[X] My Assistant

[karolp]

I was just thinking: if we buy an expensive car, we do not use it to drive to one destination and then throw it away. Also, car companies do not develop a brand new car for each new customer. I guess a large portion of the cost involved in each mission (and hence a limiting factor to the number of missions we are able to send there) is not launch or the materials but actually developing the spacecraft itself. We have already started recycling - Stardust and Deep Impact are bound to new destinations and meanwhile ESA sent identical spacecraft to Venus and Mars (MEX and Venus Express). What if instead of dumping scarce funds into starting from scratch each time, we actually reused designs and developed derivatives? Consider the following possibilities:

- sending 2 more MERs to other destinations on Mars, carefully selected based on MRO photos (which did not exist yet when Oppy and Spirit arrived), possibly outfitted with new instruments and protective mechanisms based on what we learnt using the first two :-)
- sending a MER or a Sojourner to Phobos
- adapting the MER design for lunar rover missions
- using existing Mars spacecraft designs for Mars sample return mission

What do you think?

[djellison]

Sending lots of MER's doesn't make a lot of sense. THey have a tiny, comparatively, payload and a VERY tough limitation on Landing Sites. I've seen people saying they should be stacking 3 of them together, launching them on Atlas V's etc. I doubt you could find 6 safe, scientifically interesting place to land an MER on Mars.

And VEX was not identical to MEX by a LONG way. Different solar panels, different comms, different MLI, different instruments. It was identical at two levels - the structure and the boxes inside. Mike Caplinger has often said, very wisely, on UMSF that heritage works well at the 'box' level. As an example, flying copies of Pancam would clearly be good, ditto the UHF comms on MER, or the batterys on MER. But as a complete system, MER is totally wrong for Phobos or the Moon.

Doug