The Planetary Society Blog
By Emily Lakdawalla
Report from MEPAG
Apr. 20, 2006 | 17:32 PDT | Apr. 21 00:32 UTC
When you deal with space science you have to learn a lot of acronyms, which are often pronounced as though they are real words, with occasionally silly results. Some of the silliest-sounding acronyms are those for several groups of interested scientists who get together from time to time to develop consensus on the current status and future priorities of exploration of different targets in the solar system. This week there is a meeting of MEPAG (pronounced like it's written, "MEE-pag"), which is the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group. (My favorite of these acronyms is ILEWG, the International Lunar Exploration Working Group; I've heard the acronym pronounced "ILL-ee-wig.")
Anyway, both Bruce Betts and Lou Friedman from the Society have been attending MEPAG over the last couple of days, and Bruce just sent me an email with some notes about what's been going on:
"The Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group met in Monrovia, California yesterday and today. This is a group, largely of Mars scientists, that ponder aspects of the future Mars program. There are also reports from the key administrators in NASA's Mars program.
"The Mars program, as with so many other NASA planetary programs, has been taking large hits in the current and proposed budgets (measured in billions of dollars over multiple years). General consensus in and out of meetings was that the Mars program is in danger (financial, not technical). At best, it is still metastable: perhaps still ok for now, but any small push will send it spinning downwards."
[By the way, if you'd like to give it a small push upwards, please add your voice to our Save Our Science campaign.]
Bruce continued: "But, there were simultaneous reports on the great data and successes of the 5 working Martian NASA missions and ESA's Mars Express. Also, the Phoenix lander is on track for 2007 and the Mars Science Laboratory for 2009. Some nice tidbits on MSL: the rover will be as big as a Mini Cooper car, and will have a nominal mission distance of at least 20 kilometers!
"Some of the discussions were about the next decade. NASA and this group seem to be considering another Scout mission (competed like Phoenix) and a Science and Telecom Orbiter (MSTO) in 2011 or 2013. Then, 2016 could hold a big astrobiology laboratory, a couple more MER like rovers, or a network science mission.
"There was also discussion of landing site selection processes for future missions, and discussions of instrument development for Mars missions and the long complex process that is involved."
Comments
This comment form is powered by GentleSource Comment Script. It can be included in PHP or HTML files and allows visitors to leave comments on the website.
| 
