[X] My Assistant

[karolp]

I am having difficulty finding decent comparison data, especially for the planned ExoMars's Pasteur rover as well as the planned MSL and ancient L's. I keep wondering: if we put them all at Oppy's current position, which one would be the first to reach Victoria's rim? I guess one should take into consideration not only the average speed (which I have never seen presented in a nice table for comparison) but also maneuverability and modes of navigation...

[dvandorn]

In re the drive-to concept:

The thing that bothers me is that, as I understand it, MSL's more sophisticated sensors will require dirt and rock samples to be ingested into the sensor, and that there will be a very limited number of processing cycles on these devices. Something like between 12 and 45 separate analyses, and after that, the device is inert and can never produce any further data.

If we had sensors like this on Spirit, what are the odds that your most important devices would be used up and no longer available by the time Spirit reached the Hills, thereby reducing the real interesting science quite a bit? As it is, Spirit's RAT was used up mostly on hard lava chunks out on the plains -- so, in a sense, we did run across this issue on the MER missions.

If you decide to wait to use your instruments until you reach your target location, there is the issue of landing a good, working scientific payload on Mars and willfully refusing to use it for a few months, while you drive to your "interesting" location -- all the while betting that nothing bad will happen to your rover on the way... and also betting that you don't run across an invaluable find en route, that you pass up because you're hoarding your processing cycles for after you reach Location X.

NASA probes to other planets have been designed to acquire enough data to declare "mission success" within the lifetime of the shortest-lived components on the spacecraft. Only after that is accomplished do they plan for delayed science vs. travel and/or engineering evaluations.

Whatever they do with MSL, I cannot imagine that they will design the mission to have to rely on 100+ sols of roving before the main science investigations can begin -- not with all the ways Mars can potentially kill a rover.

-the other Doug