Nancy has been with Universe Today since 2004, and has published over 6,000 articles on space exploration, astronomy, science and technology. She is the author of two books: "Eight Years to the Moon: the History of the Apollo Missions," (2019) which shares the stories of 60 engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make landing on the Moon possible; and "Incredible Stories from Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos" (2016) tells the stories of those who work on NASA's robotic missions to explore the Solar System and beyond.
Follow Nancy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Nancy_A and and Instagram at and https://www.instagram.com/nancyatkinson_ut/
Artist rendition of th ExoFly on Mars. Courtesy Ray Villard
This is perhaps the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. Ray Villard, the news director for the Hubble Space Telescope, also writes a blog for Discovery called Cosmic Ray (love that name!) He recently wrote about a dragonfly-like robotic device being developed by the Technical University Delft, Wageningen University in the Netherlands. It’s call the ExoFly, and Ray described it as a “dragonfly-on-steroids … a nimble flapping aerobot.” It could be the next generation of robotic planetary explorers. It’s a small, lightweight autonomous machine capable of flying, hovering, landing and taking off like an insect. Ray says this type of vehicle would “open up a new exploration niches that it not easily reachable by rovers or airborne vehicles on far flung worlds.” Actually, it might work best in conjunction with a future big rover, flying ahead to search for interesting or dangerous terrain, and the rover would provide a “landing pad” for the ExoFly’s home base. While the ExoFly may be small, its name sounds like a potential super hero, and its capabilities could be in the exploration super hero category, as well.
Take a look at the incredible video of the ExoFly below:
The ExoFly would be great for exploring Mars, and Titan, too. Small onboard cameras would provide a unique overhead but close-up view of the terrain in geological terms that would be different from, and could compliment, a rover.
The prototype ExoFly weighs less than an ounce, has a wingspan of only a foot, and can fly for 12 minutes on batteries.
A Mars ExoFly would need a longer wingspan and carry a miniaturized high-resolution digital video camera, sensors, navigation system and instruments.
Check out all of Ray Villard’s ideas for this future flying robot at Cosmic Ray.
Image and video credit: T.E. Zegers
Source: Cosmic Ray (with a head nod to Disco Dave Mosher for his Twitter Tweet)
Artists depiction of Odyssey at Mars. Credit: NASA
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Seems like everyone at Mars is getting an extended mission these days – every spacecraft, that is. The Mars Odyssey orbiting spacecraft, the longest-serving of six spacecraft now studying Mars, has gotten another two-year extension of its mission. And mission extensions are great opportunities to try something new, so Odyssey is altering its orbit to get a different and better look at Mars with its Thermal Emission Imaging System which maps minerals on Mars in infrared. During this third mission extension, which goes through September 2010, Odyssey will also be able to point its camera with more flexibility than ever before. Odyssey is another Energizer Bunny-like spacecraft: it has been going and going since it reached Mars in 2001.
The orbit adjustment will allow Odyssey’s Thermal Emission Imaging System to look down at sites when it’s mid-afternoon, rather than late afternoon, as it has been doing so far. The multipurpose camera will take advantage of the infrared radiation emitted by the warmer rocks to provide clues to the rocks’ identities.
“This will allow us to do much more sensitive detection and mapping of minerals,” said Odyssey Project Scientist Jeffrey Plaut of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena , Calif.
The mission’s orbit design before now used a compromise between what works best for the Thermal Emission Imaging System and what works best for another instrument, the Gamma Ray Spectrometer.
To change its orbit, the operations team at JPL and Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver fired Odyssey’sthrusters for nearly 6 minutes on Sept. 30, the final day of the mission’s second two-year extension. This image from Odyssey shows a surface changed by floods. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
“This was our biggest maneuver since 2002, and it went well,” said JPL’s Gaylon McSmith, Odyssey mission manager. “The spacecraft is in good health. The propellant supply is adequate for operating through at least 2015.”
Odyssey’s orbit a sun-synchronous polar orbit at Mars. The local solar time has been about 5 p.m. at whatever spot on Mars Odyssey flew over as it made its dozen daily passes from between the north pole region to the south pole region for the past five years. (Likewise, the local time has been about 5 a.m. under the track of the spacecraft during the south-to-north leg of each orbit.)
