March 8, 2012
How the Mars Community Shot Itself in the Foot
Mars Sample Return: Off the table?
The recent release of the administration’s FY 2013 budget gave some scientists a bit of a shock. Planetary science (considered a “jewel in the crown” of the space agency) has been identified for cutting, over 20% during the next five years. A particularly painful cut comes to the agency’s robotic Mars exploration program. Planned missions in cooperation with the Europeans and future missions designed to lead up to the return of a surface sample from Mars were eliminated from the budget. In effect, the successful program of Mars missions created after the embarrassing failure of the Mars Polar Lander over a decade ago is being scrapped.
The administration digested the National Research Council (NRC) Decadal Survey in planetary science (released last spring) before writing their new budget. The study process for this report involves getting the relevant scientific communities to determine and lay out their priorities. The assumption is that the scientific community can best determine the most relevant goals and questions in planetary science and therefore design mission concepts to address them. Through a variety of working groups and forums, the desires of the community are made known and a report is written around them. Typically, planetary scientists organize their working groups around objects of study, such as the inner (rocky) planets, small bodies (asteroids and comets), and giant planets. For the latest Decadal Survey, the Mars community had its own separate group. Mars is, of course, a rocky, inner planet, and for decades has held sway in the planning process, both for robotic and human missions.
NASA’s highest scientific priority for Mars exploration is to determine if it has now, or has ever had life. The chosen mission concept to address this question is to return samples of the surface of Mars to the Earth. This is a very difficult task. Mars is a big planet with a deep gravity well. At its closest, it is several tens of millions of miles from the Earth, leaving robotic machines controlled from the Earth with long time delays (up to tens of minutes). Safely landing on Mars is hard enough – taking off again and navigating back to Earth with samples safely in hand, is at least an order of magnitude more difficult.
Yet the new Decadal Survey made Mars sample return its only priority in the area of Mars science – the report offered no alternative missions for consideration. Moreover, the sample return mission concept presented by the Decadal Survey required not one, but three separate “Flagship” missions (i.e., those having total costs exceeding $1 billion). In a complex scenario, the mission concept called for a Mars lander to deliver a rover, explore and collect samples and then store them on the surface. A second mission years later would rendezvous with the stored samples on the surface of Mars, transfer them to an ascent vehicle, and place the samples in orbit around the red planet. The third and final mission would rendezvous with this orbital vehicle, dock with it and return the samples to the Earth. From initial landing to sample return would take over a decade and cost many billions of dollars. Moreover, in this series of three sequential and very complex missions, one single-point failure could spell the end of the entire effort.
When the Office of Management and Budget saw this plan and its price tag, they thought it was too much money for too complicated a mission. Unfortunately, the Mars subgroup left no “back-up” options in the Decadal Survey – it was do the sample return trio or do nothing. Hence, the new budget proposes nothing. Of course, a big part of the reason that this mission trio was a non-starter was to preserve funding for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which at its current estimated $8 billion cost (and counting), effectively makes most other space science endeavors non-starters.
Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war! The planetary science community was stunned. The Planetary Society organized a letter writing campaign, demanding that Congress intervene and save the “Mars program.” Scientists complained that their highest priority as expressed in the Decadal Survey had been discarded without any real thought and debate (much as the Vision for Space Exploration had been thrown away two years ago). In partial response, the agency is setting up an ad hoc group to study some less expensive, interim Mars missions (something that the Decadal Survey should have done). Presently, all of planetary science is in danger of severe cutbacks. And the final bill for JWST has yet to be delivered.
What can be learned from this these events and applied to the exploration of the Moon? Like the Mars community, the lunar science community has made sample return the centerpiece of their mission wish list. A South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin sample return has been proposed as a New Frontiers mission and studied in detail twice over the last nine years – and passed over for selection twice. Yet the new Decadal Survey once again makes this mission its top priority in lunar science. Moreover, for this mission to be scientifically successful in its goal of dating the impact that created the SPA basin (the biggest and oldest impact crater on the Moon) it must not only complete the sample return, it must collect samples whose context can be reconstructed and fully understood. As discussed here previously, given the difficulty of such reconstruction for the Apollo samples (which were carefully documented and collected by trained field observers), an unambiguous outcome for this robotic mission is exceedingly unlikely.
Certainly, returning a sample from the Moon is less difficult than doing it from Mars, so the two tasks are not directly comparable. Yet, there are a number of missions to both the Moon and Mars that could be done for less money and would significantly advance our understanding of their histories and processes. For example, an entirely new field of scientific study is the generation, movement and fate of water on the Moon, a problem rich in both scientific and exploration potential. This new field could be investigated profitably by a series of properly instrumented, small robotic missions.
