[X] My Assistant

[Doug M.]

Would it be fair to say that we're in the middle of a fairly conservative period with regard to spacecraft design? By this I mean that we haven't seen major innovations in propulsion, communications, power sources, shielding or avionics in the last decade, and we're not expecting to see major innovations in these areas in the next ten years. We are seeing a lot of ongoing advances in mission design, in payload, and in instrumentation. But the spacecraft themselves are changing much more slowly, and their design is increasingly dominated by heritage technologies.

Would this be a broadly true statement, or is there actually a lot of significant innovation in these areas that's going underreported? I'm sincerely curious.


Doug M.

[dvandorn]

There have been noticeable advances in computer systems on spacecraft, particularly in both on-board data storage/processing and in architecture. For example, remember how Phoenix's image handling, running on basically the same system as that used for MPF and MPL, seemed so clunky and kludgey after we'd had the pleasure of the more advanced architectures of the MERs for several years? And while not quite as big of an increase in capabilities, MSL has an even more advanced system than the MERs, doing more on-board imaging caching and processing.

Also, Mars landing systems have been innovative for the past 20 years. The airbag landing concept was quite innovative in comparison to what had been used successfully before, and we used it to land three probes on Mars successfully. And while it's just a reworking of existing technology, the descent stage/skycrane maneuver used by MSL was definitely innovative. I'd call it anything but conservative.

Also, while not using any really new technologies, Cassini has an innovative combination of sensors -- for example, flying a radar imager solely for the Titan encounters was not a conservative choice, though it was driven by the science needs of the mission.

So, I guess it all depends on what you consider conservative vs. innovative...

-the other Doug (with my shield, not yet upon it)