Outside consultants estimating planetary science mission costs for the next decade have produced huge numbers for the largest proposed missions, forcing some painful and unprecedented recommendations in the committee's report.
A competition for low-cost planetary missions led by principal investigators from outside NASA, called Discovery, had already yielded innovative proposals costing just hundreds of millions of dollars, well short of the billion-dollar budget of a flagship NASA mission.
It had a unique "planetary action", it cost £19 and it made him very rich indeed.
As 300 space scientists and engineers gathered for the fourth International Conference on Low-Cost Planetary Missions, conversations turned to last year's failures of two American Mars probes and how lessons learned might apply to other projects under way or being planned.
Today, NASA winnowed down the contenders for the agency's next low-cost planetary science mission.
Earlier this month, NASA unveiled a draft set of rules for its next Discovery competition, which funds planetary science missions costing no more than $450 million.
Speaking on Monday at the inauguration of the International Conference on Low Cost Planetary Missions being held in Goa, India, G. See an update to this item here.
Speaking on Monday at the inauguration of the International Conference on Low Cost Planetary Missions being held in Goa, India, G. Madhavan Nair, chair of ISRO, said, "we have thrown our call for proposals to different scientific communities; depending on the type of experiments they propose, we will be able to plan the Mars mission".
The problem involves "a small number of bad actors and NASA's lack of a comprehensive approach to control costs," says planetary scientist and committee member Larry W. Esposito of the University of Colorado, Boulder.
AOSAT-I takes advantage of low-cost, off-the-shelf components, modular design, and the rapid assembly and instrumentation of the CubeSat standard, to answer fundamental questions in planetary science and reduce cost and risk of future exploration.
