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From: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Date: October 10, 2014 2:11:10 PM CDT
To: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Subject: FW: NASA and Human Spaceflight News - Friday – October 10, 2014
Have a great Columbus Day weekend. Enjoy the next cool front.NASA and Human Spaceflight NewsFriday – October 10, 2014HEADLINES AND LEADSBoeing, SpaceX to resume commercial crew workWilliam Harwood – CBS NewsRescinding a work stoppage in the wake of a bid protest by losing competitor Sierra Nevada, NASA has told Boeing and SpaceX to resume work on commercial crew spacecraft to avoid possible delays ferrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station, the agency announced Thursday.Why do we love leaving our mark in space?Claire Felter - Christian Science MonitorJealous that Bruce Springsteen has a main-belt asteroid named after him? NASA is giving you the chance to keep up with the Boss by sending your name into space.It's Time to Take the Science Out of SpaceBrian Clegg - The Huffington PostWhen I began writing Final Frontier, my recent book on spaceflight past, present and future, I had a clear picture of the financial and practical realities. Manned flights (and the International Space Station, or ISS) have almost no scientific value. We should stop wasting our science budgets immediately and focus on the space science work that really does deliver -- unmanned satellites and probes. I knew exactly what I was going to say. And yet by the time I had finished the book, my opinion had reversed.'Stay with the Station', NASA boss urges international partnersDan Thisdell – Flightglobal.comNASA administrator Charles Bolden on 8 October called on Europe and the UK to stand behind their financial commitments to the International Space Station and work with the USA to keep it flying through 2020 and even 2024 – because the orbiting outpost is humankind's "springboard" to Mars.NASA Is Studying How to Mine the Moon for WaterMike Wall - Space.comThere's a lot of water on the moon, and NASA wants to learn how to mine it.As Comet Nears Mars, NASA Gears Up for Epic EncounterMike Wall - Space.comA comet will give Mars a historically close shave next weekend, and NASA aims to be ready for the dramatic cosmic event.NASA IG Says Planetary Science Senior Review Process Needs WorkDan Leone – Space NewsThe process NASA's Planetary Science Division uses to determine whether operating spacecraft deserve mission extensions is fiscally shortsighted, disjointed and opaque, the agency's inspector general (IG) wrote in a report released Oct. 9.Among the Martian Hills: Curiosity Rover Peers At Rocks Of Mount SharpElizabeth Howell - Universe TodayAfter a couple of years of racing towards Mount Sharp (Aeolis Mons), now it's time for the Curiosity rover to get a better look at its Martian surroundings. The rover has reached its stated science destination and mission planners say now is the time to stop the driving and get deep into the science.COMPLETE STORIESBoeing, SpaceX to resume commercial crew workWilliam Harwood – CBS NewsRescinding a work stoppage in the wake of a bid protest by losing competitor Sierra Nevada, NASA has told Boeing and SpaceX to resume work on commercial crew spacecraft to avoid possible delays ferrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station, the agency announced Thursday.On Sept. 16, NASA awarded Boeing a $4.2 billion contract to build and launch up to six flights of its CST-100 capsule using United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 boosters. SpaceX won a $2.6 billion contract to continue development of its Dragon version 2 crew craft, which will launch atop the company's Falcon 9 rocket.Losing out in the Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) contract was Sierra Nevada, which is developing a winged lifting body known as the Dream Chaser that would launch atop an Atlas 5 and return to Earth like the space shuttle, gliding to a runway touchdown.Ten days after the contract award, Sierra Nevada filed a formal protest challenging the CCtCap contract awards to Boeing and SpaceX, claiming the Dream Chaser would save the government some $900 million compared to Boeing's bid.On Oct. 2, NASA told Boeing and SpaceX to halt government-funded work on the CST-100 and Dragon V2 spacecraft pending resolution of the Sierra Nevada challenge with the U.S. Government Accountability Office, or GAO.But on Thursday, the space agency changed course."On Oct. 9, under statutory authority available to it, NASA has decided to proceed with the Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) contracts awarded to The Boeing Company and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. notwithstanding the bid protest filed at the U.S. Government Accountability Office by Sierra Nevada Corporation," NASA said in a statement posted on its commercial crew web page."The agency recognizes that failure to provide the CCtCap transportation service as soon as possible poses risks to the International Space