New Visions of Mars
“This workshop achieved a consensus that NASA’s resources have not been commensurate with its mandated missions of exploration and science,” said G. Scott Hubbard, former director of NASA’s Ames Research Laboratory in Mountain View, California, and a consulting professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford.
Recently, the Planetary Society and the Stanford University Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics has formed a joint workshop to define what true significance of the Mars and the Moon ventures is, hopefully by allowing them to serve as steppingstones for humans to serve as explorers to Mars. This workshop promoted by space experts is dated February 12 and 13, 2008, saying that NASA funding needs to be restored to put humans on Mars and beyond, yet still sustaining their science mission.
The organizers of the workshop said that future presidents of the United States need to embrace international collaboration, funding NASA to the point it can sustain all vital science programs. Presently, $74 billion dollars of the budget is targeted at restoring some of the Earth-monitoring instruments that were cut from the troubled NPOESS project, the National Polar-Orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System, which is a joint project of NOAA and the DOD since the 1990s.
It was suggested at the workshop that the goal of human spaceflight should be on an international venture should be Mars, coming from the U.S. administration that would be coming in the near future–both through public support and to sustain the program politically, according to Louis Friedman, Executive Director of the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California.
In 2006, Pentagon managers cut the number of NPOESs satellites to four instead of six, with a launch date extending to 2013. Meanwhile, numerous instruments were also eliminated that were crucial to NOAA. Eventually, support arrived for the NOAA position from the National Research Council, or NRC. Their report pointed out the present instruments used for observing Earth from space would eventually be reduced in numbers.
The budget restored at least three of these instruments for the NOAA: the Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite (OMPS-Limb); Ceres–designed to be completed and launched in 2010 on a NPP satellite; and the third instrument will continue, designed to measure the amount of solar radiation outside Earth’s atmosphere with efforts continued to find a satellite to carry it. Additionally, the U.s. Geological Survey had its overall budget cut by $38 million, with earth-monitoring projects being spared. The Landsat satellite series received an additional $2 for the USGS Land Remote Sensing program to operate it.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 7:25 pm and is filed under Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
