T
HE FIRST 50 YEARS of Mars exploration at NASA were marked by great successes—such as the twin Viking orbiter/lander missions, the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity, and the Mars Science Laboratory (a.k.a. Curiosity)—and costly failures—such as the loss of the Mars Observer, Mars Climate Orbiter, and Mars Polar Lander missions in the 1990s. This period was also marked by tension between robotic and human exploration plans for Mars, between Moon and Mars exploration plans, between Big Science and the “faster, better, cheaper” approach. Funding for Mars explo- ration has waxed and waned over the years, as have NASA’s international partnerships for missions to the Red Planet.The next two chapters in this volume address two critical aspects of NASA’s plans for Mars exploration: the importance of sample return and the interplay between science and politics.
Historian Erik Conway documents NASA’s decades of planning for a mis- sion to collect samples of Mars and bring them back to Earth. Mars sample return has been a top priority in the space science community for 40 years.
Conway explains how and why the science community identified Mars sam- ple return as a top goal and considers why it has been as yet unachievable.
That said, NASA’s Mars 2020 mission, launched in summer 2020, is designed to cache samples that are intended to be retrieved by a future sample-return mission. NASA’s fiscal year 2020 budget request included $109 million for a Mars sample-return mission, proposed to be launched as early as 2026.
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Mission architectures for Mars sample return are, and always have been, as Conway notes, “complex, technologically challeng- ing, and expensive.” In his chapter, he documents the evolution of Mars sample- return mission architec- tures from the 1970s to 2012. Getting to Mars has always been the easy part;
containing Mars samples in a pristine state, get- ting them off the surface of Mars, and returning them to Earth has always been the hard part. Given the cost and complexity of such a mission, Conway points out that planning for Mars sample return is now necessarily an international endeavor. The lat- est mission architecture has been offered by the joint NASA–European Space Agency (ESA) International Mars Analysis of Returned Samples Working Group, which published a draft architecture and science management plan for the return of samples from Mars in 2018.1
Political scientist Henry Lambright explores what he calls “the discon- nect between the long-term perspective of scientists and the short-term per- spective of politicians.” In his chapter, he documents the role of the NASA Administrator in setting goals and objectives for Mars exploration, starting with Dan Goldin (1992–2001) and ending with Charlie Bolden (2009–17), showing how Administrators must negotiate between the sometimes oppo- sitional cultures of science and politics.
1. T. Haltigin, C. Lange, R. Mugnuolo, and C. Smith, “A Draft Mission Architecture and Science Management Plan for the Return of Samples from Mars: Phase 2 Report of the International Mars Architecture for the Return of Samples (iMARS) Working Group,”
Astrobiology 18, suppl. 1 (1 April 2018): S-1–S-131, https://doi.org/10.1089/ast.2018.29027.
mars, 2018.
Artist’s concept of the proposed Mars Sample Return mission.
(NASA/JPL: PIA05488)
109 PART III • THE LURE OF THE RED PLANET
Goldin’s successor Sean O’Keefe was a public administrator (a “bean- counter” by some accounts) who had served in the White House Office of Management and Budget and the Department of the Navy and was a protégé of Vice President Dick Cheney. Subsequent Administrator Mike Griffin “was the consummate rocket engineer,” Lambright writes, and a strong advocate for human exploration.
Goldin, who is NASA’s longest-serving Administrator to date, is best known for his advocacy of a “faster, better, cheaper” approach to space explo- ration, which affected NASA’s plans for the robotic exploration of Mars.
During his tenure, he had to deal with the loss of three missions to Mars and the frenzy that broke out in 1996 after NASA researchers claimed they had found fossil evidence of microbial life in a Martian meteorite. He recon- figured NASA’s Mars exploration program to “follow the water” and estab- lished an astrobiology research program, reasserting the Agency’s interest in the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life in the solar system. (NASA’s Astrobiology program is now focused on contributing instruments and experiments to missions that will explore potentially habitable environments in the solar system.)
O’Keefe was in charge of responding to President George W. Bush’s Vision for Space Exploration, a proposal to send humans back to the Moon and then on to Mars. Lambright writes that O’Keefe “made Mars science a priority at the expense of other science programs.” Griffin, who had headed NASA’s Space Exploration Initiative Office in the late 1980s, took over implemen- tation of the Moon-Mars program, emphasizing plans for human missions and also making a hard decision to delay the launch of the Mars Science Laboratory for two years.
Charlie Bolden, President Barack Obama’s appointee to head NASA, was an ex-astronaut, a retired Marine major general, and the Agency’s first African American Administrator. Bolden had to oversee the Obama admin- istration’s stand-down of Bush’s Moon-Mars program, reconfigure NASA’s plans for human and robotic exploration of Mars, and develop Obama’s Asteroid Initiative, which featured a plan to bring an asteroid into the vicin- ity of the Moon’s orbit and send astronauts to explore it. The Trump adminis- tration canceled plans for a human mission to an asteroid. However, NASA’s Near-Earth Observations program, which had been made a key element of the Asteroid Initiative and consequently received a larger budget, remains in operation, with its larger budget intact.
NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission, launched in 2011, landed the Curiosity rover on the Red Planet on 5 August 2012. At the time of this writ- ing, Curiosity had been exploring the surface of Mars for seven years. The
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mission’s experiments are focused on answering this question: Did Mars ever have the right environmental conditions to support microbial life?
On 18 November 2013, NASA launched its Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission, which entered Mars orbit on 22 September 2014. MAVEN, which was still conducting science operations at the time of this writing, was designed explore the Red Planet’s upper atmosphere, iono- sphere, and interactions with the Sun and solar wind.
On 14 March 2016, the European Space Agency launched its ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter to Mars, arriving on 16 October 2016. On 5 May 2018, NASA launched its Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport (InSight) mission to Mars. InSight, devel- oped by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is the first robotic planetary explorer designed to study in depth the “inner space” of Mars: its crust, mantle, and core. NASA’s Mars 2020 mission and ESA’s ExoMars 2020 rover mission to Mars will continue our exploration of the Red Planet.
Also at the time of this writing, in addition to these recent missions, three workhorse missions were still conducting science operations at Mars:
NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter, in operation since 2001 (now NASA’s longest- lasting spacecraft at Mars); ESA’s Mars Express orbiter, which arrived at the Red Planet in December 2003; and NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, in operation since 2006.
At the time of this writing, NASA was responding to the Trump admin- istration’s directive to return people to the Moon by 2024 and to send people to Mars by 2033. Politics likely will sort out NASA’s Mars priorities: scien- tific exploration, sample return, and human missions. Both of the chapters in this section shine a light on the vagaries of politics—both outside and inside NASA.
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