From last week’s thruster maneuver, that synchronization will gradually change over the next year or so. Its effect is that the time of day on the ground when Odyssey is overhead is now getting earlier by about 20 seconds per day. A follow-up maneuver, probably in late 2009 when the overpass time is between 2:30 and 3:00 p.m., will end the progression toward earlier times.
This will also allow the camera away to be pointed in different directions, instead of just the straight-down pointing that has been used throughout the mission. Doing this will allow the team to fill in some gaps in earlier mapping and also create some stereo, three-dimensional imaging.
The downside of this is one instrument will likely stop being used. The gamma ray detector, one of three instruments in Odyssey’s Gamma Ray Spectrometer suite, needs a later-hour orbit to avoid overheating of a critical component. But the neutron spectrometer and high-energy neutron detector are expected to keep operating.
The Gamma Ray Spectrometer provided dramatic discoveries of water-ice near the surface throughout much of high-latitude Mars, the impetus for NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander mission. The gamma ray detector has also mapped global distribution of many elements, such as iron, silicon and potassium, a high science priority for the first and second extensions of the Odyssey mission. A panel of planetary scientists assembled by NASA recommended this year that Odyssey make the orbit adjustment to get the best science return from the mission in coming years.
Odyssey will continue providing crucial support for Mars surface missions as well as conducting its own investigations. It has relayed to Earth nearly all data returned from NASA rovers Spirit and Opportunity . It shares with NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter the relay role for Phoenix. It has made targeted observations for evaluating candidate landing sites.
Proposed design for an electromagnetic drive. Credit: SPR Ltd.
A controversial concept called the electromagnetic drive, or Emdrive for short has been called impossible. But one company believes the concept is viable and has worked for several years on building demonstration models. The Emdrive is a reactionless propulsion system that supposedly generates thrust by converting electrical energy via microwaves. If it works it could provide an almost endless supply of thrust for satellites and possibly other spacecraft. But no detectable energy emanates from the device, and most scientists say the Emdrive violates the well-established principle of the conservation of momentum. Satellite Propulsion Research, Ltd. (SPR), the company working on the drive now says researchers from China have confirmed the theory behind the Emdrive, and they should have a trial engine ready to test by the end of this year.
A reactionless drive was first proposed in the 1950’s, but came to attention in 2006 when New Scientist published an article about Dr. Roger Shawyer, who founded SPR, and claimed he had constructed a prototype that produced 88 millinewtons of forces while using only 700 watts of power. The idea was met with criticism from nearly all fronts.
The idea of the Emdrive involves forces created by reflecting microwaves between opposite walls of a cavity. If a cavity could be designed which would cause the forces on one side to be greater than the other, thrust could be achieved. The proposed cavity is cone shaped, which supposedly would provide the unequal force design.
In principle, no microwaves or anything else leaves the device, and so it is considered reactionless. But Shawyers website claims that the device is not reactionless, or a perpetual motion machine, because the force is created by a “reaction between the end plates of the waveguide and the Electromagnetic wave propagated within it.”
Originally, Shawyer, a British scientist, got funding from the UK, and then from am US company. Now the researchers at China’s Northwestern Polytechnical University (NPU) in Xi’an say they have confirmed the Emdrive theory, and have gotten funding to build the device.
Their device is based on Shawyer’s theories, and if it works, it would confirm what Shawyer has been claiming all along. The Chinese lead researcher, Professor Yang Juan, previously has worked with microwave plasma thrusters, which has similar engineering principles. A recent article in Wired said he Chinese should be capable of determining whether the thruster really works or whether the apparent forces are caused by experimental errors.
If the Emdrive works, what would it mean for spaceflight? Shawyer says a solar-powered Emdrive could take a manned mission to Mars in 41 days.
Frost now appears on Mars every sol. Credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech/U of AZ
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The days are getting shorter for the Phoenix Mars Lander, and as fall approaches on Mars’ northern plains, the scientists and engineers for the mission are quickly trying get as much done before power levels on the lander drop too low for any more scientific activities. In the image here, blue-ish white frost appears on Mars surface every day now as the temperatures continue to drop. This image was taken on the 131st Martian day or sol of the mission, October 7 here on Earth. Clearly visible are the interlocking polygon shapes that form in permafrost from seasonal freezes and thaws. These polygon patterns were seen in orbital pictures taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, as well as other spacecraft, and are part of the evidence that Mars’ north polar region harbors large quantities of frozen water.
