What? No talk about the Mars Rover?

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by David E. Gervais:
I was thinking, if they had a permanent satalite in orbit around mars, the future landers could save on payload by using it as a relay to send info back to earth. That way they wouldn't need such big bulky transmitters. The space could be used for more scientific equipment.

Just a thought, Cheers!

There are several permanent orbitting sattelites areound Mars. I am not sure but I suspect they can relay Messages in a pinch. To do that for all the communications isn't that efficent I don't think though. It's easier for the rover to track in on the Earth far away then to track a sattelite whipping about in a close mars orbit. Especially since the orbiters useally go into a polar orbit to make coverage of the entire planet easier. Your windows of communication would be much smaller than with direct comm back to earth. The limiting factor in bandwith isn't the transmitting power as much as it is the line of sight window. Unless you put the mars orbitter in a geo-synch orbit, and then it's not much good for anything but relaying Messages, which is an aweful waste of resources.

With a big enough antenna on Earth you could probably pick up a transmitter on mars not much bigger then a cell phone.

Geoschmo
I'm not a sattelite communications expert, but I play one on tv...

[ January 09, 2004, 11:57: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

[Ragnarok]

Originally posted by David E. Gervais:
I was thinking, if they had a permanent satalite in orbit around mars, the future landers could save on payload by using it as a relay to send info back to earth. That way they wouldn't need such big bulky transmitters. The space could be used for more scientific equipment.

Just a thought, Cheers!

I thought they already had something like this? I was thinking that is why they could only try at certain times to communicate with the Beagle because they had to wait for the sat. to be in the right orbit to recieve the transmission from the surface. Maybe I was mistaken. Wouldn't be the first time, that's for sure.

[gregebowman]

Hot diggity damn!! We're finally getting a president that's talking about expanding the space program. Although i doubt if men will land on the moon again before Bush leaves office, let alone before I die, it's still good to hear something like this from a sitting president. I can't wait to see what happens.

[Baron Munchausen]

His father said something similar and nothing came of it. NASA estimated that getting to Mars would cost $400 Billion and suddenly everyone forgot about space programs. Rather than make some big, vague, grandiose statement of 'values' and 'idealism' we need a concrete and reachable goal. A genuinely reusable orbital vehicle would be a good, solid goal. The current shuttles are just experimental vehicles forced to serve as working shuttles. They are essentially disassembled and rebuilt after each flight. NOT cheap and not genuinely re-usable! We need that 'space plane' to actually get developed so that the cost of going into orbit can drop by 90 percent or so. From there it will be dramatically easier to get to Mars or anyplace else we want to go.

[ January 09, 2004, 22:26: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[Narrew]

I was thinking that the "space plane" was pretty close to being done (as far as development goes) and that they were going to use a SCRAM jet/rocket engine. Been a while but I can't remember the name otherwise I would do a google search.

Also, we will see many people saying why spend that kind of money for science fiction (not me by the way) when we need to do X,Y,Z. But I heard a great come back, If the King and Queen of Spain decided NOT to fund Christopher Columbus, where would the world be today.

The pessimist in me thinks that there are too many people that would like to go back in time and stop Columbus from discovering the new world, sorry Rutha, though I don't doubt Erickson made it over here earlier, but they didn't have the cash to capitalize on it

I have read some books from people that think by-passing the moon and just head straight to Mars is the best way to go, but hell I can see the moon almost every night, what a symbol if we can set something up permanently.

I hope we do it, I really do.

[ January 10, 2004, 03:55: Message edited by: Narrew ]

[oleg]

It is not THAT expensive. $400 billions are not going to be spend in one year. War in Iraq alone costs around ~100 billions. I think Mars landing is feasible in next 20-30 years.

[PvK]

Originally posted by Narrew:
... But I heard a great come back, If the King and Queen of Spain decided NOT to fund Christopher Columbus, where would the world be today.

The pessimist in me thinks that there are too many people that would like to go back in time and stop Columbus from discovering the new world, sorry Rutha, though I don't doubt Erickson made it over here earlier, but they didn't have the cash to capitalize on it
...

Well I wouldn't have turned down Columbus for budget reasons...

... on the other hand, wiping out all the indigenous cultures of the Americas wasn't cool in my book.

I also don't think "lack of cash" explains why the Scandinavian colonists left.

But I'm mainly just being contrary.

PvK

[Fyron]

Those English, French, Spanish and Portugese conquerors were nasty people... Of course, you have to keep in mind that most of the indigenous peoples that died died from diseases carried by Europeans for which they had no immunity to at all, and so the diseases were fatal, rather than just inconveniences.

[ January 10, 2004, 22:51: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

[Cipher7071]

A few years back, there was a program to design a truly reusable space vehicle called "Venturestar," or perhaps "Venture Star." That may be what was Narrew was referring to below for the topic of a Google search.

[ January 11, 2004, 03:08: Message edited by: Cipher7071 ]

[Kamog]

According to this article, it is expected that Bush will announce a manned mission to Mars. Also, a Moon base is to be constructed within the next 15 years.

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994551