Yeah, that's the big one. I assume (fingers crossed barring an accident) Shuttle will fly out the remainder of the ET production run. That may be FY 2010, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it end in FY 11 or even early FY 12.

The big step the Administration took was committing to ending the program. While Ares and VSE are all nice and good, the real decisions about the future of manned spaceflight have been pushed to whoever wins in 2010. The thought, I'm sure, was that Ares/Orion would be far enough along to be tough to stop...but the delays have altered that calculation.

Yes, this is my take as well. It looks more like dust being shifted around rather than new dust being added to the environment. Let's hope that continues....

Hard to believe its been 10 years...but it's also hard to believe how much more we know about Mars today then only 10 years ago.

Pathfinder was when Mars for me became a real place, with Twin Peaks beckoning off in the distance....

Thanks, missed that when I was reading the article.

How does this slip change the mission profile (e.g. arrival dates, potential mission extensions)?

SCIM has been proposed in the last two Scout competitions and would follow that mission profile.

I went to Tidbinbilla (outside Canberra) to watch the pictures come in (they'd set up a big screen in the visitor's center).

Fascinating report, Alex.

While they don't come out and say it, it seems clear to me that they favor a geology and geophysics orbiter with a small landed package for 2013.

I'm glad they've gone with a more realistic, larger budget. It was the gee-wiz-on-the-cheap feeling of the initial proposal that concerned me the most.

Will MAVEN or Great Escape (Scout 2011) have the capacity to act as a data relay?

The rover spent a heck of a lot of time getting to Victoria. In the absence of a new target at an easily attainable distance, it doesn't make any sense to me to leave the crater until the potential science there is exhausted. For what? More endless Sols over a trackless dune field? And in return, we'll sacrifice many sols of in-depth analysis of the layered rock of Victoria from inside the craters?

When did you start up the message board? That whole beginning of the mission is a bit of a haze for me between the rlproject site and The Other Mars Board?

The missions that are returning data now are mature and as a result the flow of truly new information has decreased. It's natural that the number of posts in this forum should also decrease...thankfully we are NOT taken over by lolcats or pointless debates about whether Bush=Hitler!

The initial two years of the MER missions were a very, very special time. New, really new discoverys daily if not hourly. Add the Huygens landing and the first couple of passes of Titan and we were spoiled for topics.

For the "youngsters" out there, please recognize that this is not the normal state of affairs. This forum will chug along with spurts of excitement (Dawn launch, Messenger first pictures from Mercury, Phoenix landing, Kepler launch and first light, perhaps a Deep Impact MOO) but those events will be short-lived. And the forward manifest looks even grimmer; the planning for the next flagship mission, for example, is woefully behind schedule. Juno doesn't launch until 2011. JWST won't launch until 2013 and it is already sucking the life out TPF and SIM. NH doesn't arrive until 2015. SOMETHING will need to be done about the current LANDSAT disaster and that something will be hugely expensive...to say nothing of how the shuttle program wrap up might affect science at NASA.

MSL, of course, will be a fabulous mission...but it also threatens to be the exclamation point on a remarkable golden age of interplanetary exploration.

The reality of interplanetary space exploration is that it is mind-numbingly expensive and glacially slow-paced. The orginal spurt of Discovery-class missions combined with robust Mars program hid this for awhile...but Discovery is slowing and running out of targets that can be done under the cost cap. Hopefully we'll at least be able to hit each Mars launch window, but even that will be difficult to count on, depending on the person (NOT party) that wins the next US presidential election.

I have no doubt that UMSF will survive and thrive...but it won't be the same as it was during the MER landings until MSL lands (with one robot, not two).

Realistically, I think Spirit is unlikely to see more than Michaeltree Ridge/Home Plate in the remainder of its roving career, no matter what the situation with dust on her solar panels. At some point in the future, I suspect we'll see death from dust deposition as a mercy killing for the rover.

Very interesting, thanks for this.

My take away:
1) No chance of solving the choice between Saturn or Jupiter by knocking Titan or Enceledus down to NF status (Damn);
2) Titan Flagship baseline is a much sexier mission (ballon + lander + orbiter) AND demonstrates aerocapture, which seems to be ready to first trial;
3) Europa Explorer helps make up the loss of large scale images from the Galileo HGA failure (other than Io) in addition to Europa mapping coverage and lacks sexiness of a lander;
4) Jupiter System Observer seems much less salient than either of these;
5) Given the discussion of Enceladus in the NH cost study, it's tough to see how that mission profile (unavailable at the website) matches up well with either the Titan or Europa proposal;
6) ESAs projected "slices" of funding seem, not to put a fine on it, fantastical and unrealistic.

Given the demonstrated value of ground-truthing Titan, how likely is a Europa mission without that capability? And how do you pick that orbiter over the much more ambitious Titan proposal?

I think the winds are blowing for Titan on this selection....

It's pretty darn cool that a likely target is so close to our solar system.

It's just a wee little thing, isn't it!

I have to admit, there was a time when I thought this day would never happen. Grats to NASA and the DAWN team for pulling this mission out of the fire.

Evidence of fairly recent laminar flow down the face of exposed sedimentary rocks.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that I love the Firefly style camera work in the JPL animation....

Yep. I've always felt we saw Jupiter "though a mirror darkly" as a result of the HGA issue.

I know NASA/JPL have claimed that Gallileo did 95 percent of the science it was supposed to...but the five percent we lost was a disaster.

Sure gives a sense of just how radical the Skycrane concept is.

That's got to be the most "science-fictiony" thing I've ever seen bent into metal.

These resolutions don't really cost much; just a bit of time drafting them up and perhaps printing up a formal document. You would be shocked how many (and how quickly) they get processed.

Only in retrospect can we know that some of these additional capabilities were necessary. Given the limited time and resources for the mission, the software team could either:

1) Focus their efforts on essential operational capability and fault detection/recovery or;
2) Decide that those things were "good enough" and start adding bells and whistles that might (or might not) be required.

It is my firm contention that the ONLY way they could go beyond Option One is to do what they did: work out their systems on the group for real. During this time they also developed a list of the "nice to haves" that are really needed, rather than "nice to haves" fueled by a couple of nights of Red Bull.

In high risk, difficult situations, incrementalism is almost always the best approach to having the largest probability of success.

From NasaWatch's LiveBlog on MEPAG

"We think that failure that a software load we sent up in June of last year was the cause. This software tried to synch up two flight processors. Two addresses were incorrect - two memory addresses were over written. As the geometry evolved. We drove the arrays against a hard stop and the spacecraft went into safe mode. The radiator for the battery pointed at the sun, the temperature went up, and battery failed. But this should be treated as preliminary."

If true, a sad end to a magnificent mission.

http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2007/01/..._meeting_i.html

From the LiveBlog, on MGS death:

"We think that failure that a software load we sent up in June of last year was the cause. This software tried to synch up two flight processors. Two addresses were incorrect - two memory addresses were over written. As the geometry evolved. We drove the arrays against a hard stop and the spacecraft went into safe mode. The radiator for the battery pointed at the sun, the temperature went up, and battery failed. But this should be treated as preliminary."

Ouch.

The Canadian announcement is a real blow to this program...I suspect it will push the launch to 2017 or later--if it even continues.