The Phoenix Lander has dug more trenches in Mars soil in both the low troughs and high peaks of the polygons, and is scooping the soil into onboard science laboratories for analysis. About two weeks ago, Phoenix moved a rock nicknamed “Headless,” about 0.4 meters (16 inches) with its robotic arm. Then soil from under the rock was scraped up by the scoop at the end of the arm and and delivered to the lander’s optical and atomic-force microscopes.
Scientists are conducting preliminary analysis of this soil, nicknamed “Galloping Hessian.” The soil piqued their interest because it may contain a high concentration of salts, said Diana Blaney, a scientist on the Phoenix mission with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
As water evaporates in arctic and arid environments on Earth, it leaves behind salt, which can be found under or around rocks, Blaney said. “That’s why we wanted to look under ‘Headless,’ to see if there’s a higher concentration of salts there.” The La Mancha trench. Credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech/U of AZ
Phoenix scientists also want to analyze a hard, icy layer beneath the Martian soil surface. The robotic arm has dug into a trench called “La Mancha,” in part to see how deep the Martian ice table is. The Phoenix team also plans to dig a trench laterally across some of the existing trenches in hopes of revealing a cross section, or profile, of the soil’s icy layer.
“We’d like to see how the ice table varies around the workspace with the different topography and varying surface characteristics such as different rocks and soils,” said Phoenix co-investigator Mike Mellon of the University of Colorado, Boulder. “We hope to learn more about how the ice depth is controlled by physical processes, and by looking at how the ice depth varies, we can pin down how it got there.” Mars soil on the MECA instrument. Credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech/U of AZ
Over the weekend, on the 128th Martian day, or sol, Phoenix engineers successfully directed the robotic arm to dig in a trench called “Snow White” in the eastern portion of the lander’s digging area. The robotic arm then delivered the material to an oven screen on Phoenix’s Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer.
The Phoenix team will try to shake the oven screen so the soil can break into smaller lumps and fall through for analysis.
The Phoenix lander, originally planned for a three-month mission on Mars, is now in its fifth month. As fall approaches, the lander’s weather instruments detect diffuse clouds above northern Mars, and temperatures are getting colder as the daylight hours wane.
Consequently, Phoenix faces an increasing drop in solar energy as the sun falls below the Martian horizon. Mission engineers and scientists expect this power decline to curtail activities in the coming weeks. As darkness deepens, Phoenix will primarily become a weather station and will likely cease all activity by the end of the year.
The powerful opening scene of the movie “Contact” portrays radio and television signals from Earth heading out into space. Then later in the film, shockingly, one of those signals — a televised speech by Adolf Hitler — is beamed back as a reply. Could that really happen? Could an alien civilization “find” us from our inherent noise? Or, if we want other intelligent life to know we’re here, will we have to take a more proactive or aggressive approach? Perhaps we’ll find out. Today, messages from Earth were beamed specifically at an alien world considered capable of supporting life, the planet Gliese 581c, a “super-Earth” located approximately 20 light years from us. The social networking site Bebo sponsored a competition for young people to share their views and concerns of life on Earth, and the winners’ messages were transmitted this morning from a radio telescope in Ukraine. Bebo was assisted by Dr. Alexander Zaitsev, who says the only way alien civilizations might find us is if we specifically make ourselves known.
501 photos, drawings and text messages were translated into binary format and beamed through space in a four and a half hour transmission by the huge RT-70 radar telescope in Evpatoria, Ukraine, normally used to track asteroids.
The transmission started at 0600 GMT on October 9. Oli Madgett, from the media company RDF Digital who came up with the idea, said the message “passed the Moon in 1.7 seconds, Mars in just four minutes and will leave our Solar System before breakfast tomorrow”. The media company footed the $40,000 (£20,000) bill for the transmission.
The message should reach the Gliese system by about 2029. Any reply to the messages probably wouldn’t reach Earth for 40 years.
