It's said that "time waits for no man" — and the inexorable cycles of planetary motion do not wait for troubled spacecraft either.

Technical problems have postponed the launch of Mars Science Laboratory until 2011. This nuclear-powered mobile robot will investigate the Red Planet's past or present ability to sustain microbial life.

NASA / JPL

Today NASA managers made official what many space aficionados had suspected for some time: the Mars Science Laboratory, a mission so ambitious and costly that it had earned "flagship" status, will be delayed two years due to technical challenges that made the planned launch in October 2009 untenable.

The revised timetable calls for MSL to launch in 2011, when Mars and Earth will again be well positioned in their respective orbits for the interplanetary flight.

The mission team has been struggling for more than a year to keep the troubled craft on schedule. In September 2007, Alan Stern, who had recently joined the agency as head of its space-science programs, announced that MSL had overspent its budget so badly that two experiments would be dropped from the payload. Hard bargaining thereafter allowed the two packages to remain on board, but by then the ambitious construction and testing schedule had already become worrisome.

Last October, after a thorough review earlier this year, NASA managers announced that the mission was still a "go" for 2009, even though rising costs pushed the total price tag to about $2 billion. Then, just a month later, a scientific oversight panel forced the mission team to eliminate equipment that would have been used to scoop up surface samples rock for possible retrieval and transport to Earth by a future lander.

The two-year delay means that engineers will have enough time to make sure the spacecraft is really ready to made the trip. "Failure on this mission is not an option, the science is too important," noted Ed Weiler, who replaced Stern earlier this year as manager of NASA's space-science efforts. But the postponement will likely add another $400 million to MSL's price tag — funds that will be hard to come by as the agency struggles to build its next-generation craft for human exploration while maintaining its aging Space Shuttle fleet.

Weighing in at more than 2,000 pounds (925 kg), the Mars Science Laboratory will be the largest rover yet to ramble across the Red Planet. It will be a long-duration mission, operating for two years and powered by the decay of plutonium. The ambitious 154-pound payload of 10 instruments includes a laser-camera combo dubbed ChemCam that can vaporize bits of rocks up to 30 feet away and then deduce chemical compositions from the resulting puffs of vapor.

Comments


Image of Rod

Rod

December 6, 2008 at 8:32 am

This looks like a great computer science and robotics effort here as well as nuclear engineering using radioactive decay from plutonium for power. The science appears to be aimed at finding Martian microorganisms (as past efforts with Viking did). Does this indicate life evolves from non-living matter without a Creator (i.e. spontaneous generation)?

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Michael C. Emmert

December 6, 2008 at 1:18 pm

So, the Mars Science Laboratory has been delayed. Well, good, this gives a great opportunity to go over some of Dr. Stern's cuts and make sure none of them jeapordize this mission. Or future missions. They need to put the landing camera back on (for instance) so that if the ship crashes, we will know how to make the next ones survive.

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Mark

December 6, 2008 at 10:02 pm

I am disturbed about sending a rover to Mars with a radioactive payload. If the purpose to send this probe is to find life, do we really want to send a device that could kill it? Solar powered probes worked just fine so far, and there should be ways we can clean the panels of dust. I feel the risk outweigh the benefits here with possible launch explosions to the probe crashing on Mars and contaminating large areas with plutonium. Let's remember more probes to Mars fail than succeed.

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J. Warren

December 7, 2008 at 5:27 pm

The Year of Astronomy lost one of it's best news stories. Very disapointing. These types of delays make me think we are 50 plus years from a rover to Titan.

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