Author Topic: NASA Announces New Rover to Close Out Decade of New Missions  (Read 95940 times)

Offline Blackstar

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Re: NASA Announces New Rover to Close Out Decade of New Missions
« Reply #160 on: 12/09/2012 05:32 am »
Which is why it's a shame that the caching capability was left of Curosity (to contain cost, as I understand)

The cacher that was supposed to go on Curiosity was not a real cacher. It was only supposed to collect small rock shards in a cage-like device (by filtering through a grid), not the broad range of samples that scientists really want. (If you are interested, you should look around the internet for a description of the kind of sophisticated cacher that they want to fly on a future mission. Although it's a high-tech canister, it is pretty interesting how it is carefully designed so that it can be completely sealed up containing multiple samples. You'd think that this would be simple, but it's not. Remember, it is designed to be used by a robot, and it absolutely cannot fail. No jamming or getting stuck or anything like that.) Alan Stern was the one who wanted the caching device on Curiosity, and he paid for it using his Associate Administrator's contingency fund. I think the cost was a couple million dollars.

That said, I heard Scott Hubbard say that he thought it would have been a good idea, not because of the samples it collected but because it would have given the team experience with caching operations. They would have learned a lot that would have been useful for a future mission.

My understanding is that it was not deleted because of cost (it was essentially paid for). Instead, it was deleted because experience with Phoenix indicated that they needed to worry about the stickiness of Martian soil, so they put something else at that spot on the rover that they can use to clean off the instruments on the arm, or something like that. Officially, people said that it was a "real estate" issue.

That said, the decision to delete it was ultimately made by the AA who replaced Stern, and that person made no secret of his disdain for Stern's decisions as AA. As another former AA said about the decision, "The first thing the new lion does when he takes over is kill all the cubs."

Who knows where the truth lies? I once met one of the guys who was at Ames and working on the sample cacher. He showed me his early engineering drawings, and I vaguely remember him showing me a simple mockup. After it got canceled I ran into him and he was resigned to the whole thing and joked that he had a $2 million piece of useless equipment sitting in his locked filing cabinet.
« Last Edit: 12/09/2012 05:35 am by Blackstar »

Offline Dalhousie

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Re: NASA Announces New Rover to Close Out Decade of New Missions
« Reply #161 on: 12/09/2012 08:40 pm »
The cacher that was supposed to go on Curiosity....

Thanks for the inside story on this.
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Offline Mader Levap

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Re: NASA Announces New Rover to Close Out Decade of New Missions
« Reply #162 on: 12/10/2012 04:35 pm »
For me - layman getting news from space websites and forums - it was a lot more sinister than that.

MSL then had serious problems with money - and someone wanted to put some fancy, costly and useless bondoogle on it, getting away with it only because money for cacher was from different pot. I was rather... annoyed with this and thought this money would be better spend helping MSL's financial troubles instead of making toy destined to stroke Stern's ego. Fortunately, someone saner axed it.
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Offline Blackstar

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Re: NASA Announces New Rover to Close Out Decade of New Missions
« Reply #163 on: 12/10/2012 05:51 pm »
For me - layman getting news from space websites and forums - it was a lot more sinister than that.

MSL then had serious problems with money - and someone wanted to put some fancy, costly and useless bondoogle on it, getting away with it only because money for cacher was from different pot. I was rather... annoyed with this and thought this money would be better spend helping MSL's financial troubles instead of making toy destined to stroke Stern's ego. Fortunately, someone saner axed it.

I heard Stern himself explain it. And the money came from his discretionary account (I think that he said that the AA had something like $4 million in that account and he allocated $2.5 million for the cacher). I know some people thought it was a way to claim that MSL/Curiosity was doing sample caching when it was not. Who knows? It was a pretty minor aspect of the whole project.

Offline Blackstar

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Offline JohnFornaro

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Re: NASA Announces New Rover to Close Out Decade of New Missions
« Reply #165 on: 12/10/2012 09:54 pm »
For instance, you might want a broader range of samples rather than a high probability of getting just one kind of sample.

Like up one side and down the other of the whole river bed. 

Just sayin'.
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Offline robertross

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Re: NASA Announces New Rover to Close Out Decade of New Missions
« Reply #166 on: 12/10/2012 10:52 pm »
It's too bad the SLS/Orion wasn't far enough along that they could use it to launch a recovery mission for the samples - to prove the systems & saving the price tag for a lander & surface ops.

