[X] My Assistant

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

...that is, the Nov. 2-4 meeting of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Lunar and Planetary Exploration which advises NASA on mission selection, to do a print article on it for "Astronomy" magazine.

The meeting's agenda is at http://www4.nas.edu/webcr.nsf/MeetingDispl...-D?OpenDocument ; it looks extremely interesting. Anyone have anything they'd especially like me to ask about while I'm there?

[djellison]

So it raises the question - why was MTO proposed in the first place, and why was it described as being so important only a few months before it was pulled.


Doug

[mcaplinger]

why was MTO proposed in the first place...

It started out as an Italian Space Agency initiative, and when ASI couldn't find the money for it, specific engineering groups within NASA took over advocating it (laser comm, sample return canister tracking, etc.) In my opinion, at the current stage in Mars exploration, it was a solution in search of a problem to a significant degree.

Don't get me wrong, it'd be great to have that kind of comm infrastructure, but not at the cost of not having the money to fly science missions to use the infrastructure, which is what seemed all too likely to happen.