NASA plans to follow up its Mars rover Curiosity mission with a
duplicate rover that could collect and store samples for return to
Earth, the agency's lead scientist said on Tuesday.
The new rover will
use spare parts and engineering models developed for Curiosity, which
is four months into a planned $2.5 billion mission on Mars to look for
habitats that could have supported microbial life.
Replicating the
rover's chassis, sky-crane landing system and other gear will enable
NASA to cut the cost of the new mission to about $1.5 billion including
launch costs, John Grunsfeld, the U.S. space agency's associate
administrator for science, said at the American Geophysical Union
conference in San Francisco.
Budget shortfalls forced NASA to pull
out of a series of joint missions with Europe, designed to return rock
and soil samples from Mars in the 2020s. Europe instead will partner
with Russia for the launch vehicle and other equipment that was to have
been provided by NASA.
Grunsfeld said NASA will provide a key
organics experiment for Europe's ExoMars rover, as well as engineering
and mission support under the agency's proposed budget for the year
beginning October 1, 2013. T he United States also will provide the
radio communications equipment for a planned European orbiter slated to
launch in 2016.
Details about what science instruments would be
included on the new rover, whether or not it would have a cache for
samples, and the landing site have not yet been determined.
NASA plans to set up a team of scientists to refine plans for the rover and issue a solicitation next summer.
The
National Academy of Sciences last year ranked a Mars sample return
mission as its top priority in planetary science for the next decade.
"The
(science) community already has come forward with a very clear message
about what the content of the next Mars surface mission should be, and
that is to cache the samples that will come back to Earth," said Steve
Squyres with Cornell University.
"That's really a necessary part of having this mission," he said.
Humans missions to Mars
NASA
had considered flying an orbiter in 2018, but decided instead to
provide equipment for the European probes, extend its ongoing Mars
missions and develop the Curiosity twin rover for launch in 2020. "We
could have come up with something in 2018, but with the budget that
we're in we would not have had such a full program. It would have been a
down-scaled orbiter of some kind," Grunsfeld said.
Under the revamped Mars plan, Curiosity's two-year mission would be extended to five years.
The new rover also would help NASA prepare for eventual human missions to Mars, a long-term objective of the U.S. space program.
"If
we think of the 2030s as the potential for human exploration, I think
this 2020 rover and the other things we might be able to do in the 2020s
as a synergistic collaboration between science and human spaceflight.
There are a lot of cool things we can do," Grunsfeld said.
© Thomson Reuters 2012