 |
|
 |
 advertisement
| |
|
|
|
|
|
Discovery Project: Which Mission Next?
By Andrew Bridges
Pasadena BureauChief
posted: 07:00 am ET
28 August 2000
|
discovery_main_000828 PASADENA, Calif. Promising NASA the most bang for its buck, scientists have flooded the space agency with proposals for Discovery-class projects, including bids to return lunar samples to Earth, hunt extrasolar planets and fly pilotless gliders through the Valles Marineris on Mars.NASA has received 23 proposals, each capped at $299 million, for full-scale Discovery missions. The program seeks to put the agencys "faster, better, cheaper" mantra to the test, soliciting proposals that are as innovative as they are streamlined. | Discovery Proposals | | The 27 proposals submitted to NASA for its next round of Discovery missions and instruments target a little bit of just about everything there is in the solar system. Read about them. | "I have an intuitive feeling that people are trying to do more ambitious things within the Discovery program," said Jay Bergstralh, Discovery program scientist at NASA Headquarters. The agency also received four mission-of-opportunity proposals for instruments, capped at $35 million each, that would fly aboard other spacecraft. Among them is what could be the lone U.S. instrument aboard the British Beagle 2 Mars lander.About half of the proposals are first-time ideas, with the remainder back for another shot, Bergstralh said of the latest ideas submitted under the six-year-old program. Bergstralh declined to disclose any specific information about any of the individual proposals. However, SPACE.com was able to contact many of the people proposing, including a number who consented to have their names made public by NASA, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and industry partner Lockheed Martin. 
Planets of the solar system, which the Discovery -class projects would explore. Past discovery missions include such high-profile projects as Mars Pathfinder, Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (Shoemaker-NEAR) and Lunar Prospector. The Discovery program aims to build on those missions' successes, thus maintaining a steady stream of fresh data to the planetary-science community. 
"I have an intuitive feeling that people are trying to do more ambitiousthings within the Discovery program."
"September 30, 2006 is the latest launch date we want to see, unless there are some really compelling circumstances for a later date," NASAs Bergstralh said of the newest proposals. As was the case on the hit show Survivor, alliances are key in the Discovery game. Each proposal banks on the team approach, drawing together experts from within NASA, academia and industry, including the likes of Lockheed [LMT], Ball Aerospace, Orbital Science Corp. [ORB], LunaCorp and AeroVironment."The most important factor in this first round is the scientific quality of your mission. Part of that is the instrument builders and people you can bring to the table with you," said Paul Weissman, the principal investigator at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Odyssey, a mission that would orbit the nucleus of the comet Kopff. "You certainly want to put together a team that the rest of the scientific community recognizes as knowledgeable." NASA will select three to five of the proposals in December for further study; by this time next year, it will pick perhaps just one of those to fly as its ninth Discovery mission, as well as one mission-of-opportunity instrument. "Discovery is somewhat, at first blush, a crapshoot, because youre not sure whats going to win," said Noel Hinners, vice president of flight systems for Lockheed Martin Space Systems, which has a hand in seven of the Discovery proposals, including Venus, Mars, Jupiter and moon missions. "Science is at the forefront, but mission risk and cost are very important."
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
