The Astronomy Thread

Captain Suave said:

This mission was in the works until last year when Congress couldn't get its shit together to pass a budget.

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Incredibly expensive mission for what it was doing.

If NASA wanted to be more than a jobs program it wouldn't be an issue.

We've been going into space for 60 years now and gone to the moon and back. Shouldn't cost 10+ billion dollars to retrieve some already cached tiny samples.

Captain Suave said:

For whatever it's worth, my brother-in-law was working the sample return mission at JPL and he thought they were already on a tight budget given the demands.

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It's crazy. They aren't doing any collecting of samples merely picking up what the current rover has already cached for them. It's the same thing with sls costing an arm and a leg for what it does.

Cybsled said:

This isn't from the moon or an asteroid, it's from Mars. While Mars does have lower gravity than Earth and the atmosphere is thinner, it's not insignificant (it's something like 38% gravity and the atmosphere will still offer resistance to any launch). You would a) have to fly the thing to Mars with enough fuel to not only lift off from Mars, but also give it enough oomph to transit back to Earth. Even if you did a "create fuel on site" scheme, that unto itself is very complex and hasn't been tested at any scaled level. You could also make the launch vehicle not the return vehicle and make it rendezvous with an orbiting return rocket that would bring the sample back, but that is also very complex and you still need the sample to get orbital velocity b) have to land the launch vehicle in a way where it has an optimal launch trajectory c) also be close enough to the sample sites so retrieval is practical. One reason they were excited that the drone copter worked well is because they provided for an alternative means of retrieving the samples as opposed to a rover, which in theory gives them a greater selection of landing sites

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$11+ billion dollars to return not even a pound of Martian soil. That is pants on head retarded.

Weve been going to Mars for 50 years now. Vikings touched down in 1976 and since weve over a dozen missions to it and the surface.

11 billion+ dollars for a one off mission to collect a few vials of dirt is insane. Would be a lot more palatable of that was going towards a manned mission or setting up long term infrastructure. Spend that money developing a portable nuclear reactor or something.

If we want progress space wise we gotta stop developing one time use rube goldberg solutions.

god damn there are some retarded people in this thread.

Why can't the thing that's never been done before ever with about a million different "oh wait, its even more complicated than that" addons be accomplished for a measly 11 billion dollars? We've spent 300 billion dollars to lose a war in ukraine that we were already losing how hard could it be to build a robot that can just jump out of mar's fucking gravity well and fly back to earth on hopes and prays and fairy dust i mean come on?

problem with retards is that they are too dumb to be embarrassed by their ridiculously dumb opinions on shit. landing something on Mars? Sure, we've done that a few times, sometimes not so successfully a few multibillion dollar whoopsies but we've managed to not crash land a few robots on Mars. (technically everything we've shot at mars has crash landed, just "gently" enough to survive the crash)

Landing a rocket perfectly vertically (something we struggle to do on fucking Earth with billions of dollars and the best minds in the world working on it), but we're supposed to do it on a planet without any people or infrastructure, just out in a random flat piece of desert, so that rocket can launch a robot to go pick up some mar's rocks from another robot, remote back to the rocket, load itself, and then take the fuck back off btw with 40% of the fuel required to escape earth's gravity still on board so that it can escape Mar's gravity to somehow make it back to fucking earth?

You understand this is the same as asking why haven't we designed bullets to launch from a gun, travel 3,000 feet down range, hit their target, then turn around and fly back and load themselves back into a shell casing with gunpowder and primer to be fired again from the gun a 2nd time.

Aldarion said:

Putting aside the Mars debate for a moment, this sentence just perfectly summarizes online discussion in 2025.

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That's Sylas's personal motto. He tries to live up to it every day.

BrutulTM said:

All they're doing is building a robot that goes to space, flies 140 million miles to another planet, lands, picks up some cargo, goes back to space, flies 140 million miles back to earth, re-enters the atmosphere, and comes back to earth in one piece. A fuckin baby could do it.

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Why not just put the tool on the robot that analyzes dirt on the spot so they don't have to fly it back 140M miles?

Don't the Mars rovers already have that?

Cybsled said:

The rovers that have testing facilities on board are usually very specialized and also limited. So for example on this rover, it can analyze the composition of a material and take microscopic images of some samples.

However, it isn't as powerful as machines on Earth.

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Power constraints, the huge dust problem on mars and weight limits are all working against you. Even if there is a base on mars its likely there will still be reasons to send material back to earth for a long time.

Cybsled said:

The rovers that have testing facilities on board are usually very specialized and also limited. So for example on this rover, it can analyze the composition of a material and take microscopic images of some samples.

However, it isn't as powerful as machines on Earth.

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Good enough. No need to overanalyze dirt