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Unmanned Spaceflight.com _ Past and Future _ MTO Cancelled

Posted by: djellison Jul 21 2005, 06:30 PM

Just listening to the MRO conference. Highlights included...

1) 5.4 Mbits is the highest MRO data rate (not the 4 I thought)
2) An extra 50-ish KG of fuel puts it's low-altitude orbit life thru to the next decade.
3) MTO HAS BEEN CANCELLED

What the HELL!

They say that MSL can still do its mission with just MRO as it's relay capacity will suffice.

But that means less science data during an MRO extension sad.gif

Seems a bit short sighted.

Doug

Posted by: um3k Jul 21 2005, 06:35 PM

blink.gif

Posted by: Redstone Jul 21 2005, 08:42 PM

Pando hinted at this. I had no idea, although I never heard of MTO having a lot of backing in the media or scientific community.

I missed the beginning and the replay did not cover it. Was MTO cancelled because MSL went over budget?

A reporter asked what happens if MRO fails, and the NASA reply was that they would rely on Odyssey, MGS and Direct-to-Earth. I'm sure that's possible, but I bet it means MSL would tie up a lot of DSN time. Probably imaging would suffer, since the spectra and chemical analysis data give more science for the megabit.

Now that MTO is gone, I'm doubly crossing my fingers for MRO.

Posted by: djellison Jul 21 2005, 08:58 PM

Quite simply - for MSL to have any hope in hell of achieving what it's setting out to - MRO HAS to work. It's that simple.

Doug

Posted by: vjkane2000 Jul 21 2005, 09:16 PM

Griffin is remaking the priorities in the science budget. MTO would
be gone to preserve the MSL 2009 date, help fund the Hubble
servicing mission, and help fund the Glory mission.

Can't say that I would argue with his priorities. MTO would be
wonderful, but is the extra data from Mars (over what can be sent
without MTO) equal to a different dedicated science mission? While this makes MSL dependent on MRO, how many insurance policies do we want to buy for the data relay? MRO is the primary relay, the rover has its own backup antenna, and MTO would be the second backup. I agree with Griffin that funding MSL, Hubble, and Glory are higher priorities.

Here's the summary, the full article is at Nasa Watch
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=17424

The Solar System Exploration Theme would be reduced by $98 million
by deferring investments in long-term Mars missions and preparation
for human missions to Mars while also increasing investment in near-
term Mars exploration needs. These reductions would be made
available by cancellation of the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter and
the Optical Communications demonstration, and deferral of the
planned Mars Sample Return Mission, while increases would be made to
fund extended operations of the Mars Exploration Rovers, and to
maintain a 2009 launch date for the Mars Science Laboratory.

The Universe Theme would be increased by $10 million, with $30
million provided to preserve the option of servicing the Hubble with
a Space Shuttle mission until a decision can be made following
successful return to flight missions. Most funds for Hubble would
come by reducing the Terrestrial Planet Finder investment.

The Earth-Sun System Theme would be increased by $88.3 million to
fully fund a standalone Glory mission, provide additional funding
for extending the missions of currently operating satellites, and
maintain the launch schedule for the Solar Dynamics Observatory.

Posted by: lyford Jul 21 2005, 11:34 PM

I think there goes my crazy dream of a fleet of http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=789 rovers.... not enough bandwidth in orbit up there to track 'em....

Posted by: MiniTES Jul 22 2005, 12:16 AM

mad.gif mad.gif ohmy.gif

I'm a big supporter of Griffin ("rather dumb" to turn off Voyager biggrin.gif ) and even of NASA's new Moon-to-Mars manned spaceflight focus (please don't throw any cans at me wink.gif ). But still, I don't think this cut is worth it. I'd rather see MSL (two MSLs?) fly in 2011 if it meant that we'd get MTO. This may seem like it's convenient now but wait until MSL arrives with no MTO in orbit - we'd BETTER actually fly MSL in 2009 for this to be worth it.

Posted by: Analyst Jul 22 2005, 12:05 PM

There goes the James Cameron mars movie.

But:

- Two 5 min MRO passes per sol with 2 Mbit/s (from the MRO press kit) = 1200 Mbit (comm at night will be not an issue because of the RTG)
- Two 10 min Odyssey passes per sol with 256 kbit/s = 307.2 Mbit (current MER passes)
- 120 min (???) DTE per sol with 16 kbit/s (???) = 115.2 Mbit
- more than two passes per orbiter each sol, consider a third MRO pass at day or night if geometry allows it + 600 Mbit

gives 1622.4 Mbit (+ 600 Mbit) each sol (about 10 times that of MER). Not that bad.

I will miss the optical telecom experiment. This is the future.

Is MTO canceled for 2009 and delayed to 2011/2013 ... or simply canceled and gone?

Analyst

Posted by: djellison Jul 22 2005, 12:29 PM

MTO, because of being in a higher orbit - would have allowed more like 10Gbit/sol

sad.gif

Doug

Posted by: Analyst Jul 22 2005, 12:50 PM

I know, but hey, MPF transmitted 2 GBits in the whole mission smile.gif. MSL can do this in one sol, that's almost two orders of magnitude better. Well, imaging will suffer. But where are all those Scout missions, maybe someone can carry Elektra too?