Station (ISS) crew, jeopardizes continued operation of the ISS, would delay meeting critical crew size requirements, and may result in the U.S. failing to perform the commitments it made in its international agreements."These considerations compelled NASA to use its statutory authority to avoid significant adverse consequences where contract performance remained suspended. NASA has determined that it best serves the United States to continue performance of the CCtCap contracts that will enable safe and reliable travel to and from the ISS from the United States on American spacecraft and end the nation's sole reliance on Russia for such transportation."NASA hopes to begin crew ferry flights to the space station using the commercial crew craft starting in 2017.Why do we love leaving our mark in space?Claire Felter - Christian Science MonitorJealous that Bruce Springsteen has a main-belt asteroid named after him? NASA is giving you the chance to keep up with the Boss by sending your name into space.Folks have until the end of the month to enter their names on NASA's 'Mission to Mars' site, at which point the list will be loaded onto a dime-sized microchip which will be placed aboard the Orion spacecraft, designed for crewed flights to the moon, asteroids, and Mars. Orion's first test flight – an unmanned 4.5-hour orbit around Earth – is set for December, and NASA plans to fly the microchip on future missions, including one to Mars.Humans have often used names to try to leave their on the solar system and beyond. The International Committee for Small-Body Nomenclature has dubbed numerous asteroids, besides 23990 Springsteen, names that pay homage to celebrities, including each Monty Python member, Kurt Vonnegut, and the Beatles.There are a number of stars that honor the individuals who discovered them. Barnard's Star, a small red dwarf, is named after its discoverer E.E. Barnard. NASA astrophysicist Bonnard J. Teegarden led the team that discovered a nearby star in 2003 and the brown dwarf has since been known as Teegarden's Star.For several decades, people have been able to name stars after their best buds or significant others in exchange for a few ten-dollar bills. And while the names are not officially recognized by astronomers, the International Star Registry has sold over two million "Name a Star" certificates, according to the company's Facebook page.We're not exactly light packers when it comes to outer space missions, either. Each of the Voyager spacecraft, currently the farthest human-made objects from our planet, are carrying with them golden phonographic records complete with a photo gallery and a classical music concert featuring Bach and Mozart. The records are meant to act as time capsules of life on Earth for any extraterrestrial species that may stumble upon the Voyager probes.Astronauts bring all kinds of artifacts into space: astronaut Randy Bresnik took Amelia Earhart's scarf on the space shuttle Atlantis during a 2009 mission and Shannon Walker brought the famous female aviator's watch along with her on a trip to the ISS a year later. Earhart's belongings returned to Earth, but astronaut Charles Duke, Jr. left his family portrait sitting on the surface of the moon in 1972.Since Neil Armstrong's first step on the lunar surface, leaving behind footprints, literal and otherwise, has gone hand-in-hand with space exploration."When we set foot on the Red Planet, we'll be exploring for all of humanity," said Mark Geyer, Orion Program Manager, in a release. "Flying these names will enable people to be part of our journey."It seems keeping our names within the boundaries of Earth's atmosphere is not enough for us humans. At the time this story was published, NASA had received the names of more than 5,000 people from Turkey, 26,000 from India, and 136,000 from the United States.It's Time to Take the Science Out of SpaceBrian Clegg - The Huffington PostWhen I began writing Final Frontier, my recent book on spaceflight past, present and future, I had a clear picture of the financial and practical realities. Manned flights (and the International Space Station, or ISS) have almost no scientific value. We should stop wasting our science budgets immediately and focus on the space science work that really does deliver -- unmanned satellites and probes. I knew exactly what I was going to say. And yet by the time I had finished the book, my opinion had reversed.In part it was a reawakening of memories. Revisiting that wonderful time in the late '60s when, as a young person, I witnessed the most amazing thing anyone had ever seen. A human being walking on the Moon. I had been brought up on Doctor Who and Star Trek. This was the ultimate in making dreams come true. But also my shift in viewpoint was the result of thinking through a head versus heart argument.This debate is typified by the views of two scientists, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg and the astronomer-turned-science-popularizer, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Weinberg, the "head" in the debate, points out