Mars Rover Spirit Unearths Surprise Evidence of Wetter Past Options

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

Mars Rover Spirit Unearths Surprise Evidence of Wetter Past
NASA/JPL
May 21, 2007

[djellison]

Multiple MER's is a subject that's been done to death here and elsewhere. The bottom line is that while MER has been fantastic, the number of sites you can land with this system is very very small and very very limited and it's a highly inefficient way of getting a very small payload onto the ground. Because of that, MER's heritage should be in systems, not the entire vehicle.

If MSL works - you've got many orders of magnitude more Mars that can be accessed, and then it does make some sense to think about reusing MSL or indeed just its decent stage to deliver payloads.

Doug

[Pavel]

I understand the RTG makes a significant part of the MSL mission cost, and it cannot be "reused", obviously. My uninformed guess is that RTG is one of the reasons why there will be only one MSL.
But you are right, it would be nice to reuse as much of MSL as possible if it succeeds.

[mchan]

I understand the RTG makes a significant part of the MSL mission cost, and it cannot be "reused", obviously. My uninformed guess is that RTG is one of the reasons why there will be only one MSL.
But you are right, it would be nice to reuse as much of MSL as possible if it succeeds.

Reuse is meant to be reuse of the design by making additional copies of the original including the RTG. A copy mission could cost some fraction of the original mission cost.