WASHINGTON
- NASA has selected a pair of Mars missions for further study for a
2011 flight opportunity.
The U.S. space
agency announced this week that it had selected competing mission proposals
from two Boulder, Colo.-based institutions to spend the next nine months and $2
million refining their concepts in advance of selecting one of the missions in
late 2007 for full development as NASA's next Mars
Scout mission. The chosen mission would have to launch by 2011 at a cost of
no more than $475 million. The two finalists were selected from more than
two-dozen proposals the agency received last summer.
The Mars
Atmosphere and Evolution Mission, or Maven, was proposed by prominent
astrobiologist Bruce Jakosky of the University of Colorado, Boulder, to
"address key questions about Mars climate and habitability and improve
understanding of dynamic processes in the upper Martian atmosphere and
ionosphere," according to a NASA news release. NASA's Goddard Space Flight
Center, Greenbelt, Md., would manage the project.
The Great
Escape mission, proposed by Alan
Stern of the Boulder-based Southwest Research Institute would, according to
the release, "directly determine the basic processes in Martian atmospheric
evolution by measuring the structure and dynamics of the upper atmosphere." The
spacecraft would also seek out and measure "potentially biogenic atmospheric
constituents such as methane." Stern currently is the principal investigator on
NASA's New
Horizons mission, which was launched
in January 2006 on a nine-year journey to Pluto
and the Kuiper
Belt.
NASA also
announced Jan. 8 that it will spend $800,000 for St. Louis-based Washington
University researcher Alicia Wang to participate as a member of the science
team for the European Space Agency's 2013 ExoMars
mission.
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