that a major science project, the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) was abandoned because the funds went instead to the ISS. The SSC would have been significantly more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and would have achieved results a good ten years earlier, argues Weinberg. This would have been a major step in fundamental science research.By comparison, the ISS has cost the U.S. government more than ten times the SSC budget and has yielded nothing of scientific value. All the useful space science, Weinberg points out, has been done using unmanned satellites. "In the days of the Cold War," Weinberg commented, "perhaps it really was important to America to be the first country to put a man on the Moon and not let it be Russia, but today I think that really is irrelevant ... Any argument of national prestige that could have been valid in the 1960s is certainly not valid fifty 50 years later."By contrast Tyson, the "heart" in the debate, argues passionately for manned exploration of space. Tyson points out that manned missions are essential to raise public interest -- and without that interest, the funding for science in general fails to follow. When dollars are hard to come by the public can easily say, "Why should we waste our tax on obscure research?" Tyson argues for a human presence in space as a massive PR exercise. And he also sees a patriotic benefit is supporting "our" astronauts. In essence, Tyson underlines the link between the human exploration of space and national pride.Like many defenders of space programs, Tyson's final argument is to point out the spin-off benefits. You know the kind of thing. We might spend a lot on getting people into space, but as a result we've got things like Teflon and Velcro. (As it happens, neither of these frequently used examples came out of the space program, but you know what I mean.) This is a fruitless argument. If we spent a tiny fraction of the space budget on blue skies R&D we would get many more new and interesting products.In reality, both Weinberg and Tyson only see a small part of the picture. What the virtual debate between the two comes down to is establishing the priorities of the science budget. This will inevitably be bad for space exploration. There is no doubt that Weinberg is right in terms of science spending. There are far more bangs per buck to be had from unmanned space expeditions, or earthbound science, than manned missions. It is pretty well impossible to justify the risk and cost of putting humans into space for scientific purposes.However, there is something else, something bigger, that comes through in Tyson's passion. Going into space is not really a scientific endeavor at all. It may be done for any or all of political, commercial, sociological -- even spiritual -- purposes, but it isn't too much about science. We need to separate our thinking here. Spaceflight is related closer to defense spending than science -- it is about doing something that is at the heart of keeping our civilization safe. By making it thriving and fresh.Much as I love science, I have come to realize how little it has to do with space exploration. Scientists inevitably overvalue the scientific component of any activity, but in reality there is more to life -- and in the case of manned space exploration, there is more to making life worth living.Opening up the new frontier, exploring space, is a fundamental requirement for the future if we are not to see humanity settle into an asset-poor senescence, with fewer and fewer resources and no drive or energy. If we want the human race to thrive and grow, then we need to reach out. These are going to be missions on a scale that go beyond Tyson's nationalism, but it does not mean that the United States (or Europe, or China...) lacks a huge role to play, nor does it prevent space exploration being a goal that can unite a nation and give it a new drive and hope in the triumphs of its astronauts and missions within the framework of an international program.The old Star Trek introduction may be corny, but space truly is the final frontier, and we should be out there.Brian Clegg is author, most recently, of Final Frontier, published by St Martins Press.'Stay with the Station', NASA boss urges international partnersDan Thisdell – Flightglobal.comNASA administrator Charles Bolden on 8 October called on Europe and the UK to stand behind their financial commitments to the International Space Station and work with the USA to keep it flying through 2020 and even 2024 – because the orbiting outpost is humankind's "springboard" to Mars.In London to address the Royal Aeronautical Society's space strategy conference, Bolden stressed that all ISS partners are needed to keep the station flying. Commitments to 2020 need to be maintained, he says, and he hopes they would all concur with the USA's decision earlier this year to stick with the programme until 2024. Critically, he is calling on European governments to reaffirm their support for the ISS when they meet in Luxembourg in December to approve the