and analytically discriminating "Astrobiology Field Lab" rover to another place on Mars. (MEPAG currently recommends that the AFL should be launched if MSL DOES find interesting organics; but as I've noted, there may be arguments against doing so in that case, and for instead going directly to a sample return mission to MSL's landing site.) We might instead launch a pair of smaller "Mid-Rovers", a bit bigger than the MERs, to check out other places on Mars -- IF (and it's a big "if) we can devise adequately sensitive trace organic detectors for them. Or -- although this isn't mentioned as an alternative -- we might simply send a second MSL to another place on Mars (probably with more sensitive organics detectors, in which case it would actually shade into being the "AFL"). Although MEPAG currently leans against this, we might even send a stationary "Deep Drill" lander to drill down 10 meters or more into the subsurface to look for organics there.

So there are at least five different mission types that might be chosen for 2016, depending on what we find in the meantime. As for 2018, the current plan calls for the third -- and, so far, the last -- Mars Scout then.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

A quick scan of the MSTO science definition report reveals it to be pretty much what I expected -- a combination of:

(1) The Scout-class "Mars Aeronomy Orbiter" that's been talked about for a long time to study the processes by which Mars is losing its atmosphere (to allow extrapolation of how much air it might have originally had to lose); and

(2) The "MARVEL" Mars Scout finalist that would have looked for biologically interesting trace gases like methane and tried to locate their sources.

These are both now very high-ranked science goals at Mars; their functions will now be combined in a single larger craft (which will also utilize a highly elliptical orbit to improve its usefulness as a relay comsat for landers, by allowing itself to stay in radio view of them longer). MSTO can also carry out other goals, such as mapping Mars' intriguing local crustal magnetic fields in more detail, and using a limb-scanning microwave spectrometer to try to measure winds (the same goal planned for the microwave limb scanner on the proposed "VESPER" Venus Discovery mission -- an instrument which would also have been added to MRO if it hadn't broken the weight margin).

And -- while, oddly, this is given short shrift in the report -- these instruments can also do a very good job of studying the dangerous atmospheric hazards which we now know Mars landers are likely to run into: high-altitude violent fluctuations in air density, and lower-altitude winds. This is now considered a very important near-term goal to allow the safe design (and, if necessary, the last-minute retargeting) of future big and expensive landers, which as I say makes it odd that this isn't emphasized more in the report. MSTO is likely to end up serving as a weather satellite for the 2016 lander and later ones.

[Spacely]

Bruce, it seems like when we finally do get around to Sample Return, we're going to do it with an awesome amount of science. Two decades (1997-2020) of state-of-the-art landers, rovers, and orbiters will have re-written the books. Our knowledge of Mars in 2020 will be several orders of magnitude greater than our knowledge pre-Pathfinder.

I ask then, what success do you think the Mars Sample Return planned in the mid-80s for a late-90s launch would have had? (I'm speaking specifically of the MSR outlined in the Ride Report.)

[Mariner9]

I'm not Bruce, but to throw in my ten cents it depends on what you mean by sucess. Currently it seems that sucess is measured, at least publicly at NASA, in finding evidence of water, and then organics, in that order. Third place seems to be general scientific knowledge of Mars' history and current state.

IMHO, the chances an MSR launched pre-Mars Observer/MGS instruments doing much more than #3 was just about zip. In fact, #3 is dubious, because grabbing samples using only Viking as your planning guide, would not have given you nearly the global context knowledge that we have now.

I have read at least one description of the MSR that included a Mars orbiter in the Mars Observer class. The orbiter would be launched in conjunction with MSR to serve as a relay satelite and orbital mapper to help guide MSR's rover. But that would still imply picking a landing site ahead of time, and then trying to play catchup during the mission itself, and hoping you picked a good site in the first place.

I've read a number of opinions in the last ten years which state, in retrospect, the 1980's idea that Viking was sufficient knowledge base to use for planning an MSR was somewhat naive.

But then, in the late 90s we had people seriously planning an MSR for the 2005-07 timeframe that thought MGS was a good enough knowledge base. Now, the thinking is at least have MGS, Mars Odyssey, MER, Phoenix and MSL under your belt... and then you might be ready, but a follow on to MSL might still be needed.

Will be interesting to see what the scientific thought-dujour is around 2012 after MSL results are in.

[Spacely]

And let's not forget how naive those '05-07 MSR plans were in terms of the engineering required! In my mind, there's just no way in hell those plans could have succeeded. You also bring up a good point about the plans that relied on a Mars Observer-class satellite picking out a landing spot more or less on the fly. To produce great science, MSR requires a great science base. This is why I'm not angry that MSR is taking so long in coming.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

I feel the same way -- sample-return missions will be so rare, and so limited in the amount of sample they return, that finding the best possible landing sites in advance is crucial.

I may add that I'm also not all that upset by the recent delay in Terrestrial Planet Finder, for much the same reason. There are two totally different alternative designs for TPF -- the Coronagraph and the Interferometer -- and to make an intelligent decision as to which to choose, we need to know just how common Earthlike planets are around other stars, which means we need Kepler's census data (which won't come in until around 2013). If such planets are fairly common, we should probably go with the Coronagraph -- but if they're fairly rare, the Coronagraph might not be able to find any, so in that case we should go with the Interferometer, which is much more expensive but also much more sensitive and so capable of examining a much bigger collection of stars.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

I've finished reading MEPAG's recommendations as to the goals of the MSTO craft, and sure enough there is no mention anywhere of the goals considered so urgent by the "Mars Human Precursor" science steering group of MEPAG in its own report just last year: sirius.bu.edu/withers/ pppp/pdf/mhpssgaftpresentation.pdf .

The highest-priority goals achievable by an orbiter include measuring both high-altitude air-density fluctuations at 30-50 km, and lower-altitude winds and turbulence. This, to repeat, is extremely urgent for the immediate future -- both of these phenomena came close to wrecking MER-A, and larger and more expensive landers will be even more susceptible to the first one. We badly need to be able to monitor and predict them as much as possible. A somewhat lower-priority but still important goal for an orbiter is monitoring dust storms.

However, judging from the MHP report, it appears that the instruments already recommended for MSTO for purely scientific reasons will be adequate for such studies, if just one or two additions are made: a copy or improved version of MRO's infrared Mars Climate Sounder, and maybe a new instrument for measuring low-altitude winds. The MSTO paper seems confident that the millimeter-wave limb sounder recommended for MSTO can do a good job of measuring wind speeds all the way down to the surface. But the Science Steering Group for MRO, in its 2001 study, said that such a sounder could only measure winds above 40 km altitude, and the MHP study also says that a new instrument may need to be devised -- maybe Doppler lidar to measure the speed at which atmospheric dust is blowing. (I'm not sure if such an instrument is even under development for advanced Earth weather satellites.)

It seems likely that all larger Mars orbiters in the future will need to carry the instruments recommended by the MHP group, for constant monitoring of Mars' weather to allow last-minute revisions in the landing sequences (or even the targeting) of landers. (Upper-air density fluctuations could be monitored by an UV solar occultation instrument a lot simpler than the very high-resolution IR solar occultation spectrometer that MSTO will use to look for trace gases.)