I always thought MTO was a bit oversized, more than two tons, big Altlas V launcher. Maybe there is a chance in the Delta class, MGS like, one ton, eliptical orbit (not optimal I know). (Btw. what is MEX doing these day from a relay point of view?).

Hey, we get Hubble SM4. And yes, it's a MANNED mission, but HST can do another five years of great science afterwards.

The class is half full.

Analyst

Posted by: djellison Jul 22 2005, 12:53 PM

QUOTE (Analyst @ Jul 22 2005, 12:50 PM)
Hey, we get Hubble SM4.


GRRrrrrrrrrrrrr bloody Hubble. Dont even get me started.

I'm just gutted they didnt go for a downsized MTO - use the same hardware as MRO, but by dropping all the science instruments, having more, but smaller solar array panels the 2kw budget could be generated at mars on a spacecraft somewhere between the scale of MRO and MGS.

It's the duration of the overflights that was the bonus for MTO - not 10 minutes, but many tens of minutes.

By dropping MTO, we drop a lot of extended mission science for MRO, we drop the on orbit rendezvous experiments, the optical comms experiment, the small instrument opportunity, and the redundency it offered over and above MRO.

Doug

Posted by: Analyst Jul 22 2005, 01:49 PM

Contrary to popular mythology I don't see the shuttle as an old fashioned design, same for HST. We will miss both then they are gone. Don't get me wrong, I would love see to MTO, but if they can't afford it.

Why do we lose a lot of the MRO extended mission science? MSL will not land on Mars before late 2010, after MROs second martian year (about two years after it's primary mission). Second, it will only communicate with MSL four times per sol for 10 minutes each (maximum numbers). It can relay the data to earth at about the same rate it gets them and thus needs about 40 minutes per sol (maximum). There will be much downlink capacity for it's own data. I'm not sure if they will raise it's orbit, but that can be changed if they like more high res pictures. Besides, it reduces the resolution only a little bit.

The rendezvous can be done in earth orbit (DART failed), the optical comm experiment is a real loss. I don't know anything about the lost science instruments on MTO (5Kg, 10W ?). And the redundancy, nice to have, but better MSL without MTO than MTO without MSL.

Analyst

Posted by: Cugel Jul 22 2005, 03:28 PM

My two points of concern here:

1. As MSL does not have (in its current design) a direct to Earth communication link it is now completely depending on MrO. (which will last upto 2015 or so)

2. MSL itself, although Mike is apparently fighting for it, has now shifted to the top of the hitlist. Which is rather scary, given that we have to colonize the Moon first.

I'm afraid cancelling science missions will become a trend for the coming years.

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Jul 22 2005, 05:36 PM

I've just rechecked my notes from the January Mars Roadmap meeting. MTO was suppposed to return five to 50 times as much data daily as MRO and Odyssey combined could. (Each of them could return 100 Mbytes daily; MTO was supposed to return 1 to 10 Gbytes daily.)

And, being in a high orbit, it would have allowed real-time contact with the rover for 2.5 to 9 hours out of every Sol (split up into 5 or 6 sessions), as opposed to the 16 minutes/Sol allowed by each low-altitude science orbiter -- which means that it would have allowed them to drive every rover during MTO's 10-year lifetime for vastly greater distances across the surface and study far more targets. In short, by giving up MTO they HAVE given up the amount of additional science return that they would have gotten, not just from one additional science mission, but from several. Penny-wise, pound-foolish.

Posted by: MiniTES Jul 22 2005, 06:27 PM

QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Jul 22 2005, 05:36 PM)
I've just rechecked my notes from the January Mars Roadmap meeting.  MTO was suppposed to return five to 50 times as much data daily as MRO and Odyssey combined could.  (Each of them could return 100 Mbytes daily; MTO was supposed to return 1 to 10 Gbytes daily.)

And, being in a high orbit, it would have allowed real-time contact with the rover for 2.5 to 9 hours out of every Sol (split up into 5 or 6 sessions), as opposed to the 16 minutes/Sol allowed by each low-altitude science orbiter -- which means that it would have allowed them to drive every rover during MTO's 10-year lifetime for vastly greater distances across the surface and study far more targets.  In short, by giving up MTO they HAVE given up the amount of additional science return that they would have gotten, not just from one additional science mission, but from several. Penny-wise, pound-foolish.
*


Considering how important this is, has MTO been deferred or cancelled outright? Might it resurface? This is a decision we're going to regret later - and if we do end up sending people to Mars, we'll need something akin to MTO anyhow. I'd rather see them cancel the 2011 Scout or Scouts than MTO.

Posted by: Analyst Jul 22 2005, 07:05 PM

Now the "fun" ends. From www.nasawatch.com

QUOTE
Belt-tightening at NASA has forced the space agency to cancel a planned $500 million Mars orbiter that was expected to be built by Lockheed Martin in Jefferson County. Negotiations between the aerospace company and NASA had been expected to lead to the award of a design-and-build contract for the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter."

Editor's note: Word has it that Mike Griffin wants to delay the Mars Science Laboratory by 2 to 4 years as well - this would mean a launch as late as 2013.


If this is true we don't have to worry about MTO anymore sad.gif We get MSL without MTO in 2013 (And now I doubt even more we will get the Europa Orbiter by 2015). I'm not proud to say this, but I was talking about it: Missions get canceled before they leave the drawing board, new one appear and disappear ... sad.gif

Posted by: djellison Jul 22 2005, 07:38 PM

Relay capacity guestimates...

