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Editorial: Science thrives as NASA succeeds on Mars
New Science Publications
Editorial–
Editor Jeremy Webb Personal Asst & Office Manager Anita Staff Associate Editors Liz Else, Stephanie Pain News Editor Shaoni Bhattacharya Editors, Helen Knight, Celeste Biever, Richard Fisher, Sumit Paul-Choudhury Tel +44 (0) 20 7611 1206 Fax +44 (0) 20 7611 1250 Reporters LONDON Andy Coghlan, Hazel Muir, Paul Marks, Linda Geddes [email protected] BOSTON US Bureau Chief Ivan Semeniuk SAN FRANCISCO Bureau Chief Peter Aldhous [email protected] Michael Reilly [email protected] Jim Giles [email protected] TORONTO Alison Motluk BRUSSELS Debora MacKenzie MELBOURNE Australasian Editor Rachel Nowak [email protected] Features Editors Ben Crystall, Kate Douglas, Clare Wilson, David Cohen, Graham Lawton, Valerie Jamieson, Michael Le Page, Caroline Williams Features Assistant Celia Guthrie Tel +44 (0) 20 7611 1201 Fax +44 (0) 20 7611 1280 [email protected] Opinion Editor Jo Marchant Editors John Hoyland, Amanda Gefter, Alison George, Eleanor Harris Tel +44 (0) 20 7611 1240 Fax +44 (0) 20 7611 1280 [email protected] Researcher Lucy Middleton Editorial Assistant Nigel McPaul Production Editor Mick O’Hare Asst Production Editor Melanie Green Chief Sub John Liebmann Subeditors Vivienne Greig, Julia Brown, Sean O’Neill Art Director Alison Lawn Design Craig Mackie, Ryan Wills Graphics Nigel Hawtin, Dave Johnston Pictures Adam Goff, Kirstin Jennings Tel +44 (0) 20 7611 1268 Fax +44 (0) 20 7611 1250 Careers Editor Helen Thomson [email protected] Tel +44 (0) 20 7611 1248 Fax +44 (0) 20 7611 1280 Consultants Alun Anderson, Stephen Battersby, Michael Bond, Michael Brooks, Marcus Chown, Rob Edwards, Richard Fifield, Barry Fox, Mick Hamer, Jeff Hecht, Bob Holmes, Justin Mullins, Fred Pearce, Helen Phillips, Ian Stewart, Gail Vines, Gabrielle Walker, Emma Young, Anil Ananthaswamy Press Office and Syndication UK Claire Bowles Tel +44 (0) 20 7611 1210 Fax 7611 1250 US Office Tel +1 617 386 2190 NEWSCIENTIST.COM Online Publisher John MacFarlane Online Editor Will Knight Editors Maggie McKee, Rowan Hooper, Tom Simonite Reporters David Shiga, Catherine Brahic, Sandrine Ceurstemont, Michael Marshall, Ewen Callaway Online Subeditor Dan Palmer Web team Neela Das, Cathy Tollet, Ruth Turner, Ken Wolf, Edin Hodzic, Vivienne Griffith, Rohan Creasey, Matteo Giaccone
www.newscientist.com
The right stuff NASA’s Mars programme is on a roll. Long may it continue FOR those engaged in planetary exploration there are just two ways to land on Mars. One culminates in a victory celebration marked by spontaneous outpourings of joy and relief. The other ends like a funeral and is a hard, hard thing to experience. Happily for the scientists and engineers behind the Phoenix mission, their spacecraft did it the first way. That means all the money, resources and human capital invested in the project have produced a precious scientific opportunity. If Phoenix continues to perform as well as it has so far, researchers will have months to become familiar with the Martian arctic desert and search for signs of habitability among its curious polygons (see page 6). Phoenix’s safe arrival is a tremendous achievement in a risky business. When tallied up with all previous attempts to set down on the Red Planet, the success rate stands at only 50 per cent. But a closer examination suggests that the odds of Phoenix arriving intact were probably better than 50:50. First there is funding. Recent history demonstrates that more expensive landers tend to succeed while those put together more cheaply do not. Based on three successful missions in the past 11 years (Mars Pathfinder and the Spirit and Opportunity missions) and two failures (Mars Polar Lander and Beagle 2), the dividing line between triumph and disaster falls somewhere around the $200 million mark, excluding launch costs. How does Phoenix compare? It would be unfair to call it extravagant: it got its name because it was created from the second-hand hardware of a cancelled mission. Yet Phoenix still cost NASA about $420 million – less than the price of landing Spirit or Opportunity on Mars, but more than Pathfinder. Price alone does not, of course, dictate the success or failure of a mission, but it does serve as a proxy for other factors that can influence the outcome of a mission, such as the level of preflight testing. Like the rovers before it, Phoenix’s hardware underwent a relentless schedule of testing and retesting. There were many bugs to be worked out, not least in the pulsed-thruster system that ensured a soft landing for Phoenix, but which failed the Mars Polar Lander in 1999. A problem with this system would have doomed Phoenix and probably delayed the more ambitious Mars Science
