|
|
The Planetary Society Blog
By Emily Lakdawalla
Mars Sample Return, Part Deux
Sep. 22, 2006 | 15:31 EDT | 19:31 UTC
by Mark Adler
While MER was going on from 2000 through 2004, Mars Sample Return (MSR) continued to be discussed and developed. After the success of MER, MSR found a new home in the plan for future missions, which was the 2013 opportunity. The Mars Program budget had been significantly augmented, in part in response to the president's Vision to prepare for eventual human missions to Mars with more detailed science investigations and engineering system characterizations. That allowed for funding an entirely U.S. Mars Sample Return mission.
Around the Fall of 2004, the manager of the Mars Exploration Program asked me to leave MER, then in its first extended mission and soon to start its second, and become the Pre-Project Manager for the 2013 MSR. While the launch was still nine years away, a great deal of preparation was needed. This included detailed design work and credible cost estimates so that we could understand if it really fit in the budget or not, a lot of technology development for several key capabilities in the long chain of MSR events, and -- interestingly -- the preparation for a sample receiving facility on Earth. The last one needed early up-front work simply because of the very long schedule to get approval for a facility to safely contain the Martian samples while we examined them for signs of highly unlikely, but not inconceivable, biological threats to Earth.
Despite my previous experience, I decided to take the job. (Think of Charlie Brown with Lucy pulling the football away every time ... ) There really was the right amount of money in place, and the right science community support and participation in place. This could work. We could really pull off MSR this time. So MER had succeeded in my original objective for it, which was to regain the confidence we needed to go forward with MSR. Sure enough, Mars Sample Return popped up on the horizon.
I dove in with the existing MSR team plus bringing in more folks, and it was looking better all the time. The new launch vehicle families, the Atlas Vs and Delta IVs, had much greater performance that what we had handy in the last round. With more mass, there should be no great miracles that would be required technically. We now had a well established rover technology from MER to build off of for sample collection.
In the last round, the sample rocket didn't have guidance on the second stage to in order to make it light enough, but we weren't sure if that would work well enough. Now with more mass, we could make the rocket heavier and put guidance on the second stage. Now that system looked much more robust. Lastly, the work on the 2009 Mars Science Laboratory had developed a new Mars landing system that looked like it could actually handle the large landed payloads that MSR needed, maybe with some work on a larger parachute. All the pieces were in place.
So we charged ahead, working the design and cost of the mission itself, putting in place technology development plans over the next three years, and beginning the planning for the sample receiving facility.
Well, it didn't take long for NASA to begin to understand the cost of the Vision on the desired schedule combined with keeping shuttle and station going. They noticed the Mars program windfall that we had from the Vision. Looking at their priorities, they quite reasonably concluded that that money would be better spent on their nearer-term objectives. The human Mars missions were a long way off. I would probably have done the same thing in their shoes.
Since MSR depended on that windfall, it could no longer fly in 2013. It was pushed out first to 2016, then 2018, and now it lives somewhere around 2022, after a few more budget cuts. When a mission is moving forward in time at a rate greater than one year per year, which MSR was and is, well then it's not a real mission anymore.
So that was my second swing at the ball. Or the second attempted kick at Lucy's football, whichever you like. Either way, it was a big whoosh.
I'm on now to other things. Perhaps my age and cynicism has taken hold, but now I am skeptical that MSR will even make the currently imagined schedule in the decade after next. What I see coming in the next decade is a ramp up in spending to support sending people to the Moon, an energy crisis significantly impacting the economy as the rate of new oil discoveries peaks and can no longer match the rate of increasing demands, and the government trying to figure out how to pay all the retirees expecting their social security benefits. It's going to be a tough decade. The last two do not bode well for discretionary spending like NASA's, and all three would likely defer an expensive mission like Mars Sample Return for a few more decades.
MSR's only hope will be the young, enthusiastic up and coming space explorers who don't know or care about any of that, and through sheer force of will make it happen anyway. Even in my cynicism, I hold on to that glimmer of a vision for the future.
|
|
[ what is this? ]