These issues and questions were known at the time that the Decadal Survey was conducted, so there is little excuse for ignoring them, except for the community’s fixation on sample return missions. In part, this obsession exists because it provides a large part of the research community with something to do. NASA money has built many expensive laboratories to analyze extraterrestrial materials and new lunar and planetary samples are needed to keep them operating. But the full potential of remote, in situ analysis – coupled with careful and clever geological planning – has not been given enough thought by the scientific community.
Will the lunar science community also shoot itself in the foot? If so, it will simply be finishing a job started by this administration two years ago with the cancellation of the VSE. Fans of human spaceflight please take note: the process of undertaking these “Decadal Surveys” has been widely praised and advocated as a model for determining the goals and objectives of the human space program. Considering the consequences of this latest effort in planetary science, one might want to re-think that scenario.
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To an unqualified observer like me, the ballooning budgets of flagship missions seem at least slightly related to the fact that there has been no dedicated technology development and maturation missions track been running in parallel to scientific missions.
The only recent example that comes to mind was ESA SMART-1 which had very explicit tech shakeout goals.
Similar missions for advancing exploration tech would help long term scientific goals – obvious example: fly a cheap-ish lander derived from Phoenix with no other mission goals than testing out a few ISRU experiments for producing methane on mars for example – and if one succeeds, suddenly MSR is much more achievable within realistic budgets.
Comment by reader — March 8, 2012 @ 12:09 pm
I am glad they have scrapped the Decadal Survey mission, and am thankful that someone is looking out for the tax payers. Such a complex risky mission, and you can surely bet that the cost will be twice of what is promised.
What if they do find signs of past or current life on Mars? Will the Earth break out is spontaneous bouts of world peace? No, life here will go on as usual. If anything brining back microbes or whatever life from Mars to Earth could be catastrophic for us.
The James Webb Space Telescope and particle physics studies are more valuable than a Mars sample return.
It is too difficult to get to Mars and return right now. Wait until the technology to get us there, stay there, and get us back, has progressed.
Comment by Dave Mustane — March 8, 2012 @ 12:43 pm
Because of its potential near term economic impact within and beyond cis-lunar space, I question the planning of any unmanned planetary missions that does not prioritizes the exploration of the surface of the lunar poles. The high probability of lunar polar ice is one of the most important scientific and economic discoveries of this new century– and possibly in the history of humankind!
Any space faring nation that does not prioritize accessing and exploiting these lunar ice and possible carbon and nitrogen resource is jeopardizing their long term strategic and economic leadership in space– and on Earth!
Marcel F. Williams
Comment by Marcel F. Williams — March 8, 2012 @ 12:48 pm
Thanks for an interesting article. Why is it so vital to return samples to Earth? It must be simpler to ‘just’ send more and more sophisticated science packages to do the analysis in place. Which forms of analysis could only be done on Earth? Thanks
Comment by Aka Popag — March 8, 2012 @ 1:03 pm
This is exactly right, that the planetary science community shot itself in the foot with a Decadal Survey that endorsed precisely one Mars flagship mission that turned out to be unaffordable. Now, of course the Decadal Survey did mandate that if Max-C was unaffordable, a replan would be necessary to fit it into a cost cap. Also, the Decadal said that U.S. participation in ExoMars was expendable. So one could say that they’re getting what they asked for. The plug was pulled on ExoMars, and if the Mars community has any sense, it’ll start a replan on Max-C that ideally will make use of the money saved.
Of course, that’s just part of the reason for the Mars budget cut. The other part is JWST. That’s the mission that Decadal Surveys never put a cap on, and ended up eating other SMD funds.
So I think the planetary community shot itself in the foot, but with rubber bullets. Mars sample return will probably happen, but it will take a little while more to get it designed in a more affordable way.
Comment by Doug Lassiter — March 8, 2012 @ 6:21 pm
“These relations suggest that the interiors of these craters contain nearly pure water ice, with approximately 600 million metric tonnes of ice present in over 40 small craters within 10 degrees of the pole.”
As I detailed in my essay “Water and Bombs”, which was published in the Winter 2012 issue of Space Safety Magazine, the discovery of this resource on the Moon changed everything. It made the Moon THE place to go.
Build a base on the moon and then put a telescope there.
Build a base on the moon and then build nulcear spaceships that can go to Mars there.
Build a base on the moon and mass produce solar panels to supply electricity for beam propulsion and open up the solar system.
Build a base on the moon and manufacture thorium reactors to power colonies in the outer solar system.
The moon is what will make possible all these things that no one believes is possible right now.
I never thought Mars was a good destination anyway. IMO we should skip it after the moon and go straight into the outer system.
Comment by GaryChurch — March 8, 2012 @ 8:17 pm
I have to once again agree with your points. When I heard about the Mars sample return strategy, a year ago, I was disappointed in it’s complexity, cost, and timeline.
