Jesus, I'm all for sending out as many missions as Congress will pay for, but another Mars rover? Can't they throw a little bit of money towards sending a melt-bot to Europa or Enceladus, or a boat-bot to Titan already? It'll be 2015 before we even know what Ceres really looks like.
Mars is certainly critically important, but the solar system is a massive place, and with such limited budgets why wouldn't you spend at least a chunk of your resources on explorations that have the potential of finding life in our solar system? We've known about these options for decades, and yet each mission gets scrapped at the last minute. I don't get NASA's priorities sometimes.
Also, in that time frame Elon Musk, China, and even NASA have bounced around various plans for getting humans to Mars. I'm usually an advocate for robotic exploration, but for the deep digging you will probably have to do to find something interesting, it may be better to have boots on the ground (for example exploring for microbial life or fossils below the surface.) It really seems like we're at the beginning of a Mars space race anyway, and this rover will inevitably be cancelled 5-10 years from now in order to focus on beating the Chinese there.
> In April 2011, ESA stated that it seemed unlikely that a joint US–European mission will happen in the early 2020s given NASA's budget, so ESA is investigating the possibility of proceeding with a European-led mission.[3] The ESA-led mission is called the Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer (JUICE) and will be based on the JGO design. Selection of JUICE for the L1 launch slot of ESA's Cosmic Vision science programme was announced on May 2, 2012.[4]
It always comes down to budget. There's only so much you can do with $n billion, and NASA gets less money each year.
Billionaires and governments are free to declare that they'll do it faster and cheaper, but NASA has a head start on science and engineering. It's easier to believe NASA's timetables and budgets because it has the experience.
I don't see how it can be made feasible to return humans from Mars for a very long time. Think about the expenditure and infrastructure required to launch a vehicle to escape velocity on earth. Shipping that kind of equipment to Mars seems like a undertaking so many times larger than a few rovers.
And I don't see how a one way trip would be politically/ethically possible.
edit: This sounds negative. All things considered; We have to try though. But perhaps knowing that we can have a sustainable settlement have to be the step zero of space colonization.
NASA's Mars Reference Mission [1] calls for landing an un-fueled return vehicle on Mars and then manufacturing fuel.
In-situ production or not, any sane humans-to-Mars mission is going to involve landing a bunch of equipment at the landing site ahead of time. The marsnauts are going to have very complete maps of their new home before they even launch from Earth.
I'd love to see us getting to Europa too, there must be something alive down that salty ocean, but melting several kilometers of ice is hard even on Earth.
Enceladus seems a lot easier, just fly through the volcano plumes and/or land on one of the tiger stripes. I mean, we've got water, heat and organic compounds. What are we waiting for?
It is naive to ask why another? I was under the impression that Curiosity was supposed to be like the rover to end all Martian rovers. What else do they need? It seems like there must be something else to do aside from.... rove. Maybe not manned exploration, but something to push things further towards that?
Or are they still stuck on "We must make a final, irrefutable conclusion on whether life has or has not existed on Mars prior to introducing organisms to the planet"? Am I the only one who thinks that the search is kind of, well, silly at this point? How much of the surface have they covered with rovers? I'd imagine it would take much longer, and a much more exhaustive search to come to any sort of definitive conclusion.
The reasons are likely more political than scientific. The rovers keep the money flowing. Rovers have a high chance of success and they are some of the last few remaining tangible results that NASA can point to to justify their budget in the public's eye. A new kind of mission is risky and would likely get bogged down in bureaucracy (see Orion).
The function of the rover isn't to drive around and map things. Its function to serve as a platform for a suite of scientific instruments to gather data. That suite of scientific instruments will be different for the next rover, adjusted based on what we now currently know (and didn't know the last time they chose instruments). So, yes, its "another" rover. But its what that rover is carrying that is different and interesting.
Having said that, I'm all for being a lot more ambitious, and sending people to Mars instead. But that's a different discussion.
I'm a fan of all the missions so far, but when I hear that none of the rovers have been "properly equipped to find microscopic life", I fear that some of the mission planning may be trying to "preserve the mystery", trickling out plot revelations to keep the viewers/funders hooked.
Couldn't Curiousity have had some agar plates and just dragged them through the dust, for subsequent observation over weeks? (Even if any organisms detected were eventually suspected to be earth-originated contaminants, their growth details would be new info, right?)
The problem with relying on that method is that finding life on mars could be like finding life at geothermal vents; deep down in hard-to-reach volcanic pockets. If you don't poke around some of those areas before bringing masses of earth contaminants to the surface, you could easily screw up future searching.
