The Proposal:

The mission propsal should be emailed to the Eliot Mission Coordinator by the end of Tuesday, November 26. You should include in your proposal:

• The name or acronym for the mission
• The primary target planet for the mission, and possible secondary target(s)
• Whether it will concentrate on the planet or satellites
• The planned course and closest approach to the target. Some correction on approach can be made if instructions are given (eg. "measure radius using angular size and distance, compute Roche limit 2.4 radii, and approach within 3 planetary radii").
• The scientific goals of the mission and its instruments
• Choose delivery platform: flyby or orbiter
• A list of instruments, the budget, and the weights of each
• Weight allowance is total of 100kg. Total masses of all components including platforms, probes, power supplies, etc.
• The maximum budget is now reduced to $75M. The grant administrators at NASA will return your proposal for revision if you exceed this! Total the costs for all components.
• Make sure you have enough power available to run the instruments. If limited power is available, state when you want it to turn on and off.
• Because of the distance to Eliot, and the long communication delays, the mission will have to operate in autonomous mode. State any particular instructions for contingencies or targets of opportunity above the normal operating instructions provided by the NASA Spacecraft Systems Operation Team to program into the on-board computer expert system.
• The total budget and weight. Make sure this is $75M , 100 kg or under.

Common Errors and Problems:

• To deploy a micro-rover, you must land it on the planet using a soft lander.
• To use the soil analyzer/life detection experiments, you must use a lander or rover/lander. A hard impact probe or atmospheric probe are not sufficient.
• To use the atmosphere sensor/analyser, you must be able to get into the atmosphere with an atmospheric probe, hard impact probe, or soft lander.
• The orbiter is equipped with retro-rockets so it can be slowed into planetary orbit. No gravity assists are needed to slow it down.
• The flyby is ballistic except for small thrusters, so it needs gravity assist to re-direct its path into closed orbits. It is primarily designed for a fast flyby on a hyperbolic trajectory.
• Aerobraking and gravity-assist in this unexplored system are very risky. Use with caution! Missions can often be accomplished without this (use an orbiter instead of flyby, etc).
• It is a good idea to include at least a Low-Resolution Video Imager (LRVI) on an orbiter to allow visual selection of a landing site for a lander or probe! You can choose to deploy blind, but its probably be best to be careful.
• Choice of landing site can be crucial. A good (but short) set of instructions and options can make all the difference. The on-board AI may be able to calculate fast, but it can't think itself out of a paper bag on its own!
• If you want to communicate with other missions to share intelligence, data, or telemetry, both missions must include special UHF or VLF comm gear, and must state this fact in the respective proposals (so common codes and formats can be agreed upon).

Hints:

It is best to pick an overall planetary and scientific target, like "see if there is life on Planet X" or "determine internal composition of Planet Y" or "image satellites of Z". Then make sure your mission does this. Then, see what else you can put on the mission that will be complementary. Let me know if you are having troubles with this. Your mission should focus on one or several questions. Talk it over with your friends and classmates - try and design complementary and innovative missions! Try and think of missions that would show us something special. I don't want to see 43 versions of the same mission :-(

If you want a guide, look at the proposal for CATS: an example mission. Of course, don't just copy this one - I would not be happy about that!

I know you would like to make a mission that does "everything", but this system is set up so that you can only get a good shot at one primary target planet. With 43 separate missions, no one mission need do everything! See the list of approved missions to see what has already been proposed. Some redundancy is OK but try and do something different.

Keep an eye out for power requirements. Be sure you include a computer for every 3 instruments! Check to see what you expect the flux from Eliot to be at the various planets if you want to use solar panels, so you can decide how many to include. If you want to have probes or landers, then put most of your instruments on them, instead of the orbiter. Think of simple instructions to give the on-board AI, like "look for large satellites, see if they have an atmosphere, if so, drop probe there; else, drop probe into main planet". Good instructions can make the difference between an OK mission and a great mission!

If you find the choices too complicated, keep it simple! There is no single "right" answer, this is exploration.

If you have ideas for other instruments, let me know.

What Comes After:

After Thanksgiving break, I will send you the data that your mission returns. This might include images, instrument readings, analyzer output, and maybe some error messages. You will be asked some questions about them and asked to submit back a short report, which I will post on the Eliot homepage in the "Mission to Eliot Symposium 2100".

I hope this proves useful and entertaining after all those boring computations we did. Try and remember what we did and why, and think of how to use them to find things out about other planetary systems.

Eliot Homepage ---

smyers@nrao.edu   Steven T. Myers