Odyssey : 0.1 - 0.4 Gbits
MRO : 1 - 2.5 Gbits
MTO : 18 - 64 Gbits

This is why I laughed out loud at the press conf when they said the
loss of MTO wouldnt affect MSL.

Things such as MARDI with it's 2 Gbits of memory for the 100 second, 5fps 1600 x 1200 colour movie, or the 9 Gig of memory built into Mastcam... sad.gif

Doug

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Jul 22 2005, 11:42 PM

The central loss from the absence of MTO is that it will hugely reduce the distance that MSL (and later rovers) can drive, and the number of sites they can examine, per week. And, given the great variability of Martian geology (and biological evidence) over distance, that IS a very serious loss -- especially given the potential MSL would have for driving very great distances during its 2-year mininum lifetime if it wasn't for the communications bottleneck. Its drive distance
would have been multiplied severalfold, providing us with the same additional science return that we'll now have to get from at least one and maybe more separately launched MSL rovers in the new MTO-less plan. (By the way, at the Roadmap meeting I also learned that a 2-minute streaming video sequence from MSL comprises 1 Gbyte. I think we can forget about most of the video from this mission, although that is a PR rather than any kind of a science loss.)

On top of this, we just ahve word from "NASA Watch": "Word has it that Mike Griffin wants to delay the Mars Science Laboratory by 2 to 4 years as well. This would mean a launch as late as 2013."

Might be a better arrangement, actually. By then, it's possible that we might be able to reshuffle funds to allow some sort of orbital com relay link after all -- and the delay might also allow more orbital reconaissance of possible MSL landing sites if we put up the right sort of Mars Scout in the meantime. But, yet again, the manned program continues to wreck every genuinely worthwhile thing NASA is doing.

I'm not going to jump up and down on Griffin for this, or for the cuts in the Terrestrial Planet Finder's funding -- he was under orders not to actually increase the total FY 2006 funding for space-based science, and something had to go in order to fund "Glory" (which is still more important) and the preliminary work on the Hubble repair. MTO was arguably the most expendable major program. But this shows yet again how much useful space science funding is being flushed down the toilet of the manned space program.

Posted by: Bob Shaw Jul 23 2005, 12:49 AM

Bruce:

I have the sense that Mike Griffin's heart is in the right place, but that his hands are tied. At least he has the technical nous to understand the issues, unlike his probably equally well-meaning predecessor, who was rather more of a reactive bean-counter lumbered with an agency crippled by amazing boondogles. I am an ardent supporter of manned spaceflight as well as unmanned spaceflight, but certainly not a supporter of the sort of stop-go-and-reverse schemes which have characterised NASA since it's glory days. Perhaps the new Lunar and planetary exploration vision, plus the gradual upsurge of spaceflight entrepeneurs, will serve to break the log-jam - I certainly hope so.

Unmanned space exploration isn't about humanity not being present, just about vehicles not having people actually aboard, and all are part of the human urge to explore, discover, and - perhaps - settle. Who among us hasn't dreamed of walking beside Spirit, striding across the Moon, or looking back at the dimming sun from Voyager? The inspiration and joy remains the same whether or not our proxies have men aboard or not!

Let's support *all* sensible exploration, and decry only the foolish and merely wasteful stuff!

Bob Shaw

Posted by: MiniTES Jul 24 2005, 10:27 PM

QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Jul 22 2005, 11:42 PM)
... But, yet again, the manned program continues to wreck every genuinely worthwhile thing NASA is doing... But this shows yet again how much useful space science funding is being flushed down the toilet of the manned space program.
*


Bruce: I agree with Bob here. While I agree that the shuttle, and especially the ISS, is for the most part a waste of money (a COMPLETE waste of money as far as the ISS goes), I think that it's unfair for you to consider the manned program worthless. If we actually build a lunar- and Mars- capable CEV and follow through with the Moon-Mars initiative, we will see some genuine science that's orders of magnitude better than what we've been getting robotically.

Robots are fine on Mars (or anywhere) for orbital photographic surveys, long-term seismology and meteorology, and limited geochemical science. But searching for fossils, let alone extant life, requires intelligence and versality of an entirely different type. Fossil hunting requires both very heavy and very fine work. It also requires complex perception. MER and Sojourner- indeed, anything I think we can realistically expect before 2020 with the exception of MSR (and I don't expect to see that before maybe 2016 at the very earliest) has absolutely no manipulative capabilites whatsoever.

Zubrin, while controversial, has made the fair point that one could parachute thousands of MERs onto Earth, and it is a fair bet that they might not find any fossils, "at least not before the arrival of the next ice age, when they would be crushed by the glaciers which they would not be able to outrun."

Take an Apollo mission, Apollo 15. The ALSEP, for starters would unquestionably be way too complex for even the most advanced modern robots to set up. Could these same robots than explore the region? Remember everything the Apollo astronauts did; they traversed several miles over rough terrain, they carefully examined and photographed the terrain, found the "Genesis Rock", and were able to do other work like removing the stuck drill for the core sample to take back to Earth. In just three EVAs they explored a significant fraction of the Hadley area and collected over 200 lb of lunar samples. I think a robot would be hard-pressed just to land and try to take the drill core, let alone get it unstuck (if indeed it got stuck), and then somehow send it back to Earth.