Surface tests are perfectly fine, but they're not enough. prawks was talking about how we're wary of introducing Earth organisms to the planet. We should keep that attitude until we've done proper searching for life all over, not just the easiest tests.
> How much of the surface have they covered with rovers?
They've landed four successful rovers on the surface. One the size of a microwave oven, two the size of small golf carts, and one the size of a BMW Mini.
Meanwhile, Mars has approximately the same land area as all the continents of earth put together. It's a big place.
Feel free to do the math to answer your question, but there'll be an awful lot of zeros after the decimal place.
It was a rhetorical question, perhaps improperly phrased as such. The point being that they have barely even begun to attempt to scratch the surface. How effective are rovers at doing this? Shouldn't the ultimate goal to be to gather data to allow more extensive exploration (likely by humans)?
I saw a map of Mars landing sites, which I can't find anymore. The bulk were on a tiny sliver next to a mountain, and most landers were immobile. We've only had a good, constantly up to date map of Mars for a handful of years thanks to MRO. It takes time to plan new missions based on that data.
How are humans better at searching for life than robots?
Humans seem to require much more onsite support infrastructure, including for activities (eating, sleeping, remaining social and sane) that are tangential to most exploration and life-detection experiments. Such an infrastructure also increases the magnitude of Earth-contamination of the Martian environment.
I'm all for having humans on Mars so we're a two-planet species... but I don't see boots-on-the-ground as offering a faster/better/more-complete search for life than the same resources sent as robots.
Assuming terrain-optimized multipedal robots, with stereoscopic vision across a broader range of the light spectrum than human vision: less time than with humans.
Such robots should be available in the same timeframe as a human-supporting infrastructure could be delivered to the Martian surface. (In fact, building that infrastructure might require similarly-advanced robotics.)
My inner devil's advocate says: is that the spirit of spending massive amounts of money on one-upmanship and buying votes* ? ;-)
In reality, I don't have a strong opinion on this. It would be amazing to see humans reach Mars in my lifetime, but I can see why governments aren't pouring money into it.
* From the Wikipedia page Moon Landing: "Mindful that the Apollo Program would economically benefit most of the key states in the next election—particularly his home state of Texas because NASA's base was in Houston—Johnson championed the Apollo program."
"I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach." - [Bruce Sterling](http://boingboing.net/2004/01/08/sterling-ill-believe.html)
I don't see how people can believe in a long time prospect of Mars colonization as long as we shun deserts and polar regions. Seriously. Sure Mars would be fun to visit (at this point). But live there, with our current technological advancements in mind?
Colonies on Mars probably don't make economical sense currently, but the thing to keep in mind is that there are resources on Mars that no human or animal population is using. On Earth, it seems like anywhere you start digging you ruin someone's life.
With eventual terraforming of Mars, we don't have to worry about accidentally de-terraforming China and Mongolia. We would have a free hand to change the atmosphere, melt the poles, etc. But ultimately Sterling's point on terraforming is probably true. We'll probably beat desertification long before we have the ability to terraform Mars.
Most people will not choose to go to Mars. This is not a problem for settling Mars. Settling always happens via a very small fraction of the originating population.
The people who will settle Mars will do it because they want to settle Mars.
The fact that we don't choose to live in deserts shows that it's highly likely that living in deserts - and all the more in even less hospitable environments - is not sustainable given our current way of living.
Unless we can show that we can have a working ecosystem in the least hospitable environments here on earth we aren't going to be able to set one up 4 light minutes away on a desert planet without an atmosphere. We are going to send those colonizers to a slow death.
What do you mean by sustainable? Plenty of things are capable of being done, but people happen to prefer alternatives. An example might be constructing every building in the US on stilts. It's more expensive and wastes some resources but you can still manage to run farms and cities that way.
Can we sustain a ecosystem capable of sustaining human life in a desert without atmosphere or other protection from background radiation yet then? It seems like figuring this out should be the first step.
Then again, sustainable colonies on the moon might be the most efficient way to establish that.
That quote is pretty spot on. However, the whole point is to "back up the biosphere" in order to protect human consciousness from an earth shattering event (pun intended). At some point in the future, we're going to have to get off this planet.
Are you an American? How much effort have you expended in campaigning to raise taxes and increase the percentage that NASA gets from ~0.4% to 0.6%? If you've spent less than a few years on the issue, that's the reason why they're going to take 8 years.
