Space News by Casey Dreier — August 3, 2017
NASA has no mission in development to retrieve the samples that will be collected by its Mars 2020 rover.
The United States is close to sleepwalking through a major decision regarding its robotic Mars exploration plans — a decision that would depart from decades of commitment to exploring the red planet and potentially undermine 20 years of focused taxpayer investment. And this could occur just as NASA is ready to attempt some of the boldest (and scientifically important) Mars missions yet.
NASA’s Mars Exploration Program is one of the agency’s most successful initiatives in recent history. Created in 2000 in response to the twin failures of the Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander missions, this program provided centralized management, a common workforce, and a single organizing principle (beginning with “follow the water”) for an unprecedented campaign of robotic exploration of Mars. The program has overseen seven missions to the red planet — every one a success. The program is now working on an eighth, the Mars 2020 rover, for launch in 2020 (InSight, a stationary lander which launches to Mars in 2018, is managed by NASA’s Discovery Program). Mars 2020 addresses the top recommendation for large-class missions in the current Decadal Survey for planetary science: in addition to in-situ science to seek signs of life, it will prepare a carefully curated selection of drilled samples, store them in advanced sample containers, and deposit them in various “cache depots” on the surface for future retrieval and return. It is the first step of a Mars sample return campaign, one of the most important and enduring goals of the planetary science community, and would provide an opportunity to directly test the life hypothesis at Mars.
A casual observer may be forgiven, then, for looking at the current fleet of five active missions and the development of Mars 2020 and concluding that the program is in good shape. But in a research paper recently released by The Planetary Society, “Mars in Retrograde: A Pathway to Restoring NASA’s Mars Exploration Program,” we found that due to the long lead times for mission development, the immoveable 26-month wait between launch opportunities, and a lack of commitment from NASA and the previous administration, the health of the Mars Exploration Program in the 2020s is deeply uncertain.
Here’s why: NASA has no long-term Mars strategy for its robotic program (its current strategic plan ended in 2016). NASA’s existing Mars spacecraft are, on average, over a decade old and operating long past their intended design lifetimes. Significant budget cuts in 2009 and 2013 disrupted the mission development pipeline, transforming it from a parallel process (multiple missions in various stages of development) to a serialized one (one mission in development at a time). No new missions have been announced since 2012 — the longest drought in new Mars missions in decades — meaning NASA has no official plans to retrieve the samples it is spending billions of dollars to collect and no official intention to refresh its science and telecommunications orbiter network, which is critical for the successful operations of Curiosity, Mars 2020, and any future surface missions.
More:
http://spacenews.com/op-ed-sleepwalking-away-from-mars/
