MSL landing sites Options

[BrianL]

If MSL is now going to be partially dependent on solar power, does this not eliminate consideration of the landing sites well off the equator?

[mcaplinger]

If MSL is now going to be partially dependent on solar power, does this not eliminate consideration of the landing sites well off the equator?

The slides said only: "Rover power system design does not meet present mission requirements, requiring additional battery capacity, and possibly solar array".

I haven't heard any details about what solar options are under consideration and what constraints they might place on the mission. But it certainly hasn't been definitively decided to have solar arrays, and in my uninvolved engineering opinion, it seems pretty goofy to do so.

[nprev]

Skimmed the slides last night, and IIRC the main constraint driving the panel suggestion is the inability to operate a couple of the subsystems simultaneously? If that's correct, then an operational/procedural workaround would seem more practical (and less risky) than a major design change at this late stage.

[Phil Stooke]

Some news on the landing site front. A year ago a shortlist of four sites was chosen, but recognizing that newer data might identify better candidates the site selection team asked for new suggestions last summer. A new site would only be considered if it was at least as good as the four on the shortlist.

Seven new sites were suggested and two of them have been chosen for additional remote sensing to see how they stack up against the shortlist.

Details here:

http://marsoweb.nas.nasa.gov/landingsites/index.html

(PS look down that page - there's a section called 'from the public' hosting a few site visualizations... looks like an invitation to UMSF to add more!)

Phil

[PDP8E]

...more musings on a caffeine powered Sunday night (I should really do something about that)
I was over at the MSL Landing Site Workshop website for a few hours and ...boy.... PLEASE PICK GALE!

5km central mound that's traverse-able (that's Pikes Peak tall, 14,000 to 16,000 feet, depending where you are in the crater)
layers, sediments, most likely an ancient lake was there, and the mystery -- the mound itself. The top is higher than the crater walls. Good Luck MSL Steering Committee with your final choice next year!
Have there been any known recent active gullies spied at Gale?

[vjkane]

...more musings on a caffeine powered Sunday night (I should really do something about that)
I was over at the MSL Landing Site Workshop website for a few hours and ...boy.... PLEASE PICK GALE!

There, however, isn't a good model for how the clays and sulfides got into that peak. They could be thin layers that would be useless geologically.

Right now, the debate over the landing sites is between those where the geological story is clear and where the remote sensing says the interesting materials are.

Remember how we got skunked by Gusev Crater. Things turned out interesting, but what if the rover had landed to far away to reach those hills?

[tharrison]

...more musings on a caffeine powered Sunday night (I should really do something about that)
I was over at the MSL Landing Site Workshop website for a few hours and ...boy.... PLEASE PICK GALE!

5km central mound that's traverse-able (that's Pikes Peak tall, 14,000 to 16,000 feet, depending where you are in the crater)
layers, sediments, most likely an ancient lake was there, and the mystery -- the mound itself. The top is higher than the crater walls. Good Luck MSL Steering Committee with your final choice next year!
Have there been any known recent active gullies spied at Gale?

No, there are no active gullies in Gale—it's way outside the latitude range where gullies occur.

Any of the landing sites will tell us something interesting about Mars, but they are all very different and each have their different issues. Eberswalde is the easiest to sell to the general public because it's easy to understand—there's a delta there. Problem is the landing ellipse is very rugged, so the engineers aren't too keen on it. Mawrth has been built upon the mineralogy, but the geology of the area is incredibly complex and so it's hard to put the story together (I've been attending the MSL Landing Site Working Group telecons and Mawrth is so complex we needed more than one session to talk about it). It's the safest of the landing sites though, so it's high on the list. Holden is kind of one-note compared to the other sites, and it has some ruggedness issues like Eberswalde. Gale is definitely interesting, and even if MSL never made it to the mound, a panorama of the mound from the Mastcam would undoubtedly look amazing compared to the flat, bouldery landscapes we're used to seeing from other rover/lander missions. However, I don't think a beautiful panorama would be worth the >$2 billion price tag of MSL, so we have to take the fact that the landing ellipse is so far from the mound into account. The price tag should be (but won't, NASA HQ doesn't think like that) one of the big factors in picking a landing site—which site has enough to keep the rover occupied for 1 Mars year doing work worth the enormous price tag (which means no stopping to look at meteorites for weeks on end like Opportunity!).