It took Spirit almost 2 1/2 months to a reach a crater that was about 800 feet away from it. I think anyone on this board could probably walk 800 feet in about two minutes. That's the time factor; robots simply take forever to do whatever they are doing, at least compared with humans. Remember Purgatory Dune? I think that would make any self-respecting toddler who's played in a sandbox laugh as he lifted his foot up out of the dune.

Opportunity spent six months in Endurance exploring the rock outcrop. Considering the size of the outcrop, a trained geologist could probably completely cover the outcrop in an hour or two, with just as much or more thoroughness as Opportunity. More important, the scientists could do things Opportunity or even MSL could never do, such as drill deep into the outcrop and bring the samples back to a lab for (immediate) study. Plus, the scientists would probably not take a whole day to try to climb out of the crater if they failed the first time. Remember the Spirit/Opportunity trenching acitivites earlier in the mission? I could probably dig ten times that far with my bare hands in five minutes. Spend all the money you want on drills and robot arms, nothing beats a human with a drill and shovel for exposing geologic layers or drilling holes in a rock.

Now don't get me wrong here; the rovers are doing a phenomenal job. But they have the intelligence of watermelons when it comes to their usefulness in terms of exploring unassisted from earth.

The discovery of the unknown includes data collection, but it is not limited to data collection.

To quote someone from another board, "Even in Apollo there was a combination of automated and manual data collection. A camera is a camera, whether it's operated by an astronaut or by a robot. Either way you get a photograph. The difference is in the tight coupling of a human brain to the data collection process. It's not a matter of the ability to collect data, but the intuition to know where to look for data, and to adapt the study on the fly. Telepresence is just not good for that. A geologist can tell a lot about a rock by just how it feels when he bangs on it with his hammer. There are plenty of examples of expertise in observation that just aren't translatable to machine automation.

Now the point about making the best use of limited funds is certainly valid. I'm not saying manned exploration is better in all respects. It's better in the same way that hand-detailing is better than driving your car through an automated washer. You get a higher quality product, but you pay for it. Since space travel in all its forms is currently very expensive, and the willingness of the public to expend resources on it is limited, prudent financial management is the rule. But just because your budget forces you to eat mac-and-cheese six days a week doesn't mean you won't enjoy saving up for that 16-oz 30-day-aged steak on Saturday night."

So robots simply can't navigate and ambulate intelligently, make their own decisions about exploration, and analyze their findings the way humans can. Consider trying to use a MER, or MSL, to explore the Grand Canyon, or Disney World. It cannot be done.

Granted, we haven't landed people on Mars yet, and I would much rather see MTO than any STS mission, even Hubble servicing, which is probably the only real scientifically useful Shuttle activity undertaken with any regularity. However, I think it's unfair to dismiss manned missions out of hand. When we get a real, manned lunar and manned Mars program, with extended surface stays, we'll get some serious science.

Until then, of course, the loss of MTO is a great waste; the half-a-Shuttle-mission we'll get in return is not worth it in anybody's checkbook (except maybe the United Space Alliance).

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Jul 25 2005, 01:10 AM

Yeah, but at what cost compared to the serious science of all sorts -- or serious useful endeavors of other sorts -- we'd get from spending the hundreds of billions of $ we'll need for this elsewhere? Lunar geology, dammit, is LUNAR GEOLOGY; unless and until we conclude that mining the Moon might be useful in alleviating earth's need for non-fossil fuel energy (and we are a very long way from establishing that), it amounts to just spending $200 billion or so for the amusement of a (very) small clique of geologists -- period.

As for a manned Mars trip, remember that Catch-22 I talked about -- certainly a lot of Mars scientists have been mentioning it for several years now. The one thing that, scientifically, could conceivably justify the staggering cost of a manned Mars expedition (I'm still estimating about $300 billion for the very first expedition) would be the discovery of present or fossil life on Mars -- but the moment a manned lander touches down to investigate such evidence, it will very seriously contaminate it at its landing site, and maybe end up contaminating the whole planet. The one way around this dilemma would be to limit humans to orbiting Mars and running surface robots and sample-retrieval vehicles by remote control -- but, once again, we're talking several hundred billion $. And the Administration proposes to start spending money on this endeavor BEFORE WE EVEN KNOW IF THERE IS ANY EVIDENCE OF LIFE ON MARS. Any move whatsoever toward a manned Mars expedition can damn well wait until we know whether there is any reason to spend money on it.

I mean, the government -- both the White House and Congress -- isn't even seriously pretending anymore that the manned space program has any real justification other than continuing to feed the Aerospace/Industrial Complex. One wonders how much support for it there would be if the state of Florida hadn't decided the last two presidential elections (and is likely to decide all close ones for some time to come, thanks to the cretinous way the Electoral College is set up).