next tranche in the European Space Agency's budget.After 13 years of continuous occupation, says Bolden, the ISS is showing solid returns in scientific research, especially relating to human health in microgravity and the high-radiation space environment. Bolden says that now is the time for all spacefaring nations to grasp the opportunity to work together in a push to reach Mars in the 2030s."Going to Mars is important," says Bolden, because it is the only other planet in this solar system that may have harboured life. But there is no prospect of NASA going it alone, he stresses, adding that the broadly agreed global space exploration "roadmap" is achievable. As a result, all the ISS nations and other partners need "to keep the ball moving down the field" and press on with the research and incremental missions needed to send humans to Mars, he says.If we step back now, he adds, it will be "generations" before we return to where we are today, which is a point of unprecedented international co-operation in space that transcends geopolitical troubles on the ground.Praising the leadership of his UK Space Agency counterpart David Parker, Bolden also emphasises the huge contribution of the UK in deciding to return to participation in human spaceflight after decades of leaving it to other countries, and says he looks forward to UK ESA astronaut Timothy Peake's flight to the ISS in 2015.But, he warns – in a message aimed at UK and other European politicians as well as policy makers in the USA – human spaceflight capability cannot be turned on and off easily, so engagement has to be consistent. "You can't be cool about this," he notes.Ultimately, ISS partners are agreed that the station's limit from an engineering and maintenance standpoint is 2028. After the ISS era ends, the only space station flying will be Chinese. Responding to an RAeS audience question from Helen Sharman, the first Briton to fly in space – on a mission to the Soviet Mir station in 1991 – Bolden observed that NASA's work to create international standards for space hardware, particularly docking equipment, would hopefully open a path to fluid collaboration between spacefaring nations in the post-ISS period.During that time, while the capabilities to reach Mars will still be being built "incrementally", it will be important to have interoperable spacecraft, be they national or private ventures. Things will always go wrong, notes Bolden, and it will be best if "anybody who has a spacecraft can go to help".Meanwhile, Bolden says he is excited about the 4 December planned unmanned test flight of NASA's new Orion space capsule – the first craft since Apollo designed to take people beyond low Earth orbit. "That will be a huge day for humanity," he says.NASA Is Studying How to Mine the Moon for WaterMike Wall - Space.comThere's a lot of water on the moon, and NASA wants to learn how to mine it.Space agency scientists are developing two separate mission concepts to assess, and learn how to exploit, stores of water ice on the moon and other lunar resources. The projects — called Lunar Flashlight and the Resource Prospector Mission — are notionally targeted to blast off in 2017 and 2018, respectively, and aim to help humanity extend its footprint out into the solar system."If you're going to have humans on the moon and you need water for drinking, breathing, rocket fuel, anything you want, it's much, much cheaper to live off the land than it is to bring everything with you," said Lunar Flashlight principal investigator Barbara Cohen, of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.It's therefore important to "understand the inventory of volatiles across the whole moon and their purity, and their accessibility in particular," Cohen said in July during a presentation at the NASA Exploration Science Forum, a conference organized by the Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute at the agency's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.Solar sailing to the moonLunar Flashlight is working toward a possible launch date in December 2017, when it would blast off on the first test flight of NASA's Space Launch System megarocket, along with several other piggybacking payloads.Lunar Flashlight is a CubeSat mission, meaning the body of the spacecraft is tiny — about the size of a cereal box, Cohen said. But after it's deployed in space, the probe would get much bigger by unfurling an 860-square-foot (80 square meters) solar sail.The spacecraft would then cruise toward the moon on a circuitous route, propelled along by the photons streaming from the sun. Lunar Flashlight would start orbiting the moon about six months after its launch, then spend another year spiraling down to get about 12 miles (20 kilometers) from the lunar surface.The probe would then make about 80 passes around the moon at this low altitude, measuring and mapping deposits of water ice in permanently shadowed craters near the lunar poles. It would do this science work with the aid of its solar sail."We're going to use it as a mirror," Cohen said. "We're going to take