Show NASA's ambitious new Mars Rover is too costly critics say Joel Achenbach The Washington Post PASADENA Calif In a clean room in Building of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is something that looks very much like a flying saucer Its It's a capsule containing a huge brawny Mars rover a Hummer compared with the Mini Coopers that have previously rolled across the Red Planet This is the Mars Science Laboratory the space agency's next big mission to the most like Earth-like planet in the solar system But its it's been a magnet for controversy and a reminder that the robotic exploration of other worlds is never nevera a snap especially when engineers decide to get ambitious The launch has been delayed for two years because of technical glitches Approved at billion the missions mission's price tag will be at least 22 billion NASA now estimates Critics say the cost has really quadrupled since the project was first dreamed up What no one can doubt is that ambitious missions tend to become costly ones which jangles the nerves of officials who know how easy it is for a Mars mission to go bust Alan Stern Stem a planetary scientist and former NASA associate administrator for science missions charged in a New York Times op op- ed column last year that the cost overruns of the Mars Science Laboratory are a sign of a cancer o of f spending profligacy that thatis thatis is overtaking the space agency Stern Stem now a aI I i private c consultant argues that the new rover is too ambitious with too many new technologies in play making a cost overrun allbut all allbut allbut but inevitable Its not just that its it's a bigger rover Its It's also an entirely new kind of landing system Its It's also that its it's nuclear Its It's also that its it's carrying multiple ins instruments far beyond what's ever been done Stern Stem said in an interview We need to go goto goto goto to a strategy where we can access Mars frequently and take advantage of what weve we've already invented NASA officials acknowledge that they are pushing the boundaries of what's possible in Mars exploration But they say it makes no sense to do the same things over and over again with modest changes The new rover weighing 1875 pounds is more than twice as heavy as either Spirit or Opportunity the remarkably durable rovers that have been sniffing around Mars for the past five years on a mission originally designed to last just 90 days Those rovers have six instruments each the new rover has 10 including detectors for organic compounds The Theold Theold Theold old rovers co could ld reach out scratch the Martian surface and try to get a sense of things but the new rover can retrieve a sample and put it in various analytic chambers Earlier rovers were solar powered but this one has a nuclear power source that will allow it to operate day and night The new rover is ismore ismore ismore more rugged capable of navigating much trickier terrain It can operate at higher latitudes with harsher climates It has its own meteorology station It has a color camera that shoots video It can do almost everything but make espresso We Ve need a larger support structure We need a more capable arm We need to tobe tobe tobe be able to look at not just the geology but much more the chemistry much more the organic elements We have to have a more capable rover said Jim Green director of NASA's planetary science division He acknowledged that the cost overruns will put puta a crimp in the planetary science budget which is running at about 13 13 billion a year The Mars program specifically will feel the effects and there will have to be cuts or delays in the next rover mission scheduled for 2016 he said But he added that the Mars Science Laboratory will be worth it Because its it's such a large rover engineers had ha hato d to invent a new landing technique called a sky crane The rover also needed dozens of motors and gearboxes to accomplish the many tasks outlined by scientific investigators It was the iffy performance o of f those motors and gearboxes in tests that forced NAS NASto NASA A to pull the plug on th the e missions mission's scheduled 2009 launch Richard Cook the project t manager said that in calculating the cost and the th e amount of time necessary ary for designing the mission we didn't extrapolate e how much more complex x it was than the Spirit and andt an d t Opportunity mission Mars is already strewn with the litter of crashed spaceships Some probes go there and simply vanish As Charles director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory put it Mars is very unforgiving tried to illustrate how tricky it is to get a spaceship to Mars and bring it to rest in a specific region on the surface Imagine youre you're playing golf he said Starting in Los Angeles hit the golf ball toward St. St Andrews he said for those who arent aren't golf fans that's a very famous course in Scotland It has to go straight into the cup And the cup is moving And yet NASA has had many successful Mars missions over the past several decades dating all the way back to Mariner 4 which flew by Mars in 1965 That spacecraft returned 22 images of a dusty cratered world instantly ending speculation that Mars might harbor vegetation Two Viking landers in 1976 conducted the first experiments looking for life on Mars The Pathfinder mission of 1997 showed that a cheap lightweight probe could bounce to a safe landing cushioned by air bags In the past five years Spirit and Opportunity have outperformed all expectations even crawling into craters for a closer look But after all that it remains unknown whether M Mars rs harbors life beneath its surface or did many mimy many billions of years ago when the planet was warmer and wetter The new rover rove c might be able to get closer to an answer by searching directly for organic matter that might be associated with living things A Mars mission has three basic components each of which has its special challenges First the probe has to get there You cant can't launch a rocket toward Mars just anytime you must pick picka a moment when it will intercept the planet at just the right part of its orbit By missing the 2009 launch window NASA had to postpone for two expensive years And hitting Mars Marsis is not easy because its distance from Earth at any given moment is known imprecisely The landing is the hardest part No other country has ever managed to land a functional spacecraft on Mars No Martian probe has ever been as heavy as the Mars Science Laboratory and previous technologies for landing simply wont won't work for something so massive Thus has invented an entirely new system for landing a sky crane The spacecraft will descend through the thin Martian atmosphere using parachutes and rockets to slow its velocity Because Mars is so far from Earth a signal between engineers at and the craft will take many minutes to travel even at the speed of light That means the spacecraft has to guide itself sensing its altitude as well as its horizontal and vertical motion At 65 feet above the surface the descent slowed almost to a hover by retrorockets the spacecraft will lower the rover from its belly using cables When the rover touches down explosive charges will cut cut the cables and the spacecraft will fly off and crash about meters away And the rover will send a signal to Earth saying it has landed safely If history repeats itself the engineers will have turned purple by that point Adam one of the inventors of the sky crane system remembers being unable to breathe dud during g gone one of the earlier rover landings I was getting the stars and pins and needles needles' as I Iwas Iwas Iwas was starting to lose it he said After the landing comes the exploration The key attribute of the new rover is that it can operate year- year round in heat and cold at high latitudes with tremendous fluctuations in daytime and nighttime temperatures Nobody has lias built something like this before said And it has to operate on another planet in which every 24 hours you have to go from the Sahara Desert to Antarctica He pointed to a quotation prominently inscribed on one of his walls Do not go where the path may lead go instead where there is no path and leave a trail Said If y you u want to have a guarantee that y you'll ull be percent successful the best thing would be to stay on the pad and never launch t t 1 7 1 t JJ T I f. f I |