Jupiter flagship selected |
Jupiter flagship selected |
Feb 18 2009, 03:47 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 717 Joined: 3-December 04 From: Boulder, Colorado, USA Member No.: 117 |
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Feb 19 2009, 08:04 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 242 Joined: 21-December 04 Member No.: 127 |
Was MSL explicitly funded instead of an outer planets mission or did it just kinda work out that way in the end?
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Feb 19 2009, 11:46 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 718 Joined: 22-April 05 Member No.: 351 |
Was MSL explicitly funded instead of an outer planets mission or did it just kinda work out that way in the end? The last Decadal Survey (2003) called for two missions in the >$2-3B range, a Mars Sample Return and a Europa orbiter. The straight forward proposal for an Europa orbiter was changed to a very ambitious (some have used less charitable terms that aren't suitable for a family board like this one) proposal for a nuclear reactor powered multi-moon Jovian orbiter called JIMO (http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Jupiter-Icy-Moons-Orbiter) by the then NASA administrator. After JIMO's cancellation with a new NASA administrator, there was no funding to restart a straightforward Europa orbiter. The Mars Sample Return was effectively replaced with the Mars Science Laboratory as the big Mars mission. There is no formal rule that I know of that there will be just one of these big missions per decade (the Decadal Survey called for two in this past decade), but that is how the funding has actually worked out since NASA restarted its planetary program in the mid-1980s. (There was a time when the only NASA planetary mission flying was Voyager with the repeatedly delayed Galileo mission as the only one in development. Those were the bad years.) -------------------- |
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