Notes on Potentials
Aladdin said:
A calculated risk. From what NASA knows so far there are very slim chances of water being found on the Gale Crater. Add to that the pressure generated by the cost associated with carrying the drilling stuff all the way to Mars and you'll probably want to stick to the initial plan.
Depending on the bacteria in question, it could be a non-issue; the risk is that the contamination is something that can survive Martian conditions.
It would, however, be interesting what the reaction will be if Curiosity indeed finds water on its journey. Would NASA back-off and maybe plan another mission specifically targeted at examining the water?
That would be the wisest thing to do. Of course, here is also a budgetary issue. I think of the beginning of
The Empire Strikes Back when a Star Destroyer deploys several probes, one of which lands on Hoth. True, we can't just be slinging things into space one after another in perpetuity, but I'm of the opinion we should have had the next mission well under development before
Curiosity landed. As it is,
InSight isn't scheduled to launch until 2016. It would be nice to be sending something out next year, but this sort of thing isn't a high priority in the U.S.
IRIS, pushed back to late April, will examine solar wind and the physics of corona-heliosphere interaction.
LADEE, slated for August, will survey lunar conditions. These are great missions, but if
Curiosity has to back off a water discovery, we're probably not getting another instrument pack to the site until 2018-20, at the earliest; refitting InSight would likely be a very bad idea.
I wonder how those prospects affect the risk analysis.
What kind of surprised me in this story is the fact that NASA engineers thought about pre-mounting a drill only at such a late stage in the mission preparation. I'm also wondering if there's a possibility of just safely discarding the one contaminated drill and use a back-up instead?
The late change doesn't surprise me, but the protocol failure does. They're NASA; they should certainly know better.
However, I'm wondering if it would be possible to use the rover's laser to sterilize the bit. If it's possible, Team Curiosity will figure out how to do it.
Anyway, I can't wait to hear what their historic discovery is all about. Couple more weeks of waiting, I suppose.
As much as I want it to be spectacular, I'm also expecting that it will only be spectacular to scientists and enthusiasts. Grotzinger admitted he
did tell his wife and daughter what they were working on: "Bethany [daughter] looked at me and said, 'pass the ketchup.' So, not everybody was as excited as I was."
Or, maybe ... well, I don't know. I'm less confident about my earlier statement about water and life. They're not expecting to find water at Gale, but there are signs all around suggesting some sort of liquid flowed there at one point in its history. So I should probably stop speculating and just wait like everyone else.
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Notes:
Palca, Joe. "Curiosity's tasting soil on Mars, may have big news". National Public Radio. November 20, 2012. KPLU.org. November 26, 2012. http://www.kplu.org/post/curiositys-tasting-soil-mars-may-have-big-news
See Also:
NASA pages—