Offline Robotbeat

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Re: NASA Announces New Rover to Close Out Decade of New Missions
« Reply #167 on: 12/10/2012 11:37 pm »
daheck does Orion have to do with it...

And actually, doesn't need SLS. Other launch vehicles would work.
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Offline robertross

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Re: NASA Announces New Rover to Close Out Decade of New Missions
« Reply #168 on: 12/10/2012 11:40 pm »
daheck does Orion have to do with it...

And actually, doesn't need SLS. Other launch vehicles would work.

Politics. Get an Orion mission around Mars, which proves the systems, and then you have a goal to finally land people on the moon. That's all.

Not a snowball's chance, I know, but still intriguing.

Offline Robotbeat

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Re: NASA Announces New Rover to Close Out Decade of New Missions
« Reply #169 on: 12/10/2012 11:50 pm »
daheck does Orion have to do with it...

And actually, doesn't need SLS. Other launch vehicles would work.

Politics. Get an Orion mission around Mars, which proves the systems, and then you have a goal to finally land people on the moon. That's all.

Not a snowball's chance, I know, but still intriguing.
Well, if it were a manned orbital Mars mission, I could see Orion being used (in addition to Deep space hab and propulsion unit). Not otherwise, though. Way too pointless to send Orion.
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Offline Blackstar

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Re: NASA Announces New Rover to Close Out Decade of New Missions
« Reply #170 on: 12/11/2012 03:22 pm »
Well, if it were a manned orbital Mars mission, I could see Orion being used (in addition to Deep space hab and propulsion unit). Not otherwise, though. Way too pointless to send Orion.

There is a potential use of SLS and large rockets in general for planetary exploration. But it gets so easily distorted, both by NASA and by people outside the agency, that it's a dangerous topic.

We could split the issue into two separate questions/subjects:

1-Use of very large rockets like SLS for dedicated planetary missions (or other space science missions).

2-Opportunistic use of very large rockets like SLS for planetary missions (or other space science missions).


Topic 1 is what gets the most attention, although it doesn't get a lot of attention (and shouldn't). You can get benefits out of using a big rocket for some space science missions. For example, if you are planning to send a spacecraft to Europa, a very large rocket can reduce your travel times substantially, and also allow you to carry more shielding.

The danger--and it is a big danger--is that these missions are automatically expensive. The rocket itself is expensive. And the spacecraft will almost always be expensive too. There is an argument that you could hold the cost of the spacecraft down and simply add capability in cheap ways, like more fuel or faster transit times. But I don't know anybody who really buys that. There's going to be a tendency to grow the payload and therefore the cost, and very quickly you have a mission that simply busts the science budget wide open.

People who talk loosely about this stuff rarely have a sense of what these things cost, but an expensive space science mission is a billion dollars or more. When you start looking at payloads for really big rockets, they quickly go up to two, three, four, seven billion dollars, which is way more than the science program can afford. Add in a billion dollars for the launch vehicle. The wavefront collapses into mush and the mission is not doable.


(more in the next post)

Offline Blackstar

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Re: NASA Announces New Rover to Close Out Decade of New Missions
« Reply #171 on: 12/11/2012 03:27 pm »
Topic 2 is the opportunistic use of a large rocket like SLS. In other words, the human spaceflight program, which owns the rocket, decides that they need to test it or test a spacecraft. This then provides an opportunity for the scientists to ride along.

This is potentially useful for the science community, but with a big fat "HOWEVER..." attached to it. The reason is that beggars don't get to be choosers, and there is always the danger that the group that is providing the ride (the human spaceflight program) will change its mission design, or cancel the mission, and the science program will get stiffed. There is also the fact that the science program runs according to its own rules and priorities, and they may not be able or willing to take advantage of the opportunity when it comes along.

For example, suppose NASA has planned a robotic mission to Europa for the mid 2020s. Then the human spaceflight program comes along and says "Hey, we're going to send a large unmanned vehicle to Mars to test aerobraking. Do you want to come along for the ride?" Science might love to have that opportunity, but does this mean that they cancel the Europa mission to pay for stuff to put on the Mars mission? And then what happens when the human spaceflight program changes its mission design and the opportunity evaporates? Now the science program has a bunch of stuff that they cannot fly, and they have also wrecked their Europa mission plans.

