A 57-page report reviewing the American space agency’s Mars exploration program, released on Tuesday, found that JPL did not communicate to NASA headquarters its concerns about risks that the failed Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander missions ran – if it recognized those risks at all.
"There was no signal in the system under development that this job wasn’t doable," said JPL Director Edward Stone, referring to the two Mars ’98 missions.
JPL, which is federally funded but managed for NASA by the private California Institute of Technology, interpreted its mandate from NASA for the Mars ‘98 missions as nonnegotiable in terms of cost, schedule, launch vehicle and performance requirements, according to the report’s findings.
As a result, the missions were under-funded by an estimated 30 percent, and thus understaffed, which led to the unit's metric/English-measurement confusion that doomed the $125 million Climate Orbiter in September 1999, as well as the software glitch that likely doomed the $165 million Polar Lander three months later.
In the case of the failed $29 million Deep Space 2 microprobes, which piggybacked to Mars aboard the Polar Lander, the two tiny spacecraft were simply not ready for launch but sent to the Red Planet all the same.
"I’ve got it in capital letters in my notes: Don’t ask JPL to do the impossible," said Ed Weiler, NASA’s associate administrator for space science. "In hindsight, we had asked them to do the impossible."
Thomas Young, who led the Mars Program Independent Assessment Team, said the lack of oversight on JPL’s behalf led to missions that took far too many risks in a radical misinterpretation of NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin’s mandate to do things faster, better and cheaper than ever before.
"People were taking risk in the testing program, taking risk in analyses, taking risk in deviating from what we really know to be principles -- both engineering and management -- that make these things successful," Young said, "and that’s not acceptable risk."
Stone announced Tuesday the formation of the Space Science Flight Projects Directorate at JPL, which will oversee space science missions from development through early flight. Stone said he named Thomas Gavin, a 38-year JPL veteran, as director.
Stone added that JPL has reconstituted its Mars Program Office to manage its ambitious Mars exploration program. The director of that office will be named within the next week.
"We intend to put into place all of the checks and balances that were missing on Mars ’98 to ensure that success," Stone said in remarks to reporters.
At NASA headquarters, Scott Hubbard, currently associate director for Astrobiology and Space Programs at the NASA’s Ames Research Center, will become Mars program director.
JPL’s martian mettle will be tested exactly one year from March 30, when it launches an orbiting spacecraft to Mars. A lander scheduled for launch during the same period has been delayed at least 26 months, Weiler said.
Coincidentally, it was in February, during testing at Lockheed Martin of what was to have been the 2001 lander that the problem that likely doomed the Polar Lander came to light.
In tests simulating the lander’s entry, descent and landing, engineers found the lander’s three legs, when deployed, triggered a switch that fooled the spacecraft into thinking it had safely alighted on the surface. Engineers now think that happened as the Polar Lander descended, causing it to drop 132 feet (40 meters) and strike the martian surface at 50 m.p.h. (80 kilometers per hour).
Goldin was expected to speak to JPL employees on Wednesday morning.
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