[X] My Assistant

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

...that is, the Nov. 2-4 meeting of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Lunar and Planetary Exploration which advises NASA on mission selection, to do a print article on it for "Astronomy" magazine.

The meeting's agenda is at http://www4.nas.edu/webcr.nsf/MeetingDispl...-D?OpenDocument ; it looks extremely interesting. Anyone have anything they'd especially like me to ask about while I'm there?

[djellison]

Hi MC, I appreciate your comments, and it's good to know that the Des movie is something that WONT go, BUT....

End of the day, MSL will return less data to earth because of the loss of MTO, or to put it another way, the potential to return more data is not there, and a price will be paid for all MSL data in the loss of potential MRO data.

Once could draw a comparison between MSL with MTO+MRO and MER with MODY+MGS, MGS was dropped from the MER relay for reasons that havnt been publicly explained, but there's two I can see. 1) Not as efficient or productive as MODY, and 2) MOC science is more valuable given the MGS downlink rates.

The question is - what potential data will go and what impact will it have.

I agree - MTO was looking very very expensive, and there's a case to be made for dropping it to plough the funds elsewhere, but if there's no impact from it's cancellation, then why was it planned in the first place MTO was too much, too early. I think an Odyssey+ platform, i.e. Odyssey's infrastructure, but larger arrays, more powerfull transmitter, and you could have something that would be very valuable in a medium altitude orbit. The limiting factor that I can see in the current on-orbit comms infrastructure is the short duration of each UHF pass.

Doug