"thor" Mars Mission To Seek Underground Water |
"thor" Mars Mission To Seek Underground Water |
Jan 26 2006, 03:46 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 1636 Joined: 9-May 05 From: Lima, Peru Member No.: 385 |
A new, low-cost mission concept to Mars would slam a projectile into the planet's surface in an attempt to look for subsurface water ice.
"I'm interested in exploring mid-latitude areas of Mars that look like they're made of snow and ice," Phil Christensen, the project's principal investigator, told SpaceDaily.com. Christensen, of Arizona State University, and colleagues at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, are proposing a mission called THOR – for Tracing Habitability, Organics and Resources – as part of NASA's Mars Scout program. Like last year's Deep Impact mission to comet Tempel 1, THOR aims to ram a projectile at high speed into the surface of Mars while a host spacecraft remains in orbit and observes the impact and its aftermath. If approved by NASA, the mission would launch in 2011. That mission would be after MSL's mission. Now it is still a proposal It would cost around US$ 450 millions More details: http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/THOR_Mar...ound_Water.html Rodolfo |
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Jan 30 2006, 08:02 PM
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Founder Group: Chairman Posts: 14432 Joined: 8-February 04 Member No.: 1 |
Martian penetrators I can understand, a couple of hundred MPH impact - but places without an atmosphere? How do you go about bring the thing to a sensible impact?
Doug |
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Jan 30 2006, 09:20 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2488 Joined: 17-April 05 From: Glasgow, Scotland, UK Member No.: 239 |
QUOTE (djellison @ Jan 30 2006, 09:02 PM) Martian penetrators I can understand, a couple of hundred MPH impact - but places without an atmosphere? How do you go about bring the thing to a sensible impact? Doug I think you could do something with a suitable sacrificial leading edge on a penetrator, intended to vapourise on impact and act as a shaped charge clearing the way for the main body (like a bunker-buster bomb). As for standing up to the forces involved in a large deceleration, well think of the Project HARP payloads developed by the not-so-lamented in certain quarters Gerald Bull - these didn't need to stand an instantaneous acceleration (whatever that might be) but instead one that took place over a number of microseconds, and manifestly they worked just fine. So, if artillery-launched payloads survive going up, then there's no reason for the opposite not to be possible. You'd probably be talking about a spinning high speed rod, much like Jerry Pournelle's 'Thor' kinetic blasters, but optimised for slowing down rather than just going bang. Bob Shaw -------------------- Remember: Time Flies like the wind - but Fruit Flies like bananas!
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