Rocket Lab Mars Sample Return Mission Proposal

[TheRadicalModerate]

The Escapade spacecraft are using Ariannespace supplied bipropellant engine 318 ISP & 397N. Pressure fed?
Not Hypercurie that I assumed.

I think those are probably post deployment motors.  Remember that there are two separate birds in Escapade, both of them deployed from the Photon Explorer, which uses either Curies or HyperCuries.  I'd guess the latter, but I don't know.

[trimeta]

From SpaceNews' article on the Mars Sample Return decision process:

The MSR-SR will evaluate all 12 studies, but need not recommend a specific one as the best path forward for MSR. “It doesn’t necessarily have to be one of the proposed architectures. It may be that we learn things from all of the architectures,” he said. “They take those things, pieces of them, and say this is what we think the agency ought to be doing going forward.”

The goal of the review is to provide that recommendation to agency leadership, including Administrator Bill Nelson, some time in December. “What we’re looking for is an architecture that gives us the highest likelihood of returning samples to Earth before 2040 and, if possible, for less than $11 billion,” Gramling said.

Which does go along with what I suggested earlier, that although Rocket Lab is proposing a complete, end-to-end solution, they may not be too upset if NASA decided to create separate bids for each component, and they subsequently win some but not all of those bids.

[edzieba]

The Escapade spacecraft are using Ariannespace supplied bipropellant engine 318 ISP & 397N. Pressure fed?
Not Hypercurie that I assumed.

I think those are probably post deployment motors.  Remember that there are two separate birds in Escapade, both of them deployed from the Photon Explorer, which uses either Curies or HyperCuries.  I'd guess the latter, but I don't know.

They are not 'deployed' from Photon, Photon forms the spacecraft bus for both Blue and Gold.
From Rocket Lab's Cristophe Mandy:

The main propulsion engine is the S400-12 Biprop Thruster from Arianespace, which uses a combination of monomethylhydrazine (MMH) and dinitrogen tetroxide (NTO). Mandy said they weighed a number of factors when it came to choosing which components to build and which to procure, like the engines.

“We looked at all the different options for engines that could get us [to Mars]. Rocket Lab has its own engines. We are more interested in mission success than anything else,” Mandy said. “There are these high heritage, very stable, long-duration mission engines that came out of other companies and we just picked one of those.”