Posted by: MiniTES Jul 25 2005, 11:01 AM

QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Jul 25 2005, 01:10 AM)
Yeah, but at what cost compared to the serious science of all sorts -- or serious useful endeavors of other sorts -- we'd get from spending the hundreds of billions of $ we'll need for this elsewhere?...(I'm still estimating about $300 billion for the very first expedition)


Again this isn't really a fair comparison. The only manned initiative with a price range in the hundreds of billions was SEI, and the current plan on the table certainly isn't going to cost that. The NASA Mars Reference Mission 3.0 - a manned mission - is only costed at $55 billion, and that's by the same group who did the jaw-dropping $450 billion SEI analysis. The Planetary Society did a detailed report (with Mike Griffin) showing the total cost of a manned Mars program over 30 years to be between $119 and $129 billion. A lot, but not ridiculous over so long a time period. The main issue is the up-front non-recurring investment in hardware. Once you do that, the cost of each individual mission shouldn't be much more than a sample return mission (and we'd certainly get way more samples, better picked, studied, and from deeper drill points than we'd get with a robotic MSR). Why do you estimate $300 billion? Over how long a time period would that be spent? - surely NASA's budget is not going to be increased by that proportion. (If it were, it could only help the unmanned missions).

QUOTE
As for a manned Mars trip, remember that Catch-22 I talked about -- certainly a lot of Mars scientists have been mentioning it for several years now.  The one thing that, scientifically, could conceivably justify the staggering cost of a manned Mars expedition (I'm still estimating about $300 billion for the very first expedition) would be the discovery of present or fossil life on Mars -- but the moment a manned lander touches down to investigate such evidence, it will very seriously contaminate it at its landing site, and maybe end up contaminating the whole planet.  The one way around this dilemma would be to limit humans to orbiting Mars and running surface robots and sample-retrieval vehicles by remote control -- but, once again, we're talking several hundred billion $.  And the Administration proposes to start spending money on this endeavor BEFORE WE EVEN KNOW IF THERE IS ANY EVIDENCE OF LIFE ON MARS.  Any move whatsoever toward a manned Mars expedition can damn well wait until we know whether there is any reason to spend money on it.


If there are any real fossils, like stromatolites, I don't think the contamination issue is a problem. The problem with contamination is what it might do to studies of extant life. This is, of course, a problem that must be dealt with somehow. However, any extant life is likely to be in underground liquid water and therefore could probably be separated from direct human contact (which is not to say forward contamination should not be examined closely). But I think humans would be so much more effective at finding fossils than robots that they should be sent to search for fossils, not just to study what robots have already found. No robotic missions currently being funded could find unambiguous evidence of fossil life (certainly not extant life) without really enormous stromatolite-like structures.

QUOTE
I mean, the government -- both the White House and Congress -- isn't even seriously pretending anymore that the manned space program has any real justification other than continuing to feed the Aerospace/Industrial Complex.
*


What do you mean by this? Was there some specific action or statement by someone?

Posted by: MiniTES Jul 25 2005, 01:46 PM

But I do agree with you that these cuts are a waste. TPF and the Europa Orbiter and MSL and really valuable missions like them are being delayed for these useless ISS construction activities. Now that, I will agree to some extent, is flushing money down the toilet. But once we get out of LEO, and have manned lunar, NEO, and Mars flights, I think we'll see some real science out of them.

And to look at if from another perspective, we're going to have manned flights no matter how you look at it- better to be flying to a NEO than lapping the LEO racetrack. Interestingly, the period when there no manned flights at all, from 1975-1981, was perhaps the starkest period ever for unmanned spaceflight. The rising tide raises all the boats, as they say. The new moon-Mars initiative isn't what's killing MTO and company; it's the Shuttle RTF costs. And personally, I would be perfectly fine with retiring the Shuttle right now and sending to the NASM. But we're not going to do that, so we need to do the next best thing and retire them as soon as possible.

Pork-barrel poilitics is, of course, really bad. Sean O'Keefe and Craig Steidle's protracted, DoD-like procurement plan for the CEV would have stretchted it out endlessly and wasted billions, and generally made the pork-eaters quite happy. At least Mike Griffin knows what he's doing and will save billions of dollars and years of work on the CEV with his plan for acceleration. The cost of anything from a contractor isn't in hardware; it's people multiplied by time. Compared to labor costs the hardware itself is virtually negligible. So by downselecting early, you have one company working much faster, rather than two with endless amounts of time for CEV development, so you're saving billions of dollars that might otherwise have come from the unmanned stuff.

Posted by: tty Jul 25 2005, 06:36 PM

QUOTE (MiniTES @ Jul 25 2005, 03:46 PM)
The cost of anything from a contractor isn't in hardware; it's people multiplied by time. Compared to labor costs the hardware itself is virtually negligible.
*


Very true. There is even a school of thought that highly secret black programs give the best value for money. Reason: It's such a pain in the neck to get security-clearances that you use only the people you absolutely must have.
There is certainly a number of projects that seem to confirm this theory (U2, SR71, Corona, F117....). Consider what e g SR71 would have cost and how long it would have taken to procure using ordinary DoD (or NASA) procedures. smile.gif

tty

Posted by: dvandorn Jul 25 2005, 08:00 PM

I disagree with the postulate that the ISS is entirely useless.

ISS is not all that useful (especially in its present configuration) for scientific research. Most of the research that can be done on the ISS can be done better and more cheaply on science STS flights such as Columbia's last flight. Or on unmanned satellites.

But, in my humble opinion, the ISS is absolutely required *experience* for anyone who wants to travel beyond the Earth/Moon system and out into the greater solar system.

