[X] My Assistant

[Phil Stooke]

LPSC is coming up in mid-March. I just submitted my abstract - and I'm a coauthor on another one which should go in shortly.

Is anyone else from UMSF going ?

Phil

[edstrick]

..." But I'm starting to believe, reluctantly, that after MSL and MRO we won't be able to do an awful lot more with rovers and orbiters. "...

Actually, we can. But a lot of the best science will be from repeating things we've already done, but much better. It took elegant cheap image design to get ANY imaging system on Mars Observer, which reflew as MGS's Mars Orbiter Camera 2. The prevailing feeling in the late 80's was "We've imaged Mars. Enough Already".

Boggle at HiRise images and repeat "We've already imaged Mars".... and giggle.

MGS gave us a first look at global magnetic field residuals. We're accumulating global gravity maps from standard spacecraft tracking. Not good enough. We need a "Grace" type mission with dual spacecraft in low polar orbit, as low as possible, possibly with drag compensating systems and a generous 1-year supply of fuel. We NEED to get really high resolution and high signal-to-noise gravity (and magnetometry .... should be flown on the same mission) data for the entire planet.

Oddyssey's gotten global elemental abundance maps with it's gamma spectrometer. We probably need to fly an array of gamma spectrometers to Mars on a dedicated mission to remap global elemental abundances. Large, collimated detectors in a 10 x 10 gamma detector array and getting data from low orbit could provide a follow-on map with perhaps 20 times the resolution of Mars Odyssey's data, permitting real geology with it. Current resolution of most elemental abundance maps is sub-useful. It'd be like going from the COBE maps of the microwave glow to the WMap images... soon (we hope) to be followed by Planck images.

We need to fly dedicated multi-wavelength-multi-polarization side-looking radar...

The list goes on...

But the things we can learn from missions like these cover one type of research modality per mission, with a 10x 100x or 1000x improvement in what you can learn from that sort of data.

Returned samples, 0.1 cc samples of different "soils", similiar sized chips from a diverse collection of sedimentary rocks of various ages, samples of heavily weathered friable igneous rocks...

We'll learn 1,000,000 times more than we know now about the history of the martian environment, rock weathering, soil formation, salt transport and depositions.... all the things we can't learn from the hard, tenaceouis IMPACT-SURVIVING meteorites from Mars we now have.

We're almost certainly in a "barely have a clue" stage with a lot of this understandling. We "didn't have a clue" about the real nature of the lunar regolith from the Surveyors and Luna landers. We just didn't understand that impact gardening of regolith led to formation of "agglutinates"... glass spatters gluing together rock and mineral grains, with mature regoliths ending up with a "steady state" particle size distribution, agglutinates building up as fast as they were destroyed, forming the bulk of the soil. They tried to estimate soil particle size distribution from Surveyor images. They were way off.

I think we're at the same point with martian soils, particularly regarding chemistry. Phoenix's wet lab tests will help greatly, but we just plain NEED sample return.

I'll stop this rambling rant here.. but I think I've made my points. 1.) We can do a lot more from orbit and with rovers. 2.) One GOOD sample return mission will give us 1000+ times the science (and it will be essentially NEW science) for the money.

[Stu]

I'll stop this rambling rant here.. but I think I've made my points. 1.) We can do a lot more from orbit and with rovers. 2.) One GOOD sample return mission will give us 1000+ times the science (and it will be essentially NEW science) for the money.

All excellent points, too The point I was trying to make was that we could do a lot more from orbit and with rovers IF the budget continued to grow and we were able to throw money at Mars wothout constraint. But it clearly won't, and we clearly can't. No missions to meet your rerquirements are being talked about realistically, especially not a sample return mission. At this point they're too expensive. I'd hate to see us just sending budget missions to Mars every launch window just for the sake of it; I'd rather see us "save up" and send something significant that would answer some Big Questions. A sample mission is what we all want, yup, it's surely the Holy Grail of Mars missions at the moment...but it seems so far in the future that we'll need to jump in Marty McFly's Delorean to see it...

And Climber: I'm just, I think, being realistic, sadly, if only because of the politics. Not a subject to discuss in depth here, I know, but politically no-one is interested, are they? And there will, inevitably, be delays and disappointments, trials and tragedies once Ares and Orion start flying, which will push back the date of the first manned Mars expedition further. So, unless something happens to trigger another "Space Race", this time to Mars, I think we're looking at 2040 for a footprint on Mars. I'll be 75. Now, I don't know about you, but I want to watch that historic event when I'm still able to appreciate it, in the company of others who do too; not fighting for the remote in a care home while others want to watch re-runs of TERMINATOR 9 or ROCKY 15 on the Classic Movies channel...