Mars rover likely parked for good: NASAFrom Space.com:
NASA Abandons Escape Attempts for Stuck Mars Rover By Tariq Malik
SPACE.com Managing Editor
posted: 26 January 2010
01:33 pm ET
This story was updated at 3:47 p.m. ET.
The roving days are over for NASA's Mars rover Spirit after more than six years rolling across the Martian surface, the space agency announced Tuesday.
NASA engineers have decided to abandon efforts to rescue the Spirit rover from the deep Martian sand that snared it in May 2009. Instead, they are trying to prepare the rover to survive the harsh winter ahead in Mars' southern hemisphere. If the rover survives, it will serve as a fixed science outpost, mission managers said.
"This is not a day to mourn Spirit. This is not a day of loss," said Doug McCuistion, director of NASA's Mars exploration program, in a teleconference. "Its driving days are likely over, however its contribution will continue."
Spirit is stuck up to its wheel tops in Martian sand and slightly tilted back in a spot on Mars that scientists have named "Troy." The rover got stuck on May 6, when its wheels broke through a hard crust covering the soft sand and sunk into the sand trap.
"Spirit has encountered a golfer's worse nightmare," McCuistion said.
Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., spent months working on ways to extract Spirit from its sandy predicament. Those efforts - which began in November - have been unsuccessful. Making matters worse, two of the rover's six wheels are broken, hampering its escape attempts.
Spirit and its robotic twin Opportunity have been exploring different parts of Mars since they landed in January 2004. Since then, the long-lived rovers have far outlasted their initial 90-day mission plans and discovered new insights into the history of water on Mars. Opportunity is currently working fine and is studying an odd rock called "Marquette Island" – which appears to have been ejected from deep inside Mars during an impact – as it heads toward a giant crater called Endeavour.
McCuistion called Spirit's situation "inextractable." He didn't rule out that Spirit could free itself by accident, but that's not the goal anymore.
"Right now, our plan is to worry about getting through the winter," McCuistion said.
Recent attempts to drive Spirit backwards have made some improvement to its tilt toward the sun, which is vital for the rover's solar arrays to generate the power to stay alive.
During winters on Mars, the sun is low in the sky, so engineers try to perch Spirit and Opportunity on north-facing slopes to maximize the amount of sunlight their top-mounted solar panels can collect. NASA is hopeful that Spirit can be wiggled into a favorable position before the full brunt of winter arrives in a few months.
If successful, Spirit could continue to operate through the Martian winter, or possibly enter a hibernation-like mode until the season passes and springtime returns, bringing with it more favorable levels of sunlight.
"We have hope that Spirit will survive this cold, dark winter that we have ahead of us and be ready to do more science come springtime," said the rover mission's principal investigator Steven Squyres of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
Squyres said Spirit can still study the Mars dirt around Troy. There is also a tantalizing chance for scientists to determine if the core of Mars is liquid or solid iron. They could do that by using Spirit's radio signals to record the motion of Mars and deduce if the red planet's core is molten or not, he added.
"Totally new science," Squyres said.
But first, Spirit must survive the next winter on Mars.
Rover project manager John Callas of JPL said that, in the end, it will all come down to power. If Spirit does not find a good sunward tilt for the coming winter, it could experience a so-called "low-power fault" and shut down all non-essential systems.
"The rover will be like a polar bear, hibernating," Callas said. "It could be for many months...on the order of six months, that the rover will be in this state."
Unlike NASA's long-silent Phoenix Mars Lander in the Martian arctic, Spirit is designed to hibernate through winters on Mars and will experience frigid temperatures of minus 49 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 45 degrees Celsius), Callas said. But Spirit is not a new rover, so its systems could be susceptible to damage due to age, he added.
"There's no guarantee that the rover will be able to survive these colder temperatures," Callas said.
It will likely be frustrating for NASA engineers as they await word from Spirit to determine if the rover survives the coming winter. After all, NASA has spent $900 million on the Mars rover mission, and typically spends $20 million a year to support Spirit and Opportunity during their extended treks on the red planet.
