MARS POLAR LANDER
NASA has taken yet another serious blow with the $165 million Mars Polar Lander now considered lost. On 07 December 1999, the last realistic opportunity to make contact with the spacecraft ended in silence. NASA does not try to hide the fact that their missions involve greater risks than they did in the old days. Space missions will always involve a certain level of risk, but has NASA pushed this level over the edge? Since 1962 there have been 25 missions to Mars from the US and Russsia, 4 of these missions were not completed and 11 failed. In a telephone interview with CNN's Miles O'Brien, NASA chief Dan Goldin said, "We have been so successful that we may have become too comfortable. We may have asked (mission managers) to take too much risk. " This increased level of risk and hence failure, prompted debates in the US congress over NASAs budget. Remarkably, for the first time in 5 years, NASAs budget will not be cut after all these failures, instead they will receive $21 billion in funding next year! Could NASA have been taking more risks because it knew it would not have to pay the consequences of losing funding? Or maybe the risks were warranted because of the upcoming Mars Surveyor 2001 mission consisting of another more technologically advanced orbiter and lander.
NASA has currently scheduled robotic missions to Mars every 26 months for the next decade. Questions are currently being asked among the scientific community regarding the validity of manned space missions. The robotic missions are being favoured by a large number of people because of the cheap costs involved compared with transporting humans around the solar system. However some believe that there would not be a space program unless human space flight was involved. With the recent failures of the robotic probes, Dan Goldin has said that the whole Mars program was going to be examined which could delay upcoming missions like the Mars Surveyor 2001 program. Perhaps the date for a manned mission to Mars could be brought forward since these recent events have highlighted the inability of robotic probes to avoid the enormous amount of unpredictable hazards and demonstrated how quickly they can malfunction or vanish.
John Pike from the Washington-based Federation of American Scientists recently emphasised the contradiction of NASA's overly ambitious motto of "Faster, Better, Cheaper". "Pick the two of those three that you want, because you cant have all three", he said.
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Peter Smith from the University of Arizona is in charge of the team that NASA has contracted to build the cameras for the upcoming Mars mission. They have also designed and built cameras for the previous Pathfinder and MPL missions. CNN recently quoted Smith as saying, "I didnt realise how fast and cheap it was going to get". "I think we have had enough of cheaper; lets go for a little more of the better" he said.
One of the first signs of trouble for the MPL mission was discovered from high-resolution images of the proposed landing sites from the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS). The primary and backup landing sites were chosen from images taken by the Viking orbiter, the same probe that originally photographed the "Face" on Mars. Its commonly understood that the resolution on these photographs are terrible by todays standards. The Viking spacecraft could only see objects that were larger than a football field, while the newer MGS camera can see objects down to 12 feet in size. The Viking pictures could not see any large boulders, steep slopes, mesas or other hazardous obstacles. Mars Polar Lander Project Scientist Richard Zurek must have forgotten this simple fact while trying to decide on landing sites. After the new MGS pictures of the landing site were developed he said, "At first we thought this was really sort of rolling areas, with pretty gentle slopes." "Now it is clear at least parts of the area that we may end up on are a little rougher than what we expected." The clearer, detailed MGS pictures of the landing sites sparked a detailed analysis of the primary and backup site. "We picked two sites that were as different as you could get...", said Zurek, "but what we are finding is if you find it over here, you find it over there" said Zurek comparing the terrain of the two sites. The decision was made to go with the primary landing site since both sites were essentially the same. If everything wasn't cheaper and faster, maybe they could have had better photos to choose a more appropriate landing site instead of relying on older technology.
The preliminary thoughts about the reason for the loss of the MPL have not really focused on the facts. Up until the last communication with the spacecraft, its trajectory and system conditions were in an excellent state of health. There was no indication of anything wrong with the spacecraft. Complying with the Ockhams Razor theory, the simplest explanation given that the spacecraft was healthy, is that it landed on inhospitable ground causing it to smash or fall over. However John Pike is suggesting under-funding and staffing problems were the cause for the crash. Richard Zurek has acknowledged Pike, saying "Its a matter of staffing, really: Did we try to do too much with too few people?" This was the problem with the MCO, NASA changed navigation staff at the last minute and numerous other "Better, Faster, Cheaper" antics. However according to the data, the MPL actually made it to Mars and was preparing to land. The fact is it couldn't land safely for whatever reason, what has staffing on Earth got to do with landing conditions on Mars?
NASA is now planning on using the MGS to photograph the landing site again in the hope of finding the lost spacecraft or its parachute. If they succeed in locating such a tiny object and obtaining good quality photographs, the next question will be "Why can't they successfully target the requested areas of interest around the 'Face' on Mars and provide photographs without the loss of quality present in their current images?"
