US and Europe mull single 2018 Mars rover

By Jonathan AmosScience correspondent, BBC News

The idea was to send two rovers together - one from the US (Max-C), and one from Europe (ExoMars)

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America and Europe are looking now at flying just one rover to Mars in 2018.

The US and European space agencies (Nasa and Esa) had planned to land two vehicles together on the Red Planet to perform a kind of tandem mission.

One rover would have investigated below the surface with a drill; the other was to have collected interesting rocks for later return to Earth.

But cost concerns have prompted Nasa and Esa to consider combining these roles into a single vehicle.

The idea follows high level discussions between the partners in California.

It was discussed by Esa member states on Thursday and received broad support. A lot of technical details still need to be worked out, however.

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Minimise change

The new rover would be larger than either of the vehicles in the paired concept - known as ExoMars (Esa) and Max-C (Nasa).

One suggestion is that the new vehicle would be built in Europe and take a mix of European and US instruments.

Nasa would provide the rocket to get it into space and the "mothership" to carry it to Mars.

Critically, this new vehicle's placement on the surface of the planet would use the equipment planned for the American "Curiosity" rover due for launch this year.

The 900kg Curiosity - also called the Mars Science Laboratory - will be lowered on to Mars with tethers slung from a rocket-powered "sky-crane".

Making as few changes as possible to this landing architecture for 2018 is considered an imperative if costs on the whole venture are to be constrained.

Despite the reorganisation, the goals of the 2018 mission opportunity would stay broadly the same.

These would be to look for signs of past or present life by digging down into the soil; and packaging, or caching, rocks that can be picked up and despatched to Earth laboratories by a subsequent mission.

MSL-Curiosity will be lowered to the
 surface of Mars by a rocket-powered skycrane


In what are acknowledged to be difficult financial times, America and Europe are both having to reassess how they explore the Solar System.

An influential group of US planetary scientists issued a report last month in which they said America's plans at Mars were too costly and, unchecked, could damage other space projects.

They called for the $3.5bn (£2.2bn) expected to be spent on the US side of the 2018 paired concept to be reduced by $1bn. If that saving could not be made, the group argued, the mission should be shelved.

Europe, too, is under pressure to control expenditure. It has been trying to fashion a Mars rover mission since its member states approved such a project in 2005.

But there has always been a struggle to match the ambitions for the vehicle to the funds available.

Going as part of a double-rover mission with the Americans appeared the most viable solution - until now.

Italy and the UK

The changes being proposed by senior Nasa and Esa officials will mean upheaval in Europe and the US.

But while the Americans had not progressed very far with the design of their Max-C rover, European industry has already presented its preliminary design for ExoMars. It was ready to start building the vehicle.

One key outcome of the Californian bilateral discussions is that the orbiting spacecraft the two agencies plan to send to Mars together in 2016 will go ahead.

This satellite, which will map methane and other traces gases in the Martian atmosphere, will be needed to relay the data from whatever rover concept arrives at the Red Planet at the end of the decade.

Member states of the European Space Agency got their first opportunity to discuss the one-rover idea at an exploration programme board meeting in Paris on Thursday.

The two European nations with most at stake are Italy and the UK.

The former, by promising to invest the most money, leads the 2016 and 2018 campaigns. The latter, as the second largest contributor, has taken primacy on the development of the European rover itself.

European industry had advanced to the point 
where it was ready to start building ExoMars

But there are other nations in the project, and their concerns will need to be satisfied before the one-rover initiative can fully take shape.

Dr David Parker, director of space science and exploration for the UK Space Agency, said after the programme board: "It's got lots of questions and uncertainties at this stage; but I'd certainly say that if we can make this happen with one rover, all the European instruments onboard and the American caching system - it could be quite a mouth-watering prospect, in scientific terms.

"We expect to see a very strong involvement on the part of the UK in the development of this rover," he told BBC News.

