Mars Exploration Program. “Everything ground to
a halt,” Hecht says, and the planned Mars Surveyor
2001 Lander, similar in design to the polar lander,
was canceled. After those failures, however, NASA
redeveloped its Mars strategy, calling for more
integration among the goals and capabilities of
individual missions. And out of that effort came the
“enormously successful” Mars Exploration Rover
tandem of Spirit and Opportunity, he says, which
set the stage for Curiosity and the 2020 rover.
So could the class of 2020 lead to a similar leap
forward in Mars exploration?
While some of the missions will “push the
envelope” technologically, Logsdon says, others are
addressing simpler questions that are not as “cen-
tral to planning for human expeditions to Mars.”
(That’s not meant as a slight, he notes, just a reality
given that the agencies behind them are new to
interplanetary exploration.) But for nations new
to space-faring, like China, India and the UAE, the
sense of national accomplishment that may come
with successfully putting a craft in orbit around,
or on, Mars could spur interest in further Red
Planet exploration.
And regardless of whether all of the 2020 mis-
sions are successful, with more nations and even
private interests now vying for Mars, the pool
of expertise in designing, planning and executing
missions is growing, and competition could spur
innovation. “Opinions will differ,” Hecht says, but
“I see enormous significance” in the fact that thereare so many diverse missions attempting to reach
Mars. There’s “a sense of urgency that’s created
by the fact that if we don’t go there, someone
else is going to,” he says.
But what happens next, after the upcoming
missions? When it comes to what these mis-
sions might lead to in the future, “my basic
answer is it’s not clear,” Logsdon says. Return-
ing samples and sending humans to Mars are
goals, not strategies, he says, adding that neither
the U.S. nor Europe has a detailed strategy to
follow up the 2020 missions.
This isn’t the only hurdle for ongoing exploration
efforts. Sustaining the political and programmatic
will to enable long-range planning and carry out
increasingly ambitious missions is challenging. And
there’s growing concern that a shortage of commu-
nications and data transfer capacity could occur if
the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, TGO and other
orbiters that serve as relays for surface probes aren’t
replaced or supplemented in the near future. (Surface
missions can communicate independently with Earth
without orbital relays, but the transmission capacity
is greatly reduced.) There have been proposals within
NASA for a new communications orbiter to launch
in 2022 or 2024, but nothing has been funded and
development would need to begin soon to be ready
for either of those launch windows. ESA, meanwhile,
is considering multiple follow-on options with sample
return in mind, Vago says, potentially with NASA if
that agency moves forward in the near future with a
plan for Mars sample return. Alternatively, ESA could
collaborate with Roscosmos’ anticipated mission to
sample the Martian moon Phobos.
In the near term, though, the clock is ticking for
the missions already queuing up to launch. ExoMars
2020 is scheduled to be delivered to the Baikonur
Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan several months prior
to its anticipated launch on July 25, 2020, and “we
are very aware that, in engineering terms, that is
just around the corner,” Vago says. But there are
still many steps left to complete in assembling and
testing the spacecraft, he says. “You just focus on
what needs to be done next week and the week after
that ... knowing that, by doing all the small steps,
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