"That'll be challenging for the team, but it's just something we'll have to be disciplined about," Callas said
This 2-frame animation aids evaluation of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit during a drive on the rover's 2,147th Martian day on Jan. 16, 2010. The rover about 3.5 centimeters (1.4 inches) southward and a half-inch (1 cm) up. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
This blink comparison aids evaluation of a drive by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit during the rover's 2,099th Martian day, or sol (Nov. 28, 2009). A stall by the right-rear wheel ended the drive partway through the first of two planned wheel spins. Most of the wheel movement was slippage. Click on the image to see the animated image. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
Cassini Takes New Images of Saturn's Moons
Two of Saturn's icy moons pass each other in a mutual event recorded by the Cassini spacecraft.
The smaller moon Enceladus (504 kilometers, or 313 miles across) passes in front of the larger moon Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across). These three images were each taken a little more than a minute apart. Mutual event observations such as this one, in which one moon passes close to or in front of another, help scientists refine their understanding of the orbits of Saturn's moons.
The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 2.3 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Enceladus and 2.7 million kilometers (1.7 million miles) from Rhea.
The images were taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 15, 2009. Scale in the original images was 14 kilometers (9 miles) per pixel on Enceladus and 16 kilometers (10 miles) per pixel on Rhea. The images were contrast enhanced and magnified by a factor of 3 to increase the visibility of surface features.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
Looking for all intents and purposes like a celestial egg after a session in Saturn’s skillet, Prometheus displayed its pockmarked, irregular surface for NASA’s Cassini spacecraft on Jan. 27, 2010.
Prometheus is one of Saturn’s innermost moons. It orbits the gas-giant at a distance of 139,353 kilometers (85,590 miles) and is 86 kilometers (53 miles) across at its widest point. The porous, icy-bodied world was originally discovered by images taken by Voyager 1 back in 1980. You could say this latest “egg-cellent” view has the Cassini science team licking their chops at the thought of future Prometheus images.
This raw, unprocessed image of Prometheus [pro-MEE-thee-us] , taken in visible light, was obtained by Cassini’s narrow-angle camera at a distance of approximately 36,000 kilometers (23,000 miles).
This unprocessed image of Dione was taken by Cassini on Jan. 27, 2010. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 27, 2010. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 46,000 kilometers (29,000 miles) from Dione. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.
Oh...oh!
President Obama to Propose Abandoning NASA's Moon Plan By Todd Halvorson and Bart Jansen
FLORIDA TODAY
posted: 28 January 2010
07:10 am ET
CAPE CANAVERAL — President Barack Obama will ask Congress to extend International Space Station operations through at least 2020 but abandon NASA's current plans to return U.S. astronauts to the moon, administration and NASA officials said Wednesday.
The president's 2011 budget request, due to be delivered to Congress on Monday, will direct NASA to invest in the development of U.S. commercial space taxi services to ferry American astronauts to and from the station.
The move is meant to reduce reliance on Russian crew transportation services after the retirement of America's aging shuttle fleet.
The administration will provide for a safe fly-out of five remaining shuttle missions – even if the final flights slip into 2011. But an option to extend shuttle operations through 2015 is being cast aside, officials said. Obama's aim is to turn NASA once again into "an engine for innovation," one that will spur the development of commercial industry in low Earth orbit.
The focus will be on developing technologies that would enable sustainable human expeditions beyond Earth orbit. But those journeys are not likely to take place before the early 2020s.
Despite a fiscal freeze on most discretionary programs, NASA's budget will be increased by $6 billion over the next five years for a total of $100 billion.
"Budgets are very tight," said former astronaut Sally Ride, who served on a presidential panel that determined NASA's current Project Constellation – the post-shuttle program – is on "an unsustainable trajectory."
"For NASA to be getting new money over the projections is to me an indication of how seriously this administration takes NASA and our goal of future innovations for this country."
The administration hopes to create 1,700 jobs in Florida and 5,000 jobs nationwide, helping to offset an anticipated loss of 7,000 jobs at Kennedy Space Center after the shuttle program's shutdown.
But some in Congress are not happy.
"My biggest fear is that this amounts to a slow death of our nation's human spaceflight program, a retreat from America's decades of leadership in space, ending the economic advantages that our space program has brought to the U.S. and ceding space to the Russians, Chinese and others," said U.S. Rep. Bill Posey, R-Rockledge.