At the last Esa Ministerial Council Meeting in 2008 - the European organisation's key policy and budget-setting forum - member states allocated 850 million euros (£750m) to their ExoMars project.

It is widely acknowledged that this sum is not sufficient to carry through both the 2016 satellite and the European side of the 2018 endeavour - neither as a single large rover concept nor as a smaller vehicle paired with an American robot.

Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

The Sun rises on Chinese space science

Jonathan Amos | 22:00 UK time, Monday, 28 March 2011

The world is changing, and fast. Take the new report from the Royal Society. It's calledKnowledge, Networks and Nations: Global Scientific Collaboration in the 21st Century.

It examines how the emerging economies, led by China and followed by others such as Brazil and India, are challenging the "old order".

The pre-eminent scientific positions of the US, Western Europe and Japan are now being eroded on every front - in the number of scientific papers published, in citations made, and in patent applications. In terms of pure investment, the emerging economies are also pumping increasing funds into their labs and their science-based industries.

This blog is concerned with space, of course, and all of the above applies very much to this particular field of endeavour. But, as I say, where there is a challenge so there is an opportunity.

John Zarnecki (third from right) inspects a prototype Chinese Moon rover in 2007

That's the view certainly of Professor John Zarnecki from the UK's Open University.

John has had an amazing career at the pinnacle of British space science.

He's worked on a diverse group of missions, including Europe's Giotto probe which flew by Comet Halley in 1986, and on the development of Hubble.

He also led the surface science instrument team on Huygens, the European spacecraft that landed on Saturn's moon Titan in 2005. But he's felt the wind of change, also, and is heading to China for several months a year to start working on the Asian giant's space programme.

He's being given a lab, people and money to work on space instrumentation. There's a good chance the products of this work will end up on China's Chang'e programme, which is exploring the Moon.

So far, the Chinese have put two spacecraft in orbit around the lunar body. The future missions Chang'e 3, 4 and 5 will very likely land, rove and finally return rock samples to Earth.

This is not one of those classic "brain drain" stories; rather it's about chasing possibilities. John will still anchor himself in the UK and at the OU. He believes British and Chinese space interests can build a strong new partnership:

"Some people have put their heads in the sand about this, but China is coming. This is the last big project in my career, but what an opportunity to work with the Chinese on developing an instrument or package and sending it to the Moon or Mars!

Huygens made the most distant landing in the Solar System. John Zarnecki's instrument package probed Titan's surface

"They've offered me a visiting professorship at Beihang University, which is a new name for the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. They're strong on technology and very well connected with the Chinese space agency.We've had contacts with them for several years, but I've come to the conclusion that to make real progress then even more personal contact is needed; and so when this professorship came up, it was too good an opportunity to miss.

"The OU is encouraging me because, like a lot of UK universities, they recognise that China is the coming force and it's important to engage at all levels, from teaching to research. And whereas in the UK we are under tremendous pressure over resources, in China they're offering me a lab and giving me people.

"This year, I will be out there for about three months and then we'll see how it goes. I'm not signed up to a particular space mission, but I hope by being there I will be able to get on some great missions like Chang'e 3, 4 and 5. Here, we're talking about a lunar lander, a lunar rover and lunar sample return over the next three missions.

"And the really exciting thing is that when I started going there a few years ago, Mars was just a dream; it would feature in one slide at the end of a presentation from some of their senior people. Now, we get whole presentations on very detailed technical studies. I think the Chang'e 1 and 2 missions - the success of them, technically - have given the Chinese huge confidence that they really can do stuff.

"Now, China is very good on the technical side of things, but what they don't have is the 40 years' experience in space science that we have in the UK and Europe. That's what we can bring to them. And, you know, I see this as a win-win: I see this as the OU opening a lab in China, and I want to see Chinese students coming to Britain and British students going to China.

"Many of these kids will be the scientific leaders of tomorrow and if I can help bring them through, that will be fantastic."

The UK has done fantastically well in recent years with its space science partnerships with the US. Consider the recent Nasa missions launched to study the Sun - the Stereo spacecraft and the Solar Dynamics Observatory.

