Re: Four years of Mars exploration

Paulf Foley <paulfxfoley@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

:
:
:Jorge R. Frank wrote:
:
:> "The rovers will be able to do in a day what a skilled field geologist
:> can do in 30 seconds". - Steve Squyres, Principal Investigator, Mars
:> Exploration Rovers.
:
:A skilled field geologist on earth. On mars, he'd be a good deal less
:efficient. Especially if he arrived there dead.
:

Ok, let's stack the deck in favour of robots and then consider your
following statement. Let's assume that the geologist is an order of
magnitude less efficient. That means it now takes him 5 minutes to do
what the rovers can do in a day.

The rovers have been working for some 1500 days or so. That means it
would take 125 hours of 'skilled geologist on site' to equal the
current rover record.

:
:A manned mission to mars would be a massive undertaking, and obscenely
:expensive.
:

True. It would be quite expensive. If it's done as a 'one time'
thing it could cost as much as $100 billion dollars.

:
:The robotic mission is cheap, ...
:

No, the robotic mission is cheapER. That doesn't make it cheap.

Doing nothing is even cheaper (and actually 'cheap', since doing
nothing costs you nothing).

:
:... therefore it wins the cost/benefit prize.
:

You haven't shown that. To show that you need to figure out the total
cost of ownership of the rovers (including the development costs and
the 4 years of spending Earthside) and then figure out what the 'cost
per unit of science' is.

You also need to factor in the fact that a manned mission would not do
JUST what the rovers are doing and you get the lift of being able to
bring back a bunch of samples from all over the place and continue to
work on them long after the manned mission is over.

If we apply your thinking above, doing nothing has the highest
cost/benefit ratio of anything, which is an obviously preposterous
contention.

:
:The manned mission is a gamble, the robotic mission
:is a proven winner.
:

The robotic mission wasn't a "proven winner" until we did it. Your
argument above amounts to saying we should never do anything we
haven't already done.

:
:>
:> Yup. Spirit has traversed a total of 7.5 km, Opportunity 11.6 km:
:>
:> <http://marsrover.nasa.gov/mission/traverse_maps.html>
:>
:> The average traverse on *each* Apollo EVA with rovers was 10.1 km:
:>
:> <http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4029/Apollo_18-30_Extravehicular_Activity.htm>
:>
:
:It's not a race. Rolling past landscape is not the point. Oh wait, in
:the Apollo mission it was the point. Astronauts go to the moon, they
:bring a little car with them and go for a drive. How American! It was
:a stunt, just like hitting the golf ball was. Or planting the flag.
:

The preceding remarks exhibit so much ignorance about what actually
happened that no response is possible other than to tell you to go
educate yourself and get back to us.


--
"Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the
truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong."
-- Thomas Jefferson
.

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