Mars Sample Return

[Crispy]

The Perseverence rover is currently stashing little sample tubes of all the rocks and soil it finds. It's also depositing caches of these tubes on the Martian surface, just in case the rover breaks down. Over the next decade, the spacecraft required to bring those samples home are going be built and flown. It's a daring mission, with lots of moving parts, but the science payoff will be huge.



(not shown in this video, two more helicopters, which can pick up the cached sample tubes independently of Perseverence)

Loads more detail:

Mars Sample Return - NASA Science

Mars Sample Return would be NASA’s most ambitious, multi-mission campaign that would bring carefully selected Martian samples to Earth for the first time.

mars.nasa.gov

 

[editor]

The Perseverence rover is currently stashing little sample tubes of all the rocks and soil it finds. It's also depositing caches of these tubes on the Martian surface, just in case the rover breaks down. Over the next decade, the spacecraft required to bring those samples home are going be built and flown. It's a daring mission, with lots of moving parts, but the science payoff will be huge.



(not shown in this video, two more helicopters, which can pick up the cached sample tubes independently of Perseverence)

Loads more detail:

Mars Sample Return - NASA Science

Mars Sample Return would be NASA’s most ambitious, multi-mission campaign that would bring carefully selected Martian samples to Earth for the first time.

mars.nasa.gov

It's incredible science. I just wish they'd hurry up with it all!

 

[weltweit]

Could they have made it any more complicated?

 

[Artaxerxes]

Could they have made it any more complicated?

Send a bloke in a transit van

 

[platinumsage]

Anyone who has tried the Spaceflight Simulator app knows it’s not easy to design a rocket that will take something to land on Mars with enough fuel to then escape Mars again and return to Earth.

 

[MickiQ]

If anything goes wrong it will be the bit where the lander throws the rocket into the air before the engine ignites.

 

[clusterfarce]

The US's new launch vehicle is the Vulcan Centaur, pretty much a new out the box first stage using Blue Origins BE-4 engines but the tried and trusted Centaur upper stage. Its a beefy brute able to put the same mass in low Earth orbit as the Delta IV Heavy or a fully reusable Falcon Heavy. But the Centaur upper stage is a hydrogen fuelled stage, this means it has a very high specific impulse and will be able to get more into deep space than previous rockets.
To that end NASA should be able to start designing much more adventurous missions around the new suit of rockets arriving, Vulcan Centaur, Falcon Heavy (launching the Europa Clipper mission) and NASAs funded Starship. Discounting the lumbering mountain of pork barrel that is SLS, they have the best fleet of heavy vehicles ever, with the sole exception of the Apollo era Saturn V.
They have the mass launch capability to now target return missions to Mars. Just a matter of getting budget and then designing the missions.

 

[WouldBe]

Send a bloke in a transit van

As long as the analysis doesn't show chocolate, caramel and nougat.

 

[bcuster]

Senate puts NASA on notice over Mars mission

The Senate is signaling deep skepticism about NASA’s ambitious plans to fetch samples of soil from the red planet, expressing concerns over the mission’s cost and viability. …

thehill.com

 

[editor]

Senate puts NASA on notice over Mars mission

The Senate is signaling deep skepticism about NASA’s ambitious plans to fetch samples of soil from the red planet, expressing concerns over the mission’s cost and viability. …

thehill.com

Oh for fuck's sake :/

 

[bcuster]

Bad show by the Senate. It'll've been money well spent. The human species need an escape from the dying Earth...

It could happen again:

Earth review: BBC tells terrifying story of our planet’s Great Dying

This epic TV series kicks off with Inferno, the story of our planet’s biggest mass extinction. Host Chris Packham probes how Earth lost up to 90 per cent of its species in an event which began 252 million years ago

www.newscientist.com

 

[WouldBe]

Send a bloke in a transit van

Direct Planet Delivery.

 

[bcuster]

Martian Sulphur

Curiosity rover makes an accidental discovery on Mars. What the rare find could mean

The rover crushed a section of rock with its wheels and discovered a rare sample of pure yellow sulfur crystals.

www.usatoday.com

 

[WouldBe]

Martian Sulphur

Curiosity rover makes an accidental discovery on Mars. What the rare find could mean

The rover crushed a section of rock with its wheels and discovered a rare sample of pure yellow sulfur crystals.

www.usatoday.com

Isn't sulphur found around volcanoes? Lots of those on mars so not sure why it's a suprise.