Britain provided a modest amount of scientific instrumentation and components, and in return got prime access to some cutting-edge data on our star.

It's the sort of access British researchers could never have got any other way because the UK simply does not have the budget to launch these kinds of missions on its own.

It looks increasingly likely that these opportunities will also now present themselves in China and India. Who'll grab opportunities?

The Royal Society report investigates the emergence of China and others as big scientific players

SpaceX to launch huge new rocket

By Jonathan AmosScience correspondent, BBC News

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The Californian SpaceX company says it plans to launch the most powerful rocket since the Apollo era in 2013.

The Falcon 9-Heavy is a beefed up version of the vehicle the firm will soon use to send a robotic cargo ship to the space station.

The new rocket should be capable of putting more than 53 tonnes (117,000lb) of payload in a low-Earth orbit - more than twice that of the space shuttle.

CEO Elon Musk said the rocket would be made safe enough to launch people.

"It is designed to meet the Nasa human-rating standards," he said. "So, for example, it is designed to structural safety margins that are 40% above the actual flight loads it would expect to encounter."

The Falcon 9-Heavy should make its debut in 2013

The performance promised by the 70m-tall (227ft) rocket made bigger, more ambitious missions beyond the space station possible, he added.

Science, too, would benefit, Mr Musk explained. Complex ventures such as trying to return rocks from the surface of the Red Planet to Earth could be considered realistic once the Falcon 9-Heavy was in operation.

The first flight will take place from the Vandenberg Air Force Base with future missions also planned at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

Last year, SpaceX became the first private company in history to put a spacecraft in orbit and return it intact. This capsule - known as Dragon - splashed down in the Pacific Ocean.

The unmanned flight was part of a series of demonstrations the Hawthorne-based firm is working through to prove its technology is reliable enough and safe enough to be allowed near the space station.

Although it has received seed funding from the US space agency (Nasa), SpaceX says it has spent less than a billion dollars so far on its development programme - a remarkably low figure by any comparison.

The Falcon 9-Heavy ties together the core stages of three standard Falcon 9s. Those cores combined will host 27 individual rocket motors - upgraded versions of the motors currently built for the standard Falcon.

The thrust at lift-off is expected to be 17 meganewtons (3.8 million lbf). This is something like 15 Boeing 747s taking off at the same time.

Mr Musk said the vehicle could put in orbit a few hundred km above the Earth a mass equivalent to "more than a fully loaded Boeing 737 with 136 passengers, luggage and fuel".

"That's humongous," he told reporters during a media conference at the National Press Club in Washington DC.

"It's more capability than any vehicle in history apart from the Saturn 5 [Moon rocket]. So, it opens up a range of possibilities for government and commercial customers that simply aren't present with the current lifting capacity."

Mr Musk claimed the Falcon 9-Heavy would also be a breakthrough in terms of cost. Missions would be priced at $80m-$125m, meaning each pound of payload could be delivered to orbit for around $1,000.

SpaceX is part of the new wave of commercial ventures that Nasa hopes can help it reduce the cost of going into space.

An unmanned Dragon orbited the Earth and then

 returned safely to a splashdown in the ocean

With the shuttle due to retire this year, the agency has already given the company a contract to take over some of the servicing needs at the space station using Dragon. On Wednesday this week, Nasa is likely to provide some funds to help SpaceX develop an emergency escape system for the vessel. This is a necessity before astronauts will be permitted to board it.

The US Congress last year mandated the agency to lead the development of a rocket capable of lifting more than 70 tonnes to low-Earth orbit by 2016. Nasa responded that it would struggle to meet the multi-billion-dollar schedule laid out by politicians.

SpaceX stressed on Tuesday in a statement that an even bigger rocket than the Falcon 9-Heavy would eventually be needed if humans were ever to go to Mars. Its vehicle could not put in orbit the mass of equipment needed to mount such a mission, it added.