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If you’re looking for a public figure with an astronomical approval rating, think Curiosity. The Mars rover has been a huge hit in terms of both public and scientific interest.
NASA seems to love Curiosity, too. So much so that the space agency is planning to launch a similar rover to Mars in 2020. Former astronaut John Grunsfeld, now NASA’s science chief, announced the new rover mission December 4th during a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.
With the unveiling of the $1.5-billion rover plan, NASA now has seven current or planned missions to Mars. But no trips dedicated to more exotic places like Titan or Europa, which also might harbor extraterrestrial microbes—and which have received considerably fewer robot visitors.
Plus it’s unclear how well the 2020 rover will mesh with existing blueprints for Mars exploration. Long-term plans drawn up by planetary scientists called for a series of missions ultimately bringing samples from Mars back to Earth. But the new rover may not help achieve that goal.
So Curiosity has been a hit. But would a knockoff visit be a mission, or a miss?
—John Matson
[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]
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5 Comments
Add CommentAbsolutely not. I think it's time to review the mission statement for NASA and determine what the public goals are.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes! At least 1 more plus a manned mission. The NASA budget needs to be at least tripled; even then it would be less than a rounding error in the federal budget.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe article does not provide nearly enough information to make draw any conclusions. Do you think the folks at NASA plan their research budgets on nothing more than the contents of this news flash? If experts required more information to come to this decision then what is the value of a bunch of amateurs making the same decision with less data?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think there are so many other destinations worthy of exploration than Mars. I am beginning to think that the search for life on Mars is like trying to find Sasquatch. Mars exploration is consuming too much of a limited budget. What has been done is good and Curiosity has been worth the money spent, but how about sending Cassini type probes to Uranus and Neptune?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUS governments are incapable of thinking in the timescales required to plan and explore the solar system. They are mostly all looking for photo-ops, and a big news story that will inflate their legacy. In the mean time, real science will be done by robots.
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