ISS is a learning laboratory on how to mount multi-year missions. Once you have figured out how to keep a crew alive and well on the ISS for a good fraction of a year, you've figured out how to send people to other planets on trips that will last from months to years.

NASA engineers had a belief about the Russian space station program -- that the Russians used crude and unreliable technology that constantly exposed their crews to needless danger. That the Russian stations broke down because Russian engineering was inherently inferior to American engineering.

ISS is proving the NASA engineers wrong -- equipment breaks down, be it in space or on the ground. Even bulkheads and other structural elements that are given a full reliability factor of 1.0 (never, ever expected to fail) can indeed fail given extraordinary circumstances.

The Russians found this out early on, and developed systems that can be serviced on-orbit. They even came up with techniques for servicing equipment that was never meant to be serviced. But us Americans, we wouldn't allow ourselves to learn those lessons, because it was *easier* to believe that the Russians were simply semi-competent entrants into the space game.

It is my belief that if the U.S. had decided to mount a manned Mars expedition without going through the learning curve of operating an ISS-style station for several years, the expedition would end in abort at best, and loss of vehicle and crew at worst. That this would have been inherent in the engineering mindset that believed you can design and build each and every system on such a complex spacecraft with *no* potential for disastrous failure.

Granted, such a station doesn't serve many other purposes beyond teaching us how to keep people alive and well, and keeping their spacecraft working properly, over months and years of flight time. Which is why the ISS *seems* to be such a waste. But unless we want to give up on the idea of manned solar system exploration, we *have* to gain this kind of experience before we can move on.

So, give the ISS a break. Everyone needs to spend some time in grade school before we can think about graduating into high school, much less attending university...

-the other Doug

Posted by: dvandorn Jul 25 2005, 08:12 PM

Oh, and for mini-TES' question -- Bruce was referring to a comment made by President Dwight Eisenhower late in his term. He gave a speech in which he sounded a warning against simply giving what he called the "military-industrial complex" everything it wanted simply because it wanted it. He pointed out that the large aerospace companies (they were mostly just airplane manufacturers back then), and all the companies that built tanks and guns and ships, had a very narrow world-view that *required* you to believe you were going to fight one major war and several smaller skirmishes every generation. That belief was their reason for existence, so they believed it very strongly.

They still do.

-the other Doug

Posted by: Mark6 Jul 25 2005, 08:56 PM

QUOTE (dvandorn @ Jul 25 2005, 08:00 PM)
But, in my humble opinion, the ISS is absolutely required *experience* for anyone who wants to travel beyond the Earth/Moon system and out into the greater solar system.

ISS is a learning laboratory on how to mount multi-year missions.  Once you have figured out how to keep a crew alive and well on the ISS for a good fraction of a year, you've figured out how to send people to other planets on trips that will last from months to years.

NASA engineers had a belief about the Russian space station program -- that the Russians used crude and unreliable technology that constantly exposed their crews to needless danger.  That the Russian stations broke down because Russian engineering was inherently inferior to American engineering.

ISS is proving the NASA engineers wrong -- equipment breaks down, be it in space or on the ground.  Even bulkheads and other structural elements that are given a full reliability factor of 1.0 (never, ever expected to fail) can indeed fail given extraordinary circumstances.

The Russians found this out early on, and developed systems that can be serviced on-orbit.  They even came up with techniques for servicing equipment that was never meant to be serviced.  But us Americans, we wouldn't allow ourselves to learn those lessons, because it was *easier* to believe that the Russians were simply semi-competent entrants into the space game.

It is my belief that if the U.S. had decided to mount a manned Mars expedition without going through the learning curve of operating an ISS-style station for several years, the expedition would end in abort at best, and loss of vehicle and crew at worst.  That this would have been inherent in the engineering mindset that believed you can design and build each and every system on such a complex spacecraft with *no* potential for disastrous failure.

Sorry, but that is not a good argument for ISS. What you presented is a good argument against arrogance and "Not Invented Here" syndrome. In other words, spending umpteen billion dollars on ISS is necessary, but only because NASA was too arrogant to learn from the Russians.

Posted by: djellison Jul 25 2005, 10:53 PM

QUOTE (Mark6 @ Jul 25 2005, 08:56 PM)
Sorry, but that is not a good argument for ISS. What you presented is a good argument against arrogance and "Not Invented Here" syndrome. In other words, spending umpteen billion dollars on ISS is necessary, but only because NASA was too arrogant to learn from the Russians.
*


Someone else who's read 'Star Cross Orbits'. smile.gif Excellent read.

Doug

Posted by: MiniTES Jul 26 2005, 12:09 AM

QUOTE (dvandorn @ Jul 25 2005, 08:12 PM)
Oh, and for mini-TES' question -- Bruce was referring to a comment made by President Dwight Eisenhower late in his term.  He gave a speech in which he sounded a warning against simply giving what he called the "military-industrial complex" everything it wanted simply because it wanted it.  He pointed out that the large aerospace companies (they were mostly just airplane manufacturers back then), and all the companies that built tanks and guns and ships, had a very narrow world-view that *required* you to believe you were going to fight one major war and several smaller skirmishes every generation.  That belief was their reason for existence, so they believed it very strongly.
*


I understand what the complex is - I was asking what Bruce meant by saying "both the White House and Congress -- isn't even seriously pretending anymore that the manned space program has any real justification other than continuing to feed the Aerospace/Industrial Complex," whether someone in the White House or Congress had said something to the effect of "science is secondary".

