Earth_Magazine_October_2017

seeking proposals from Indian researchers by the end

of last summer for instruments to fly on “MOM-2.”

The announcement stated that “it is now planned

to have the next orbiter mission around Mars for

a future launch opportunity,” but did not specify a

date. ISRO is said to be considering a lander and/or

rover for the mission as well, and to be interested

in returning to Mars as early as 2021, which would

mean launching in 2020. The mission budget was

reportedly approved last winter.

A 2020 mission from California-based SpaceX,

which would be the first privately funded and

planned effort, appears to be the most tenuous at

this point. The “Red Dragon” mission, hotly antic-

ipated since it was first announced in 2016, was to

repurpose the company’s Dragon 2 craft — currently

in development as a crew transport for NASA — as

a Mars lander. The first incarnation of the Dragon

capsule has been ferrying supplies to and from the

International Space Station since 2012, and Red

Dragon was intended as the first major step toward

SpaceX’s long-term goal of ferrying passengers to

the Red Planet. Before carrying people, however,

the modified Dragon 2 landers could also be used

for flight testing and carrying heavy equipment

in support of early human explorations. The main

goal of a 2020 mission would be to demonstrate

supersonic retropropulsion, a landing technology

employing powerful braking thrusters to decelerate

a spacecraft too large to be slowed by the airbags,

parachutes and skycranes used in the past. Speak-

ing at a space conference in July, however, SpaceX

CEO Elon Musk said the company no longer plans

to use such thrusters on the Dragon 2, and that the

retropropulsion technique originally envisioned no

longer seemed like the right approach for a Mars

landing, comments that suggest the prospects of a

SpaceX Mars mission in 2020 are slim.

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With so many missions eyeing the 2020 launch

window, it could seem that they’ve been planned

collaboratively to advance international Mars explo-

ration. But that’s not the case. Likewise, the fact

that environmental conditions on Mars when the

spacecraft arrive in 2021 should be relatively favor-

able (see sidebar, page 35) — a boon for surface

missions in particular — has not driven the uptick

of Mars missions. Rather, “it’s somewhat of an

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