University of Colorado Chosen for NASA’s Maven Spacecraft
“This mission will provide the first direct measurements ever taken to address key scientific questions about Mars’ evolution,” said Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The loss of Mars’ atmosphere has been an ongoing mystery. MAVEN will help us solve it.”
The choice of the University of Colorado by NASA for their $485-million-dollar Mars robotic mission has come with a very high price after a nine-month delay. A delay, mind you, which has cost NASA time they could not afford, extra money, and the loss of scientific time for the mission. The increase in price was an additional $10-million-dollars because of a two-year launch delay, with the “science-gathering mission cut in half to one year.”
The University of Colorado’s proposal was just one of 20 other ideas to study Mars, scheduled for launch late in 2013, before a serious conflict of interest was declared—which has remained a secret other than it was NOT created by NASA or the two groups involved. According to NASA, the conflict of interest had been destroyed as it could not disclose details which involved “proprietary information.”What is known is that the conflict was not with the Colorado proposal, which meant it was with the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio—who could not be reached nor would comment on it.
Last December, NASA stated that a “serious conflict of interest” in one of the two proposals forced the board to disband before the winner could be picked. Meanwhile, another panel was created to give the awards. This was mainly due to that both finalists had submitted new proposals, whereas the “conflict in the original reports was irrelevant to the evaluation and the selection decision.”
Originally, the Mars Scout program has been scheduled for 2011 launching, but NASA had to postpone the mission to 2013 as Mars comes close only to Earth every 26 months. And the purpose of the mission is to focus on the Martian atmosphere, how the planet evolved and lost its water.
MAVEN is called the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN, designed to provide information about the Red Planet’s atmosphere, climate history and potential habitability in high detail. The proposal chosen we to provide the best science value and lowest implementation risk from all 20 proposals that were given to NASA’s Announcement of Opportunity in August 2006.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 at 9:49 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.