Laboratory, which will employ a similar method of landing in 2010. Finally, there is expertise. Since Pathfinder landed in 1997 we have seen a generation of engineers and managers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, learn what it takes to place a spacecraft on another planet. The faces are not identical from landing to landing, but there has been “Phoenix’s success significant overlap bolsters the case between missions, and a tremendous that NASA should repository of working preserve present knowledge has built for newcomers levels of funding up to draw on. This in the Mars professional group is coming to resemble programme” the much larger pool of expertise that developed around the Apollo moon landings in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This is crucial: the Apollo programme withered when NASA’s budget tightened and public interest in space began to wane. Expertise was lost, and will have to be rebuilt if the US space programme can hope to succeed in its stated objective of returning to the moon by 2020. Now budgets are tightening again, and the impact has been felt across NASA, including the Mars programme. Certainly, further sacrifices will have to be made, but Phoenix’s success bolsters the case that NASA should preserve present levels of funding in the Mars programme, even at the expense of other planetary missions if necessary. This will be a bitter pill for scientists whose specialities lie elsewhere, yet it is a strategy NASA should follow even if more challenging destinations such as Europa or Titan could tell us more about extraterrestrial life than Mars could. The point is that scientific returns can be optimised when the technical programme that makes the science possible is on a roll and the expertise exists to keep it that way. This does not mean that Mars should forever be the favoured child. In time, Phoenix and future missions may tell us that Mars is not the place to search for life, at which point priorities will shift. But at this time, the best long-term strategy is to keep the Mars machine humming. G 31 May 2008 | NewScientist | 5
Editorial–
Editor Jeremy Webb Personal Asst & Office Manager Anita Staff Associate Editors Liz Else, Stephanie Pain News Editor Shaoni Bhattacharya Editors, Helen Knight, Celeste Biever, Richard Fisher, Sumit Paul-Choudhury Tel +44 (0) 20 7611 1206 Fax +44 (0) 20 7611 1250 Reporters LONDON Andy Coghlan, Hazel Muir, Paul Marks, Linda Geddes [email protected] BOSTON US Bureau Chief Ivan Semeniuk SAN FRANCISCO Bureau Chief Peter Aldhous [email protected] Michael Reilly [email protected] Jim Giles [email protected] TORONTO Alison Motluk BRUSSELS Debora MacKenzie MELBOURNE Australasian Editor Rachel Nowak [email protected] Features Editors Ben Crystall, Kate Douglas, Clare Wilson, David Cohen, Graham Lawton, Valerie Jamieson, Michael Le Page, Caroline Williams Features Assistant Celia Guthrie Tel +44 (0) 20 7611 1201 Fax +44 (0) 20 7611 1280 [email protected] Opinion Editor Jo Marchant Editors John Hoyland, Amanda Gefter, Alison George, Eleanor Harris Tel +44 (0) 20 7611 1240 Fax +44 (0) 20 7611 1280 [email protected] Researcher Lucy Middleton Editorial Assistant Nigel McPaul Production Editor Mick O’Hare Asst Production Editor Melanie Green Chief Sub John Liebmann Subeditors Vivienne Greig, Julia Brown, Sean O’Neill Art Director Alison Lawn Design Craig Mackie, Ryan Wills Graphics Nigel Hawtin, Dave Johnston Pictures Adam Goff, Kirstin Jennings Tel +44 (0) 20 7611 1268 Fax +44 (0) 20 7611 1250 Careers Editor Helen Thomson [email protected] Tel +44 (0) 20 7611 1248 Fax +44 (0) 20 7611 1280 Consultants Alun Anderson, Stephen Battersby, Michael Bond, Michael Brooks, Marcus Chown, Rob Edwards, Richard Fifield, Barry Fox, Mick Hamer, Jeff Hecht, Bob Holmes, Justin Mullins, Fred Pearce, Helen Phillips, Ian Stewart, Gail Vines, Gabrielle Walker, Emma Young, Anil Ananthaswamy Press Office and Syndication UK Claire Bowles Tel +44 (0) 20 7611 1210 Fax 7611 1250 US Office Tel +1 617 386 2190 NEWSCIENTIST.COM Online Publisher John MacFarlane Online Editor Will Knight Editors Maggie McKee, Rowan Hooper, Tom Simonite Reporters David Shiga, Catherine Brahic, Sandrine Ceurstemont, Michael Marshall, Ewen Callaway Online Subeditor Dan Palmer Web team Neela Das, Cathy Tollet, Ruth Turner, Ken Wolf, Edin Hodzic, Vivienne Griffith, Rohan Creasey, Matteo Giaccone
