Mars Rover Spirit Unearths Surprise Evidence of Wetter Past Options

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

Mars Rover Spirit Unearths Surprise Evidence of Wetter Past
NASA/JPL
May 21, 2007

[djellison]

Multiple MER's is a subject that's been done to death here and elsewhere. The bottom line is that while MER has been fantastic, the number of sites you can land with this system is very very small and very very limited and it's a highly inefficient way of getting a very small payload onto the ground. Because of that, MER's heritage should be in systems, not the entire vehicle.

If MSL works - you've got many orders of magnitude more Mars that can be accessed, and then it does make some sense to think about reusing MSL or indeed just its decent stage to deliver payloads.

Doug

[Stephen]

If MSL works - you've got many orders of magnitude more Mars that can be accessed, and then it does make some sense to think about reusing MSL or indeed just its decent stage to deliver payloads.

True. But wouldn't an MSL also be a lot more expensive than an MER? With NASA already paring science and unmanned missions back to the bone in pursuit of the VSE it may not have the money to choose the Rolls-Royce of rovers over the Ford econovan version. Especially if scientists wanted to send more than one at the same time.

(In that context I notice that MEPAG in this document:

http://mepag.jpl.nasa.gov/reports/3715_Mar...l_Strat_GPO.pdf

tentatively advocates (for the 2016 opportunity) either "two MER-derived rovers" it terms "mid rovers" but only a single MSL-derived Astrobiology Field Rover.)

I also seem to remember the US currently have a plutonium shortage. Until that is addressed there will doubtless be a limit on how many MSL-style rovers can be despatched unless they were solar powered; and wouldn't a solar-powered MSL suffer from some of the same restrictions the solar-powered MERs have to put up with?

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Stephen