Phoenix Site Options

[djellison]

Is there any chance Phoenix will be able to 'hop,' as Surveyor 6 did?

Once it's on the ground, any remaining fuel would quickly freeze. From a systems point of view I'm not sure a hop is even possible, there are things you'd want to have bolted back down to the deck when you do it - and cant be 're-stowed' so would likely be broken under the force more engine activity ( met boom, SSI mast etc )


Doug

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

I've been told flatly by Peter Smith: can't be done.

[tedstryk]

Again I will say, lets be honest. We are image junkies, and image junkies prefer rovers to stationary landers. Worse, with MSL likely slipping to 2011, once Spirit and Opportunity die, we will have an addiction we are no longer able to feed, so a 2007 Mars rover would be nice. So would a longer-lived vehicle. But with the opportunity to get the science we will be getting out of this mission at a relatively low cost, given the already-spent money, I think that this mission will be a great one. And, as has been said by myself and others, there will be imaging consolations (the microscope, the new kind of terrain - and I wonder if we will see deposition of frost a la Viking 2 before Phoenix dies).

[gpurcell]

I agree..but I also think we're going to find it very bittersweet when we can't look over that rise 15 meters away....

[Decepticon]

Can phoenix be put into Hibernation during the winter?

[Gsnorgathon]

I dunno if there will be a rise 15 meters away, or 15 kilometers away. The MOC images of the region around -120W 70N make the place look even more featureless (less featureful?) than Meridiani. Of course, the precise coordinates haven't been set yet, so maybe they'll pick some place that's chock full of tormenting vistas...

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

It can't be put into hiberation any more than simply shutting it down (except for the command receiver) over the winter and praying that the batteries don't freeze -- which they probably will. They will, of course, try to contact it again come spring, but th odds are very much against success. Keep in mind that the only additional data they'll be getting from it after its first 2 months on the surface is meteorological (including visual observations of the skies and frost).

[paxdan]

Again I will say, lets be honest.  We are image junkies, and image junkies prefer rovers to stationary landers.

yeah true, but then the imagery is all we are given to play with... i wonder how many of us would become mini-tes, mossbauer, APXS, thermal, insolation, every measurement made on mars junkies with access to the full data stream from the MERs. someone commented recently about how imagery is regarded as the poor relative of the remote sensing 'real science' being done, and sure, people strive for decades sometimes to get 'their' instrument in orbit/on the surface, careers are made on the results, but why on earth (or mars) isn't the rest of the data available? (even in a degraded form like the raw imagery).

so what if only a handful of people have the inclination, knowledge or skill to process it, surely this information should be available to the amatuer community in order that it can be shared by those who can to those who want to know.

Doug, if i had my one question to ask steve it would be parsed from the above. Given the interest in the missions, why isn't more raw data made available?



edited to include link to thread i referred to

This post has been edited by paxdan: Aug 26 2005, 10:54 PM

[Bob Shaw]

Imagine if Phoenix had set down where Opportunity landed, in the only crater for miles, with an outcrop a metre beyond the reach of the sample arm...

...Viking 3 style limited mobility would save the day. Or Marie Curie...

[helvick]

...but why on earth (or mars) isn't the rest of the data available? (even in a degraded form like the raw imagery).

so what if only a handful of people have the inclination, knowledge or skill to process it, surely this information should be available to the amatuer community in order that it can be shared by those who can to those who want to know.

As one of the few amateurs with enough interest in the engineering of the machines themselves to work on figuring out how well they are working I'd add to that a request for the engineering data too.

For the record I've just spent the last two weeks building a reasonable insolation model based on badly scanned pdf's served up by the Nasa Technical reports server - all of the data I have is in poor quality scans from appendices in typed reports from the 90's. I'd have a field day with some real raw engineering data from the MER's but it 's very sparse.

To be fair NASA\JPL are light years ahead of everyone else and for that I am really grateful but it is worth pointing out that there is an outreach benefit there that is being lost.

[elakdawalla]

As one of the few amateurs with enough interest in the engineering of the machines themselves to work on figuring out how well they are working I'd add to that a request for the engineering data too. ...
To be fair  NASA\JPL are light years ahead of everyone else and for that I am really grateful but it is worth pointing out that there is an outreach benefit there that is being lost.

