NASA is bracing itself for the release Tuesday, March 28 of an in-depth review of the space agency’s troubled Mars exploration program. The report, according to NASA insiders as well as industry officials, paints a bleak picture of program mismanagement, lack of proper technical oversight of government and industry teams and inadequate testing of spacecraft hardware that led to last year’s failure of multiple Mars probes.
March 27th, 2000
New questions arise about Mars; future probes are in doubt The Seattle Times
Just as the lure of Mars grows stronger, with scientists poring over tantalizing new evidence of an ancient ocean and fresh views of layered canyons, sculpted polar ice caps and swirling dust devils, missions to the Red Planet are in disarray. The back-to-back failures of the Mars Polar Lander and Mars Climate Orbiter late last year have NASA rethinking what kind of spacecraft it will send to the planet most like our own.
March 17th, 2000
Nasa pulls back from Mars
The United States is to abandon its ambitious plans to bring back rocks from the surface of Mars before the end of the decade. It is a decision that could set back hopes of an astronaut landing on the Red Planet by many years.
March 13th, 2000
Success Should Be Number One Goal, Panel Tells NASA
In their zeal to fly space missions under the banner of “faster, better, cheaper,” NASA managers are forgetting one thing. Those missions also have to succeed.
March 13th, 2000
NASA Report: Too Many Failures with Faster, Better, Cheaper
A former NASA manager issued a critical report Monday of the agency’s “faster, better, cheaper” approach that has pushed the agency’s engineers and scientists to crank out more frequent, low-cost and stripped-down missions since the early 1990s.
March 13th, 2000
NASA’s Mars failures put under microscope
The cheaper, faster, better strategy that successfully propelled NASA to Mars with a small roving robot three years ago crumbled just as spectacularly because it took success for granted, according to two reports released by the agency Monday.
March 12th, 2000
Piece of Mars Finds Its Way to Museum Los Angeles Times
It traveled millions of years through space, dropped into the Mojave Desert and was snatched up by rock collector Robert Verish. Then, for 20 years, it was left unnoticed in a crate in his backyard. It’s been a long journey for the so-called Los Angeles meteorite, now on exhibit at the Natural History Museum in Exposition Park. UCLA scientists have confirmed that the half-pound chunk of basalt came from Mars–one of only 14 Martian meteorites to have been found on Earth.
March 9th, 2000
Mission to Mars: Reality check
When it comes to the technologies required for a human mission to Mars, some experts say it
March 8th, 2000
NASA at the Martian Crossroads
Stung by the recent back-to-back losses of two robotic spacecraft at Mars, NASA has embarked on an exhaustive retooling of its entire program to explore the Red Planet. Some missions may be delayed, swapped, beefed up or stripped down. Others may be cancelled outright. But the aim, said Jordan, the Program architect for the Space and Earth Sciences Directorate at NASA