"Until we have a clearer plan for the future, the only realistic and reasonable way to preserve America's leadership in space is to provide for a temporary extension of the shuttle," he said.
NASA since 2004 has invested $9 billion in developing the Constellation program's Ares I and Ares V rockets and the Apollo-style Orion crew capsule for missions to the moon, Mars and, in the event no commercial means becomes available, the International Space Station.
The agency also planned to develop a rocket stage to propel astronauts from low Earth to lunar orbit, and a lunar lander dubbed Altair.
The idea was to return American astronauts to the moon by 2020. But the presidential panel convened by Obama to review NASA's plans determined that a human lunar return was unlikely before 2028.
The panel favored the development of commercial crew transportation services, a move that would be a radical shift in national space policy. NASA since the late 1950s has developed rockets and spacecraft flown by U.S. astronauts.
"We really do believe it is time for American companies to come into this program in a way that they have on the cargo side for decades now," a senior NASA official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"This is a serious, serious effort that we believe will reduce the gap" between shuttle retirement and the first flights of successor craft, the official said.
So, what does all this mean for KSC? Here are some of the implications:
Commercial crew taxi services: One of the two companies now under NASA contract to launch cargo to the International Space Station -- SpaceX -- will be operating at Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
A competition presumably would be held to select a company to provide commercial crew transportation services, and it's almost certain that KSC and Cape Canaveral would be among the launch sites considered.
Senior administration officials said the commercial launch services – both cargo and crew – are expected to result in more new jobs and a higher launch rate on the Space Coast.
A higher launch rate would be good for business throughout Brevard County (which includes the Kennedy Space Center), particularly in the tourist industry.
Extending space station operations through 2020: NASA officials, U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Orlando, and others aim to secure payload processing business for extended station operations.
Scientific experiments and cargo all must be prepped for launch, and it makes sense to locate that business near the launch site.
No moon missions: The Obama administration aims to ramp up NASA's technology development programs, which have atrophied over the last several years, and make "strategic investments" at KSC, according to a senior administration space policy adviser.
The idea is to turn KSC into a "launch complex of the future," making it increasingly attractive to commercial space launch companies, the adviser said.
Technology development efforts, some of which might focus on building heavy-lift launch vehicles, would be conducted at KSC along with other endeavors that would enable eventual human expeditions beyond Earth orbit.
Obama's space plan will be a hard sell in Congress. Even ardent Obama supporters and some key space advisers are taken aback.
"If some of the reports about the president's plans for NASA's budget are correct, it would decimate the space program," a Nelson spokesman said.
NASA's planned return to the moon is behind schedule because about $12 billion budgeted for the project was not appropriated by Congress during the past six years.
But Project Constellation enjoys strong bipartisan support in both the U.S. House and the Senate, and Congress will have a big say in the plan for NASA.
The Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee passed legislation in December that requires broader congressional approval to change NASA's existing exploration program.
"I think that's the intent of the language," said U.S. Rep. Suzanne Kosmas, D-New Smyrna Beach. "It does give us hopefully some ability to weigh in."
Posey said, "This issue is far from over."
No Moon Trips: Obama's Space Vision a 'Paradigm Shift' By Clara Moskowitz
SPACE.com Staff Writer
posted: 28 January 2010
03:07 pm ET
This story was updated at 5:41 p.m. ET.
President Obama's plan for America's space program, according to early reports, represents a fundamental shift for human spaceflight, some experts say.
The reports suggest the Obama administration intends to move toward relying on commercially-built spacecraft, rather than NASA's own vehicles, to carry humans to low-Earth orbit. The plan would also involve extending the International Space Station's lifetime and abandoning current plans to send astronauts on moon missions by 2020.
"This is definitely a paradigm shift in the way the country will go about its space program," said John Logsdon, a space policy expert and professor emeritus at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
A spokesperson for NASA's Constellation program overseeing the moon mission work at the Johnson Space Center in Houston told SPACE.com that it would be premature to make any comments on the agency's future until after NASA's spending goals are announced next Monday in Washington, D.C.