One has to wonder why they could not fly a single, complete sample return system (along the lines of Luna 16, 20, and 24) that had a much smaller payload mass…
But then again, I don’t understand why MSL has to have such a complex, new, “skycrane” lander. By now, they should have a tried and proven lander technology that can be used, over and over again, without expensive development efforts.
Comment by Nelson Bridwell — March 8, 2012 @ 8:51 pm
Aka,
Why is it so vital to return samples to Earth? It must be simpler to ‘just’ send more and more sophisticated science packages to do the analysis in place. Which forms of analysis could only be done on Earth?
Briefly, it is argued that we need to make very precise measurements to significantly advance our understanding of martian processes and history, for example, determine a rock age or the isotopic ratio of materials. Right now, extreme precision can only be attained in sophisticated terrestrial laboratories.
However, flight instruments improve constantly and we have yet to exhaust all of the possible things we could learn from remote in situ measurements. In any event, those are the opportunities that we will likely have, if anything, so serious thought ought to be given to the range of things that we could accomplish with them.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — March 9, 2012 @ 10:57 am
“-it will take a little while more to get it designed in a more affordable way.”
And we will have fusion power plants making electricity too cheap to meter in ten years also. And a hundred launches a year of 28 engine hobby rockets carpeting the bottom of the Atlantic with thousands of expended turbopumps and gymbals. And giant fuel depots in space pumping liquid hydrogen into earth departure stages hundreds of tons at a time as easily as you fill up your car. And zero G playboy mansions and…….well, you get the picture.
There are over a hundred moons in the outer system suitable for human colonies. Most of them you can almost land on in a spacesuit. Here are a few- check it out;
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/science/moons/
The way to get to these new worlds is not by way of returning handfuls of dirt from mars for billions of dollars spent over a decade. The way to open up the solar system is to build a base on the moon using HLV’s.
And the money? The DOD needs to defend us from impacts and insure we do not go extinct from bioterrorism. This requires spaceships, not cold war toys.
Comment by GaryChurch — March 9, 2012 @ 3:49 pm
The era of large-scale vanity projects by the 3rd world usa has now come to an end.
Economics and a lack of a need for expensive genital-waving toward the FSU has put paid to ‘boldly going’ for the largely obsolete, crumbling, old-fashioned america whose bridges are rotting while its roads get ever more potholed and its sidewalks crumble.
Who needs a moonbase when one’s schools cannot afford teachers let alone books, police officers are quietly canned and fire-engines are being sold abroad?
The impending, yet amusingly obvious and soon-to-be public, failure of the latest and overtly-complex swansong of NASA, the MSL Curiosity, will once again show the usa to have but feet of clay and a head of excrement in an age where other less prestigious projects, like ensuring 12 million americans aren’t sleeping in their cars each night need addressing.
But if it makes you feel like you’re wearing a shiny jumpsuit in that jet-suited future you dreamed about back when ‘I Love Lucy’ was cool, by all means ‘american dream’ on!
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the tent cities grow and the u.s national debt still has 14 digits!
Comment by SuperiorEuropean — March 9, 2012 @ 6:03 pm
There are two very successful Mars rovers – Spirit and Opportunity. I don’t understand why Mars missions have to keep larger and more and more expensive. There is plenty of Mars left to explore that could be acheived using the Spirit/Opportunity design. Why not save costs by sending another two rovers along with perhaps a variation in instruments? As a result, we may well be left with nothing if, heaven forbid, Curiousity fails.
Comment by DarylLilburn — March 10, 2012 @ 4:46 pm
@SuperiorEuropean
The development cost of a Moon base plus the SLS/MPCV/ and lunar lander is estimated to cost less than $8 billion a year with operational cost at also less than $8 billion a year.
Federal, State, and local government spending on education in the US will cost about $941 billion this year. So totally eliminating such a beyond LEO program wouldn’t even increase annual public spending on education by 1% in the US.
Marcel F. Williams
Comment by Marcel F. Williams — March 12, 2012 @ 1:13 pm
Comment by Marcel F. Williams — March 12, 2012 @ 1:13 pm
“@SuperiorEuropean
The development cost of a Moon base plus the SLS/MPCV/ and lunar lander is estimated to cost less than $8 billion a year with operational cost at also less than $8 billion a year.
Federal, State, and local government spending on education in the US will cost about $941 billion this year. So totally eliminating such a beyond LEO program wouldn’t even increase annual public spending on education by 1% in the US.”
Hi Marcel.
All well put and worth saying for anyone else who may be reading, but it will not change SuperiorEuropean’s mind (as much as he has one) about anything. We have picked up another troll.
I know Dr. Spudis wants to maintain a better tone around here (and I agree with that desire), but anyone who writes things like:
- a need for expensive genital-waving
- ‘boldly going’ for the largely obsolete, crumbling, old-fashioned America
- will once again show the usa to have but feet of clay and a head of excrement
is not looking for a serious discussion. He is only looking to pick a stupid/juvenile fight, to make himself feel important because someone (anyone) is paying attention to him.
