I think it should be called Rover.

Then it would be the Rover rover.

That would be me. I was in high school from 1982-86. I got Voyager at Uranus.

The only missions bending metal were Magellan, Ulysses, and Galileo. I guess Mars Observer might have been in early planning mode. We had one (1) encounter to look forward to in the next five years--the Voyager Neptune flyby. Hubble was years away from flying (and of course even further away from data collection due to the mirror).

It wasn't just the lack of data coming in. It was the lack of hope of data, of new knowledge, that was so mindcrushingly depressing.

Was MSL explicitly funded instead of an outer planets mission or did it just kinda work out that way in the end?

How did it happen that there was such a gap between Cassini and this mission? Was this is a result of the Battlestar Galactica JIMO fiasco?

FWIW, looks like the observations were purely Earth-based, from the Mauna Kea observatories.

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=27373

I wonder if that is referring to a revenue-enhancement option rather than a cost-savings option! You've got a bare-bones NF mission under $800M and you also get $50-$100M for the MoO for Jupiter/Saturn...making the whole ball o'wax a $900M mission.

What I find particularly exciting about this discovery is that the imaged planet is so close to ours. It is within the realm of possibility to image a century long campaign of surveying the system, learning more about it, and eventually sending a multi-generational probe sent to investigate it and establish ground truths.

What a day to be alive!

I've got a very bad feeling about this delay...the cost cap at $1B Euro is going to be a real challenge and I just don't see how NASA will have the funds to chip in additional money. Slipping from 11 to 13 to 16 sure seems like kicking the ball down the road every time real money needs to be spent on it.

Thanks for this link.

I'm a bit surprised that raiding JUNO or the GRAIL/LADEE Moon missions are on the table to cover the existing overrun.

My guess is that MSL flies eventually, just because there is absolutely no guarantee that money saved by cancelling it would be directed into other Mars program activities. If I were the budgeteer handling this I suck every penny and dime from the rest of the program into the MSL account and make a pitch for the difference using that good faith demonstration. That means cancelling all work on MSR, cancelling MAVEN, cancelling the 2016 lander in favor of a cheaper orbiter (perhaps delayed until 2018), and cancelling MER continuing operations (at least Spirit). I'd also recommend pushing MSL to 2011 to make sure this thing flies right since there won't be a "next mission" coming down the pipe for a long time.

KSC with two shuttles on the pads at the same time
Canberra DSN for the Pathfinder landing
Air and Space Museum
Enterprise exhibit at the New Orleans Worlds Fair
Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center

What implications would a Perchlorate of some flavor have for cross-contamination considerations on future missions? At a minimum it seems to me that it renders the fear of a Terrestrial bacterium running rampant throughout the planet far less likely.

Just saw a post on this on the general political discussion board I frequent, so it is definitely beginning a break out into the wider media.

How long before the Drudge Report link, ya think?

Thanks for the link, Paolo.

A quick read through Chapter 2 leads me to believe the door has been kicked wide open for another Jupiter mission for NF3 if it can be brought in under the cost cap.

These sort of encounters always fascinate me...this is likely to be the only close approach data humanity collects on this particular hunk of rock for hundreds of years. Some time in the distant future an asteroid miner will pull up these old images on his way to this asteroid and wonder at the folks who sent a barbaric robot out to it....

Honestly, this sounds like a fatal flaw in the mission design. I cannot imagine that planning for best (or even decent) data transmission rates 180 days after the design life of the instruments gathering and transmitting the data has expired will be seen as an acceptable solution.

"Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter - Ambitious"

Snicker.

I agree with this. The first picture has done a lot to assuage my fears we would be frustrated by tantalizing targets just out of reach of the lander.

Very interesting stuff, thanks for posting.

The compromise position is becoming clearer--the losing planet of the flagship mission gets a Stirling-powered Discovery class consolation prize.

I agree with all of that, Phil. In fact, I think we'll end up seeing MSR restricted to locations where we have established ground truth and know we'll get rocks that are worth the huge cost.

Unfortunately, there is no real solution to the budget fights except to let the fights occur. While a JROC-type approach sounds good in theory, in practice the military has a great deal more latitude to spread resources around. A specific command may not get a high-priority request filled this budget cycle, but they will be able to reapply again next fiscal year.

In the NASA context, on the other hand, the stakes are much higher. Losing a flagship decision means that community is shut out not for one or two fiscal years but rather for 15 to 20 fiscal years (remember the Cassini start was in 1988/1989) long enough that it ends careers, often before they begin. The losers of the Titan/Europa flagship mission realistically have to plan for a start date for a flagship mission to their planet in the 2025 range. And even then the losing "team" has to worry about losing two contests in a row and seeing a 30-40 year gap between mission starts.

Given that sobering scenario, nothing NASA can do will make all of the players even moderately happy.

Exactly. My comment wasn't to be snarky...I think there is a very good argument that the science return from a sample return mission that collects the best bits of MSL rocks would be greatly superior to a sample return mission that cannot be initiated until the samples are collected.

Well, there was Stern's talk about integrating sample collection capacity for a future sample return into this mission...wonder how much weight they would need to carve out for that.

Stern has asked a tiger team at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., to design sample caching gear to be installed on the Mars Science Laboratory. A small, hockey puck-sized device is being studied, seen as a "secondary payload" to be attached to the rover.

The final study results from the Ames team on the caching hardware are due by the end of July or early August, reported Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at the space agency field center who is helping to assess the feasibility of the Mars Science Laboratory add-on. Preliminary discussions also are under way with officials in the European Space Agency's ExoMars rover project to carry similar sample caching equipment on board that 2013 mission.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/0707...mplereturn.html

Emily, in all seriousness, you should submit that to Edward Tufte as an example of a way to present a huge amount of data in a compact and interpretable form.

http://gsahist.org/

Might be a place to start. Geology as a discipline is actually reasonably concious of the need to address history due to the 1950s paradigm change of plate tectonics as well as the old uniformitarianism/catastrophism conflict.