NASA mulls 2 choices for Mars 2003 mission

File image of a test of the Pathfinder airbag system

May 15, 2000
Web posted at: 4:57 p.m. EDT (2057 GMT)

From staff reports

(CNN) -- Hoping to boost its struggling Mars program, NASA is considering landing a rover on the red planet with an airbag cocoon like the one that cushioned Mars Pathfinder's landing in 1997. A second option for a 2003 launch is a martian orbiter that would search for water and support other missions to the planet for a decade, the space agency said.

Mission managers in early July will decide which project, if any, will proceed. NASA had planned to launch a Mars lander in 2001 but canceled it following the loss of two red planet missions late last year.

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The rover concept involves nestling the 286-pound (130-kg) Mars Mobile Lander in an airbag system similar to the one that protected Pathfinder. That probe snapped pictures, analyzed weather conditions and deployed a mini-rover that studied surface rocks and soil.

Unlike the 1997 mission, the four-petal enclosure for Mars 2003 would not carry out scientific or support functions and only serve to place the rover on the ground.

After landing, the rover would travel up to 100 yards (100 meters) a day, using sophisticated instruments to search the terrain for signs of water in Mars' past. Its range of travel would far exceed that of the Sojourner rover, which never strayed far from the initial landing site.

The rover would communicate directly with Earth or a Mars orbiter during a mission that would last at least 30 days, NASA said. It is based on a design considered for the cancelled 2001 mission.

The proposed Mars Surveyor Orbiter would carry out the same scientific duties as the Mars Climate Orbiter, which presumably burnt up in the martian atmosphere in September due to mathematical errors.

Similar in size to the Mars Global Surveyor, which now circles the red planet, the orbiter would study the thin, carbon-dioxide rich martian soil and investigate ancient and modern signs of water on the planet.

Separate teams at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Denver, Colorado, are evaluating the mission options.

NASA Associate Administrator Ed Weiler will make a decision in two months that would give project engineers 36 months to prepare. After 2001, the next launch window to Mars opens up in May 2003.

"These two mission concepts embody the requirements we have learned through the hard lessons of two recent Mars mission failures," Weiler said in a statement. NASA's budget will support only one of them, he said.

The preliminary cost estimate of either mission exceeds $200 million, a NASA spokesman said. The rover project would likely be the more expensive of the two.

NASA announced this year that it would reorganize its Mars program following the loss of the Climate Orbiter in September and the Mars Polar Lander in December.

The lander most likely shut off its descent engines early because of a software error. It then slammed into the martian surface at a fatal speed, according to a NASA report.

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