NASA's Rejected Missions and New Hopefuls...

[robunos]

interesting little article....


http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/story/301923/nasa-s-rejected-missions-and-new-hopefuls


cheers,
Robin.

 

[blackstar]

There's a more detailed discussion of several of these missions over on NASASpaceflight.com. I happen to know both of the PI's for the non-selected missions (and I've met the PI for the InSight mission).

There is a better image of the Titan Mare Explorer than the one that they used. I've attached that. TiME even had mission patch.

InSight used to be called GEMS, as the article states. But GEMS is actually a de-scoped version of a New Frontiers mission proposal for sending three landers to Mars simultaneously. That mission proposal was called Cerberus and it would have been expensive. Scaling it down from 3 to 1 lander reduced the data, but made it affordable. Because InSight would use the same lander as Phoenix, it is already a proven design. That reduced cost and schedule risk. TiME was probably not something that could make it under the Discovery cost cap, and Comet Hopper might have been pushing the cost cap as well.

 

[blackstar]

Of the other three missions that were given technology development money, I know a bit about NEOCam. You would think that it would be pretty straightforward to put a telescope in orbit and use it to search for near Earth objects. But it turns out that the data processing and analysis is difficult, which is probably why NASA put some development money behind it.

However, just because those three proposals received technology development funding does not mean that they have first dibs for the next Discovery selection. There were reportedly 28 proposals during the last round (6 got downselected in some form). That's a lot of proposals, and it indicates that there are a lot of ideas out there. As a well-known space scientist told me a year and a half ago, even if only one in three is a viable mission, that's still a lot of good small science missions that could get funded in the future. The problem is that the administration is not providing the funding necessary to pursue these missions at a healthy pace.

 

[Grey Havoc]

On a related note: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3249387/Firm-Apple-s-Spaceship-HQ-reveals-plans-Nasa-backed-3D-printed-Mars-habitat-built-robots.html

 

[Grey Havoc]

http://gizmodo.com/nasa-has-called-off-the-launch-for-its-brand-new-mars-l-1749320999

Not good, to put it mildly.

 

[blackstar]

Which goes to show that this stuff isn't easy to do.

InSight was selected because it was, among other things, the lowest technological risk. Certainly the spacecraft was proven, so that was low risk. The instruments were obviously higher risk.

And although there have been a few people saying that NASA should have picked one of the other competitors (everybody's favorite seems to be TiME), keep in mind that both of those spacecraft were higher risk than InSight. Entirely new spacecraft compared to InSight's lander. In addition, both would have required ASRG power sources, and shortly after the Discovery selection NASA announced that the ASRG program was experiencing significant cost overruns and running into technology hurdles. So either one of those programs might have gotten into even more trouble than InSight, at higher cost.

 

[Grey Havoc]

http://www.space.com/31508-mars-insight-lander-launch-delay-investigation.html

 

[Grey Havoc]

For various reasons, I never got back to posting on InSight. I'll create a new topic for it since it has been so long.