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Major Mars Discovery !!!!!!!

paulwhannel said:
yay! i was right. boo, it's not so exciting. still, i don't think anyone expected to just go up there and find the place littered with some ancient civilization... baby steps. and the first baby step is finding water, so i guess it's not too disappointing...

paul
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Wahhh? What about that guy that said there was a stove, a piston, and the letter 2 on a rock?
 
Well, its good news and justification for more rovers, that's for sure. They'll probably send a mission to Mars with a rover that will bring back samples now. That's going to be tough, though. What samples do you pick and how do you get them. You're not going to want just what's laying around, you need to dig.

That and you need to lift off the surface, which means landing will have to be more along the lines of the Apollo Lunar Landers and not bouncing in a bunch of balloons. :D

D
 
At least, for a sample returning mission, they don't have to lift off the whole thing. I guess they only need to bring back a sample the size of a can of tuna at most, give or take a little. I wonder how big/heavy/powerfull a rocket they'll need to escape martian gravity's (0.4 earth' sgravity) and get back to earth in a short enough period of time. (We'd want the sample to get back to earth before a manned mission reach mars ^_^). Maybe an automated docking would be too complicated but the sample return rocketcraft could re-attach to it's orbiter for additional power. Oh well, I'll let Nasa's boys figure that one out.
 
Mr. Anderson said:
That and you need to lift off the surface, which means landing will have to be more along the lines of the Apollo Lunar Landers and not bouncing in a bunch of balloons. :D
D
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Well, actually, there's no reason you couldn't use the "airbag" approach, since that significantly reduces the weight of the thing you're landing (and therefore of the rocket you launch from earth). The launch of the return samples from the Martian surface could still be done by a platform that was originally inside of the "beach ball". I assume they (the samples) would be picked up in orbit and then transferred to Earth, as opposed to launching an Earth-bound device from the surface.
 
Did anyone catch the latest picture from spirit (I think) which showed an unidentified flying object streaking across the martian sky? that was wierd
 
Mr. Anderson said:
Well, its good news and justification for more rovers, that's for sure. They'll probably send a mission to Mars with a rover that will bring back samples now. That's going to be tough, though. What samples do you pick and how do you get them. You're not going to want just what's laying around, you need to dig.
D
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I wonder with the lower gravity of Mars if a rail gun could be used to fling rock samples into orbit for collection by a Earth-bound return vehicle? The escape velocity of Mars is ~5 km/s, and I know of home-brew devices that can achieve that. Then you'd just need a digger to go get rocks, something to pack them up, and the rail gun to get them into orbit. Seems like you could get lots of material back to Earth for pretty cheap that way.
 
topicolo said:
Did anyone catch the latest picture from spirit (I think) which showed an unidentified flying object streaking across the martian sky? that was wierd
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Eh? Could you find it on the NASA site and post a link?
 
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