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Jul 26 2005, 02:33 AM

In reply:

(1) I find that $55 billion price tag for Mars Direct about as plausible as the original $8 billion price tag for ISS, and for much the same reason. I take for granted that the cost on this thing will rapidly explode once it actually gets underway -- and the staggering size and complexity needed even for a 6-man ship according to the latest studies backs me up. See the documents from the first two Mars Strategic Roadmap meetings:
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/apio/ppt/mars/human_studies.ppt

(2) Even assuming that you can get support for manned Mars landing expeditions that would ONLY look for fossils and restrain themselves from poking into any sort of environment that might conceivably contain extant Martian life -- which is extremely doubtful -- the dangers of their accidentally contaminating such an extant biosphere would be huge. And just how likely is it in any case that we can get support for such a hugely expensive manned fossil hunt UNLESS we already have strong evidence for Martian fossils from robot explorers?

Moreover, by an overwhelming margin, the most valuable fossil evidence we're likely to find on Mars is not of the shape of Martian microbes -- microbes, for elementary physical/chemical reasons, are likely to have the same shapes on any world -- but of their biochemistry. It's the variations in that, compared with Earth germs, that will make extraterrestrial life interesting -- and, given the great difficulties in interpreting whether apparent fossilized microbes even on Earth are really biological or are just copycat nonliving mineral formations, such preserved biochemical evidence may very well be necessary even to determine that any possible martian fossils really ARE fossils. But it is also precisely this kind of delicate, trace organic-chemical fossil evidence that will be disastrously contaminated at the landing site of any manned Mars lander.

(One point made clear in the testimony of NASA officials at the first Mars Roadmap meeting is that any manned Mars landing expeditions will be radically different in overall concept from our Apollo visions of spacesuited explorers tromping around the landscape. 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 presurized 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.)

(3) As an Earth-orbital training ground for manned deep space ships, the ISS is absolutely ludicrous. It must be constantly resupplied; it will be very hard to build any closed-cycle, self-reliant (and leakproof) life-support system into it -- and in any case any such systems (absolutely crucial for manned deep space ships) can be tested on the ground, BETTTER, for literally about 0.1% of the cost of testing them on the ISS.

Indeed, the only aspect of manned deep-space flight for which any kind of Earth-orbital facility might be useful is to determine the effectiveness of various levels of artificial gravity in fending off the harmful effects of 0-G. But the ISS can never be equipped with artificial gravity -- unless you count the Centrifuge Module that Japan is building for it, which npw seems very likely to get kicked completely off the ISS due to NASA's funding oroblems, and whose usefulness in understanding the effects of low-G on humans themselves is extremely limited anyway. By far the best way to test that is simply to put a simulated manned-deep space ship cabin, spun up to provide some level of artificial gravity, into Earth orbit and simply put a crew on that.

(4) I didn't mean to say that NASA is actually officially saying that "science is unimportant in manned spaceflight" -- although I was at one meeting at NASA's 2004 Astrobiology Conference at Ames Research Center, at which a group of scientists hd been ordered to come up with (so help me God)strong "astrobiological" justifications for manned LUNAR exploration. Sean O'Keefe informed them threateningly in a message that the Great Leader was determined to fly a manned lunar program in any case -- and that, if the scientific community didn't get with the program and start coming up with official scientific justifications for it, the Great Leader would order it flown WITHOUT any science onboard. (Since, by now, the Bush Administration's ability to threaten people was already on a rapid downhill slide, the scientists literally jeered this announcement.)

But what I was really saying is simply that the "scientific" and "commercial" justifications being put forward by both the White House and Congress for NASA's manned program are at this point so ridiculously lame, pathetic and transparent that it's clear that not even they really expect anyone to believe them -- they're just going through the motions of a standard political Kabuki Play as the obligatory (if transparent) fig leaf for a pure pork program. Certainly this is entirely the case with Shuttle/Station,; the arguments for a return to the Moon are just as ridiculous when looked at, and not even Bush dares to push something as expensive as a manned Mars expedition on us at this point.

(5) Regarding a manned Moon program as an expensive blind alley when it comes to sending men to Mars: the Mars Roadmap group came close to a rebellion on the third day of its first meeting for precisely this reason. O'Keefe showed up in person at the start of the first day (I was there) and blew threateningly through his mustache that they were under no circumstances to actually question the advisibility of any part of the Great Leader's manned program; theirs was but to suggest the best way to carry it out. But since it was plain to everyone that a manned lunar program is probbly just a very expensive side distraction from a manned Mars program, the Committee (led, in the rebellion, by Tom Young and Sally Ride) nevertheless on the third day came close to issuing a statement to that effect -- and I wrote it up in my SpaceDaily piece on the meeting. Unfortunately, by the time the Committee actually isssued its preliminary Roadmap, enough additional arms had been twisted that they just ended up sticking in a brief, bland statement that the manned lunar program might provide useful experience for a manned Mars program, without going into any significant detail as to what such experience might be: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/apio/pdf/mars/mars_roadmap.pdf (pg. 29-30). Every one of the five listed areas in which manned lunar exploration might be useful in acquiring experience for manned Mars expeditions could probably be achieved much more cheaply in other ways.

