Free The Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin Page B

balloon will carry an 8-kilogram instrument package containing atmospheric science instruments, data recording and transmitting equipment, a rechargeable battery, a solar array, and an imaging system, the heart of the package. Comprised of two sets of optics—one for high-resolution images, another for medium-resolution images—the imaging system will significantly advance our understanding of Martian geology while allowing us to identify landing sites for future missions and possible areas that offer promise for investigations of past or present Martian life. The best Viking orbiter images reveal surface features the size of a baseball diamond; Mars Surveyor images show surface details as small as a mid-sized car; the cameras MAP carries will be able to reveal surface features the size of a cat (which is not to say that they will reveal Martian cats). Every fifteen minutes during daylight hours, the cameras carried by each balloon will take two simultaneous photographs: one a black-and-white, high-resolution photograph and the other a color, medium-resolution photograph centered on the area imaged by the high-resolution camera (the latter photograph can be used to determine the location of the high-resolution photograph on a map of the planet). MAP will return a staggering number of photographs. For each hundred days an eight-balloon fleet sails the Martian winds, MAP will return 32,000 high-resolution photographs along with an equal number of context photographs at resolutions superior to the best Viking images.
    MAP will return an avalanche of science data that will transform our understanding of Martian geology and meteorology, atmospherics and geomorphology. Engineers and scientists will have the data at hand to help them design new missions, identify sites for exobiological investigations and, perhaps, prospect for water when exploring the Martian surface. But the greatest return from MAP will be the least tangible—its impact on the intellectual life of humanity at large.
    Today, nearly five hundred years since Copernicus and Kepler, Brahe and Galileo, most people still think of Earth as the only world in the universe. The other planets remain mere points of light, their wanderings through the night sky of interest to a select few. They are abstractions, notions taught in schools. The MAP cameras offer the possibility of taking humanity’s eyes to another planet in a way that has never been done before. Through the gondola’s cameras we will see Mars in its spectacular vastness—its enormous canyons, its towering mountains, its dry lake and river beds, its rocky plains and frozen fields. We will see that Mars is truly another world, no longer a notion but a possible destination. And just as the New World entranced and enticed mariners here on Earth, so can Mars entice a new generation of voyagers, a generation ready to fashion the ships and sails proper for heavenly air.
    THE MARS SAMPLE RETURN MISSION
     
    The Holy Grail of robotic Mars exploration programs is the Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission. If only those Viking samples had been in one of our labs, we could have subjected them to a battery of tests and examinations that would have left no doubt in interpretation of results. Well then, why not bring a sample back? Currently, NASA’s solar system exploration branch has penciled in precisely such a mission for 2005.
    There are three ways this might be done. The first, and conceptually the simplest, is the brute-force method. In this case, a launch vehicle in the claof a Titan IV is used to deliver to the surface of Mars a very large payload consisting of a miniature rocket ship, massing perhaps 500 kilograms, completely fueled for an ascent from Mars and flight back to Earth. The lander also has on board a robotic rover that is dispatched to wander about (under human remote control) and collect geologic samples. The samples are then loaded aboard a capsule on the rocket vehicle. When the launch window from