(more in another post)

Offline Blackstar

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Re: NASA Announces New Rover to Close Out Decade of New Missions
« Reply #172 on: 12/11/2012 03:37 pm »
Now there have been some attempts at NASA and JPL to look at both topics 1 and 2--in other words, what can a large rocket like SLS offer to planetary missions, and what if there was an opportunity available on a human spaceflight mission or test mission?

The problem is that these efforts have usually been pretty half-assed. If there's one thing I've learned from watching a lot of studies conducted over the years, it is that your initial starting conditions and the composition of your study are important. Often, when these kinds of studies have been done, they make some mistakes right off the bat. A big problem is that they do not carefully control the starting parameters and ground rules to make sure that the study is something that is realistic (in terms of budget), rather than fantasyland. And so what happens is that they get a group of people together, they all put on their Star Trek uniforms, and then they design some science fictional study that is nowhere near realistic. The end results are just crazy, and anybody who looks at it afterwards will say "What you have proposed will cost $15 billion and will never get funded. You just wasted everybody's time."

The other thing that sometimes happens is that they don't staff these studies properly. They stick a bunch of human spaceflight people on the study and then one or two scientists, and so the study ends up reflecting what the human spaceflight people think that the science program can do rather than what it actually can do. Often this happens in order to justify the rocket. A bunch of these SLS briefings reflect that--it's the guys who want to build the big rocket saying "Hey! It can do X, Y, and Z!" and what they are saying is not realistic, and they don't really know what they're talking about. You can hang out with a group of planetary scientists for a week and never hear the word "SLS" (other than them saying that it is going to eat their lunch). They don't have much use for it. But if you go to the guys making the rocket, they will talk about all the wonderful things it will do.

Offline Blackstar

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Re: NASA Announces New Rover to Close Out Decade of New Missions
« Reply #173 on: 12/11/2012 08:31 pm »
(cont.)

So where am I going with all of this?

A few years ago (around 2007 or so) NASA did an internal study of Ares V and robotic science missions on Mars. The study was called CEMMENT (Worst. Acronym. Ever.). The gist of the study was that if you assume a human Mars mission, then before you send humans to Mars, you may have to test the large descent vehicle. That would be a robotic mission to the Martian surface. If you are going to fly such an engineering test mission, it offers the opportunity to send robotic science spacecraft to the Martian surface as well.

Logical, right?

The problem with the CEMMENT study was that instead of coming up with realistic things that you could do with that vehicle, they went nuts and packed it full of spacecraft. They had rovers, orbiters, a drilling rig. Just a lot of nuttiness. Just a simple back-of-the-envelope guess indicates that the robotic spacecraft would probably cost over $8 billion or more, which is far more money than the planetary science program would have to spend in a decade.

The CEMMENT study was a perfect example of how not to do this kind of trade study. Instead of trying to fit something into a notional budget, they tried to fit something into a notional payload fairing. It was a shame, because somebody could have come up with some interesting ways to take advantage of that capability.

Offline Robotbeat

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Re: NASA Announces New Rover to Close Out Decade of New Missions
« Reply #174 on: 12/11/2012 10:24 pm »
Very good series of posts.

What I was talking about was using a human orbital mission to Mars that would happen anyway (not THAT unrealistic) to simply retrieve a MSR canister in Mars orbit. If you happened to have a manned mission to Mars orbit, how difficult would it be to retrieve a canister that happened to also be in Mars orbit around that timeframe?

Presumably, that could save the science folks a couple billion in development while making the manned spaceflight program look like they're doing something that is actually deemed scientifically useful, assuming they were going to do a manne orbital mission first as a precursor to a surface mission anyway.

Lots of problems with it, and the science folks are probably cared to death of hitching themselves to human spaceflight, for the very good reasons you outlined. But something to think about, since ostensibly the decadal survey says we should do a MSR by the 2030s, which is the same timeframe that the Bronco Bama administration says we should be doing Mars missions (and since all the pieces for a mars orbit mission are being worked on or defined... Propulsion unit, Orion, deep space hab, etc... Provided these yearlong ISS missions are a smashing success). Huge grains of salt, obviously.
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Offline Blackstar

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Re: NASA Announces New Rover to Close Out Decade of New Missions
« Reply #175 on: 12/12/2012 12:05 am »
Very good series of posts.