the sunlight, bounce it off the solar sail into the permanently shadowed regions, and we're going to use a passive infrared spectrometer to collect the light from the permanently shadowed regions in wavelengths that are indicative of water frost."Lunar Flashlight aims to find water ice that would be accessible to future explorers, be they human or robotic."What we're looking for is water right at the surface," Cohen said. "Could humans or their vehicles go into a permanently shadowed region and just scoop up the regolith and use what's at the surface to be able to extract water ice?"Such deposits could provide drinking water for potential manned lunar outposts. And moon water could also be split into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen — prime components of rocket fuel, which could then spur and support exploration even farther afield, advocates of moon mining say.A water-mapping roverWhile Lunar Flashlight would eye the moon from above, the Resource Prospector Mission (RPM) plans to send a rover onto the lunar surface to get an up-close look.This rover would land at a yet-to-be-determined polar site and map surface and subsurface concentrations of hydrogen at two different locations, which would ideally be separated by at least 0.6 miles (1 km). RPM would use a neutron spectrometer to measure water concentrations up to 3.3 feet (1 m) underground and a near-infrared spectrometer to make its surface measurements.The solar-powered rover would roll into permananently shadowed regions, relying on batteries to keep working in the dark. It would likely have an operational lifetime of about one week on the lunar surface, mission officials have said.Like Lunar Flashlight, RPM is geared to help enable future exploitation of water ice on the moon."How is the water ice distributed in the soil?" RPM project scientist Tony Colaprete of NASA Ames said at the Exploration Science Forum event. "That's really what Resource Prospector is fundamentally about, is identifying, locating the 'ore' and understanding how to excavate it — how to get at it — and what does that cost in terms of energy."The rover would also be equipped with a drill, allowing it to take samples from up to 3.3 feet (1 m) deep, Colaprete said. Collected samples would be heated up in an oven, and the volatile materials such as water liberated by this process would be identified and quantified.RPM also plans to extract oxygen from lunar dirt in a demonstration of in-situ resource utilization (ISRU). (This oxygen can be combined with hydrogen carried onboard to create water.)"We need to take the first steps in demonstrating off of this world utilization of material," Colaprete said. "There's a lot of technology demonstration in here that's not just applicable to the moon; it's applicable to any mission, to any surface where you want to manipulate materials."Mars is one such place. Indeed, NASA is also planning to conduct an ISRU experiment on the Red Planet in the coming years. In July, agency officials announced that its next Mars rover, slated to blast off in 2020, will carry an instrument that will generate oxygen from the carbon-dioxide-rich Martian atmosphere.More missions coming?NASA isn't the only entity eyeing the moon's resources. A number of private firms, including Moon Express and Shackleton Energy Co., also aim to mine and process lunar water.If Lunar Flashlight and RPM get off the ground — both missions are still in the concept phase and have yet to be officially approved by NASA — they could bring such dreams closer to reality, by providing a better understanding of the quantity, distribution and composition of water on the moon, Cohen said."This is a very broad strategic knowledge gap," she said. "We're taking a very, very small bite out of it. Resource Prospector is taking another bite out of it. There's probably many, many missions to come that are going to address this."As Comet Nears Mars, NASA Gears Up for Epic EncounterMike Wall - Space.comA comet will give Mars a historically close shave next weekend, and NASA aims to be ready for the dramatic cosmic event.The space agency has already trained a number of its science assets on Comet Siding Spring, which will zoom within 87,000 miles (139,500 kilometers) of Mars on Oct. 19 — about one-third the distance between Earth and the moon. And NASA's fleet of Red Planet orbiters and rovers will be watching on the big day, studying the comet and its influence on Mars' atmosphere."On October 19, we're going to observe an event that happens maybe once every million years," Jim Green, director of NASA's planetary science division, said during a news conference today (Oct. 9). "We're getting ready for a spectacular set of observations."First-time visitorComet Siding Spring, also known as C/2013 A1, was discovered in 2013 by astronomer Rob McNaught using Australia's Siding Spring Observatory. The comet is making its first trip through the inner solar system from the frigid, faraway Oort Cloud, which lies about 50,000 astronomical units from the sun. (One astronomical unit, or AU, is