With their Mars Polar Lander presumed dead, NASA bosses said Tuesday that they were scrapping their timetable for future missions and rethinking their entire Mars exploration program.
NASA has spent $193 million building a lander that was to be launched to Mars in 2001, but it now has an uncertain future.
The space agency will “take the shackles of schedules off the program,” which could postpone the series of robotic missions that was to culminate in 2008 when a pound of Martian rocks would be flown back to Earth, said Edward Weiler, head of NASA’s Office of Space Science.
In the span of three months, NASA has lost more than $300 million of space hardware to Mars, raising questions about whether NASA is living up to its credo to mount missions that are “faster, better, cheaper.”
They are indeed cheaper, but the agency now must defend the claim that they are “better” after the latest failure.
In Washington, discussions began Tuesday on the need for congressional hearings into NASA’s procedures and budget.
The space agency is to convene its own panel of experts to diagnose what went wrong with the lander and build a “new architecture” for the Mars program, Weiler said. “With two failures, there must be some kind of a problem with architecture.”
A decision whether to continue with a 2001 launch of the lander, which is nearly complete, won’t take more than a few weeks, Weiler said.
“Right now, I am not convinced that we will go forward with the lander in ’01. Right now, I have no confidence that that will be a successful mission,” Weiler said.
Delaying launches to Mars is tricky. It is not government officials, but the motion and position of the planets that determine when it is best to launch a spacecraft from Earth to Mars. Good launch opportunities arise every 26 months.
Rather than miss the 2001 launch window, NASA is considering sending up different spacecraft to build an “infrastructure” around Mars. Those devices could include beacon satellites to guide spacecraft toward the planet and telecommunications satellites to help relay information from incoming craft back to Earth, eliminating the radio blackout period during which the lander vanished.
NASA will have to study whether it can get those devices ready by 2001.
“I would not like to miss an opportunity, but I am not going to launch just for the sake of launching,” Weiler said.
In the wake of the orbiter loss, NASA officials acknowledged that the lander had become critical to the political momentum needed to keep the agency’s Mars program running. They also expressed concerns that the success of Pathfinder in 1997 had inflated expectations for the missions, inviting the public to expect only successful interplanetary blockbusters.
With NASA’s glow of success now temporarily dimmed, legislators in Washington began talking of hearings, but there appeared to be no immediate rush to slash the space budget.
“NASA has been a great program for the taxpayer and science, but we have run into some problems,” said Rep. Tim Roemer (D-Ind.), who sits on the subcommittee with jurisdiction over NASA.
“Let’s not jump into criticism, but let’s not hesitate to ask some tough questions in Congress to get NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory back on their feet,” he said.
Elsewhere, some were questioning whether NASA is attempting to fly too cheaply to Mars.
The lost lander and its two probes cost about $200 million to build. Under previous leadership, NASA spent $1 billion to build the Mars Observer — and it was lost, too, disappearing in 1993.
“I certainly would not want to launch one behemoth mission every 10 years, but if we add just a little more oversight, just a little more engineering, we might have more success,” said Bruce Jakosky, a University of Colorado professor who specializes in the study of Mars.
“When you talk about more oversight and engineering, that translates into more people and more money, of course,” he added.
Richard Cook, Mars Polar Lander project manager, defended NASA’s aggressive philosophy, despite the recent failures.
“I still think that the issue with `faster, better, cheaper’ is one of risks and rewards,” he said. “The `faster, better, cheaper’ allows us to do a lot of things we otherwise would not be able to do.”
NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin coined the phrase in a 1992 speech to the World Space Congress, in fact saying that NASA had to build its machines “smaller, faster, cheaper.” After the loss of the $1 billion Mars Observer the next year, “better, faster, cheaper” became NASA’s credo.
His eyes swollen from sleeplessness, Cook spoke at a news conference early Tuesday after the last of the best methods for reaching the lost lander had produced nothing.
Many of the scientists had been sleeping on the floor of laboratory offices since the spacecraft disappeared Friday and the mission turned into a vigil.
Inside the Jet Propulsion Laboratory control room in Pasadena, the scientists could be seen on NASA television whiling away the long hours, sharing peanuts and fiddling with pencils.
When it became clear that the mission had failed, one man snapped a pencil in half. Cook pushed back from his computer terminal and glanced around at the others in the room and then slowly left the room with a look of exhaustion and disgust on his face.
Shortly after that, Cook said, “We are certainly disappointed, but we are extremely determined to recover from this and go on.”
In coming weeks, scientists hope to steer the Mars Global Surveyor, which is in orbit around the planet, to the south pole to snap photographs of the landscape. Although the lander is too small to be seen, its 28-foot parachute might be visible in images relayed back to Earth.
Just a glimpse of the parachute would lift spirits in the space program, indicating that the lander survived entry and came that much closer to completing its mission.
But there may be little else NASA can do to discover what went wrong.
“It is entirely possible that the Mars Polar Lander did a perfect descent, the parachutes came out, and the rockets fired, and we landed on a rock and tipped over,” Weiler said. “This entire failure could be due to fate.”
NASA officials know it could also be due to deep systemic problems with their Mars program. In November, a mishap investigation report on the lost orbiter found that the immediate cause was that one group was using metric units and another was using English units on engineering plans. The report also found much broader failings with the organization and communication of the team guiding the spacecraft.
Answers about the lander’s fate could be elusive, however. The spacecraft would have recorded data about its descent and landing, which could tell the story of what happened, said Norm Haynes, director of JPL’s System Management Office.
“In a way there is a voice box recorder there. The problem is that we can’t get at it,” said Haynes, who was part of the review board on the failure of the orbiter.
“There is a strong possibility,” Haynes said, “that we will never know for sure.”
