MER's to Mars with SpaceX/Falcon 9? Options

[Guest_Oersted_*]

I was wondering how the MER package would integrate with a Falcon 9 rocket for eventual future Mars exploration on the (relatively) cheap?

My idea is that they'd dust off the old blueprints of the MER's at JPL, build a couple of them, integrate them (transit stage, EDL package and all) on top of a Dragon 9 and then fire it off towards Mars. Would be a proven exploration package with no extra research needed, sent off on a (hopefully) cheap and reliable rocket.

Does the MER heatshield fit inside the proposed Falcon 9 fairing? Could it carry one of maybe even two MER's?

Do you think we could get Musk and JPL interested in the idea?

[MahFL]

It's not NASA's policy to fly missions that have already sucessfully flown, you'd have to have different instruments as far as I know.

[PaulM]

Steve Squyres said in an interview that he could not see the benefit in flying the Athena instrument package again.

He also wrote that he would have preferred not to have squeezed MER into Pathfinder base petals because there was a high risk that the rover might not completely unfold, which would end the mission prematurely. Presumably this means that NASA would be reluctant to launch more unfolding MER style rovers again.

A disappointment I have with MSL is that there is only one of them. However, I do understand that the cost of a second MSL might have been more than $500 million dollars.

MSL's landing site selection process identified a number of very different sets of rock types at the different candidate landing sites. I am hoping that more than the 2 planned rovers might visit Mars over the next 10 years to visit these diverse landing sites. I think that the diversity of landing sites would justify flying the same mission twice.