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(May 22, 2024 at 9:51 am)Fake Messiah Wrote: There was recently an article how rocks from Mars will most likely not arrive to Earth because there are so many other projects that could be accomplished, some of which seem very dramatical (like searching for life in solar system), to useful (looking for dangerous rocks and measuring magnetic field). In other words, scientists are fighting among themselves whose mission will get to space and widen the human knowledge.
Add to that that people are expecting humans to walk on the Moon again very soon which is the least of scientific mission but it is without doubt the most expensive one. And if humans don't walk on the Moon very soon, people will again attack NASA that it's useless, and if they can't put a man on the Moon now then they definitely didn't 50+ years ago.
Here are some highlights from the article
Quote:Perseverance will stay on Mars forever, but the majority of its carefully packaged samples are meant to return to Earth.
NASA officials recently announced that the sample-return effort has become too expensive and fallen worryingly behind schedule. The latest estimated cost of as much as $11 billion is nearly double what experts initially predicted, and the way things are going, the samples won’t arrive home until 2040, seven years later than expected.
Scientists who study Mars are worried that the mission will be downsized. Scientists who don’t study Mars—and a few who do—are frustrated, because MSR consumes so much of NASA’s budget. Scientists can’t imagine NASA giving up on the mission entirely, but the debacle has even prompted some whispered jokes about China coming along and claiming the tubes on the surface before NASA can fly them home.
Last summer, some congressional appropriators briefly threatened the entire MSR effort with cancellation. This February, facing uncertainty over the money that Congress would allocate for MSR in the next fiscal year, the JPL laid off more than 500 employees. (Congress has since allocated a fraction of what NASA spent on the mission last year.) Thanks to budget concerns, NASA has delayed the launch of a telescope that would monitor potentially hazardous asteroids near Earth, and put on hold a proposed mission to study Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field.
Some scientists fear that MSR will draw resources away from other potential projects to search for life in places that they now believe to be far more promising than Mars. The search for alien life in the solar system has long been guided by water, and in the 1990s, when NASA kicked off a golden age of Mars missions, the red planet’s ice regions seemed appealing. But in the years since, other celestial bodies have become more compelling. A moon of Saturn, Titan, is the only body in the solar system besides Earth that has bodies of liquid on its surface, even if that liquid is methane. Europa, a moon of Jupiter, and Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, are both likely icy worlds with subsurface oceans; on the latter, cracks in the ice release plumes of salty water, hinting at something like deep-sea hydrothermal activity on Earth. NASA is launching an orbiting mission to Europa later this year, and the latest survey of planetary scientists advised NASA to start working on another to Enceladus. “If I could go anywhere, I would go to Enceladus,” Brook Nunn, an astrobiologist at the University of Washington, told me.
Even some Mars scientists believe that Mars is no longer the top candidate. Darby Dyar, a planetary geologist at Mount Holyoke College, has spent decades studying Mars. “If anybody should be enthusiastic about the returned samples, it’s me, and I am,” she told me. But now she works on a NASA mission to Venus, a planet that might rival Mars as a candidate for extraterrestrial life, and she says she wouldn’t prioritize MSR over her current research.
NASA is well aware of the all-consuming nature of MSR. As the mission is redrawn, officials have said they are even willing to consider proposals that would bring home just 10 sample tubes, one-third of the amount initially planned.
The US government only undertakes projects that will 1) make somebody rich, or 2) increase US hegemony over other countries. Going to Mars won't do either of those things.
Let the Chinese do it. They're human, we're all human, it doesn't matter what nation does the science.