Bebo’s intent was to raise awareness for the concerns that young people have for the future of Earth, and to generate interest in space exploration. Bebo spokesman Mark Charkin said, “A ‘Message From Earth’ presents an opportunity for the digital natives of today… to reconnect with science and the wider universe in a simple, fun and immersive way.”
Dr. Zaitsev was a consultant for the project, and is one of the world’s experts in interstellar radio communication and is Chief Scientist of the Radio Engineering and Electronics Institute, at the Russian Academy of Science. His early work helped design and implement radar devices to study Mercury, Venus and Mars and Near-Earth asteroid radar research. Lately, he has focused on interstellar radio messaging, and what he calls METI – Messaging to Extra Terrestrial Intelligence.
“The leakage is of commercial television radio is much weaker than coherent sounding radar signals, such as the Arecibo Radio Telescope or the Goldstone Solar System Radar,” Zaitsev told Universe Today. “The leakage is weakly detectable against a background of solar radio emissions. I do not say that any imaginable super-aggressive and powerful civilization cannot detect our leakage, however.”
As opposed to SETI, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, METI takes a more proactive approach. In his paper “Making the Case for METI,” Zaitsev and two colleagues wrote, “It is possible we live in a galaxy where everyone is listening and no one is speaking. In order to learn of each others’ existence – and science – someone has to make the first move.”
Zaitsev has been involved in several deliberate transmissions to space in hopes of making contact. “Otherwise,” he said, “centers of intelligence are doomed to remain lonely, unobserved civilizations.”
METI, as well as the Bebo project, takes a complete opposite approach from the recently formed WETI – Wait for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence.
Have you seen this image before? You know you have. It’s probably right on the tip of your tongue. This is the image for this week’s “Where In The Universe?” challenge. The goal of this challenge is to test your skills and visual knowledge of our universe. Guess the name of this image, and give yourself extra points if you can guess the telescope or project that this image came from (is that a clue? It’s not from a spacecraft…). As always, don’t peek below before you make your guess. Comments on how you did are welcome.
A highly scientific illustration of the Voorwerp. Courtesy Galaxy Zoo
This image is of “Hanny’s Voorwerp” from the Galaxy Zoo project, which in turn, is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which uses a 2.5-meter telescope on Apache Point, NM, to scan the sky. ‘Voorwerp’ is Dutch for ‘object’, and ‘Hanny’ refers to Hanny van Arkel, a Dutch school teacher. The voorwerp is the blue blob just below the big galaxy. Hanny found the object as she was classifying galaxies from astronomical images as part Galaxy Zoo’s “citizen science” project, where volunteers classify galaxies as spiral or eliptical. As for what the blob is, no one knows for sure. Yet.
Other spectral images show the blob as green, which is probably closer to how our eyes would actually see it if we were close enough. It’s about 700 million light years from Earth and the Voorwerp itself is about 65,000 light years across.
Hanny’s Voorwerp has been of interest to lots of folks, and an astronomer at the William Herschel telescope at La Palma took a spectrum of the Voorwerp, in an effort to help figure out what it is. The spectrum showed that the Voorwerp is at the same distance as the big galaxy. This implies that it’s really big and luminous.
The the best explanation might be that the Voorwerp got its energy from light that was once emitted by a bright quasar. The big galaxy, called IC 2497 is thought to have once hosted the quasar that lit up Hanny’s Voorwerp.
From the Galaxy Zoo Blog: “What is the Voorwerp? That’s not too clear yet. We have to properly analyse the spectrum to understand what exactly is going on. It’s likely forming stars at a huge rate, ionising lots of gas and making it shine. We’re also trying to get a deeper image to see if there’s evidence of an interaction between the big galaxy and the Voorwerp.”
If you’re not familiar with Galaxy Zoo, check it out. It’s a lot of fun. If you’re good at this challenge, you’d be a great help over at Galaxy Zoo. And who knows? Maybe you could find the next unusual object!
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The Cassini spacecraft will make two close passes of Saturn’s geyser-spewing moon Enceladus this month. The first one on October 9 is the closest flyby yet of any moon of Saturn, at a white-knuckle distance of only 25 kilometers (16 miles) from the surface. The not-quite-as-scary Halloween flyby on Oct. 31 will be farther out, at 196 kilometers (122 miles). The focus of the Oct. 9 is the plume of the moon’s geyser, and the spacecraft’s fields and particles instruments will venture deeper into the plume than ever before, directly sampling the particles and gases. Scientists are intrigued by the possibility that liquid water, perhaps even an ocean, may exist beneath the surface of Enceladus. Trace amounts of organics have also been detected, raising tantalizing possibilities about the moon’s habitability.
