[X] My Assistant

[Cugel]

http://www.space.com/news/060706_mars_report.html

quote:

The review group also flagged “the extraordinary resilience” of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers still at work on the red planet. Success of that Mars machinery “strongly suggests that a prudent, risk-reduction strategy is to use their design as a basis for the proposed Mid Rovers,” the committee stated.

RIGHT!
Would you believe it. We're going to do it all over again!

[djellison]

I can see where you are coming from.

Science Comittee's should outline the priority science, the order of how they'd like things to be investigated.

Engineers should then examine that, and propose a series of missions to do those investigations

Then politicians given them 10th as much money as any of it needs.

BUT - Are the engineers going to be guilty of designing the things they WANT to design instead of the 'best' (be that quickest, cheapest or whatever ) way to go and do those investigations. That's the ever-present tensions - engineers and scientists, questions and answers, ying and yang blah blah blah

I think MER has produced an orgy or people wanting to reuse the platform, but even Squyres admits that it's not ideal. There's a certain fondness for the platform, a belief that because two of them have worked, that if you sent two more you would get another 2 x 800+ sols of exploration.

I think two of everything makes sense, historically it's made sense as well. Viking, Voyager, Mariner, Viking, MER. I'm dissapointed that NH2 was not selected, and I'd have thought that an MSL2 would have made quite a lot of sense as well....but as ever, the money just isn't there.

There are situation when many copies of a vehicle make sense. Comms sats, weather sats, and obviously something like a netlander mission would justify many copies of the same probe...ditto impactors etc.

But more MER's, 5,6 years after they started building the first two, wouldn't make as much sense as say, investing the same cash in doing 2 MSL's.

The current problem I guess is that we have a load of questions, but don't really know where to go to get the answers.

Doug