NASA to miss Mars shot in 2011

An undisclosed conflict of interest has delayed a NASA Mars mission by two years and likely increased the cost of the $475 million mission by nearly 10 percent.

NASA announced today that the next mission in the Mars Scout program, originally planned for launch in 2011, will now launch in 2013. The slip means that NASA will launch no Mars mission during the 2011 launch window and must wait 26 months for the red planet to again come near Earth.

"This is the first time in a decade we've missed an opportunity," Mars exploration program director Doug McCuistion said Friday.

The two-year launch delay resulted from a four-month delay in the program due to the conflict of interest. The organizational conflict of interest was discovered in one of the mission proposal team's concept studies.

"In the process of regular review, we discovered the conflict," McCuistion said. He refused repeated requests to explain the conflict during a press briefing Friday.

"That's procurement-sensitive information," he said. "Any kind of information could compromise the competition."

He did, however, say the conflict was created by one of the proposers.

"This was not an issue NASA created," he said. "The government has done nothing incorrect."

There will be no criminal or civil action, NASA spokesman Grey Hautaluoma said.

However, the delay will cost the program about $40 million.

The Mars Scout Program was created to launch a series of small, low-cost missions that are competitively selected. Small landers or rovers, balloons and airplanes, like the one pictured above, are among the types of craft NASA aims to send to the red planet under the program. The first Scout mission to be launched was the NASA Phoenix lander. Launched from Cape Canaveral in August, it is scheduled to land on Mars' polar region in May 2008.

Two missions for 2011 had been selected from among 26 proposals for further evaluation when the conflict was discovered. Both would study the evolution of Mars' atmosphere.

"Both are to study what's happened to the atmosphere of Mars over the life of the planet," said McCuistion.