While Cassini’s cameras and other optical instruments were the focus of an earlier flyby in August, this time the emphasis will be on the composition of the plume rather than imaging the surface.
“We know that Enceladus produces a few hundred kilograms per second of gas and dust and that this material is mainly water vapor and water ice,” said Tamas Gambosi, Cassini scientist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. “The water vapor and the evaporation from the ice grains contribute most of the mass found in Saturn’s magnetosphere.
“One of the overarching scientific puzzles we are trying to understand is what happens to the gas and dust released from Enceladus, including how some of the gas is transformed to ionized plasma and is disseminated throughout the magnetosphere,” said Gambosi. The Oct. 9 flyby will be only 25 kilometers (16 miles) from the surface. The Oct. 31 flyby is farther out, at 196 kilometers (122 miles). Credit: NASA/JPL
On Oct. 31, the cameras and other optical remote sensing instruments will be front and center, imaging the fractures that slash across the moon’s south polar region like stripes on a tiger.
These two flybys might augment findings from the most recent Enceladus flyby, which hint at possible changes associated with the icy moon. Cassini’s Aug. 11 encounter with Enceladus showed temperatures over one of the tiger-stripe fractures were lower than those measured in earlier flybys. The fracture, called Damascus Sulcus, was about 160 to 167 Kelvin (minus 171 to minus 159 degrees Fahrenheit), below the 180 Kelvin (minus 136 degrees Fahrenheit) reported from a flyby in March of this year.
“We don’t know yet if this is due to a real cooling of this tiger stripe, or to the fact that we were looking much closer, at a relatively small area, and might have missed the warmest spot,” said John Spencer, Cassini scientist on the composite infrared spectrometer, at the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colo.
Results from Cassini’s magnetometer instrument during the August flyby suggest a difference in the intensity of the plume compared to earlier encounters. Information from the next two flybys will help scientists understand these observations.
Four more Enceladus flybys are planned in the next two years, bringing the total number to seven during Cassini’s extended mission, called the Cassini Equinox Mission.
The Enceladus geysers were discovered by Cassini in 2005. Since then, scientists have been intrigued about what powers them, because the moon is so tiny, roughly the width of Arizona at only 500 kilometers (310 miles) in diameter.
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Using gravitational lensing, astronomers have been able to see a young star-forming galaxy in the distant universe as it appeared only two billion years after the Big Bang. Appropriately enough, the galaxy used as a zoom lens was the “Cosmic Eye” galaxy, named so because through the effect of gravitational lensing, it looks like a giant eye in space. The researchers, led by Dr. Dan Stark, of Caltech, say this distant galaxy may provide insights into how our own galaxy may have evolved to its present state.
The astronomers used the ten meter Keck telescope in Hawaii, which is equipped with a laser-assisted guide star adaptive optics (AO) to correct for blurring in the Earth’s atmosphere. By combining the powerful telescope with the magnifying effect of the gravitational field of the foreground galaxy – called gravitational lensing – they were able to study the distant star system, which lies 11 billion light years from Earth. The Cosmic Eye, the foreground galaxy, is 2.2 billion light years from Earth.
The distortion of light rays enlarged the distant galaxy eight times.
This allowed the scientists to determine the galaxy’s internal velocity structure and compare it to later star systems such as the Milky Way.
In the image, the red source in the middle is the foreground lensing galaxy, while the blue ring is the near-complete ring image of the background star-forming galaxy.
Research co-author Dr. Mark Swinbank, in The Institute for Computational Cosmology, at Durham University, said, “This is the most detailed study there has been of an early galaxy. Effectively we are looking back in time to when the Universe was in its very early stages.
Stark said, “Gravity has effectively provided us with an additional zoom lens, enabling us to study this distant galaxy on scales approaching only a few hundred light years.
“This is ten times finer sampling than previously. As a result for the first time we can see that a typical-sized young galaxy is spinning and slowly evolving into a spiral galaxy much like our own Milky Way.”
