Forgot your password?
E-Commerce Task Force
~ 
~ 
Red Colony
Will new Mars lander be parked or scrapped?
BY ROBERT S. BOYD MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
WASHINGTON -- America's next daring adventure on Mars - a one-ton rolling
science
laboratory scheduled to launch next October - is in deep trouble.
Huge cost overruns and technical difficulties may cause the $2 billion dollar
Mars Science
Laboratory to be delayed or canceled outright, members of a NASA advisory
committee
were warned on Oct. 2.
"Our problem is enormous," said Jim Green, director of the space agency's
Planetary
Science Division, as project costs soar up to 40 percent above budget.
The successor to the wildly popular Spirit and Opportunity rovers, still toiling
along on
Mars, is supposed to check out a region on the planet's surface where conditions
could
support past or present life - one of science's highest goals.
Twelfth International Mars Society Convention
Brookhaven National Laboratory Publication Features FMARS
