"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, 09:35 PM
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Founder Group: Chairman Posts: 14432 Joined: 8-February 04 Member No.: 1 |
Perhaps you would have to have some sort of small solid stage that takes the thing down to a much lower velocity at a few km altitude, and let it fall from there.
I wonder - would a Europa Impactor work at a Discovery budget ( unlikely I'd have thought ) or are we talking New Frontiers post-Juno ( with some small relay ability installed on Juno to handle it?) Doug |
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Jan 30 2006, 09:42 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, 10:35 PM) Perhaps you would have to have some sort of small solid stage that takes the thing down to a much lower velocity at a few km altitude, and let it fall from there. I wonder - would a Europa Impactor work at a Discovery budget ( unlikely I'd have thought ) or are we talking New Frontiers post-Juno ( with some small relay ability installed on Juno to handle it?) Doug Doug: Or a two stage penetrator, with a sacrificial leading module which blasts a hole and a solid motor deceleration stage which would pop the instrument module down the hole, perhaps with a heat shield which would ablate away against the hot gases produced by the leading module. It'd be like firing two bullets through the eye of a needle, but could be a very cheap way to organise some landings! Bob Shaw -------------------- Remember: Time Flies like the wind - but Fruit Flies like bananas!
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Jan 30 2006, 11:42 PM
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Dublin Correspondent Group: Admin Posts: 1799 Joined: 28-March 05 From: Celbridge, Ireland Member No.: 220 |
The news reports on this talk about a 250kg impactor making a 30m diameter crater.
Making use of the ever useful LPL "Computing Crater Size from Projectile Diameter" Calculator it seems that in order to create a crater on Mars with ~30m diameter crater using a 250kg copper impactor (0.38m diameter) it needs to hit the surface at around 2.5km/sec. However using the LPL Earth Impact Calculator I cannot get a simple copper sphere of that size to hit the ground - it vapourizes at any atmospheric speed over ~43km/sec which yields a terminal velocity of only 1.2km/sec. At any speed over that the impactor disintigrates. The Martian atmosphere is obviously different but I think that for the purposes of this exercise it is not that different where it matters (at the high altitude where it explodes). So it will obviously need to be shaped and shielded in some fashion in order to survive atmospheric entry. Does anyone know what the mars approach velocity is likely to be if it is going to be a 2 part craft with the other part being an orbiter? I suspect that in order to create a crater of this size we'd need 2 separate mission components, one component being a high velocity impactor and the second component the orbiter on a separate trajectory probably launched much earlier so it can avail of a standard Mars capture transfer orbit. |
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