MANES: The Mars Neutron Energy Spectrometer As NASA considers long-term missions to Mars and beyond, it will become crucial to understand what various forms of radiation astronauts will be subjected to, said Richard Maurer, a physicist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Baltimore, Maryland. Maurer’s proposal for a neutron-energy spectrometer was provisionally selected for the 2003 HEDS payload with a budget of about $3 million.