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`Irony` actually does mean `metal like`...

NASA Langley plane eliminated from mission to Mars

NASA Announces 2011 Mars Scout Proposals

It took 20 years to increase the resolution by a factor or 10 over Viking with the Mars Global Surveyor mission. But only 10 years to increase the resolution over that of MGS by a factor of 10 with Mars Reconnassance Orbiter.
Could we increase the resolution over MRO by another factor of 10 to, gulp, 3 cm per pixel in only 5 years this time?


Bob Clark

There comes a point when the size of the optics requried to get the increase in resolution are such that they are prohibitive to launch onboard a reasonable sized vehicle. Second problem - you then have a 100 factor data volume increase or 100 factor reduction in coverage. Personally - I'd rather send an upgraded MARCI - something producing daily weather images in a few more wavelengths and at say 250metre globally - or a good SAR mission.

For Scout budgets though - these two new missions look interesting, it will be nice to see more details...i.e. are they Odyssey scale vehicles, or MRO scale vehicles in terms of size, power, bandwidth etc.

Doug

Then 3mm/pixel 2.5 years after that, and 300 microns 1.25 years after that, and ...
Hmm, in less that a decade we should be able to resolve microbes from space.



Bob Clark ;-)

Funny, that rather off-the-cuff estimate of mine is close to what is possible.
To resolve 3 cm in the optical from say a 300 km orbit would require a 6 meter mirror. The James Webb Space Telescope will have a 6.5 meter mirror and is scheduled for launch in 2013. But it was originally scheduled for launch in 2011:

James Webb Space Telescope.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope

The JWST though is a 4 billion dollar mission. Also it uses a beryllium metal mirror for infrared astronomy only. The beryllium makes the mirror lightweight but it is unclear if you can achieve the much more stringent smoothness requirements at optical wavelengths with a metal mirror.
As for data storage and transmission, data storage capacity and cost are doubling and halving per year, respectively:

Bye-bye hard drive, hello flash.
By Michael Kanellos
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: January 4, 2006, 10:00 AM PST
"Currently, NAND chips double in memory density every year. The cutting-edge 4-gigabit chips of 2005, for example, will soon be dethroned by 8-gigabit chips. (Memory chips are measured in gigabits, or Gb, but consumer electronics manufacturers talk about how many gigabytes, or GB, are in their products. Eight gigabits make a gigabyte, so one 8Gb chip is the equivalent of 1GB.)
"Another driving factor in the uptake of the technology is cost: NAND drops in price about 35 to 45 percent a year, due in part--again--to Moore's Law and in part to the fact that many companies are bringing on new factories."
http://news.com.com/Bye-bye+hard+dri...3-6005849.html

MRO uses the type of flash memory chips discussed here.

Also, interestingly NASA had planned a laser communication orbiter for Mars for launch in 2010 before it was canceled:

Record Set for Space Laser Communication.
By Ker Than
Staff Writer
posted: 05 January 2006
02:11 pm ET
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches...aser_comm.html

Mars Telecommunications Orbiter: Interplanetary Broadband.
By Bill Christensen
posted: 05 May 2005
06:41 am ET
http://www.space.com/businesstechnol...om_050505.html

This would have allowed data transmission rates of a hundred times greater than what is currently available.

That the costs for electronics are dropping exponentially with capacity increasing exponentially is no doubt fueled by the free market.
Conversely, that launch costs are staying static is no doubt because the launches are controlled by large governments. When private companies become the primary financer and purveyor of launches, the launch costs will also drop dramatically.


Bob Clark