The Register‘s Gary Robbins, on his ScienceDude blog that puts most of his relentlessly-local material out directly to readers thus circumventing that messy newsprint, has word of a new idea for a Mars sample return mission. A Fullerton man works at the Jet Propulsion Lab as a Mars Exploration Program manager. On his plate is a rework of the agency’s much-delayed mission to get a piece of Mars to Earth. One aspect that intrigues The Tracker is that the capsule bearing the goods is to plunk into the Great Salt Lake without benefit of a parachute. Just wondering – does this trace any of its ancestry to the accidental recovery of some good science from the crashed remnants of the Genesis space probe that smacked into Utah three years ago — after its parachutes didn’t open? If so, it just goes to show that some accidents may have an unexpected lesson: let’s do it again!
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-CP
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