Mars team teaches old rovers new tricks

SpaceFlight Now ^ | December 29, 2006 | NASA/JPL NEWS RELEASE

[IronJack]

You INVESTED with them???? That's got to be the most expensive toilet paper in the world!

[org.whodat]

"...the intrepid little rovers are not only surviving into old age they are getting smarter!"

Little green men tuning them up.

[1rudeboy]

mid-1990's . . . invested about $1000.

I was gambling in Havana,
I took a little risk
Send lawyers, guns and money,
Dad, get me out of this.
--Warren Zevon

[gcruse]

I'd have to put the Viking landers in there with the rovers. The pictures they sent back from Mars were astonishing by themselves.

[Toddsterpatriot]

See how well they did with cheap, Chinese, prison engineers? If we still had good old 'merican engineers, they'd have terraformed Mars by now. LOL!

[dirtboy]

Gawd, take your political views to another thread.

[Toddsterpatriot]

Humor over your head?

[dirtboy]

No, try being humorous first.

[Toddsterpatriot]

Holiday depression can be tough. Don't do anything rash.

[dirtboy]

Wal Mart is having a sale on clues.

Go get one.

[Toddsterpatriot]

Are those Chinese slave labor clues?

[Popocatapetl]

Prior to a manned mission to the Moon and Mars, there are several intermediate steps that will save vast amounts of time, effort and energy.

1) We are currently planning heavy-lift unmanned rockets, capable of carrying 100 tons of cargo into orbit. We should use these to take modular spaceship units up for assembly in orbit. They can also carry fuel and provisions.

2) The first thing we build in orbit is a big engine with fuel tanks. Its purpose is to shuttle other spaceships back and forth between Earth and their destination orbit. This saves a LOT of problems, and lets the carried ships take a lot more cargo with them, instead of fuel. We did this before, in the original Lunar landing program, but it should be scaled up considerably. The shuttle would never land.

3) Second, our first mission to the Moon or Mars should be tunneling-mining robots that can dig hard-rock horizontal shafts. Such tunnels solve many problems and are far easier to make habitable, and just generally better, than shipping pre-fab habitations from Earth. These robots could work slowly and methodically for years before manned arrival, powered by a lightly shielded small nuclear reactor brought with them. And they continue to work once people are there, continuing to improve the tunnel system.

4) Though it is still on the drawing board, if they can ever build a functioning Space Elevator, the size of missions to the Moon and Mars can be increased by a factor of 10 or more. Instead of a 200 ton spaceship, we could build in orbit a 2,000 ton ship, the size of a destroyer.

[Unmarked Package]

"I'd have to put the Viking landers in there with the rovers. The pictures they sent back from Mars were astonishing by themselves."

I'm right there with you on the striking success of the Viking 1 & 2 Mars landers.

Not only did they produce detailed closeup photographs from the surface of Mars as you mentioned (4500 images total from both landers, the very first color picture from Viking 1 is shown below), they were spectacular achievements in the number of new technologies attempted for the first time in a space probe that worked successfully.

Besides the closeup surface photography, the Viking probes were the first spacecraft from Earth to land intact on Mars, the first to collect weather related measurements on Mars (more than 3 million measurements total) including observations of dust storms for the first time, and the first probes to make in situ biological tests for life on another planet.

It's an astounding story that all those firsts were accomplished successfully by the Viking project as long ago as 1976.

Viking 1 operated continuously for more than 6 years on the surface of Mars and Viking 2 operated for nearly four years.

Both landers were powered by nuclear thermoelectric generators using heat released by the natural decay of plutonium to produce electricity. That was in a time before the environmentalist wacko movement when spacecraft design decisions were made based on real science instead of junk science and emotion.

[Cacique]

btt for later

[DigitalVideoDude]

I think that is a Pennsylvania Dutch saying. My Lancaster County grandparents had that one also.

[Steve Van Doorn]

Is a Space Elevator feasible? How about just a long cable and pull stuff up? As you are pulling you would have to hold your elevation that would take just as much fuel wouldn’t it?

[Professional Engineer]

ROFL

[Dog]

The little guys are still plugging away...:-)

[Popocatapetl]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator

However, that's only part of the story. Right now, they are trying to make longer and longer sections of carbon ribbon, and with each length breakthrough, like 1mm, 1in, 1 foot, 1 meter, etc., will come all sorts of unrelated, but high value applications.

Each of these can be spun off for thousands of other technologies, and the royalties will start to add up and fully fund more innovation--and maybe eventually a space elevator.

The material exists, the math supports it. Now what they need is a process to create it at the lengths they need.

[My2Cents]

Thanks for the reading suggestion. I have the book, but it's in the "que" and haven't yet gotten to it. The IMAX film is pretty good too.