Data from the Keck Observatory was combined with millimeter observations from the Plateau de Bure Interferometer, in the French Alps, which is sensitive to the distribution of cold gas destined to collapse to form stars.
Dr. Swinbank added, “Remarkably the cold gas traced by our millimetre observations shares the rotation shown by the young stars in the Keck observations.
“The distribution of gas seen with our amazing resolution indicates we are witnessing the gradual build up of a spiral disk with a central nuclear component.”
These observations has astronomers looking forward to the capabilities of the European Extremely Large Telescope (E -ELT) and the American Thirty Metre Telescope (TMT), which are being built and will be available in about 10 years.
We don’t normally publish political articles here on Universe Today, but I’m going to make an exception here after watching last night’s presidential debate because a.) John McCain mentioned something about a planetarium, which is an area of interest for UT readers, and b.) McCain obviously had no idea what he was talking about. McCain, the Republican presidential nominee pointed out how Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, has voted for almost a billion dollars of “pork barrel” projects (money for specific pet projects in their districts) and said, “He (Obama) voted for … $3 million for an overhead projector at a planetarium in Chicago, Illinois.”
First of all, there’s a big difference between an overhead projector and a planetarium projection system. Spacewriter’s Ramblings has a great explanation and pictorial description, if you have questions.
Second, if you want to be nitpicky, while Obama requested the funding, he never voted on it.
Obviously, McCain thinks this is a big issue, since this is at least the second time he’s mentioned Obama and planetariums. A few weeks ago he said that Obama has sought money for “planetariums and other foolishness.”
Foolishness! Over 110 million people around the world visit planetariums every year! They are important learning and teaching tools that encourage a science-literate population, and have inspired young people to become astronomers and astronauts, and aspire to many other science-related occupations as well.
Davin Flateau says it much better than I can on his great post at his Perfect Silence blog.
Obama’s website has a list of his federal funding requests for Fiscal Year 2008, and clearly listed is “Adler Planetarium, to support replacement of its projector and related equipment, $3,000,000,” with a description that says the 40 year old projection equipment has begun to fail and since parts are no longer available, soon students and other museum-goers will be left “without this very valuable and exciting learning experience.” I don’t see that as “pork barrel” funding, but an attempt to maintain a long-standing (Adler opened in 1930) and important institution in his district.
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The Mars Science Laboratory, a souped-up Mars rover scheduled to launch next year might be delayed, scaled down or canceled due to technical problems and cost overruns. The nuclear powered rover designed to search for microbial life on the Red Planet, has already cost $1.5 billion and if it reaches a 30-percent cost overrun, it could be cancelled by Congress. Aviation Week reports that officials from the agency’s Mars Exploration Program (MEP) and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) will brief NASA Administrator Mike Griffin and Science Associate Administrator Ed Weiler this Friday and attempt to work out a potential solution. Delaying the rover’s mission until 2011 would be costly, but Weiler has said that JPL is so stretched trying to make the 2009 launch window that the result could be “a nuclear crater on Mars.”
Nearly the size of a small car, the proposed MSL will be three times as heavy and twice the width of the Mars Exploration Rovers (MERs) that landed in 2004, and will be able to travel twice as far. It will carry ten advanced scientific instruments and cameras. It will make the first precise landing and a predetermined site, using a guided entry system and a soft-landing system called the Sky Crane. But assembly and testing of critical components and instruments are behind schedule because of technical problems. Entry, descent and landing for MSL. Credit: JPL
Since there’s not much extra cash anywhere in NASA and JPL’s pot, any cost overruns from technical issues or delays would have to be taken from other missions. To keep MSL, NASA could be forced to cancel the $485 million 2013 atmospheric Scout mission MAVEN that was recently announced, or a future rover mission tentatively set for 2016.
A slip to the 2011 launch window will add another $300 million-$400 million to the price tag, but it could be better than trying to launch in 2009 with a rover and team that is potentially unready to fly.
Doug McCuistion, the MEP manager said his program is stretched to its limits, with no funding for technology development and “next to nothing” for education and public outreach.
NASA has been sending a mission to Mars approximately every two years to determine if the planet ever was capable of supporting life.
