WASHINGTON -- NASA has decided to send a water-sniffing rover to Mars in 2003 in a mission similar to the wildly successful 1997 Mars Pathfinder, the space agency announced Thursday WASHINGTON -- A long-range rover designed to sniff for water will be launched to Mars in 2003 on a mission similar to that of the wildly successful
Mars Pathfinder, NASA announced Thursday.The mission is expected to cost $350 million to $400 million. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) will build the rover.
| 2003 Mars Rover in Action |
| The next rover headed to Mars is designed to be even more ambitious than Pathfinder's Sojourner was. See an animation of the 2003 rover . |
Officials also are looking into the possibility of sending a second rover to a different location on the
Red Planet -- an unprecedented feat that, if successful, could shore up the agency's bruised image at Mars. If that course is taken, it would be an additional $175 million to $200 million and would be launched on a separate rocket.
The twin-rover idea "could be an amazing opportunity, as well as a challenge," NASA space-science chief Ed Weiler said in a statement.
NASA has selected this rover concept by Cornell to land on Mars in 2003.
"I intend to make a decision in the next few weeks so that, if the decision is to proceed with two rovers, we can meet the development schedule for a 2003 launch," he said.
After a launch atop a
Delta 2 rocket on June 4, 2003 and a cruise of seven and a half months, the rover mission should enter the Martian atmosphere January 20, 2004. Surface operations are expected to last about 90 days, until late April 2004.~
"This mission would give us the first-ever robot field geologist on Mars," said Scott Hubbard, NASA's Mars Program Director. "It not only has the potential for breakthrough scientific discoveries but also gives us necessary experience in full-scale surface science operations."
The 300-pound (136-kilogram) Mars Exploration Program
Rover would be a larger version of Pathfinder's rover Sojourner and land with Pathfinder-type bouncing airbags. The exact landing site has not been chosen, but
NASA expects to choose a location such as a former lakebed or channel deposit where water once might have flowed. That could help scientists determine whether life ever existed on Mars or may still exist today.The choice of a landing site will be made after NASA studies data from the
Mars Global Surveyor -- as well as images from a Mars orbiter that will be launched in 2001.The 2003 rover would have a far greater capability than its predecessor. The new rover could trek up to 110 yards (100 meters) across the Martian surface each day -- almost as far as the little Sojourner went in its entire lifetime.
The
rover will carry among its six instruments a color camera, as well as a detector to search for evidence of liquid water that may have been present in the planet's past."Were ready to go," said Steve Squyres, the principal investigator for the rovers science payload and a professor of astronomy at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
The rover, Squyres said, would be equipped with "20/20 vision, an ability to look inside of rocks, microscopic imaging capability and three different spectrometers to tell us what things are made of."
"The idea is to go someplace where
water has been active on the surface and to use all these tools to read the geologic record and find out how habitable the conditions were," he said.Thursday's announcement came just days before the agency's self-imposed August 1 deadline to pick a mission to dispatch to
Mars.Any later than that and mission planners simply would not have had time to prepare any sort of spacecraft in time for a 2003 launch.
The decision was especially critical because launch opportunities occur only every 26 months, when Earth and Mars are aligned in such a way as to minimize flight times to the
Red Planet.The debate over what to send to Mars was part of an ongoing dilemma over how best to explore Mars in the wake of last year's failures of both an orbiter and a lander.
NASA originally had planned to announce its decision on July 24 at a press conference. But that was postponed after NASA, in a statement, said the decision proved "much more complex and difficult than anticipated."
Squyres said he would be hard-pressed to think the choice between an orbiter and a rover came down to the science value of either.
"Clearly, both missions were going to do outstanding science," he said. "But I think one of the primary reasons you would favor a rover over an orbiter, for one thing, its time to get back down to the surface of Mars. You cant understand Mars without getting down onto the surface."
Noel Hinners, vice president of flight systems for
Lockheed Martin Space Systems, which would have built the orbiter that lost out to the rover for the 2003 slot, agreed that "the science per se was not the discriminator.""The fact that we have the Mars Global Surveyor there, we have the 2001 orbiter going, ESA (the European Space Agency) is looking at
Mars Express, Japan has Nozomi. Part of it is there is a slew of orbiters there already," Hinners said. "Very clearly too, the pizazz of the Sojourner has gotten people to say these rovers get a lot of attention and good science, so let's go that way."Two teams at NASA's JPL in Pasadena, California, conducted separate two-month studies to determine the likelihood for success, cost and readiness for flight.
"The rover offers never-before possible opportunities for discoveries about the
Martian surface at scales ranging from microscopic to that of gigantic boulders," said Jim Garvin, a Mars project scientist at NASA Headquarters. "This is a key steppingstone to the future of our Mars exploration program."Senior Space Writer Leonard David and Pasadena Bureau Chief Andrew Bridges contributed to this report.
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