[X] My Assistant

[Marcel]

Does anybody know when and how many MSL will go, or when the decision on this will be made ?

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

"60 Minutes" did a marvelous piece a few years ago on the increasingly desperate efforts of the French government to keep the language pure of the vile English pollution -- including an angry debate between two advocates of the idea which ended with one of them yelling "Shut up!" at the other in English. I honestly don't understand why the French are so barmy on this subject.

As for MSL: yep, it has had a DTE antenna added, and you can find an accurate picture of the new setup at http://www-robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/projects/MSL.cfm?Project=3 . (The new antenna will be provided by Spain, and the DTE system adds fully 50 kg to the rover's previous 700-kg mass -- but they haven't had to take anything off to compensate. They are approaching the upper limits at which a Viking-type parachute works on Mars, however.)

[Guest_exobioquest_*]

As for MSL: yep, it has had a DTE antenna added, and you can find an accurate picture of the new setup at http://www-robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/projects/MSL.cfm?Project=3 .  (The new antenna will be provided by Spain, and the DTE system adds fully 50 kg to the rover's previous 700-kg mass -- but they haven't had to take anything off to compensate.  They are approaching the upper limits at which a Viking-type parachute works on Mars, however.)

Good, though that antenna should only be needed in case something goes wrong with the orbiters, if they need to save weight they can ditch its mast and motors and put it on the pancam, if the pancam motors fail we will loss the antenna but since it is redundant to begin with it should not be as bad as the supersonic shut failing or worth the money of having to design a new one.

If the arm on that preliminary design is what the final is going to look like then it will only have a core drill and a microcam, that means it can sample and run over to another rock while analyzing the sample from the first one! That will be great but I worry about how long the core drill will last and how much CO2 will be available for cleaning the sampling carousel inside the rover. Extra drill bits and an “air” pump will definitely add more weight though the air pump with extra filters could be used to get pure samples of Martian atmospheric dust and could be classified as a experiment in its self.

[mcaplinger]

if they need to save weight they can ditch its mast and motors and put it on the pancam...

First, we call it the Mastcam. Or maybe the MastCam, I'm not sure. The whole mast is generically called the Remote Sensing Mast (RSM), since the navcams and the LIBS (aka Chemcam, or is it ChemCam?) is on it as well.

Second, there's just no way the extra mass and volume of an antenna could be supported by the RSM.