Unfortunately engineering data is one of those details that falls into the yawning chasm of "stuff you can't publish because it could benefit the terrorists," that is to say, it falls under ITAR. (International Trafficking in Arms Regulations.) ITAR is a terrible, awful drag on any attempt to do anything on any mission with anybody who is not a U.S. citizen, and it severely limits what technical information on missions can be published. I can't describe to you the absurdity and complexity that we had to go through in order to get permission for the teenage kids participating in the Red Rover Goes to Mars program to access the tiny amount of engineering data necessary to permit them to run the software to put the hour markings on the MarsDial images. In the end, it was only because the same data was being released to the folks working on Maestro that they were permitted the access. A couple of the foreign scientists who were working on the mission were initially told that THEY WOULD NOT BE ABLE TO TOUCH THE COMPUTERS at JPL because ITAR forbade it. Later, the absurdity of this position was at last overcome, but I think for some months they still were not given logins to the computers; they had to get an American to log in for them! To give them credit, everybody on the engineering and science teams on MER were doing everything they possibly could to help the foreign scientists, and our students as well. But those security people weren't having any of it.

Sigh.

Emily

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Bob, the really big qualitative difference between Phoenix and the MERs is that the latter were designed primarily to investigate ROCKS (for which you have to travel long distances horizontally), while Phoenix is designed to investigate SOIL -- which is far more evenly mixed in the horizontal dimension.

This was a major consideration in the design of Polar Lander. I have several 1995 documents from its science definition team during their consideration of its proper payload, which stated that its single most important goal was to look at the makeup of "evenly mixed substances" on Mars -- namely, the soil and the atmosphere -- for the clues they could provide on the very-long-term climate history of Mars over its entire global extent. Rocks were described as very minor scientifically for MPL. Phoenix has exactly the same traits, except that it will place more emphasis than MPL would have on the biological habitability of the near-surface ice layer.

By the way, the science groups determining the exploration strategy for Europa have also emphasized that the need for horizontal mobility on Europa is relatively trivial -- it's vertical mobility that is of overwhelming importance there. It will be a long time before we see any Europa rover.

[Bob Shaw]

Bob, the really big qualitative difference between Phoenix and the MERs is that the latter were designed primarily to investigate ROCKS (for which you have to travel long distances horizontally), while Phoenix is designed to investigate SOIL -- which is far more evenly mixed in the horizontal dimension. 

This was a major consideration in the design of Polar Lander.  I have several 1995 documents from its science definition team during their consideration of its proper payload, which stated that its single most important goal was to look at the makeup of "evenly mixed substances" on Mars -- namely, the soil and the atmosphere -- for the clues they could provide on the very-long-term climate history of Mars over its entire global extent.  Rocks were described as very minor scientifically for MPL.  Phoenix has exactly the same traits, except that it will place more emphasis than MPL would have on the biological habitability of the near-surface ice layer.

By the way, the science groups determining the exploration strategy for Europa have also emphasized that the need for horizontal mobility on Europa is relatively trivial -- it's vertical mobility that is of overwhelming importance there.  It will be a long time before we see any Europa rover.

Bruce:

I accept all that you say, but they *would * say that, wouldn't they? © Christine Keeler 1962.

It'd still be a tragedy if, after driving miles across Gusev (etc) we're defeated by inches when Phoenix lands.

As for Europa, the icy surface is of little interest compared to the depths, but even there some horizontal discretion could be the difference between boom and bust...

Bob Shaw

[gpurcell]

Bruce, I really wonder about that. I really think Phoenix, while a cool mission, will sudder from the MER comparison and cause a lot of people to sit back and say "No immobile missions anymore."

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Once again: the reason they're willing to fly Phoenix is that:

(1) It will be investigating something that is spread evenly across thousands of km of the surface, and is therefore just about impossible to miss (although, as I say, those more detailed radar ice maps will be important in firmly nailing down a final landing site). It's conceivable that they might manage to land in an isolated patch where the ice is too deeply buried to sample, but that risk is small and therefore worth running.

(2) It can be done CHEAPLY. As a way to investigate Meridiani (as was originally planned), Phoenix would have been a fiasco. As a way to investigate the precise chemical and physical nature of the near-surface ice layer -- in itself extremely important -- it's a cut-price bargain, since it utilizes an already-built craft. it is, in fact, hard to visualize any other way to properly utilize this craft. ("Urey" was relatively cost-ineffective because age-dating is required in several different places on the Martian surface, not just one.)