OK I know I promised to start writing posts that were more accessible, but right now I just want to get this idea properly sketched out and for that, I need to use engineerese
First and foremost, I think Curiosity is one of the coolest pieces of hardware that humans have ever built, we have a nuclear powered robot massing in at 900 kg wandering around the surface of Mars, that is effing awesome (if you don't think so I don't know how you got to this blog post). One of the challenges in the design of Curiosity, or any of the rovers on Mars is having sufficient power to move around. Currently all of the rovers still active on Mars carry their power supplies with them. What if instead of carrying their solar panels/nuclear generators , rovers operated similar to how the US Navy uses air-craft carriers and smaller planes, ok not a perfect example.
With this new approach the emphasis on rovers would be mission flexibility, each rover might only come with a small number of sensors and an electrical contact to allow them to receive power from the command pod. The command pod would most likely carry the bulk of communications, power production(duh), and processing. The individual probes receiving power from the mothership could be much simpler affairs, with relatively standard parts aside from their specialized sensors. Each machine would have a very limited amount of on board power storage and production, this would be as a means of redundancy, as well as provide flexibility. Assume rover A needs to get to a location that is too far away to get to with just its own tether, well rover A and rover B could roll out in the general direction of interest, once B and A have gotten to the maximum distance that their tether will allow, B parks in place, A connected to the mother ship through B, can continue the mission until it gets to the target. This daisy chaining of mini-rovers could go for a decent amount of distance, of course there would be a limit, either by the number of rovers sent in the mission, or by voltage losses over the distance of transmission.
There are some inherent trade offs from the maximum area of investigation, to potential mechanical complexity, etc....
The total mass of the mission devoted to all of their little motors will probably be slightly higher than what a larger multi-use rover would use. You would need to be careful to not let the electrical tethers of the rovers get tangled with other rovers. This isn't a mission that you do when it still costs $10,000+/kg to get something to Mars, this kind of mission makes sense when launches are 1/10th that (or hopefully less). As time goes on scientists will want clearer details on areas for future landing sites, governments are going to be interested in quickly confirming whether a region has sufficient resources for larger manned missions. Smart mission planners would have fall back projects, when the rovers start to fail, the mothership could still do activities, ranging form refining fuel for future missions, to weather research stations, to acting as a data backup system for orbiting satellites (I know this is a stretch, but who knows). The Viking probes operated on the surface of Mars for over 6 Earth years, considering Opportunity is still working (12 years passed its original mission length) who knows how long the mothership could do useful science/fuel production.
Any thoughts or alternative approaches are welcome please leave a note.
First and foremost, I think Curiosity is one of the coolest pieces of hardware that humans have ever built, we have a nuclear powered robot massing in at 900 kg wandering around the surface of Mars, that is effing awesome (if you don't think so I don't know how you got to this blog post). One of the challenges in the design of Curiosity, or any of the rovers on Mars is having sufficient power to move around. Currently all of the rovers still active on Mars carry their power supplies with them. What if instead of carrying their solar panels/nuclear generators , rovers operated similar to how the US Navy uses air-craft carriers and smaller planes, ok not a perfect example.
With this new approach the emphasis on rovers would be mission flexibility, each rover might only come with a small number of sensors and an electrical contact to allow them to receive power from the command pod. The command pod would most likely carry the bulk of communications, power production(duh), and processing. The individual probes receiving power from the mothership could be much simpler affairs, with relatively standard parts aside from their specialized sensors. Each machine would have a very limited amount of on board power storage and production, this would be as a means of redundancy, as well as provide flexibility. Assume rover A needs to get to a location that is too far away to get to with just its own tether, well rover A and rover B could roll out in the general direction of interest, once B and A have gotten to the maximum distance that their tether will allow, B parks in place, A connected to the mother ship through B, can continue the mission until it gets to the target. This daisy chaining of mini-rovers could go for a decent amount of distance, of course there would be a limit, either by the number of rovers sent in the mission, or by voltage losses over the distance of transmission.
There are some inherent trade offs from the maximum area of investigation, to potential mechanical complexity, etc....
The total mass of the mission devoted to all of their little motors will probably be slightly higher than what a larger multi-use rover would use. You would need to be careful to not let the electrical tethers of the rovers get tangled with other rovers. This isn't a mission that you do when it still costs $10,000+/kg to get something to Mars, this kind of mission makes sense when launches are 1/10th that (or hopefully less). As time goes on scientists will want clearer details on areas for future landing sites, governments are going to be interested in quickly confirming whether a region has sufficient resources for larger manned missions. Smart mission planners would have fall back projects, when the rovers start to fail, the mothership could still do activities, ranging form refining fuel for future missions, to weather research stations, to acting as a data backup system for orbiting satellites (I know this is a stretch, but who knows). The Viking probes operated on the surface of Mars for over 6 Earth years, considering Opportunity is still working (12 years passed its original mission length) who knows how long the mothership could do useful science/fuel production.
Any thoughts or alternative approaches are welcome please leave a note.
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