So
NASA wants ideas for instruments to put on a new rover to send to Mars. If they don't have ideas for this themselves, to me that means it's time to send the start of a colony instead.
What we lack for that is certainty about one element - the landing. There was a tremendous amount of engineering that went into it for Curiosity. It was a triumph that what we did worked, but we were also very lucky. If NASA wants to land a colony on Mars, at some point that needs to get a little bit less spooky for the public.
Instead of a rover, we should be sending an airport.
Now, I don't have the mass requirements, or power requirements, or any of that for what I'm suggesting. But it's a little less hairy than it sounds when you consider that it doesn't need to be tarmac and air traffic control towers. No, the big thing we lack that the space shuttle had each time it landed was a functioning weather and positioning system.
For that, consider the humble RFID. What I propose is a two part system.
One, the sensors. These could be anything we'd like (barometric, temperature, humidity, whatever), and there would have to be a lot of them. They'd be compact, durable, and reprogrammable to repurpose them for other things, but we'll get to that. They would be powered entirely by radio flux, possibly with a secondary radioisotope-powered transmitter in orbit, and we'd achieve that by having very long, very thin antennas attached to each.
These would unfurl as draglines - the sensor modules would be shaped like spools, grooved aerodynamically to spin as they entered the Martian atmosphere, throwing the wound antenna outwards forcefully as they descend - as they slow, the antennas would naturally start to pull more and more, putting a large amount of its momentum into rotation. There would have to be no other method slowing them, so yes, the sensor would impact with a certain amount of force.
If we made them rugged enough (with well-engineered sensors), that could actually help them find purchase in the soil once they hit. Some of them would probably fail, but we're trying to prevent the same thing from happening for colonists. It's an unknown to me, but since there's no complicated robotics, I'm reasonably certain we could work something out.
So now we have a loose network of transmitters scattered across the surface of Mars. If you made the mission large enough (which, lacking the need for crazy heat shields and sky crane maneuvers and chutes etc etc etc, you might be able to make this system quite thorough), you would now have the beginnings of a communications and locations system. They could act as primitive relays to allow future martians an emergency comms system that would "never" fail. Because Mars has no magnetosphere, they could act as doppler weather stations for a suitably equipped orbiter (and this is also why I think that a RFID-type setup could transmit powerfully enough to work, correct me if I'm wrong) If you'd like, they could be repurposed as a great big radio telescope, which could provide for another source of data for solar activity, or just for Science. I'm sure people could think of other uses for a bunch of antennas attached to computers. It'll probably end up being Martian WIFI, which is probably a sanity saver for colonists.
This is why having them be reprogrammable would be a good thing. Raspberry Pi anyone?
So two - the orbiter.
Distributing this system properly would benefit from some better planning than just letting them all go at once. I would suggest a single sensor be sent down to gather weather data in the local area, and then an additional one should be dropped each time mission parameters are reached where they could be reasonably sure that the sensor would not veer off-course. If there was significant drift from wind activity during the descent, this process could be sped up, and if we notice them drifting together in certain spaces, that would be an indication of a more established wind pattern.
As the sensors are released, the orbiter would naturally tend to drift out further - we could do three things at this point.
One, allow it to leave orbit to go off to another mission. Two, slow it at a higher orbit using the propulsion system we used to get there, or just keep it at the orbit we first had by correcting as they're unleashed. Three, time things correctly to put it into orbit around Phobos, or even at the L1 to form the start of a future tether mission (the orbitter would have to have a substantial antenna too, after all) All three have advantages, which could be better studied and determined by NASA rather than someone with no degree and no fat government salary (haha. Ha. I'm effectively 'furloughed' too :/) motivating them to do the legwork on what each would require.
What do you guys think? I just think that we can do better than another rover. Particularly now that we've found water, and philanthropists seem to be interested in dipping their toes into exploration on their own, it seems like a waste to send a nearly identical mission just because we don't feel like spending money to develop other ideas.