Posted on 10/08/2016 1:15:55 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Starting in the 2020s, scientists who participate in the agency’s Mars missions might no longer design and build their own highly specialized payloads to explore the red planet. Instead, planetary scientists could find themselves operating much as astronomers who use large telescopes do now: applying for time to use a spacecraft built with a generic suite of scientific instruments.
The proposed change is spurred by NASA’s waning influence at Mars. The agency’s long-running string of spacecraft is winding to a close, and international and commercial interests are on the rise. By the middle of the next decade, European, Chinese, Emirati and SpaceX missions are as likely to be at Mars as NASA is.
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Under the new, facility-based approach, scientists would propose investigations using one or more instruments on a future spacecraft — likely an orbiter. NASA would award observing time to specific proposals, much as telescope allocation committees parcel out time on their mountaintops. This would be different from the current approach, in which individual teams of scientists propose, build and operate instruments.
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But some researchers are already pushing back. Alfred McEwen, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, notes that the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera has taken thousands of images of Mars based on public requests. “We’ve managed to do all the things [Watzin] described already without a new paradigm,” says McEwen, the camera's principal investigator. “We have distributed operations, we have multiple customers, we have a foreign contributed instrument. So my immediate reaction to this idea was not very positive.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
I’m of the opinion that NASA, as an organization, is not capable of anything meaningful, except the expenditure of vast amounts of tax dollars.
Nasa’s time has come and gone.
This is why NASA is so broken.
The “Management Cultists” affect all the FedGov and much of the large corporations.
If there’s no Muslims on Mars then what’s the point in going?
If I were to send a spacecraft over to Mars, it would be capable of doing deep soil samples for spectrometric analysis of all the elements and microscopes capable of looking at one-celled life forms.
So there’s pussy on Mars?
No new populations of Democrat voters there, so forget it.
And he loves to dig holes.
Are they only going to travel there at night, so it’s not so hot like in the daytime when the Sun is out?
*SMIRK*
(Some old Polish joke. That’s OK; I’m Polish...and *SIGH* Blonde.)
“If there’s no Muslims on Mars then what’s the point in going?”
Well, SOMEONE has to do the RECON to see if we can send the bad ones there in the future!
Because, remember, as the Enemy Media has TAUGHT us, there ARE these Magical Unicorns called, ‘Moderate Muslims.’ You’ll know them because they’re the ones MARCHING IN THE STREETS whenever a radicalized one blows a bunch of us up! ;)
You win The Internets today with that GIF, LOL!
Some dogs are diggers....some are mudders
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