 

[krtek a houby]

Bad show by the Senate. It'll've been money well spent. The human species need an escape from the dying Earth...

Nah, we shouldn't be allowed fuck up any other planets.

 

[bcuster]

Isn't sulphur found around volcanoes? Lots of those on mars so not sure why it's a suprise.

It's pure sulphur

 

[WouldBe]

It's pure sulphur

That's what I'm in about. Thousand+ years ago the main source of pure Sulphur was Sicily, home to Etna.

 

[urbanspaceman]

Nah, we shouldn't be allowed fuck up any other planets.

How, exactly, could we fuck up Mars ? It's a desiccated, frigid, airless. radiation-scoured wasteland now. How could we make that worse ?

 

[krtek a houby]

How, exactly, could we fuck up Mars ? It's a desiccated, frigid, airless. radiation-scoured wasteland now. How could we make that worse ?

Give it time...

 

[NoXion]

Give it time...

I find the level of misanthropy displayed by some on the left to be very baffling. How can one hope or advocate for a better society when believes that humans are such bastards and always will be? It seems like a serious contradiction.

Isn't sulphur found around volcanoes? Lots of those on mars so not sure why it's a suprise.

Martian volcanos have been extinct for a good while or so we thought. This finding might be evidence that such geological activity has continued into more recent times.

 

[krtek a houby]

I find the level of misanthropy displayed by some on the left to be very baffling. How can one hope or advocate for a better society when believes that humans are such bastards and always will be? It seems like a serious contradiction.

Guess everyone has different life experiences, and sometimes hope can be obscured by pessimism

 

[mojo pixy]

Bad show by the Senate. It'll've been money well spent. The human species need an escape from the dying Earth...

Nah, we shouldn't be allowed fuck up any other planets.

Even if we could build escape craft that each held a million people, we'd need thousands of them to remove 8 billion+ people

It's not a remotely viable plan. Sadly we do actually need to fix up this planet instead.

 

[WouldBe]

Martian volcanos have been extinct for a good while or so we thought. This finding might be evidence that such geological activity has continued into more recent times.

With very little atmosphere on Mars I'm not sure what the sulphur would react with so would still be in it's elemental form.

 

[editor]

Even if we could build escape craft that each held a million people, we'd need thousands of them to remove 8 billion+ people

It's not a remotely viable plan. Sadly we do actually need to fix up this planet instead.

But the Earth and its entire history, eco-systems, plants, animals, arts and cultures could be totally obliterated by an extinction level event which could happen at any time,

If you give a shit about humanity, you should be all for us becoming a multi-planetary species, and the sooner the better.

 

[mojo pixy]

But the Earth and its entire history, eco-systems, plants, animals, arts and cultures could be totally obliterated by an extinction level event which could happen at any time,

If you give a shit about humanity, you should be all for us becoming a multi-planetary species, and the sooner the better.

It's never going to be a solution for any but the very very richest humans. Everyone else will 100% get left behind. Not to mention all the other animals and plants.

 

[Silas Loom]

It's never going to be a solution for any but the very very richest humans. Everyone else will 100% get left behind. Not to mention all the other animals and plants.

We can take the formulae for fauna and flora, then recreate tweaked versions in labs to suit local conditions wherever new human colonies sprout.

 

[mojo pixy]

We can take the formulae for fauna and fauna, then recreate them in labs to suit local conditions.

"We" lol

You mean elon musk's and jeff bezos' kids. Not yours or mine.

 

[mojo pixy]

If you give a shit about humanity,

Nice

U75 discourse still hitting those highs

 

[Silas Loom]

"We" lol

You mean elon musk's and jeff bezos' kids. Not yours or mine.

Why would they subject their kids to being frozen and defrosted two hundred years later to colonise a distant planet? I’d hand mine over like a shot, though.

 

[editor]

Nice

U75 discourse still hitting those highs

Knowing that an extinction level event is pretty much a certainly at some point, you still don't think that humanity should ever leave this planet. So what else could I conclude?