[Stu]

(which means no stopping to look at meteorites for weeks on end like Opportunity!).

How VERY dare you!!!!

[Vultur]

Hoping for Holden or Eberswalde personally, for the fluvial features. But I'm sure they'd all be interesting.

[Phil Stooke]

Ok, this is off topic for MSL, though on topic for site selection... but it's not worth starting a new thread for. So I'll throw it in here.

This is a page of illustrations of potential landing sites for Mars Surveyor 2001, from the second landing site workshop just before it was cancelled. I'm posting it to celebrate (almost) finishing the first draft of my Mars atlas and my upcoming vacation.

The original plan for the mission was to carry a large rover similar to MER, and somewhere else I posted some proposed traverses for that. Then the rover was shrunk to Sojourner-class with a range of only about 1000 m, so most people didn't propose traverses. But there was one - from Nathan Bridges - which is included here. It's not a 'must-do' traverse, but a sample of what might be possible. Incidentally, trying to find that location was not simple. There are some serious flaws in the VIking image coordinates database, including its representation on the THEMIS Viking Image Map system. Sometimes the coordinates for late-mission high resolution frames are 2 or 3 degeees off.

And what about Tim Parker's 'Ibishead Peninsula'? That's no Ibis, that's a rabbit!

Phil

[PDP8E]

No, there are no active gullies in Gale—it's way outside the latitude range where gullies occur.
.....

Thank you Tanya for your professional perspective. It must be a excruciating decision as to where to plunk down a one-of-a-kind, $2 billion laboratory on Mars. The MSL EDL sequence is so bold, the instrument suite is fantastic, and the ground operations will test the limits of the teams. The careful deliberations of the steering committee will only increase that one small common thread with exploration, and that is serendipity ... the luck, the discovery, that seems to come out of nowhere. I wish the team all the best in deciding on a landing spot for MSL and to get those wheels down in one piece. We look forward to your insights during the whole MSL adventure.

[MahFL]

The trick of course is to have the intact wheels still attatched to a 100 % functioning rover .

[tharrison]

Thank you Tanya for your professional perspective. It must be a excruciating decision as to where to plunk down a one-of-a-kind, $2 billion laboratory on Mars. The MSL EDL sequence is so bold, the instrument suite is fantastic, and the ground operations will test the limits of the teams. The careful deliberations of the steering committee will only increase that one small common thread with exploration, and that is serendipity ... the luck, the discovery, that seems to come out of nowhere. I wish the team all the best in deciding on a landing spot for MSL and to get those wheels down in one piece. We look forward to your insights during the whole MSL adventure.

The problem is that NASA does things backwards—they design a rover, put out a call for instruments, and THEN select a landing site and figure out what to do there, whereas the landing site selection should come first and then a rover should be designed to fit the goals and needs of that particular site. Gale, Holden, and Eberswalde are hugely important locations on Mars, but the MSL EDL technology is such that it is going to require a lot of luck (and again I say, not stopping to look at meteorites ) to get to the areas of interest during the primary mission phase. Mawrth is the most likely candidate because it is not a go-to site and it's the least rugged of them all, so the engineers favor it. Even if the Landing Site Working Group were to tell NASA that a certain site was the best scientifically, HQ will still pick whatever they want. NASA doesn't always act in the best interest of science. Ultimately, Gale would be the ideal site because you've got a 5 km stack of sediments to explore, which would keep MSL busy for multiple extended missions. It would also tell us a lot about the greater history of Mars because it's only one of MANY examples of filled, buried, and partially exhumed craters on Mars (i.e. see all of Arabia Terra and northern Noachis).

[Guest_Oersted_*]

Thx so much Tanya for joining this community: great outreach! - Those considerations of yours are VERY interesting reading.

For the moment my ambitions are to get Curiosity down safe and sound, even if it were on the most boring parking lot of Mars!

[eoincampbell]

Will the landing site meeting on Sept 27-29, produce the final destination?