let's design a rip off mars lander

[orcot]

Back in 2000 NASA was building the 2 martian rovers that are as of today still working on Mars and they did it at a total cost of 600 million$, The nicest part of it is that the initial designad rover costed around 300-450 million to build and launch and the second one only costed around 200 million (probably because they could use spare parts and the same scematics)

Now I wonderd how much it would cost to basicly rebuild the £50 million beagle 2 probe using the spare parts but redisgning it to carry a 3.5 kilogram (also allready developed by esa) martian balloon and offcourse designing it so that this time it doesn't crash on the surface). Could this new probe again cost as little as £50 million or could it be build even cheaper as both parts are already designed?

the new probe would basicly be a mobile lander that lands does it rechearch and and let the balloon carry it with him on the martian winds when the ground samples are analysed, only to land a few km further to start again.
Further advantages are that the solar panels could be mounted on the balloon itself where their will be less dust and more winds to clean them and if it the balloon would only travel a few km each time it doesn't have to be designend for control a small weather station on top of the balloon that measures windspeed and direction combinend with a 360 panorama camera at top could be all the navigational hardware required.

link abouth the beatle 2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_2)
link abouth the balloon for beagle 2 (http://www.space50.net/Aerobots.html)

[Xylene]

Wouldn't it be a smarter idea to just build a whole lot of large balloons, and have a fleet of them drifting around the planet on the Martian winds, with a group of different cameras taking photos automatically every few seconds and transmitting the images to Earth directly. The cameras could all be set to different wavelengths, to capture as much information as possible as the balloons went over the landscape.:)

[orcot]

maybe at 3.5 kg a balloon you would be more restrictedby their volume then anything else, the trouble would be that nobody has designend this balloon yet and it would need a pretty good AI. Unless it's solar panels are strong enough it should avoid traveling to far to the poles where their isn't enough sunlight for the onboard computer to work or to close to any of the big mountains where the atmosphere is to thin to get lift.

The balloon I'm proposing would only travel for very short distances so if ESA wan't it to go east it simply waits until their is a eastern wind and then get lift to land only a couple of km further to take a other ground sample.

Say it would have a life time of 1 martian year 660 days and it could do it's ground rechearge every 3 days and then fly's for 20 minutes to land roughly 5 km further, then it could do 220 flights perhaps devided by 2 because you have to wait for the right wind that's a 110 soil samples, over a area of at least 550km and a lot of atmospheric rechearge