And that is also the conclusion reached by the IAA's carefully thought-out, incremental 2004 plan for manned deep space flight ( http://www.iaanet.org/p_papers/exploringspace.pdf ) -- in which the movement is toward manned deep-space expeditions over longer and longer distances (first the Earth-Sun L-2 point, then near-Earth asteroids, and finally Mars), and it specified that a manned lunar base, while quite possible to incorporate into the program, is actually a side branch whose relevance to manned Mars mission planning is seriously doubtful. (Pg. 56, 63 and 69.) The Roadmap Committee was very interested in this report and indeed incorporated it into their background briefing material.

Posted by: dvandorn Jul 26 2005, 06:34 AM

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... biggrin.gif

-the other Doug

Posted by: dvandorn Jul 26 2005, 06:55 AM

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

Posted by: slinted Jul 26 2005, 09:41 AM

QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Jul 25 2005, 06:33 PM)
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.

Posted by: Roly Aug 13 2005, 03:52 AM

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

Posted by: dvandorn Aug 13 2005, 07:35 AM

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

Posted by: SigurRosFan Apr 20 2006, 10:17 AM

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

- http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=20324

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 ... >>

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Apr 20 2006, 10:57 AM

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?)

Posted by: Analyst Apr 20 2006, 11:37 AM

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

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Apr 20 2006, 12:15 PM

The nature of the 2016 mission is now hotly debated. (See the November MEPAG report: http://mepag.jpl.nasa.gov/reports/Mars_Progam_Plan_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.

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Apr 20 2006, 12:33 PM

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.

Posted by: Spacely Apr 20 2006, 04:18 PM

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.)

Posted by: Mariner9 Apr 20 2006, 05:12 PM

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.

Posted by: Spacely Apr 20 2006, 06:58 PM

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.

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Apr 20 2006, 08:26 PM

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.

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Apr 21 2006, 07:02 AM

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.)

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Apr 24 2006, 02:15 AM

I've been looking more into how good various techniques may be for measuring near-surface Martian winds, and I've managed to dredge up a few interesting items:

(1) While MRO's original SDT report said that a microwve limb sounder couldn't measure winds below 40 km, the French MAMBO limb sounder that they had planned to install on their Netlander-carrying Mars orbiter would supposedly have been able to do so -- with the sensitivity required by MEPAG -- down to only 20 km: http://www.lmd.jussieu.fr/Planeto/mambo.pdf

(2) The Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite had a Fabry-Perot interferometer for the purpose (the "High Resolution Doppler Imager") that could supposedly measure winds down to only 10-15 km by comparing Doppler shift in the emission lines of O2 -- which is down to depths well below the surface air pressure of Mars:
http://hrdi.engin.umich.edu/publications/pdf/getpdfmeetingpaper.pdf
http://www.earth.nasa.gov/history/uars/uars1.html

The first of those documents, written in 1993, says that at that time "The algorithms for the stratospheric inversions are still under the final stages of development. However, they are at a level sufficient to resolve the gross characteristics of the stratospheric wind field as illustrated in Fig. 11. This shows the wind field on September 7, 1992 at 30 km." I haven't been able to find out how much the UARS wind measurements from this instgrument have been improved by further analysis since then (it stopped working in 1995).

(3) Regarding Doppler wind lidar: this instrument is very complex and heavy if it is to be used to try to measure wind speeds well down in earth's bulky atmosphere (it will probably need a 30-cm telescope, among other things). But a June 2005 paper ( http://esto.nasa.gov/conferences/estc2005/Presentations/B7P1.pdf ), which mentions current development work on a Mars wind lidar (pg. 27-37), says that "Wind measurements are easier on Mars than Earth. A relatively modest lidar would do the job on Mars [due to] lower orbit height [and] more aerosols/dust."

In short, it appears that there are one or two additional approaches which could make surface wind measurements feasible from the MSTO even if its microwave limb sounder proves inadequate for the purpose.

Posted by: nprev Feb 13 2007, 04:26 AM

Sorry to ressurrect a truly ancient thread, but can anyone point me to some public-source data on MTO's now-defunct lasercomm payload? Interested in the freq, power, modulation/encoding protocols, etc. Thanks!

Posted by: monitorlizard Feb 28 2007, 07:06 PM

nprev, this is an abstract in its entirety from SPIE publication "Free-Space Laser Communications Technologies XVIII", published Feb. 2006:

MARS LASER COMMUNICATION DEMONSTRATION: WHAT IT WOULD HAVE BEEN

The Mars Laser Communications Demonstration Project completed a preliminary system design for sending data at 1-30MBPS from a spacecraft orbiting Mars. The flight transceiver diameter was 30.6 cm, transmitting 5 W average laser power at 1064 nm and using 32- and 64-ary pulse position modulation (PPM). A ground network comprised of two receive terminals (5-m and 1.6-m effective diameter) and two transmit terminals for sending 1076 nm lasers would have been used to communicate with the transceiver.

This is the experiment that would have been on the 2009 MTO spacecraft. BTW, the abstract is free, but the technical paper would cost $18 - $20.

Posted by: nprev Mar 1 2007, 04:33 AM

Exactly what I needed...thanks, Monitor! smile.gif

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