Boost to the private sector
The new reliance on the commercial spaceflight industry to take over the duty of ferrying humans back and forth from the space station is particularly significant, experts say.
On Wednesday, a senior White House official told two Florida newspapers (Florida Today and the Orlando Sentinel) that the administration would ask for an additional $6 billion over the next five years to help private companies develop this capability. So far, no commercial company has ever independently launched humans into orbit in its own spacecraft.
"The $6 billion shows that they are very serious about making it a successful and safe program," said Brett Alexander, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, a private industry group. "I think what they're putting in place is bold and exciting. Bringing commercial and private [companies] into it will reinvigorate human spaceflight."
Alexander said he's confident that industry can rise to the challenge and meet this new task, and others agree.
"I think the commercial outfits ought to be given a chance to succeed," said Leroy Chiao, former NASA astronaut and member of a blue-ribbon panel President Obama put together last year to review NASA's plans. "The technology to get into low-Earth orbit has been around for almost 50 years — it's nothing particularly new."
In fact, the Obama administration's plan is seen by some as following closely one of the possible paths put forward by the panel, which was headed by Norman Augustine, a retired Lockheed Martin chief executive.
The committee found that NASA was severely underfunded to accomplish its vision of replacing its space shuttle fleet with new Orion vehicles and Ares rockets. It also suggested that relying on commercially built spacecraft would allow NASA to focus on more ambitious human spaceflight missions, like expeditions to a nearby asteroid or the moons of Mars.
Sharp critics
Not everyone agrees with the new plan, though. Former NASA administrator Michael Griffin, now an eminent scholar at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, sharply criticized the decision, questioning whether a commercial vehicle will be ready to carry humans to the station anytime soon.
"Today we have in orbit a $75 billion International Space Station, a product of the treasure and effort of 15 nations, and the president is recommending that we hold its future utility and, indeed, its very existence hostage to fortune, hostage to the hope that presently nonexistent commercial spaceflight capability can be brought into being in a timely way, following the retirement of the Space Shuttle," Griffin said in a statement.
And others are unhappy that the Obama space plan would potentially cause the loss of many NASA jobs if the business of launching humans into space is handed over to the private sector after the space shuttles retire.
"For Florida it would be devastating in the short term," Roger Handberg, a political scientist at the University of Central Florida who has written extensively on space policy. "If NASA goes into relative decline or suspension of manned launches, we're going to be in a hole.
Florida senator Bill Nelson (D-Orlando) has also come out against the plan, and other politicians from states that would lose jobs are also likely to fight the proposal. President Obama intends to officially announce his plans for space when he submits his federal 2011 budget request Monday, which will include his request for NASA funding.
Some say to wait until then to judge the plan.
"Most of what we're reading in the media right now are rumors and I think we really would do a disservice to ourselves if we jumped to conclusions," Chiao said.
What about the moon?
One of the major questions about the new plan is what will happen to the goal of returning people to the moon. Opinion is split on whether or not Obama plans to completely scrap the Constellation program, which is NASA's current vision for space exploration. Under the program, work has already begun to design a new rocket, Ares I, and crew capsule, Orion, to carry astronauts to the moon and beyond. The first test launch of that booster went off successfully in October 2009.
"I think it would be premature to say that Constellation is going to end," Chiao told SPACE.com. "What I think would be more probable is that there would be some variation on current plans."
But others take a dimmer view.
"Constellation is dead," Logsdon said. Yet he emphasized that that doesn't mean America won't go back to the moon. It just won't go back on the schedule and vision laid out by President Bush in 2004.
"The 'vision' to return to the moon that has been guiding NASA since 2004 was always an inadequately funded fantasy," said Joan Johnson-Freese, chair of the Department of National Security Studies at the Naval War College in Newport, R. I. "One of the goals of the Obama space plan appears to be to give NASA the opportunity to build and use enduring hardware — rather than an impulsive and unrealistic return-to-the-moon on a shoestring plan."
While the shift in policy may take some adjusting to, some are hopeful that it will allow America to retain its leadership as a space-faring nation.
"Any large organization doesn't necessarily like change so it's not surprising that people are concerned and worried," Chiao said.
"But change always brings opportunity. I'm cautiously optimistic."
