The funding debate

[Asur84]

I have just read this article on the Astronomy Now website

http://www.astronomynow.com/news/n1409/04seniorreview/#.VAyl22anxoM

I'm intruiged as to other peoples opiniins on these missions and which they feel may be of more benifit.

I personally think that each of them have their merits for example learning more about saturn (I'm under the impression that we don't actually know a great deal as I have not read much personally but happy to retract this statement if I have just missed it) but am very interested in other peoples views.

[Dubhar]

It looks like their main complaint for the curiosity mission extension is the lack of detail in their proposal, which if it does lack detail id agree that it need to be addressed. Its a shame though that these missions have to continually be reviewed not necessarily for their scientific merit but a lot of the time also because of money constraints with the relatively low budget NASA gets.

Its not like these missions cannot provide any more science, I think as long as they can provide scientific data they should continue to be funded.

[Asur84]

Agreed.

In my opinion one mission cannot be any less significant than another purely based on potential for the discovery of something that could be ground breaking.

[ronin]

Read this a couple of days back and I tend to agree somewhat. I have no idea what Curiosity is doing. It really seems to be doing a long drive from A to B. Not even sure why and there is no obvious feedback from anything that is going on along the way to B. Not even sure where B is.

According to the artical it's job was to get 8 rock samples, over a 2 year period. If what is said is correct it seems to have not had a great deal of direction from the start. And I certainly think that it is now a case of how far can it travel, not what can it do.

I suspect that remote missions cannot do a great deal more, any samples are going to be limited, and getting a few interesting rocks and samples back to us here is not an option. What is the next one to do that this or the last one has not done to some extent. They are limited to ambling round getting and analysing small rock samples.

Is the previous Opportunity still going, I can see mention of it in July 2014 and no mention of it's demise, Spirit got stuck in dust.

Actually a search looks like Opportunity is alive and well.

[Dubhar]

Read this a couple of days back and I tend to agree somewhat. I have no idea what Curiosity is doing. It really seems to be doing a long drive from A to B. Not even sure why and there is no obvious feedback from anything that is going on along the way to B. Not even sure where B is.

According to the artical it's job was to get 8 rock samples, over a 2 year period. If what is said is correct it seems to have not had a great deal of direction from the start. And I certainly think that it is now a case of how far can it travel, not what can it do.

I suspect that remote missions cannot do a great deal more, any samples are going to be limited, and getting a few interesting rocks and samples back to us here is not an option. What is the next one to do that this or the last one has not done to some extent. They are limited to ambling round getting and analysing small rock samples.

It might be that a more detailed plan really need to be created, however going around and looking at rock samples even to just identify the types of rocks and materials in the ground might be uneventful but potentially useful, it does give data about the makup of the land over a geographical area, if that's all it did for the next 10 years that would be useful information, maybe even for future missions. In fact I believe that is one of its goals, to gather data for potential future missions.

But it does seam like they need to provide more detail on exactly what they want to do the next few years.

[Asur84]

I may be way off the mark here but I do believe the main part of the data collection was for future missions and I think I read somewhere that the importance of the chemical makeup of the rocks was important to plan manned missions but again I may have either read it incorrectly or may have read too much into the information contained

[r3i]

Actually a search looks like Opportunity is alive and well.

Yes, Opportunity is still going strong although I think it has been driving in reverse for a quite a while due to a dodgy wheel.  Status updates on various NASA missions can be found here: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/sci.space.news

[michaelmorris]

The basic problem with the Mars rover missions is that they have been too successful! These things must cost a fortune to keep running (manpower, radio dish time, etc.) So logic dictates that, with a finite budget, at sometime you are going have to divert your funding elsewhere.

[r3i]

Looks like the Curiosity team is going to respond: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/sci.space.news/2jHpUdzrwFE