Nanorover Scrapped PASADENA, Calif. NASA has canceled work on the MUSES CN nanorover, a tiny wheeled robot that a Japanese spacecraft was to have dropped off to roam across an asteroid in 2005.
The miniature rover would have been launched in 2002 as part of Japans MUSES C mission to return samples to Earth from the asteroid 1998 SF 36. A NASA official said Friday that a formal letter informing the Japanese of the decision to scrap the rover is en route.
| The Rover and the Asteroid |
| How will the little rover get around the rough terrain of the asteroid? Watch the video . |
How close to Earth does asteroid 1998 S36 come? Watch the video . |
Two issues lay at the root of the problem, Jay Bergstralh, NASAs acting director of solar system exploration, told SPACE.com. "Money and mass, both growing and no real end in sight," he said.
The 2.5-pound (1.1-kilogram) NASA rover, which was slated to embark on a one-month tour of the asteroid, would have been by far the smallest wheeled robot ever dispatched to explore another world. It would have been equipped with visible-light and infrared cameras.
"It's a little hard for me to disentangle what all happened," Bergstralh said of the decision to halt work.
The estimated $180 million mission originally was to visit the asteroid (10302) 1989 ML, also known as Nereus. However, problems with the Japanese M-5 rocket which
failed in a February attempt to hoist that nations Astro E X-ray observatory into orbit and was to launch the MUSES C spacecraft forced a launch delay to late 2002.
NASA's Muses CN nanorover will be the smallest rover ever sent into space.
Subsequently, the Japanese moved to select a new target for its spacecraft to visit. The mission still aims to return samples of the asteroid to Earth for study by 2007.
Furthermore, the rover saw its estimated cost balloon from $21 million to nearly three times that amount in recent years.
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NASA said it will hold discussions with Japans Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) on how else it might contribute to the mission, formally known as the Mu Space Engineering Spacecraft C.
"We still intend to cooperate with the Japanese on the MUSES C mission," Bergstralh said. U.S. co-investigators are on some of the spacecraft's instruments, he said, and ISAS, one of Japan's space agencies, has asked NASA for tracking and communications support for the asteroid mission.
Presumably, work on the nanorover might have some future application for Mars exploration, Bergstralh said. The tiny rover was always considered a technology-development program. "It was not primarily driven by science," he said, adding that NASA will continue working on the nanorover's development.
The tiny rover would have for the most part rolled around the asteroid with the help of its four wheels.
An artist's rendering of the nanorover at work on a distant asteroid
However, later in the mission, engineers envisioned the rover attempting several scissors-kick moves that would allow it to jump about in a gravity environment perhaps one-one hundred-thousandth that of Earth.
Louis Friedman, executive director of The Planetary Society, a Pasadena, California space exploration advocacy group, blasted the decision to can the rover.
"Its a terrible disappointment. Its a loss for science, a loss for technology and a big loss for international cooperation," Friedman said.
Friedman added it seemed that NASA was returning to the era of launching a single, large mission once a decade from the heady days promised by NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin, who foresaw launching swarms of spacecraft built better and more quickly and cheaply than ever before every year.
"Its like watching a movie in reverse," Friedman said, as canceled NASA missions, including the nanorover, the 2001 Mars lander and in all likelihood, a Pluto flyby pile up.
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