What I was talking about was using a human orbital mission to Mars that would happen anyway (not THAT unrealistic) to simply retrieve a MSR canister in Mars orbit. If you happened to have a manned mission to Mars orbit, how difficult would it be to retrieve a canister that happened to also be in Mars orbit around that timeframe?

If you want something done right, you better do it yourself. Meaning, if the science community really wants sample return from Mars, they should (and would) plan for all parts of the mission themselves. It would be folly to do the first steps and then expect the human program to finish the job, for the simple reason that if the human program runs into trouble, the first thing they will dump overboard is any requirement that they did not generate themselves, such as the requirement to retrieve samples.

There are lots of examples of this in the past, but the best and most obvious one is the International Space Station. When ISS went way over-budget in 2002/3 NASA was told to get the costs under control and to cap the overall cost. Goldin was kicked out and O'Keefe brought in to do this. The solution was to toss overboard all of the science equipment and plans then in the pipeline.

Offline kevin-rf

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Re: NASA Announces New Rover to Close Out Decade of New Missions
« Reply #176 on: 12/12/2012 12:19 am »
Personally, If you want sample return done right, it would be cheapest to send a geologist and have him pack the samples for return. And if he stays behind, that's 180lbs of extra samples ;)
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Offline robertross

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Re: NASA Announces New Rover to Close Out Decade of New Missions
« Reply #177 on: 12/12/2012 12:22 am »
Very good series of posts.

What I was talking about was using a human orbital mission to Mars that would happen anyway (not THAT unrealistic) to simply retrieve a MSR canister in Mars orbit. If you happened to have a manned mission to Mars orbit, how difficult would it be to retrieve a canister that happened to also be in Mars orbit around that timeframe?

If you want something done right, you better do it yourself. Meaning, if the science community really wants sample return from Mars, they should (and would) plan for all parts of the mission themselves. It would be folly to do the first steps and then expect the human program to finish the job, for the simple reason that if the human program runs into trouble, the first thing they will dump overboard is any requirement that they did not generate themselves, such as the requirement to retrieve samples.

There are lots of examples of this in the past, but the best and most obvious one is the International Space Station. When ISS went way over-budget in 2002/3 NASA was told to get the costs under control and to cap the overall cost. Goldin was kicked out and O'Keefe brought in to do this. The solution was to toss overboard all of the science equipment and plans then in the pipeline.

A very good series of posts. Thank you.

I can see the folley in my thinking - bitting off more than I (or especially NASA & their limited budget & expected cost overruns) can chew.

I just see this SLS program with a 'goal' of getting to Mars, and needing to get some development & testing done, and being able to cover some costs of a retrieval mission in there. But yes, it would just add uneccessary complexity (especially cost).

Offline robertross

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Re: NASA Announces New Rover to Close Out Decade of New Missions
« Reply #178 on: 12/12/2012 12:25 am »
Personally, If you want sample return done right, it would be cheapest to send a geologist and have him pack the samples for return. And if he stays behind, that's 180lbs of extra samples ;)

I agree. I'll get a geologist's degree, and volunteer!  lol

:)

Offline JohnFornaro

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Re: NASA Announces New Rover to Close Out Decade of New Missions
« Reply #179 on: 12/12/2012 02:07 pm »
f you want something done right, you better do it yourself. Meaning, if the science community really wants sample return from Mars, they should (and would) plan for all parts of the mission themselves, .. for the simple reason that if the human program runs into trouble, the first thing they will dump overboard is any requirement that they did not generate themselves, such as the requirement to retrieve samples.

There are lots of examples of this ... When ISS went way over-budget in 2002/3 NASA was told to get the costs under control and to cap the overall cost. Goldin was kicked out and O'Keefe brought in to do this. The solution was to toss overboard all of the science equipment and plans then in the pipeline.

The key phrase being "get the costs under control and to cap the overall cost".

Which is a problem, and the not-solution for that problem is "toss overboard all of the science equipment".

The agency is not structured properly; each fiefdom is in competition with the other fiefdoms instead of in cooperation with the other fiefdoms.  Furthermore, the agency's leadership perpetuates the competition by throwing this or that useful equipment under the bus, while blindly pursuing a theoretical idealization of a BFR, even as is being done at the moment.

But hey:  May the mass times acceleration be with you.
Sometimes I just flat out don't get it.

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