Why doesn't NASA go to Mars polar caps?

Question

Nasa spends millions looking for water on mars, why don't they land a rover at the polar caps where they know water is already present?

Answer 1

The Martian icecaps are not water, but more likely to be "dry ice", which is frozen carbon dioxide.

Also, they don't have complete control over where the spacecraft land. They just have a general area they can shoot for, and try to get it close. Too many unpredictable things, like Martian weather, happen that steer a lander off course.

Skylor Williams

Answer 2

One answer is, "because we already know there is water there."
That, however, doesn't mean there isn't some good science that can be done by exploring the polar caps.

Another answer is, we tried to land at the polar cap and crashed (Mars Polar Lander back in 1999). A little more than half the missions ever sent to Mars have failed - it isn’t easy. But the good news is that we are trying again to send a lander to the polar cap - the Phoenix Mission to Mars launches in Aug 2007: http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/index.php

Comments on others’ answers:
patrarno – we have 2 robots on Mars that do withstand extreme conditions (temperatures of -50 C at night to 0 C during day). But you’re right it was difficult to build them.

skylor_williams – the ice caps contain both frozen H2O and frozen CO2. Also, they have excellent control over where they land.

General - we are not looking for water just to find water, we are looking for water because where there is water (or has been water in the past) is the most likely place to find evidence for life.

Answer 3

Two things: First, there's no real evidence of water in the Martian Polar caps (they are frozen Carbon dioxide----dry ice) Any water we are going to find on Mars would be subsurface water.
Second, the energy costs of a space probe at a high inclination to the ecliptic (the path the planets follow in general about the sun) would be prohibitive.
So why expend that vast extra effort to look at something you can see inside an ice cream wagon?

Answer 4

NASA people had a long process to decide where to land the rovers. They consulted many people, and came up with a list of about 185 spots.

"In choosing where to go, we need to balance science value with engineering safety considerations at the landing sites. The sites we have chosen provide such balance," -- NASA associate administrator for space science Ed Weiler.

Answer 5

"The 'root cause' of the loss of the spacecraft was the failed translation of English units into metric units in a segment of ground-based, navigation-related mission software, as NASA has previously announced," said Arthur Stephenson, chairman of the Mars Climate Orbiter Mission Failure Investigation Board. "The failure review board has identified other significant factors that allowed this error to be born, and then let it linger and propagate to the point where it resulted in a major error in our understanding of the spacecraft's path as it approached Mars.

"Based on these findings, we have communicated a range of recommendations and associated observations to the team planning the landing of the Polar Lander, and the team has given these recommendations some serious attention," said Stephenson, director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, AL.

The board's report cites the following contributing factors:


errors went undetected within ground-based computer models of how small thruster firings on the spacecraft were predicted and then carried out on the spacecraft during its interplanetary trip to Mars

the operational navigation team was not fully informed on the details of the way that Mars Climate Orbiter was pointed in space, as compared to the earlier Mars Global Surveyor mission

a final, optional engine firing to raise the spacecraftÕs path relative to Mars before its arrival was considered but not performed for several interdependent reasons

the systems engineering function within the project that is supposed to track and double-check all interconnected aspects of the mission was not robust enough, exacerbated by the first-time handover of a Mars-bound spacecraft from a group that constructed it and launched it to a new, multi-mission operations team

some communications channels among project engineering groups were too informal

the small mission navigation team was oversubscribed and its work did not receive peer review by independent experts

personnel were not trained sufficiently in areas such as the relationship between the operation of the mission and its detailed navigational characteristics, or the process of filing formal anomaly reports

the process to verify and validate certain engineering requirements and technical interfaces between some project groups, and between the project and its prime mission contractor, was inadequate
The failure board will now proceed with its work on a second report due by Feb. 1, 2000, which will address broader lessons learned and recommendations to improve NASA processes to reduce the probability of similar incidents in the future.

Mars Climate Orbiter and its sister mission, the Mars Polar Lander, are part of a series of missions in a long-term program of Mars exploration managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. JPL's industrial partner is Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver, CO. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA.

Answer 6

you're lacking one key think approximately "water = existence." you desire liquid water. that's what seems to be the biggest. everywhere we've got here across liquid water, we've got here across existence. The polar caps of mars have water, yet in simple terms water ice. in fact liquid water can no longer at present exist on the martian floor, it could in simple terms exists in its good and gasoline states, very like CO2 does right here on earth. We did attempt to land on the pole, the undertaking failed, seek for them to attempt lower back in some unspecified time sooner or later nonetheless.

Answer 7

We have fresh water stored on earth's polar caps. why do we need to go to mars for that.

Answer 8

We sent a mission to the polar cap but it was one of the ones that was lost.

Answer 9

It's tough to design a robot capable of withstanding extreme conditions.

Answer 10

Its all fake man, they take all the tax money spent on the NASA program and spend it on booze and girls. They take like $20 and make a crappy picture to show the public.