Haven't seen this posted here yet (sorry, I missed the post if it has) but the long awatied article by Bruce Moomaw has appeared on Space Daily:

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-future-05f.html

Very intersting.

Cheers,

JC

Thankee, James. A pity I wasn't able to attend the second meeting of the group -- but I did attend the first meeting of the Strategic Roadmap Committee for (non-Mars) Solar System Exploration, and am working on a companion piece on that one. (By the way, a tremendously shortened version of my SpaceDaily piece appeared back on Feb. 28 on the "Astronomy" Magazine website.)

It's a good read

Doug

I haven't even finished reading this excellent article by Bruce, but I have to ask this. What on earth [or better, what on Mars] is James Cameron doing in "the Committee to develop a strategic roadmap for the future "Robotic and Human Exploration of Mars" ?

He's part of the MSSS team working on the MSL instruments ( particularly Mastcam and the Des imager I believe )

Doug

Thanks Doug. I did some googling myself. I understand he is a physicist and space enthousiast, but so are thousands other people
Is this enough to put him that high in the decision chain as Squyres and the rest of the scientists/engineers ?

His company has done excellent work to make instruments (HDTV based) for RMS Titanic expeditions - no harm in him being onboard.

Missions are often critisized for not making things accesable enough to the public - he's the top man to rectify that situation I'd have thought.

He's not an out and out scientists - but he's got the skill sets in himself and his company to make a genuine BIG contribution to MSL imho

Doug

I was a bit thunderstruck by Cameron's presence on that board, too -- but his comments (of which there were a lot) during its third day indicated that he really is keeping up very well with the program's details and actually making intelligent suggestions about it (whereas a lot of the members barely talked at all). Granted that he was appointed for pure PR, but at least he turns out to be a lot more qualified than one might have feared given that fact. (Actually, when you look at his movies, it's clear that he has a lot more interest in the purely technical and engineering aspects of movie-making than in portraying believable emotional situations.)

Space.com has a short piece on the same subject at http://www.space.com/news/mars_overhaul_050311.html with what may be some more up-to-date information -- which, to the extent that it exists, meshes well with a few hints dropped in the presentation mateials for the second meeeting of the Mars Roadmap Committee in early February, which I didn't attend. (Those materials can be found at http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/apio/mars_materials2.htm .)

Specifically, there is serious consideration being given both to flying at least one more MSL rover (as was made very clear at the Committee's first meeting) and also to delaying the first MSL until 2011 (because of continuing difficulties in its development, thanks to its great complexity -- it's the most complex US Solar System mission since Cassini). This raises the possibility that the two of them might both be flown in 2011.

But I wonder whether that's the optimum course of action. The current schedule is:

2009 -- First MSL and first Mars Telecom Orbiter. (The second MTO is set for 2018.)

2011 -- Three relatively cheap missions in the same launch window -- namely, two more Mars Scouts and the first "Mars Testbed" mission.

2013 -- An as-yet unchosen large mission (whose landing site selection probably depends upon the discovery of organic compounds in some place on Mars by an MSL).

However, there was already considerable apprehension during the first Mars Committee meeting about launching the MTO only about a month before the MSL, given the extreme dependence of the rover on MTO's high-rate com link. If MTO fails, MSL will be tremendously strangled in the amount of data it can return (it doesn't even have any direct-to-Earth com link!) So, if I myself were God-Emperor of the Mars Exploration Program, the scenario I'd go for at this point would be:

2009: MTO and two Mars Scouts. Simultaneously, a second MTO is built to be ready for launch in 2011 if the first one fails -- otherwise, the second MTO will be left in storage until 2018 (or whenever it is needed to replace the first one).

2011: The first MSL and (if needed) the second MTO.

2013: The second MSL and the first Testbed mission (whose experiments might instead ride piggyback on the second MSL).

Bruce, great read. Thanks for the in-depth article.

Thanks Bruce; How to synthetize while giving significant details...