Most Americans think that NASA is 10-20% of the federal annual budget. Most Americans want NASA to have less funding, do fewer things, and take longer doing them. If you want to have NASA move faster, you have to spread the knowledge that NASA is cheap. Then NASA can move faster. See efforts like penny4nasa if you want to help!
Limited budget is certainly a big reason, and another is the lack of a pipeline. When Apple releases a new iPhone every other year, it's not like they started development on the next model only after the current one is released. Development is staggered so that there is always something at each stage of development.
As it says in the article, they will be leveraging proven technologies, but have not yet solicited proposals for instruments. This means they are still at the very beginning of the development process, and more money would only help so much. That's why the planetary.org post says that a higher budget would only move the launch date up 2 years. If they had started on a new rover 6 years ago with adequate funding, then we could be looking at a new rover in a year.
Circumstances often lead to NASA building fewer bigger things instead of more smaller things.
Which I disagree with as a result, because as soon as one of those few big things fails (which is inevitable no matter how smart NASA is), there are going to be massive Congressional investigations and talk about how NASA is wasting our money and how they need to be even more careful, which just means they have to build even bigger, even fewer, even more expensive things that just attract that much more attention when a failure happens.
On the other hand, they can lose a $300 million project entirely and no one blinks an eye.
I watched a talk by Peter Diamandis where he said that around 90% of the costs (for a NASA rocket) is in labor. By 2020, we should be sending people, not another robot.
I can't but think this is bad PR for NASA (in an unintended consequence kind of way).
"How cool is it that we've got an awesome rover on Mars! ...oh they're sending a new generation one there in 18 years time? Bah... now I have to wait for the good stuff to happen. Curiosity is already last generation gear."
I'm sorry, but I have to go on a little rant here. Let me state in advance that it's completely out of proportion to the subject matter and that this is more of chance to drag out my soap box than anything else.
HN is a place where you shouldn't have to spell everything out or restate the context every step of the way. But here's what just happened:
1) panacea posited the idea, perhaps humorously, that the news of another rover on the horizon would diminish interest in Curiosity much like the announcement of a new phone diminishes interest in the current model.
2) I said I didn't think people thought of the rovers the same was as they thought of their phones.
3) You disagree with that in a completely orthogonal way.
Context is everything. If you read panacea's comment and then my comment you should not get the idea that I'm saying there can not be any congruence between rovers and smart phones in the public's thoughts. Obviously, if the pictures were not high res people would complain and the easiest reference point to hand would be a phone camera. That has nothing to do with what I was saying.
Again, this a pet peeve, but carrying on a discussion via medium such as this rewards a little carefulness.
No offense, but yeah, I was intentionally jumping context in order to express what I considered to be an interesting idea. There's no intent to imply what you said is wrong, but to move beyond it to more interesting topics.
Comparing the Mars rovers to phones made me think of the ways in which the public does in fact do that. There's interesting conversations to be had in that direction. Perhaps future shock has turned into future expectation. Or blase-ness. Or something.
This is personal for me, and I've been around long enough to realize I'm never going to have what I want in this regard, but I do wish conversations were more fluid when there are more interesting directions to pursue beyond the immediate context.
We should really try and crowd-fund a melt-bot to Enceladus or Europa, or a boat-bot to Titan. They're being criminally ignored by the various space agencies, and all have the potential to host life. See my comment above.
By 2020 I'd kind of hope we're sending mostly-autonomous humanoid robots. Wouldn't that really inspire people's imagination? And they could start building the infrastructure for a colony.
I wouldn't want to seriously see humanoid robots as the first workers on Mars. The human body isn't terribly well-shaped to perform the kinds of tasks needed in an efficient manner. Balance, for example, is monumentally tricky and doesn't need to be with a four-wheeled style robot.
Mars is certainly critically important, but the solar system is a massive place, and with such limited budgets why wouldn't you spend at least a chunk of your resources on explorations that have the potential of finding life in our solar system? We've known about these options for decades, and yet each mission gets scrapped at the last minute. I don't get NASA's priorities sometimes.
Also, in that time frame Elon Musk, China, and even NASA have bounced around various plans for getting humans to Mars. I'm usually an advocate for robotic exploration, but for the deep digging you will probably have to do to find something interesting, it may be better to have boots on the ground (for example exploring for microbial life or fossils below the surface.) It really seems like we're at the beginning of a Mars space race anyway, and this rover will inevitably be cancelled 5-10 years from now in order to focus on beating the Chinese there.