Question for the experts: what are the tests and analysis that we cannot do via a rover-based lab and hence need to send the samples to Earth? Asking out of curiosity (pun not intended!).
Simple answer from a space nerd: Rovers are small, light, and have very little energy. So what we can't do is anything that requires a large or heavy device or anything that requires significant energy. They break/fail. They take forever to make happen.
Want to burn 20kg of soil to see if there's any trace of specific elements? You'll need a furnace. Those are both heavy and high-energy. You could do a smaller scale test on a rover of 2g perhaps, but what if the traces are very, very small? Plus, whatever analysis tools you would use now have to also be extremely small and light, which means less capabilities.
Also, rovers have limited size: we can only do a small number of tests per rover because the rover's utility belt of tools is only so large. If your experiment is really easy to do but it's not a high enough priority, it won't happen.
Lastly, rovers die. You might spend 5 years building a tool, 2 years sending it on the next rover to Mars, only to have it crash or die before it's time to run your experiment.
But if we sent 300kg of soil back from Mars, we could do every test we can think of, carefully, with the best tools humanity can make and as much energy as we need.
Edit: +1 to what Something1234 said too! You can't clean out apparatuses easily after an experiment!
Not an expert, but the test chambers on a rover can't be cleaned easily or without a massive amount of complexity. They are also fairly limited and very limited use. While a sample collected and sent back can be split and used in many ways.
Better question: What will we learn that we cannot learn from all the Martian rocks we already have on earth.
There have been plenty or Martian meteors found in Antarctica, and no doubt many more if we redoubled our efforts to find them. Many once claimed to have found evidence of life in these rocks already. Some of us are even old enough to remember President Clinton's speech on the subject. (That isn't a deepfake video. The US president really did talk about the discovery of life on mars.)
Excellent question. Obviously there are lots of things they couldn't afford to get into a lander. Question is what could they have put into a lander, for much less than $billions, that they still haven't?
I am no expert, but I can imagine there are many kinds of laboratory equipment that is way too heavy to pit on a rover, perhaps mass spectrometers, etc.
Biological wxperiments is a big one. There is kind of outstanding question of perclorates in martian soil and its toxicity to earth organisms, plants, etc.
Can't we just shoot a orbital space laser at mars then from mars orbit? If we're already sending a very heavy craft that way... should be able to do spectral analysis from space.
SpaceX Starship is planned for 2024, and with a cargo capacity in the hundreds of tons. Even if it gets delayed by four or five years it will be able to bring back samples before this is is even launched. NASA’s plans seem very slow in comparison.
Musk has made a strategy of "overpromise, maybe deliver", rebranded as "vision" or "ambitious goals". Some of what his companies have delivered is impressive, but you never know what they're going to actually deliver until there are at least working prototypes.
>SpaceX Starship is planned for 2024, and with a cargo capacity in the hundreds of tons.
And Full-Self-Driving will be available in the summer of 2015, and a cross country autonomous drive will happen in 2017, and this year we'll have 1,000,000 autonomous Robotaxis on the streets. Let's go!
Though I would very much like to see Starship succeed, it must be understood just how risky a project it is. Just having the rocket be able to work in Earth orbit is a risky proposition, given its novel design and materials challenges. Add to that the many novel challenges returning Starship would entail, refueling in space, landing and taking off from Mars, setting up multi megawatts of solar, mining, methane production, etc.
Consider that Falcon Heavy was something like 5 years late. That was doing something that had been done before, strapping rockets together to make a Heavy version. Starship is many times more ambitious, with any of the challenges I raised above likely to hit multi-year delays.
I've been on this website long enough to remember when everyone was saying 'of course manually-driven cars will be the exception by 2020', and believing Elon Musk's timescales has taken over as the new naive credulity of the HNer.
I am very haply to see the idea of electric propultion tug finally commited to implementation. This has a lot more utility than delivering samples from Mars - in principle there is a lot of equipment that could use rugging between , and Mars.
I hope this becomes a configurable platform for future missions, nur just a one-off experiment.