the average distance between Earth and the sun — about 93 million miles, or 150 million km).Because Siding Spring has never been "heat-treated" before, the incoming comet likely remains largely unchanged since its formation 4.6 billion years ago, researchers said. So studying its composition and behavior should provide clues about the conditions that existed at the birth of the solar system."That's one of the reasons we study comets — they're the remnants of our solar system's formation," said Padma Yanamandra-Fisher, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute's Rancho Cucamonga branch in California.Observations by a number of missions, including NASA's Hubble, Swift, Spitzer and NEOWISE spacecraft, have already returned some data on Siding Spring. For example, researchers think the comet's core is between 0.5 miles and 5 miles (0.8 to 8 km) in diameter. Further, the fuzzy cloud (or coma) surrounding Siding Spring's nucleus is about 100,000 miles (160,000 km) wide at this point, and its tail stretches for about 300,000 miles (480,000 km), scientists said.But the real show will begin Oct. 19. NASA's three Mars orbiters — Mars Odyssey, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and the newly arrived MAVEN spacecraft — will observe Siding Spring's flyby from space, while the agency's Opportunity and Curiosity rovers will watch from the Red Planet's surface.The goal is to learn more about the comet's size, rotation speed, activity and composition, researchers said. The interactions between comet particles and Mars' atmosphere could also help scientists better understand the Red Planet's air. MAVEN is particularly well suited to perform this latter task, since the mission was designed to study Mars' upper atmosphere (MAVEN is short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution).If all goes according to plan, MRO will take the first-ever good pictures of an Oort Cloud comet's nucleus. And Opportunity and Curiosity could make some history as well, if Martian dust storms don't cloud up the atmosphere too much."We certainly have fingers crossed for the first images of a comet from the surface of another world," said Kelly Fast, program scientist at NASA's planetary science division. "That would be really exciting."Various instruments and assets will continue to watch Siding Spring after the flyby, following the comet as it recedes into space.Protecting the spacecraftSiding Spring will barrel past Mars at about 126,000 mph (203,000 km/h) on Oct. 19 — so fast that even tiny particles shed by the comet could do some serious damage to an orbiting spacecraft. So NASA has taken pains to maneuver its Red Planet orbiters out of harm's way."When Mars gets very close to the dust tail, which is about 100 minutes after closest approach, all our spacecraft will be on the opposite side of the planet," Green said. "So the planet will provide the additional protection we believe we need to be able to make these observations safely."Curiosity and Opportunity aren't in any danger, researchers said; the Mars atmosphere, while just 1 percent as dense as that of Earth, is still substantial enough to protect the rovers from incoming comet material.NASA IG Says Planetary Science Senior Review Process Needs WorkDan Leone – Space NewsThe process NASA's Planetary Science Division uses to determine whether operating spacecraft deserve mission extensions is fiscally shortsighted, disjointed and opaque, the agency's inspector general (IG) wrote in a report released Oct. 9.The sting is all the greater for the Planetary Science Division — which operates missions such as the nearly 3-year-old Mars Curiosity rover and 17-year-old Cassini Saturn orbiter — considering the inspector general said it found no major issues with the senior review process used in NASA's Astrophysics, Earth Science and Heliophysics divisions.All four NASA science divisions are legally required to conduct scientist-led reviews of operating missions every two years, but only the Planetary Science Division exempts missions from review without adequate justification while at the same time requiring reviewers to make funding recommendations for two-year periods instead of five-year periods, as is typical for NASA's other three science divisions, NASA Inspector General Paul Martin wrote in the report, "The Science Mission Directorate's Mission Extension Process." The IG's audit took just over a year to complete and wrapped up in August, meaning it overlapped with a five-month Planetary Science senior review that concluded in July."In our judgment, these shortcomings impair the Planetary Science Division's ability to inform its budget formulation process and ensure the effectiveness and transparency of its Senior Review process," the IG wrote.The watchdog recommended the Planetary Science Division require review panels to recommend at least four-year funding guidelines, which would be easier to fold into the notional five-year budgets included each year in the White House's annual budget request to Congress, and to review each operating mission