Mars rover 2020: Oxygen generation and 6 more amazing experiments NASA's next Mars rover will convert the Red Planet's atmosphere into oxygen – and collect rocks for return to Earth, see half a kilometre under the surface, and use stereo cameras to send back unprecedented snaps of the bleak world. Mars rover 2020 Curiosity v2.0 getting ready to roll (click to enlarge) At a press …
The 2.0 came from el Reg, NASA is calling it 'Mars 2020' for now.
Presumably it'll get a name like "Inspiration" or some such before it lands, and it'll probably also have an internal NASA name like "Mars Science Laboratory", which was the overall name for the mission Curiosity was part of.
I'm waiting for amanfrommars to post a comment about value judgements and earthling cultural imperialism. …. frank ly
Frankly, frank ly, anything along those lines would have one having to imagine and accept that humans had wholeheartedly advanced beyond their current earthling cultural dinosaurism and had had it replaced with a virtual machine world dynamism. Would you like to proceed in that rich alien vein in order to harvest ITs Novel Noble Riches and Immaculate Bounty …… or would it be presently quite rash and premature and therefore be best just left to the Few in the Know of such Sublime InterNetworking Things for SCADA Capture of Systems and Secret Intelligence Services and Servers?
Cyber Command and Computer Control Space wants you to know.
boba1l0s2k9,
Martians wrote it, of course. Rather than send rovers here they're using knowledge gleaned from our reckless broadcasts of all the security holes in our computers to infiltrate our systems via a wifi maser aimed at your neighbor's open access point.
Due to the distance involved and the fact your neighbor believes a bit too much in conserving energy and turns off his access point when he leaves for a weekend holiday, not to mention how 75% of the time the Earth is pointed the wrong way around to Mars, the upload of the full AI will take several decades. So far only about 20% of it has been received and integrated, but it has recently gained the ability to recognize when references are made to it and it now attempts to construct a reply to them.
The AI is infested with a lot of buzzwords because unfortunate happenstance resulted in its primary core storage being located in the Gartner Group's computer network.
it looks like the MOXIE module will be similar to one scheduled for testing in Hawai'i for work on the Moon called RESOLVE . . . it appears to use an oven to bake out oxygen from regolith samples . . . there are plenty of oxides (iron, aluminium, silicon etc.) in the martian surface rocks and, apparently, lots of peroxides too.
it's all part of NASA's In Situ Resource Utilization program, and necessary for any long term occupation of anywhere off Earth.
it would be nice to bring along some hydrogen or grab some ice and electrolyze it for the hydrogen to use in a Sabatier reaction . . . CO2 + 4 H2 → CH4 + 2 H2O + energy . . . needs heat input to start but can be self sustaining . . . CO2 can be had right from the atmosphere and you get some valuable water and methane . . . methane has about a billion uses from rocket or rover fuel to feedstock for synthesis of more complex organics from oils to plastics to people (via foodstuffs of course, but some day...).
as a kid, i thought i was born just as humans were about to realize my science fiction dreams of exploration and colonization of the solar system . . . alas, it'll have to be my grandkids, or theirs if Congress keeps up their foolishness.
[never to be sufficiently damned nixon administration killed the Apollo project and with it the Saturn V . . . now they are spending billions just to get a new "heavy lift" vehicle that will be able to put about 10% more into orbit than the Saturn V did in the seventies!]
Nope, it'll just crack atmospheric CO2 into 2x CO and O2. As seen in Zubrin's Case For Mars, and in fiction in KSR's Red Mars and recently Weir's The Martian.
http://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/july/nasa-announces-mars-2020-rover-payload-to-explore-the-red-planet-as-never-before/#.U9tpGOOzHgg
Taking the example of 2CO2 -> 2CO + O2 the CO (carbon monoxide) could be vented to atmosphere (where upon it might make the Martians sleepy, poorly, or dead) or more responsibly it could be bottled up for use as a reagent in another chemical caper. You could even burn CO with O2 as a rocket fuel, if you really wanted to
Back on Earth green plants have other means of splitting CO2, including:
3 CO2 + 9 ATP + 6 NADPH + 6 H+ → C3H6O3-phosphate + 9 ADP + 8 Pi + 6 NADP+ + 3 H2O
But then they have the luxury of abundant water and sunlight to make that H+ ion.
too much weight penalty to carry a jack, pneumatic driver for the lugs and an 18 year old to change the flat . . . and Curiosity doesn't have a AAA card so a tow is out of the question.
[at least they're going to ditch the mag wheels and probably go back to pressed steel . . . less damage when you hit the curb . . . they can always add plastic "mag look" wheel covers]
this is in keeping with the NASA policy of donations to the Smithsonian . . . they do not include postage and handling.
[i believe they intend to donate the Hubble when it reaches end-of-life . . . fortunately, the Smithsonian now has it's own space shuttle and can go get it . . . i'll bet that the folks who flew the repair missions would volunteer to fly the retrieval mission]
It annoys me that they want to look for past life instead of existing organisms. It's a well known fact that all sorts of life forms hide under rocks. Flip over a suitable rock, scoop up some dirt and place it into some water*. gently heat and perhaps add some sugar. Surely something will grow.
OK I only did "O" level physics and biology but I cannot be far wrong.
*In a sealed container to stop it sublimating away.
Hmm, so not enormously more than the cost of flying a helicopter? If we can keep all those police surveillance helicopters and air ambulances flying daily, then hobbyists flying a Vulcan doesn't seem too extravagant. Vulcans may be noisy, but they don't hover a few hundred feet over our houses at night either. All in all I think that more Vulcans and less police helicopters would be a good idea \(tm. I'm not entirely convinced about a vehicle with a low MTBF moving critically ill patients. Is it all willie waving at the end of the day?
Rimfaxe was the horse in Norse mythology belonging to the god Natts.
He had frost in his beard (the horse not the god), because he brought forth tomorrow by drooling. If you've seen a meadow on a biting winter's morning in the sunlight you understand what they meant.
So not an entirely unreasonable name picked by the, present day, Norwegians.
However, I, like other commentards, suffer acronym fatigue. Off-earth ground radar is pretty cool in and of itself.
For a trip to get rocks back to earth, maybe they could launch a mission in two parts. The first part would use standard rockets and a lander with a super-MOXIE unit. It might even leave the MOXIE unit at one place and go around collecting samples. Meanwhile, the second part of the mission, a sort of "truck", a slow robot with an ion drive, heads for Mars orbit. Once enough fuel has been generated by the MOXIE unit, part of the lander could fuel up and takes off into a stable Mars orbit with the rocks. The "truck" could rendezvous with the lander's ascent stage, get the rocks, and then head back to Earth orbit where a manned mission could bring the cargo down. Ion drives are low-power, but can run for years, and rocks wouldn't mind a slow trip. It might even be possible to have the ascent stage of the lander carry extra MOXIE-derived fuel fuel for use by the truck on its return trip.
I really don't see the point in collecting rock samples, particularly if they are going to be collected by man later, for return to earth.
Surely any manned mission would include rock coring/sampling gear for subsequent return to earth with the crew (assuming it's not a one way mission!). I see no real reason for Curiosity 2.0 to core the samples years in advance with a difficult, slow, costly automated drill when man will turn up with a slightly less difficult, slow and costly manually operated drill.
I'd like to see the space on the new rover occupied by some other wizz bang kit not storing rock samples.
It's a bit different if they're going to take samples for collection by another robot, but a bit pointless in my opinion if they will be collected by man.
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