Nasa is pondering three potential missions as it picks its next interplanetary project. Depending on its final choice the US space agency could examine the interior of Mars, study a comet over time or float a robot boat in the icy seas of Titan.
The agency’s Discovery Program invited proposals for cosmic investigations in June 2010. The panel received 28 submissions and has now whittled the competition down to the final three. Each team will receive $3 million to further study, conceptualise and design their plans.
In 2012 Nasa will pick the winner and supply the team with a sizable budget (cost-capped at $425 million) to carry out development and embark on the mission by around 2016.
May 12th, 2011
NASA to choose between Mars lander, Comet hopper and Titan boat Wired
March 29th, 2011
What’s next for NASA: A new space shuttle? A mission to Mars? Salon
With Discovery’s retirement, this year marks a turning point in NASA’s history. At the end of the year, the familiar orca-like space shuttle will depart from the public eye as NASA looks to create something that can take a person deeper into space than ever before.
Last year, Obama lit the fuse for NASA’s blastoff into the post-shuttle world with a renewed commitment to explore deep-space destinations (like Mars) and to create jobs in the process. With a $6 billion budget over the next five years — on top of $50 million worth of NASA contracts awarded to commercial companies like Boeing — we should expect great things. Here are some of the projects in the works:
March 3rd, 2011
China likely to launch first probe to explore Mars’ surface in 2013 Xinhua News Agency
China is likely to launch its first probe to explore the surface of Mars in 2013, a chief scientist said here Wednesday.
“Mars is the first choice for mankind’s interplanetary explorations as it is the closest Earth-like planet to Earth and could have life and be turned into a habitable place,” Ye Peijian, chief scientist of deep space exploration at the China Academy of Space Technology, told Xinhua.
The mission will use China-made rockets, observation device and detector, said Ye, member of the 11th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, before the annual session of the country’s top political advisory body, which is scheduled to open Thursday.
China will update and modify its lunar probes to develop a Mars probe, he said.
March 1st, 2011
Russia To Probe Major Planets Before 2023 MarsDaily
Russia will launch probes to several planets and their satellites, Russia’s Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) said Thursday. The probes are expected to study the moon and the Martian satellite Phobos, as parts of a dozen of projects in astrophysical and solar research before 2023, Roscosmos said.
January 18th, 2011
China to launch 1st Mars probe in 2013 People's Daily Online
Qi Faren, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and chief designer of Shenzhou spaceships, indicated on Jan. 16 that China is expected to launch the first Mars probe in 2013.
The probe, Yinghuo-1(YH-1), was due to blast off in October 2009 with Russia’s “Phobos Explorer” from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, but the launch was postponed.
Qi Faren disclosed that China and Russia will launch the first Mars probe this year. By 2013, there will be a minimum distance between the Mars and the Earth, which will be a good time to launch the Mars probe. If this opportunity is missed, China will have to wait several years to launch another. Therefore, China will consider launching its first Mars probe independently.
November 28th, 2010
26 space agencies to prepare joint flight to Mars The Voice of Russia
26 space agencies around the world will carry out a joint flight to Mars after the year 2030, says the Head of the Russian Space Agency Roskosmos Anatoly Perminov. According to him, all 26 space agencies have signed a declaration to that end to point out that it is expedient to make joint flights to deep space.
November 21st, 2010
The nuclear-powered ‘space hopper’ that will leap across surface of Mars The Daily Mail
British scientists have designed a Mars hopper that could explore the Red Planet’s surface by leaping half a mile at a time.
It would be able to travel 400 miles during a six year mission – far further than Nasa’s intrepid Spirit Rover that managed to roll 15 miles over seven years.
The innovative vehicle would move by sucking in carbon dioxide from Mars’ atmosphere and compress it into fuel before blasting it out in much the same way as a rocket. It would take a week for the 63st vehicle to recharge. During this time it would carry out tests on Mars’ physical and chemical surface and subsurface.
Researchers from the University of Leicester unveiled their grand design in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A.
August 5th, 2010
New Mars Orbiter Will Be a Super-Sniffer
The first joint U.S.-European mission to Mars now has a plan for its toolkit.
Scheduled for launch in 2016, the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter will study the chemical composition of Mars’ atmosphere with a suite of instruments specially suited to the task. These instruments are expected to take measurements 1,000 times more sensitive than those by previous Mars orbiters.
“To fully explore Mars, we want to marshal all the talents we can on Earth,” said European Space Agency scientist David Southwood.
May 6th, 2010
Destination Phobos: humanity’s next giant leap New Scientist
PHOBOS is a name you are going to hear a lot in the coming years. It may be little more than an asteroid – just two-billionths of the mass of our planet, with no atmosphere and hardly any gravity – yet the largest of Mars’s two moons is poised to become our next outpost in space, our second home.
Although our own moon is enticingly close, its gravity means that relatively large rockets are needed to get astronauts to and from the surface. The same goes for Mars, making it expensive to launch missions there too
May 3rd, 2010
The Phobos Monolith The Economic Voice
We have all seen the famous humanoid face-shaped rock from mars but we know it’s not real, these images and shapes are caused by natural erosion due to the weather patterns and, if you look hard enough and long enough, you will find whatever your mind wants to find, from human faces to pyramids.
I myself am not a lunatic, neither do I believe in conspiracy theories, I believe in mathematics and science but I still have an open mind. Something though caught my attention yesterday, whilst watching an interview from last year with Buzz Aldrin. He spoke about space travel and the reasons we should be going back to the moon and even landing on asteroids. I know it was probably a lot of spin to get people talking about and therefore funding space travel, but what he said next definitely got my attention. He spoke about the moons of Mars, saying that on the moon Phobos there is a monolith and that when people see this they will start asking questions about it, some will say God put it there and others will say the universe put it there. These were his words and there is a definite glint in his eye when he speaks about the monolith.