at the earliest possible opportunity, rather than exempting missions on a case-by-case business as was done in the last two senior reviews. Whenever the Planetary Science division wants to excuse a mission from review, it should document the reasons, and obtain a waiver from NASA's associate administrator for science. The 2012 Planetary Science senior review alone cost $1 million to conduct, so extra reviews should be avoided whenever possible, the IG said.The IG also recommended the associate administrator develop standardized senior review guidelines for the entire Science Mission Directorate.John Grunsfeld, the current associate administrator for science, subsequently promised to conduct his own directorate-wide evaluation of the senior review process, to be completed by August. However, he also defended the peculiarities of the Planetary Science Division's senior review process.In a letter dated Oct. 7 and appended to the IG's report, Grunsfeld wrote that he was "concerned that the scientific missions vary enough between divisions that tailored approaches to their senior review processes may be warranted."After the latest Planetary Science senior review, the results of which were released in September, NASA concurred with reviewers' recommendations to extend all seven missions up for consideration. Among those extended are Curiosity and Cassini. Cassini was the only mission approved for a three-year extension; the other six were approved for two-year extensions.Meanwhile, three operating Planetary Science missions were exempted from the five-month review, which wrapped up in July: the Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging orbiter that launched in 2004; the protoplanet probe Dawn, which launched in 2007 to explore two of the largest objects in the asteroid belt; and the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) probe, which launched in 2013 on a mission to study the red planet's upper atmosphere.The IG allowed that "it may have been logical" to spare the Mercury mission from review this year because it is expected to run out of fuel and crash into Mercury in March. The other two spacecraft, however, "will complete their primary missions prior to the next scheduled Senior Review in 2016 and therefore should have been included in the 2014 review."NASA, according to the IG, said it excluded Dawn from the 2014 review because the ion-powered spacecraft is still in the middle of its primary mission to explore the planetoids Ceres and Vesta. As for MAVEN, the probe only arrived at Mars on Sept. 21 and is not scheduled to begin its primary science mission until Nov. 2.NASA prefers to extend missions whenever practical because the cost of gathering data from an existing spacecraft is often cheaper than designing, building and launching another. The Mars rover Opportunity, for example, got its ninth mission extension this year.In addition, NASA senior review panels are advised to put pressure on missions to trim their operating costs during extended operations, although that seldom seems to happen, the IG found.Of the 22 missions that moved from primary to extended mission phases between 2005 through 2013, just one saw a funding reduction greater than 33 percent. On the other hand, 10 of those missions received more money after moving into an extended phase than they got during their primary missions, the IG wrote in its report.Among the Martian Hills: Curiosity Rover Peers At Rocks Of Mount SharpElizabeth Howell - Universe TodayAfter a couple of years of racing towards Mount Sharp (Aeolis Mons), now it's time for the Curiosity rover to get a better look at its Martian surroundings. The rover has reached its stated science destination and mission planners say now is the time to stop the driving and get deep into the science.NASA is on the hunt for signs of habitability on the Red Planet, and officials hope that the layers of this big mountain will yield a wealth of information on Martian history."This first look at rocks we believe to underlie Mount Sharp is exciting because it will begin to form a picture of the environment at the time the mountain formed, and what led to its growth," stated Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity's deputy project scientist in a press release from late September.As Curiosity drills and analyzes rocks at its feet, it continues to send back stunning pictures of its surroundings. Check out a sample from this week below.Mars Curiosity peers over a craggy ridge on Oct. 7, 2014 (Sol 771). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSSMartian hills beckon in this photo from the Curiosity rover taken Oct. 7, 2014, on Sol 771. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSSClose-up of a brush instrument on the Mars Curiosity rover on Oct. 3 (Sol 767). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSSCracked terrain underfoot seen by the Martian Curiosity rover on Oct. 7, 2014 (Sol 771). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSSENDMore at www.spacetoday.net
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