NASA’s new asteroid retrieval mission has not won over two influential voices in space policy debates.  Cornell University’s Steve Squyres and George Washington University’s Scott Pace told the National Research Council (NRC) on Monday that it is not necessarily the best next step for the U.S. human spaceflight program.

The NRC’s Committee on Human Spaceflight met Monday and Tuesday in Washington, DC.  The committee is tasked with describing the value proposition of the human spaceflight program – what do taxpayers see as its value for the money spent – and providing advice on future planning for that program.  Among the topics discussed was NASA’s new asteroid retrieval strategy to capture an asteroid, redirect it into a retrograde lunar orbit, and send astronauts to retrieve a sample.

Squyres chairs the NASA Advisory Council (NAC) and is perhaps best known as the principal investigator for the twin Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity.  He also chaired the NRC’s 2011 Decadal Survey for planetary science.   In addition to talking about NAC’s view of NASA’s human exploration program, he shared his personal views on topics NAC had not yet considered, including the new asteroid retrieval strategy.

His personal recommendation is that NASA not attempt to sell the asteroid retrieval mission either on the basis of exploring asteroids or that it is a more effective way to satisfy President Obama’s goal of using an asteroid mission as a step towards Mars.  Quoting the President’s April 15, 2010 speech at Kennedy Space Center, Squyres reminded the committee that the President’s goal was to build “new spacecraft designed for long journeys … beyond the Moon into deep space,” which is not what the new strategy entails.  He agrees that understanding asteroids is an important scientific goal, but not one that requires humans on-site.   Humans and robots work effectively together in exploring complex environments like Mars where Earth-bound scientists cannot anticipate the many surprises that lie ahead. Comparatively straightforward environments like that of an asteroid can be effectively explored with robotic spacecraft alone, he believes.

Squyres does, however, support the idea of sending astronauts into cis-lunar space for longer periods of time than during the Apollo era, such as the 22-day mission envisioned for the asteroid retrieval mission.   In his view, that is worth doing whether or not an asteroid has been redirected there.  His major concern personally, which he said also has been expressed by NAC, is that “NASA needs a compelling and clearly articulated goal for future human spaceflight that is consistent with its budget.”

Pace strongly supported a robust U.S. human spaceflight program, but not the asteroid mission as a step towards Mars.   He said he is “hard pressed to run into anybody who thinks that going to an asteroid is the right way primarily to go to Mars.”  He believes that the Obama Administration made a decision “not to do anything the prior Administration was doing” in space, and that is how the asteroid idea emerged despite broad bipartisan and international support for returning to the Moon as laid out in President George W. Bush’s Vision for Space Exploration.  Pace was a high ranking NASA official in the Bush Administration.

Asked what would happen if the United States abandoned human spaceflight entirely, Pace said it would diminish U.S. influence on the global stage in discussions about space issues such as orbital debris and sustainability.  “We will have made ourselves irrelevant to a lot of discussions,” adding that he sees some of that reduced influence already with the U.S. decision to withdraw from cooperation with Europe in the robotic ExoMars missions.   “Countries are not upset at us. They simply think we’re irrelevant….I can’t think of [anything] that is … more dangerous or serious for a great power than to be considered irrelevant.”

Lt. Gen. Thomas Stafford (Ret.) told a Senate subcommittee today that a human mission to an asteroid should not be a central element of any “sensible” human spaceflight program.  Instead, a return to the Moon is a prerequisite to the ultimate goal of sending people to Mars and should be the next step.

Stafford is an iconic presence in the space community.  A former astronaut who flew four space missions — including commanding the 1975 U.S.-Soviet Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) — he has remained closely involved in the civil space program even as his career took him back to the Air Force and ultimately into retirement.   

In his written statement today to the Subcommittee on Science and Space of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, he noted that a number of studies conducted over many decades are “remarkably consistent” that “[l]eadership in space is, for any society that can aspire to attain it, a key to leadership on Earth and in human society, for all the generations to come.”   He led one of those studies during the George H.W. Bush Administration entitled America at the Threshold: America’s Space Exploration Initiative.

He asserted that the “choice of destinations has … already been made for us.  The surface of the Moon is … our proper next frontier.”  He acknowledged that the concept of sending astronauts to an asteroid, whether the original plan announced by President Obama in 2010 or the new idea of directing an asteroid into cis-lunar space, has “inherent scientific interest.”   However, it “should not be the central theme of any sensible long-term human spaceflight program.  Such missions are an interesting adjunct to the far more interesting theme of human presence on the Moon” and then Mars.

Stafford also highlighted the importance of international cooperation in pursuing future human spaceflight goals. He has been deeply involved with U.S.-Soviet/Russian space cooperation since ASTP and chairs NASA’s International Space Station (ISS) Advisory Committee.  That committee and its Russian counterpart meet regularly to review and identify major issues for the ISS.   At a meeting last year, he told the Senate committee, the Russians shared their long term plan for human spaceflight.  It is based on international cooperation modeled on the ISS partnership, he reported.  “I have said that we should make it the nation’s business to lead in space.  We should.  But I have also noted that leaders need partners and allies.”

Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA’s Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations, and Steve Cook, Director, Space Technologies, at Dynetics, also testified.   Gerstenmaier was very upbeat about the state of the human spaceflight program today and the road ahead, including the asteroid retrieval mission announced in the FY2014 budget request.   Cook represented the commercial space industry and emphasized the need for “stable, long-term space policy and supporting programs” in order for the “commercial space sector to flourish.”  In response to a question from subcommittee chairman Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL), Cook said the key is to have a long term plan with associated dates that the private sector can leverage in order to develop business plans and look for ways to be profitable.

A webcast of the hearing and the prepared statements of the witnesses are on the committee’s website.

Russia launched its Bion-1M spacecraft today carrying an array of critters that will spend 30 days in orbit and then return to Earth.

Russia has a long history of launching animals into space on both orbital and suborbital missions.   While almost everyone remembers the first Soviet launch, Sputnik, on October 4, 1957, that began the Space Age, few recall that the very next flight, a month later, took the dog Laika (Barker) into space.  It was, unfortunately, a one-way mission since recoverable spacecraft had not yet been invented.  

Laika, the first animal in space, before her one-way trip to space on November 3, 1957

The Soviets continued launching biological flights throughout the decades, many in cooperation with NASA.   Some carried monkeys and became very controversial in the United States as animal rights groups objected.   When one of the two monkeys on a 1996 mision, Bion 11, died after returning to Earth, the program ended. 

The Bion program was resurrected in the mid-2000s and the launch today was the first of the new series, Bion-M.   No monkeys are involved this time.  Aboard the spacecraft are:

• 45 mice
• 8 Mongolian gerbils
• 15 geckos (lizards)
• snails
• containers with various microorganisms and plants

NASA is a partner on this mission as it was in the past, providing four Animal Enclosure Units and collaborating with Russian scientists on rodent research.

The spacecraft and its cargo will be recovered after 30 days.  Russia’s RIA Novosti says that more than 70 experiments with be conducted “in support of long-duration interplanetary flights including Mars missions.”

Several Russian and non-Russian microsatellites are attached to the spacecraft and will be released over the next two days.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) announced today that analysis of imagery from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) may have revealed the Soviet Mars 3 spacecraft that landed on Mars in 1971.  For unknown reasons, contact with the lander was lost seconds after it touched down.

The Soviet Union was jinxed in its robotic Mars exploration program with no complete mission successes to claim.  Some of its probes were partial successes, however, and Mars 3 is in that category.   Mars 2 and Mars 3 were orbiter/lander combinations launched in 1971.   Both orbiters returned data.  The Mars 2 lander crashed.  The Mars 3 lander successfully reached the surface and returned data for a few seconds before contact was lost. 

Russian individuals with an interest in NASA’s current Mars program as well as earlier efforts by the Soviet Union and Russia to study the Red Planet took it upon themselves — with the help of crowdsourcing —  to scrutinize imagery from the High REsolution Imaging Spectrometer Science Experiment (HiRISE) on MRO looking for the Mars 3 lander.  They knew the predicted coordinates of where it landed.

MRO has been in orbit around Mars since March 2006.  The original images they looked at were taken in 2007 and objects resembling the parachute, heat shield, descent module, and lander eventually were identified.  They requested that MRO take another image of the area, which was accomplished on March 13, 2013.  That image is in color and provides different illumination angles and supports, in particular, what they believe is discovery of the parachute.

HiRISE principal investigator Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona, Tucson, said “this set of features and their layout … provide a remarkable match to what is expected from the Mars 3 landing, but alternative explanations for the features cannot be ruled out.” 

The image is posted on the HiRISE website and JPL’s website.

Sam Ting’s Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) instrument was attached to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2011 and scientists have been eagerly awaiting results ever since.   Tomorrow, April 3, Ting and others will announce their findings to date at a NASA press conference.

AMS actually is not a NASA instrument.   It was primarily funded by a consortium of institutes in 16 countries brought together by Ting, a 1976 Nobel Prize winning physicist.  The U.S. portion of the project was funded through the Department of Energy (DOE).  NASA’s role was to get it into space and give it home as part of the ISS complex.

AMS is a particle physics instrument that is being used to search for antimatter in the universe, as well as study dark matter and other cosmological mysteries.

Joining Ting at the press conference at NASA Headquarters tomorrow at 1:30 pm ET will be NASA Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations Bill Gerstenmaier, DOE’s program manager for AMS Michael Salamon, and NASA’s AMS program manager Mark Sistilli.  The briefing will be broadcast on NASA TV.