Thank you! I'd say only early 2023 was crap—once I started reconnecting with the non-space aspects of myself, and focusing on friends, food, experiences, and hyper-local exploration, it was an incredible rest of the year. ❤️

I just noticed an unfortunate autocorrect error in an earlier post in the thread—MEP was asking for industry help b/c they said they couldn't *fund* anything else beyond Mars Sample Return. (The autocorrect changed it to "find," quite a difference in meaning!)

WOOOOOOOW 🤩

To answer your question @dsfpspacefl1ght.bsky.social, they weren't asking industry for mission concepts; they asked for help with specific capabilities that are on aging spacecraft at present and that have no replacement in the pipeline yet. But they didn't offer any funding to go along with it yet.

Much delayed reply on my end, haven't been checking this app, whoops! But MRO 2.0 is basically what MEP asked for. All of the things they asked for industry help with were MRO capabilities: Comms, hi-res imaging, weather monitoring...

Thanks!! And yes!!!

MEP even held an industry day last fall asking industry day for help with continuing non-MSR-related Mars exploration goals because they can't find anything else. I have...many thoughts from attending that meeting.

I'm happy to chat about the Mars mysteries part but probably couldn't do justice to the other missions part!

YES. PLEASE.

Being interactive helps a *lot* with keeping them attentive and engaged! With kids that young, I like to ask them a lot of questions that are a quiz about what they already know, and questions about what they think an answer to a question might be. They're always more than eager to talk!