Southwood wrote a letter and an article to NASA management, urging them to stop making rash decisions, even if they are due to financial and organizational factors. NASA has been regularly delaying work on its mission to deliver soil and dust samples from Mars collected by the Perseverance rover throughout its operation.
According to the scientist, NASA should listen to the scientific community, which criticizes the agency’s intention to speed up and simplify the MSR for the sake of savings. This will not lead to anything good – it will not give the necessary and valuable results for science. The scientist wonders what exactly should be excluded from the project: a landing platform, two helicopters, a rover for collecting samples, or a landing module designed to transport samples to Mars orbit?
The problem is that NASA refused to work on the mission due to the very large budget that the agency could not get from the state (about $ 11 billion). For this reason, the launch of the MSR is constantly postponed from the second half of 2020.
“Our colleagues at NASA now face a difficult choice. On the one hand, they can greatly simplify the mission, quickly collecting dust samples from Mars and returning them to Earth for the first time in history, which does not meet the wishes of the scientific community. On the other hand, given the agency’s current budgets and the mood in the US Congress, they will have to find ways to allocate large amounts of money for the implementation of the entire mission without compromising other NASA projects. Southwood emphasized in the article.
Source: Ferra
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