Comment by Imnimo
4 hours ago
I never really understood why you'd have Perseverance drill the cores and then just leave them on the ground for an underdefined future mission to retrieve.
4 hours ago
I never really understood why you'd have Perseverance drill the cores and then just leave them on the ground for an underdefined future mission to retrieve.
An all-in-one solution would be far too heavy. Splitting the tasks up makes a lot of sense. Having all the equipment onboard to drill cores, quickly analyze them, decide if they're worth keeping, and then putting samples in containers is enough work for one rover.
* Storing all the samples onboard means a larger and heavier rover
* Mass budget squeeze means no more helicopter
* The return requires a ground launch from mars, so no more SkyCrane delivery system
They store the empty tubes, why not the full ones? Are they collecting that much mass that it’s really impractical. Are the empty tubes nested like solo cups to save space? I understand the rationale for the sample return, but those tubes will be hard to find after years of dust storms.
They store most of the samples on-board - ten out of 43 were dropped off as a backup.
They do store the tubes onboard according to: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-perseverance-rover-compl...
It says they have two sets of every sample: One onboard and one in the designated drop area.
The drop area is a backup: if the rover dies while travelling somewhere, the return pickup mission would not be in the right spot.
Perseverance, obivously, has onboard instruments to analize the samples before dumping them on the ground
No. The sample is only physically measured and then imaged. https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/jpl/the-extraord... All further analysis will happen when the sample is returned to earth.
That’s not what Perseverance does - I don’t know how so many have this misconception about the mission.
Because the powers that be would have deemed a real plan as too expensive.
> would have deemed a real plan as too expensive
Who are these "powers that be"? And do they have an infinite credit card? Could they really just do whatever they want and for some reason they choose not to?
Yes. They decided that it was more valuable spending a trillion dollars bombing people halfway around the world (and enriching weapons companies in the process) than it would be to spend a few billion advancing science.
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The powers that be are the US federal government. Their credit card is extremely large, but that money is going towards wars and weapons.
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The entity that has exclusive power over the US federal budget, and thus NASA budget, is called the US Congress. This is a standard arrangement in representative democracies.
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NASA administrator Bill Nelson https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/04/nasa-says-it-needs-bet... and then, once somewhater cheaper options had been considered, Congress following Trump administration priorities. https://www.science.org/content/article/nasa-s-mars-sample-r...
Look around the room.
The reason why NASA ended the Apollo program is because the American public 1) was never as committed to Apollo as younger people seem to believe they were with most people being indifferent to it and plenty of people being outright against it as wasteful, and 2) even the modicum of support it had on the Apollo 11th landing was gone by the next mission. Famously, Apollo 13 was notable for regaining the attention of the public, which it almost certainly would not have had if it weren't for their lives being on the line.
The public has almost never voted for more funding to NASA. The Kennedy Administration put a shitload of money into NASA hands, without real public approval, for geopolitical goals. It was never for public anything. The public just cannot be assed to spend even a few dollars on things they don't like, and they've never cared for generic space science.
The general public can in fact do whatever they can manage to fund, including through enormous debt, which is how we spent like $40 trillion on stupid wars in the desert for no reason. I was never really in agreement with doing that, but for some reason such a suggestion was "Unamerican", as claimed by the very people bitching about the debt right now. Who just so happened to be mostly the same people voting on doing those stupid wars.
It doesn't matter how many games you want to play with how "the system" makes it hard to vote for the right people, or how the incentives are constructed, but even in such a system, the Trump power bloc is still based around voting people out if they get in his way. The power always comes down to voting. The people in our government do all the shenanigans they do because it's how you capture the votes. They pander to giant businesses because those businesses pay for their political ads, which always go up in price so that only the largest businesses can afford to control them. But politicians do it because those ads get them the votes. If just doing their job better got them more votes, they would do that, or be replaced with someone who would.
The powers that be are the voters, with caveats and nuance.
The war in Iran costs about $95m a day and is already over $43b cost to the taxpayers, just in military spending. That's nearly two NASA budgets in just over 200 days.
The "powers that be" chose to lose a completely optional and ill-conceived war on your dime. Instead of science or helping people they decided to spend money blowing up schoolgirls.
Or, it's simply cheaper to send the equipment to analyze the samples in the rover than to send the samples back.
Note: They DID do analysis on these samples, on site. They didn't just dig them up and leave them there, as suggested.
Agree, the decision to drop samples on the ground doesn’t make sense to me. Store them in the rover. Much easier to find them all in one spot later.
They only dropped ten out of 43 - the rest are stored on-board, including duplicates of the ten.