Comment by Joe — March 12, 2012 @ 4:12 pm
“Federal, State, and local government spending on education in the US will cost about $941 billion this year. So totally eliminating such a beyond LEO program wouldn’t even increase annual public spending on education by 1% in the US.”
And it wouldn’t really offer the taxpayers 1% of the annual public benefit either. Hey, we educate 76 million students with our education system. So if we go to the Moon, we can throw only 760,000 of them out of the system to fund it. What a concept! Gosh, we’ll hardly notice that.
It’s fun to play with numbers like this, but it looks pretty silly, really.
I believe that returning humans to the Moon is important, but your rationale isn’t why.
Comment by teacher — March 12, 2012 @ 6:50 pm
Everyone: We greatly appreciate and encourage the debate that goes on in the comment threads on this blog; however, we ask that you keep your critical words limited to programs and processes discussed in the posts, and NOT direct them at each other. We hate to knock out your otherwise interesting and substantive comments because of an instance of name calling, so please keep it civil and we’ll keep rolling them through.
Thanks all,
Heather Goss
Associate Editor
Comment by Heather Goss — March 13, 2012 @ 11:29 am
LOL!
$8billion for a moonbase?
I don’t know what you’re smoking but it sounds like good stuff!
NASA can’t organise a round of catflap evaluation committee meets and prelim R&D for suggestions for possible trend fact finding mission statement imagineering re. the color of the cubicle doors in the women’s lavatories in NASA headquarters for that kind of loose change!
$8bil!!
Add a handful of zeros on the end of that number and we’re talking, pal!
The usa is impoverished.
The usa can barely afford the interest on its treasury notes.
I find that it is best to avoid eating caviar when one is struggling to pay the rent!
Moonbase! Sheesh! Your gallant nation of intellectuals’ll be wanting to finance a new war on something soon… turkish delight perhaps? hangnails? some nation with -ran on the end of its name, maybe!!
I think the days of jetpacks, peeing down a tube from inside a tin can and thoughts of mining the asteroid belt is well and truly OVER!
Welcome back to Earth…
Comment by SuperiorEuropean — March 14, 2012 @ 7:48 am
A sincere question for Heather Goss.
In post 16 (the one directly following yours) “SuperiorEuropean” writes (presumably directed at Marcel):
- “I don’t know what you’re smoking but it sounds like good stuff!”
- “NASA can’t organise a round of catflap evaluation committee meets and prelim R&D for suggestions for possible trend fact finding mission statement imagineering re. the color of the cubicle doors in the women’s lavatories in NASA headquarters for that kind of loose change!”
- “Add a handful of zeros on the end of that number and we’re talking, pal!”
- “Moonbase! Sheesh! Your gallant nation of intellectuals’ll be wanting to finance a new war on something soon… turkish delight perhaps? hangnails? some nation with -ran on the end of its name, maybe!!”
- “I think the days of jetpacks, peeing down a tube from inside a tin can and thoughts of mining the asteroid belt is well and truly OVER!”
How do you feel the above comments fit into you edict to “keep your critical words limited to programs and processes discussed in the posts, and NOT direct them at each other.”?
Please believe me I am really asking as when this sort of thing is deemed acceptable it is hard to know what is allowed and what is not.
Comment by Joe — March 14, 2012 @ 12:19 pm
Joe,
I have a pretty low-bar you need to pass for me to approve your comments — essentially, I’m going to post everything that isn’t offensive — because I work on the assumption you guys are adults and can handle some heated conversation (including another commenter thinking your ideas are silly) without resorting to namecalling, i.e. “eurotrash.”
Heather
Comment by Heather Goss — March 14, 2012 @ 12:34 pm
“And it wouldn’t really offer the taxpayers 1% of the annual public benefit either. Hey, we educate 76 million students with our education system. So if we go to the Moon, we can throw only 760,000 of them out of the system to fund it. What a concept! Gosh, we’ll hardly notice that.”
Assuming an x% budget cut would result in x% students being turned away. Doesn’t work that way.
Perhaps schools could save money by cutting some of the endless government mandated tests to assess student progress. This would free up more time to actually teach.
“It’s fun to play with numbers like this, but it looks pretty silly, really.”
Here we agree.
Comment by Hop David — March 14, 2012 @ 11:54 pm
[...] budget has just been slashed, partly a victim of its own excesses. The Mars program has been the biggest offender of late, but advocates of missions to the outer planets have proven little better at bringing down costs. [...]
Pingback by Lake Vostok, Europa, and Washington | The Daily Planet — March 30, 2012 @ 1:36 pm
Can you put lighter than air aircaft on mars and check for humidity and clouds
c
Comment by Philip franklin — April 9, 2012 @ 8:27 pm