www.newscientist.com
The right stuff NASA’s Mars programme is on a roll. Long may it continue FOR those engaged in planetary exploration there are just two ways to land on Mars. One culminates in a victory celebration marked by spontaneous outpourings of joy and relief. The other ends like a funeral and is a hard, hard thing to experience. Happily for the scientists and engineers behind the Phoenix mission, their spacecraft did it the first way. That means all the money, resources and human capital invested in the project have produced a precious scientific opportunity. If Phoenix continues to perform as well as it has so far, researchers will have months to become familiar with the Martian arctic desert and search for signs of habitability among its curious polygons (see page 6). Phoenix’s safe arrival is a tremendous achievement in a risky business. When tallied up with all previous attempts to set down on the Red Planet, the success rate stands at only 50 per cent. But a closer examination suggests that the odds of Phoenix arriving intact were probably better than 50:50. First there is funding. Recent history demonstrates that more expensive landers tend to succeed while those put together more cheaply do not. Based on three successful missions in the past 11 years (Mars Pathfinder and the Spirit and Opportunity missions) and two failures (Mars Polar Lander and Beagle 2), the dividing line between triumph and disaster falls somewhere around the $200 million mark, excluding launch costs. How does Phoenix compare? It would be unfair to call it extravagant: it got its name because it was created from the second-hand hardware of a cancelled mission. Yet Phoenix still cost NASA about $420 million – less than the price of landing Spirit or Opportunity on Mars, but more than Pathfinder. Price alone does not, of course, dictate the success or failure of a mission, but it does serve as a proxy for other factors that can influence the outcome of a mission, such as the level of preflight testing. Like the rovers before it, Phoenix’s hardware underwent a relentless schedule of testing and retesting. There were many bugs to be worked out, not least in the pulsed-thruster system that ensured a soft landing for Phoenix, but which failed the Mars Polar Lander in 1999. A problem with this system would have doomed Phoenix and probably delayed the more ambitious Mars Science
Laboratory, which will employ a similar method of landing in 2010. Finally, there is expertise. Since Pathfinder landed in 1997 we have seen a generation of engineers and managers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, learn what it takes to place a spacecraft on another planet. The faces are not identical from landing to landing, but there has been “Phoenix’s success significant overlap bolsters the case between missions, and a tremendous that NASA should repository of working preserve present knowledge has built for newcomers levels of funding up to draw on. This in the Mars professional group is coming to resemble programme” the much larger pool of expertise that developed around the Apollo moon landings in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This is crucial: the Apollo programme withered when NASA’s budget tightened and public interest in space began to wane. Expertise was lost, and will have to be rebuilt if the US space programme can hope to succeed in its stated objective of returning to the moon by 2020. Now budgets are tightening again, and the impact has been felt across NASA, including the Mars programme. Certainly, further sacrifices will have to be made, but Phoenix’s success bolsters the case that NASA should preserve present levels of funding in the Mars programme, even at the expense of other planetary missions if necessary. This will be a bitter pill for scientists whose specialities lie elsewhere, yet it is a strategy NASA should follow even if more challenging destinations such as Europa or Titan could tell us more about extraterrestrial life than Mars could. The point is that scientific returns can be optimised when the technical programme that makes the science possible is on a roll and the expertise exists to keep it that way. This does not mean that Mars should forever be the favoured child. In time, Phoenix and future missions may tell us that Mars is not the place to search for life, at which point priorities will shift. But at this time, the best long-term strategy is to keep the Mars machine humming. G 31 May 2008 | NewScientist | 5