It will be interesting to see what the situation will be like when this spaceship is ready. By that time we should have Starship and New Glenn flying regularly. Even New Armstrong could be close to ready by then.
Remember when Uber’s business got a little shaky so they started making a bunch of noise about a flying taxi project that would launch soon and be cheaper than a car?
Well this smells like that. Airbus knows that orders for commercial airplanes may be low for years as we work through the fallout of this virus. So time to go to space to give the investors something to think about.
Eh? Airbus has always been a large contractor for ESA; they make a lot of ESA probes and are a stakeholder in Arianespace, which makes the launchers. This is pretty normal for them.
If NASA really wanted to answer the 'life on Mars' question, Perseverance would have included a microscope. AFAICT, the reason it doesn't is because nobody wants to stake their reputation on the hypothesis.
Why don’t they just give the money to spacex? This is such typical French/eu behaviour. Let’s build something that already exists, for 10x the price, 10 years late, so that we can create jobs and have our own... Except the market viability is close to 0.
how about using that money for something that’s actually innovative? Or perhaps charge less tax so people can decide on their own what’s worthwhile.
While I absolutely agree that SpaceX is way ahead of anyone else, and I am very enthusiastic about SpaceX in general, SpaceX is a US corporation, and it is a really bad idea for any other economy or military to allow the USA to have a monopoly on space tech.
Space has enough strategic advantages that the economic reasoning of comparative advantage, while still true in itself, simply isn’t the most important concern.
"The joint American-European project is expected to cost billions and take just over a decade to implement."
This doesn't exist. It's never been done before. If SpaceX does it before Airbus and brings back literal tons of mars rock then great, but it's not certain when that will be possible.
Market viability isn't an appropriate metric for scientific research.
On the contrary, it would be foolish of the EU to be so dependent on a foreign company, dependent on a foreign law on a subject as strategic as space.
It is a crucial choice that, as a EU citizen, I applaud.
US and EU have already a "trade war/tariffs", so it is really stupid to give money to US to build their space industry so in future some weird dispute can cause $EU to lose access to space or over pay. There are also good engineers in EU that would need jobs, maybe they can create better stuff if they compete with SpaceX or create something different that can dominate a niche.
i bet US would have loved Airbus do not exists so Boeing made more money.
For strategic industry you don't want to minimize your dependency on external factors, some natural disaster happens and you no longer have food to feed your citizens or no longer have medicine or your software will refuse to run etc.
I don't want my tax money to go fund SpaceX. SpaceX is American and all their capabilities are practically owned by American entities.
Europeans like me cannot even work for SpaceX, so unless we have our own parallel programs we would just have no capability at all in this space.
[+] [-] pansa2|5 years ago|reply
So, four times as difficult?
[+] [-] klyrs|5 years ago|reply
Lesson: don't handwave your math when you're talking to lay journalists, because nerds are gonna read it and be horrified.
[+] [-] lt_kernelpanic|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mabbo|5 years ago|reply
Want to burn 20kg of soil to see if there's any trace of specific elements? You'll need a furnace. Those are both heavy and high-energy. You could do a smaller scale test on a rover of 2g perhaps, but what if the traces are very, very small? Plus, whatever analysis tools you would use now have to also be extremely small and light, which means less capabilities.
Also, rovers have limited size: we can only do a small number of tests per rover because the rover's utility belt of tools is only so large. If your experiment is really easy to do but it's not a high enough priority, it won't happen.
Lastly, rovers die. You might spend 5 years building a tool, 2 years sending it on the next rover to Mars, only to have it crash or die before it's time to run your experiment.
But if we sent 300kg of soil back from Mars, we could do every test we can think of, carefully, with the best tools humanity can make and as much energy as we need.
Edit: +1 to what Something1234 said too! You can't clean out apparatuses easily after an experiment!
[+] [-] Something1234|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandworm101|5 years ago|reply
There have been plenty or Martian meteors found in Antarctica, and no doubt many more if we redoubled our efforts to find them. Many once claimed to have found evidence of life in these rocks already. Some of us are even old enough to remember President Clinton's speech on the subject. (That isn't a deepfake video. The US president really did talk about the discovery of life on mars.)
