"thor" Mars Mission To Seek Underground Water Options

[RNeuhaus]

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

[edstrick]

Note that the Viking seismometer <VL-2> did not take seismic data continually, and only a fraction of the data returned was high-rate waveform data. High-rate data ate communication's bandwith to Earth, so they had a compressed mode, where they just measured the average signal amplitude and the number of "zero-crossings" the wave did during some short time interval. An even more compressed mode, I think, just measured average signal over some interval like a minute or more.

They took their highest quality data during low-wind night time periods and accumulated a fair amount of data. The conclusion was that the lander may have detected a signal similar to a terrestrial Richter 5'ish quake some couple hundred kilometers away, but they didn't have simultaneous meteorology data to prove that event wasn't an unusual quiet-period wind-gust. The lander thus was in an area with a seismicity similar to or less than a typical intra-plate area on Earth. No big surprise.

Since Viking, "network science" including seismic network, has always been a priority at Mars. The problem is that it has always been SECOND priority, so everything else flies and the geophysicists are left holding the bouquet. Pathfinder was the engineering proof-of-technology vehicle for a set of network landers, which had already been abandoned by the time the prototype flew... and so on...