HypatiaPhoto

Hypatia

@HypatiaPhoto

25, white-Latinx, plural trans therian photographer and musician. Anarcha-feminist. Occasionally NSFW

discord: hypatiacoyote

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HypatiaPhoto
@HypatiaPhoto
lupi
@lupi
Cynosura
@Cynosura

Alan is clearly incredibly pissed about what they're doing to NH and I can't blame him

Cynosura
@Cynosura

and boy, the rest of the planetary community is not happy with MSR being a budget-eating monstrosity

Cynosura
@Cynosura

re: new horizons:

even without another KBO flyby, there's plenty of planetary science NH can still do until it leaves the Kuiper Belt in 2028. they're wringing every last ounce of science they can get from that spacecraft, and the mission had a very positive senior review recently.

instead, NASA told them that they're not getting any more planetary funding after 2024, and they're handing it off to heliophysics, which would basically remove all funding for the existing mission science team, because helio division runs their missions differently than planetary does.

NH is the only KBO probe we've ever had, and the only one that will be in the Kuiper Belt for several decades. so by handing it off to heliophysics, they're basically taking a baseball bat to the knees of KBO science, to save an incredibly minimal amount of money in the grand scheme of things (0.15% of the planetary division budget)

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in reply to @Cynosura's post:

lupi
@lupi

ohh, i've missed some stuff, what's happening

is the universe today article from a month ago correct, that they're wanting to push it out of KBO exploration and into being yet another deep space sun probe

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in reply to @Cynosura's post:

Cynosura
@Cynosura

To be clear, the MSR comment was not related to the New Horizons discussion; it was simply another topic that came up at the meeting.

MSR stands for Mars Sample Return- i.e. returning material samples from Mars's surface to Earth. MSR is the next big Mars mission, and is going to be extremely expensive and extremely complicated. I can't speak for the Mars planetary science community, but MSR is generally understood to be the 'holy grail' of Mars science, short of actually sending humans there.

The group doing the discussions today that I was attending are primarily focused on bodies beyond the asteroid belt (the giant planets, the Kuiper belt, etc). To put a long story short, there's only so much money to go around in NASA's planetary science budget, and there's a lot of concern among the non-Mars planetary science community that MSR is going to be allowed to eat significant amounts of the budget, forcing other missions to be delayed, downscoped, or straight-up cancelled. There is a perception that Mars flagship missions are not held accountable to their budgets (cost growth on Curiosity and Perseverance point to this), while missions from non-Mars divisions are held much more strictly.

One of the comments I heard today was essentially "because there seems to be a lack of transparency about the mission design and engineering, I'm not yet convinced that MSR can even be accomplished in the supposed timeframe. how are we supposed to believe their cost estimates?"

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AndreL
@AndreL

And we all know humans aren’t going to Mars and the coming home in the next decade, probably never.

Does NASA view MSR as more a step in the humans to Mars path or more as a mission valuable on its own?

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Cynosura
@Cynosura

It is definitely valuable on its own. The key appeal of sample return from any body (not just Mars) is that you are no longer subject to the weight/design/engineering restrictions of spacecraft. Bring those samples home and you can analyze them in any lab on Earth, with any technique or scientific instrument you want, even if the instrument is the size of a building. It opens up vast amounts of science that are just not feasible for a spacecraft to do on-the-spot.

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Cynosura
@Cynosura

worth noting: the only way they managed to fit MSR within the budget as-is is that they basically are treating it as three separate missions: sample collection by a rover (Perseverance), a lander with a rocket to bring the samples to Mars orbit, and an orbiter to bring those samples back to Earth (which is the ESA's contribution).

as far as I can tell, they haven't decided how they're going to get the samples from the caches Percy is leaving to the lander with the rocket: either a small rover or maybe even a small helicopter since Ingenuity has been so successful. I'm a little worried about the helicopter approach given how thin Mars' atmosphere is and how lightweight Ingenuity had to be just to fly...can a similar design carry any amount of extra weight?

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