Members of the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics expressed frustration at a hearing last month about what they and a prominent planetary scientist charged was the Obama Administration’s lack of commitment to two missions to Mars in 2016 and 2018. A senior NASA official testified that the Administration’s decision about these missions would be announced with the release of NASA’s FY 2013 budget request in early February.
Subcommittee Chairman Steven Palazzo (R-MS) aptly summarized the situation in his opening remarks when he said “The conundrum now facing NASA is selecting a mission that is the next logical step in our exploration of Mars, and how to pay for it.” As is true for many of NASA’s current and future programs, money is largely the limiting factor.
Administration to Announce Decision on Mars Missions in February American Institute of Physics
Mission to Mars: NASA gears up to send robotic laboratory and laser-armed rover to red planet The Daily Mail
Nasa’s most advanced mobile robotic laboratory, which will examine one of the most intriguing areas on Mars, is in final preparations for a launch from Florida’s Space Coast on November 25.
The Mars Science Laboratory mission will carry Curiosity, a rover with more scientific capability than any ever sent to another planet.
It will set down inside a huge crater and use its highly advanced instruments, including cameras and lasers, to find out more about the planet’s environment, which will help pave the way for human missions.
Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars Exploration Program at Nasa Headquarters in Washington, said: ‘Mars Science Laboratory builds upon the improved understanding about Mars gained from current and recent missions.
‘This mission advances technologies and science that will move us toward missions to return samples from, and eventually send humans to, Mars.’
Daring Russian Sample Return mission to Martian Moon Phobos aims for November Liftoff Universe Today
Russia’s exploration of the Red Planet following the failed Mars 96 mission and is currently scheduled to head to space just weeks prior to this year’s other Mars mission – namely NASA’s next Mars rover, the Curiosity Mars Science Laboratory (MSL).
Blastoff of Phobos-Grunt may come as early as around Nov. 5 to Nov. 8 atop a Russian Zenit 3-F rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The launch window extends until about Nov. 25. Elements of the spacecraft are undergoing final prelaunch testing at Baikonur.
“November will see the launch of the Phobos-Grunt interplanetary automatic research station aimed at delivering samples of the Martian natural satellite’s soil to Earth’” said Vladimir Popovkin, head of the Russian Federal Space Agency, speaking recently at a session of the State Duma according to the Voice of Russia, a Russian government news agency
Russians to explore Mars’s moon’s soil The Voice of Russia
Russian scientists are now testing the unmanned international station “Phobos-Grunt” – for the last time before launching it to one of Mars’s moons, Phobos, on November 5.
The station will take samples of Phobos’s ground and bring them to the Earth.
Mars sample return mission could begin in 2018 Spaceflight Now
Space officials in the United States and Europe are planning an ambitious dual-rover mission that could start collecting Martian soil samples in 2018 to be picked up by a subsequent mission and returned to Earth in the 2020s. The costly mission would blast off on an Atlas 5 rocket in 2018 and land two rovers on Mars with a single “sky crane” descent system that will be tested for the first time at the Red Planet in August 2012. It would be the first time two rovers will be delivered to the same landing site on Mars. The European Space Agency’s ExoMars rover and a $2 billion NASA Mars Astrobiology Explorer-Cacher mission are the leading candidates for the tandem project.
To Researchers, Space Samples Are Well Worth The Cost of Fetching
If a Japanese space capsule that recently returned to Earth is found to have collected particles from a billion-year-old space rock, it will join the short history of lucrative sample-return missions.
Retrieving samples from space is considered more complicated, potentially more costly, and riskier than conducting remote or robotic expeditions, but successful retrievals can confirm or disprove theories more accurately and can fuel or accelerate decades of scientific research.
As researchers and mission scientists await an analysis of what the plucky Hayabusa asteroid probe has brought back from space, they say previous sample-return missions have proven their usefulness. And, with improvements in technology and in methods of cleaning and sterilizing storage facilities, future missions to retrieve samples from Mars and beyond could provide even more valuable insights into the unknowns of our solar system.
Carefully Choreographed NASA/ESA Mission Could Return Martian Soil Samples to Earth Popular Science
We’ve landed the robots, puttered about on the planet’s surface, and, at long last, found the water. Now, NASA is getting back to basics on Mars with a plan to once again search for signs of life on the Red Planet, a focus that’s been on the back burner since the 1976 Viking missions. But this time, NASA doesn’t want to analyze Mars from Mars. This time the space agency wants to bring samples back home, and has a cleverly orchestrated scheme to do it.
NASA thinks the acquisition and return of Martian rock and soil samples is completely doable, but it’s going to be a costly three-phase process, probably with a price tag totaling some $10 billion. And since the federal government isn’t exactly showering NASA with cash, the agency recently teamed with its European counterpart to map out the details of such a complex mission.
Planet Mars: Searching for Life Continues The Voice of Russia
Any proof that there’s life on Mars is still non-existent. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) agency of the U.S. government has made a statement to that effect in answer to the sensational article in the British tabloid newspaper “The Sun”, saying that the Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have allegedly found a biological substance similar to a bog.
It is really not very important whether purposefully or simply wrongly interpreting the NASA reports, the author of the publication in the daily tabloid newspaper “The Sun” deceived its readers. In any case, everybody, as before, is interested to know whether there is life on Mars. New arguments have appeared in the dispute over the presence of primitive life on Mars.
Scientists have proved that there’re bacteria on the Earth, which can live under extreme conditions, similar to the conditions existing on Planet Mars. This provides us sufficient grounds to reconsider the results of the experiments, which denied the existence of life on Mars.
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
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.