Cameron attended the Mars Society's annual meeting when it was held in Toronto several years ago and was an active participant in the meeting, not just a "prestige" speaker for one talk at the event.

He presented a very interesting scenario he was developing for a (currently shelved) Mars exploration movie where the surface exploration crew would do entry-descent-landing in a large pressurized mobile laboratory. It would jettison descent rockets and fuel tanks after landing and go trucking off across the landscape to the main habitat and earth-return or ascent-to-orbit vehicle. Even if their landing was a couple hundred kilometers from the hab (cause of a problem), all they had to do was drive there to be safe.

He based the concept in part on his submersible experience, where you *CAN'T* go outside at depth, and do all your work with remote manipulators (Waldos) and other instruments. It'd be idiotic to have to suit up for EVA to go outside and whack a rock with a geologist's hammer!

In the space.com article Bruce posted a link to a couple of posts up, I find worrying that it is even considered whether the MERs will be funded by September

Those not prepared to face their successes are doomed to failures
on 4ever

Nice work, Bruce!

(Though SpaceDaily is the only site that still seems to launch a pop up ad despite Safari telling it not to do so....hmmm.)

IMHO, it still is too early to commit to a MSR date - so having several paths only makes sense. Each step is so contingent upon discoveries (of lack of them) from preceding missions, that charting the course too far in the future is fraught with peril.

Still, converging on "standard" rover designs with interchangeable instruments will help ease the cost and the mission redundancies will make up for lost craft - I like Bruce's proposed scenario, though I hate to postpone MSL for any reason, due to selfish impatience.

And how about a MER or two for some scout missions, eh? Still some nice juicy equitorial targets to see, and we can upgrade the cameras while we are at it.

I take the lack of a direct-to-Earth com link is a "feature", not an oversight. I also take it that the rationale behind it is the vast amounts of data that an MSL will need to send back. So much that NASA is willing to turn the MTO not merely into an optional extra for the MSL but an integral part of it.

That makes the following suggestion you made eminently sensible.


There is just one problem with that scenario: what happens if the 2009 MSL does fail? The very logic that would see the 2009 MSL pushed back to 2011 to ensure an MTO was in place and functional before an MSL arrived would surely dictate that if such a failure did happen that MSL would need to be pushed back again, to 2013--just in case the Great Galactic Ghoul did strike the MTO again. (Which in turn would doubtless push everything else back.)

After all, it is not as if the GGG has not struck NASA Mars missions twice in a row before. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to lose two spacecraft might be regarded as a misfortune. To lose two in a row plus wind up with a third on Mars, in flawless condition yet unable to send more than a trickle (if any) useful data to the boffins waiting with baited breath back on Earth, would look an awful lot like carelessness.

It seems to me that if an MTO and MSL are both to be sent at the one window, be it in 2009 or 2011, steps need to be taken to mitigate the potential for the MTO to be a single point of failure.

(I take it that even the MRO's communications relaying capabilities will not suffice for MSL, and that there is no chance for the MTO to be ready for the 2007 window.)

Given that the planned operating lifetime of the first MTO in Mars orbit is supposed to be at least 9 years, the risk of it breaking down between a first failed MSL in 2011 and the launch and arrival of a second one 4 years later is not very great. The MTOs will be made to last, so the odds are much greater that the first MTO would fail during launch or at Mars orbit insertion.

And, yes, MRO -- thanks to its low-altitude polar orbit that would fly over MSL only briefly twice a day -- would return only a very small fraction of the daily data return they'll get if an MTO is operational. (I believe the figure is about 10%.) Ditto for Odyssey and Mars Express if they're still functioning then.

The Strategic Roadmap Committee did express some interest in the possibility of bumping the first MTO up from 2009 to 2007, but was told that this would require a large new boost in Mars program funding -- at precisely the time when the MSL itself may run into developmental problems. (It is, after all, the most complex Solar System probe since Cassini, and there is already a lot of apprehension as to whether all 10 experiments -- or even all of the top-priority 6 -- can really be crammed onto it.)