Coming Up Live: Next Mars Mission Might Slip

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission is facing an uphill battle to make an October 2009 planetarty launch opportunity, and senior agency officials will be holding a news briefing at noon to update the media on the project.

An announcement of significance is expected during the briefing, and the participants will include the highest-ranking officials in the hierarchy of NASA. They will include:

++NASA Administrator Mike Griffin.

++Ed Weiler, NASA's Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C.

++Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA
Headquarters.

++Charles Elachi, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Pasadena, Calif.

You can watch the briefing unfold live here in The Flame Trench. Simply click the NASA TV box on the righthand side of the page to launch our NASA TV viewer and live coverage of the news conference.

What follows is the story we published after the last Mars Science Laboratory update in October:

NASA's is keeping its most ambitious mission to Mars alive, but agency officials said Friday it would take more money to finish a mobile science laboratory in time to meet launch windows in 2009 or 2011.

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory so has cost $1.9 billion - a dollar figure that represents a $300 million cost overrun.

Saying Congress and the White House must be informed first, agency officials would not release estimates for completing the robotic rover in time to launch during time-critical opportunities in 2009 and 2011.

But they did say the high-priority mission is so important to NASA science objectives that killing the project was out of the question.

"It's easy to say let's just cancel it and move on," said Ed Weiler, the Associate Administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C.

"But we've poured over a billion and a half dollars into this. The science is critical. It's the flagship mission in the Mars program, and as long as we think we have a good technical chance to make it, we're going to do what we have to do."

The Mars Science Laboratory is scheduled to blast off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket at the start of a 20-day window that will extend from Sept. 15 to Oct. 4, 2009.

A launch during that window would enable the Atlas 5 rocket to put the spacecraft on course for a landing on Mars between July 10 and September 14, 2010.

Earth and Mars won't be properly aligned for the trip again until the fall of 2011.

Despite cost overruns and technical challenges, NASA Administrator Mike Griffin decided to keep the program going after a periodic review on Friday.

Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters, said spacecraft developers are struggling with both hardware and software problems.

Of particular note: The manufacture of complicated small motors that will drive the rover's six wheels and move the wrist, elbow and shoulder joints of the craft's robotic arm.

Aeroflex Inc. of Plainview, N.Y., is running behind schedule on the production of the complex motors - some of which have as many as 600 individual parts.

McCuistion said manufacturing would have to be sped up to make the 2009 or 2011 window. Software and other test programs also would have to be accelerated, but the costs involved remained unclear.

Published reports indicate the extra costs could range from $100 million to $300 million.

Weiler said NASA first would look at other Mars missions in its science portfolio to determine whether money from any of them could be shifted. The next targets typically would be other planetary planetary missions, but Weiler would not be more specific.

About the size of an SUV, NASA's Mars Science Laboratory will be equipped with the most sophisticated suite of instruments ever delivered to the surface of another planet. Its chief goal: to determine whether Mars is, or ever was, capable of supporting microbial life.