[+] [-] ncmncm|5 years ago|reply
Like, a microscope?
[+] [-] ClumsyPilot|5 years ago|reply
Biological wxperiments is a big one. There is kind of outstanding question of perclorates in martian soil and its toxicity to earth organisms, plants, etc.
[+] [-] Apofis|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hoorayimhelping|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emilfihlman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bufferoverflow|5 years ago|reply
I'm 99% sure that if SpaceX's starship takes off, it will fly to Mars and back within a few years.
But still, competition is good.
[+] [-] rsynnott|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BurningFrog|5 years ago|reply
I'm annoyed by this innumerical journalistic habit where imprecise large numbers are only given as "millions", "billions" or "trillions".
[+] [-] itsoktocry|5 years ago|reply
Define "a few years" and I'll bet you it won't, with whatever odds you want.
[+] [-] antonvs|5 years ago|reply
I'm 99% sure that's wrong.
[+] [-] jiofih|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kerkeslager|5 years ago|reply
Musk has made a strategy of "overpromise, maybe deliver", rebranded as "vision" or "ambitious goals". Some of what his companies have delivered is impressive, but you never know what they're going to actually deliver until there are at least working prototypes.
[+] [-] itsoktocry|5 years ago|reply
And Full-Self-Driving will be available in the summer of 2015, and a cross country autonomous drive will happen in 2017, and this year we'll have 1,000,000 autonomous Robotaxis on the streets. Let's go!
[+] [-] thinkcontext|5 years ago|reply
Consider that Falcon Heavy was something like 5 years late. That was doing something that had been done before, strapping rockets together to make a Heavy version. Starship is many times more ambitious, with any of the challenges I raised above likely to hit multi-year delays.
[+] [-] qayxc|5 years ago|reply
The first Starship that might be able to return anything wouldn't be able to launch before 2026 either, so...
[+] [-] ballooney|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kiba|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ClumsyPilot|5 years ago|reply
I hope this becomes a configurable platform for future missions, nur just a one-off experiment.
[+] [-] Tepix|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _Microft|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ape4|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adrianmonk|5 years ago|reply
Although, it is a cargo ship, so maybe Vacuumtruck would be more accurate.
[+] [-] Aeolun|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gostsamo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mud_dauber|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woodandsteel|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] habosa|5 years ago|reply
Well this smells like that. Airbus knows that orders for commercial airplanes may be low for years as we work through the fallout of this virus. So time to go to space to give the investors something to think about.
[+] [-] rsynnott|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arkitaip|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhh__|5 years ago|reply
If you found life on Mars you're going to be rendered immortal as long as knowledge survived. No one is refusing out of pride.
[+] [-] lrnStats|5 years ago|reply
I recently made an error regarding essential amino acids, and it only improved the quality of suggested foods. Everyone wins.
(Although you still get a few internet haters)
[+] [-] zpeti|5 years ago|reply
how about using that money for something that’s actually innovative? Or perhaps charge less tax so people can decide on their own what’s worthwhile.
[+] [-] ben_w|5 years ago|reply
Space has enough strategic advantages that the economic reasoning of comparative advantage, while still true in itself, simply isn’t the most important concern.
[+] [-] Jabbles|5 years ago|reply
This doesn't exist. It's never been done before. If SpaceX does it before Airbus and brings back literal tons of mars rock then great, but it's not certain when that will be possible.
Market viability isn't an appropriate metric for scientific research.
[+] [-] ever1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simion314|5 years ago|reply
i bet US would have loved Airbus do not exists so Boeing made more money.
For strategic industry you don't want to minimize your dependency on external factors, some natural disaster happens and you no longer have food to feed your citizens or no longer have medicine or your software will refuse to run etc.
[+] [-] ragebol|5 years ago|reply
What already exists that can do what this is built to do?
[+] [-] rsynnott|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] shantara|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cynicalreason|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lumberjack|5 years ago|reply