Advantages of using Balloons

Balloons can fly 100 times closer than orbiters to the surface of Mars and travel 1000 times faster than rovers. Due to the daily heating and cooling conventional stratospheric have a lifetime limit of a few days. Ultra Long Duration Balloons are currently under development which will fly for more then 100 days.

How to Bring Samples back to Earth

1. Currently instruments are being developed that can determine which rock and soil samples are the most scientifically interesting. These samples will probably be selected by using some sort of electronic imaging system (to look at rock features) and spectroscopy (to analyze the rock’s chemical composition).
2. Instruments have been designed to drill that are more preserved then the ones on the surface. The rock collected must be small enough to be brought back but large enough to display texture and structure.
3. To make sure that the sampling system does not contaminate the sample with anything brought from Earth the apparatus must be thoroughly cleaned before launched.
4. Developing a way to weld metal to form clean airtight seals are needed to protect the samples. The rover will seal the sample in a capsule to prevent contamination from the Earth’s atmosphere or biosphere upon landing on Earth.
5. A Mars Ascent Vehicle will launch the capsule off Mars.

WATER PAGE

“Water is the key to the most important scientific questions dealing with Mars.” This link is to the Mars Today “Water Page” which is really interesting. It shows the current and future water vapor predictions for the Martian Atmosphere. The page also has some fancy water facts about Mars such as “Note that the total amount of water in the atmosphere is very small (measured in precipitable micrometers). If all the water in the Martian atmosphere were to rain out at any given time, it would make a puddle less than a hundredth of a centimeter deep!” The page goes on however to note that, “Approximately 10 times the total atmospheric inventory of water can be found adsorbed in the top few centimeters of the Martian soil.”http://www.mgcm.arc.nasa.gov/MarsToday/MarsWater.html

Mars as it is Today

This is a site that contains a poster which is produced daily by Howard Houben of the Mars Global Circulation Model Group for the Center for Mars Exploration at NASA's Ames Research Center. The poster depicts current conditions on Mars and its relationship to Earth in six panels. The panels show predicted wind speeds for today, temperatures for today, water vapor distribution for today, etc. The poster also shows the relative scale of Mars as compared with Earth and the orbital positions of the Earth and Mars with respect to each other and the sun for today. Furthermore it has a high res image of Mars taken on that day as it would look to us on that day. This link is excellent. http://www.marsinstitute.info/epo/marstoday.html

Finding water on Mars

Collecting information about the crust of Mars it important if we ever want to get to the subsurface. It is suspected that Mar’s desert-like surface covers aquifer of liquid water deep underground. While we have no evidence for water at the surface of Mars, there is a lot of evidence of ancient surface water. It is not unreasonable to believe there is subsurface water if we apply what is known about Earth. Even in the desert regions water can be abundant in the subsurface.

Airplanes on Mars

Rovers are great, but what better way to cover more territory then by flying around the planet? Apparently scientists and engineers hope to design an airplane to be flown on Mars that could be navigated without a human pilot. This seems to be a difficult task because the Martian atmosphere is so thin, requiring huge wings or an extremely fast takeoff. Yet, if the plane is dropped off by the entering spacecraft and the wings unfolded it could have a short but very controlled flight.

Robotic Arm Injury

In a recent experiment to brush and grind a rock on Mars's surface, Opportunity's robotic arm stalled due to a failure in one of its joint. The joint, which controls left-right motion, stopped working while taking microscopic images of the surface. However, the rover has continued to perform its other tasks without failure and operators of the rover will adapt to the new restriction on movement.