Mars Gets Independent Assessment

Washington - January 10, 2000 - Sixteen experienced engineers, scientists and executives have been named by NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin to form the Mars Program Independent Assessment Team. The team held its initial organizational meeting at NASA Headquarters in Washington DC on Friday.

Chaired by Thomas Young, retired executive vice president of Lockheed Martin Corp., this team has been chartered to review the agency's approach to robotic exploration of Mars in the wake of the recent loss of the Mars Polar Lander mission.

The team's participants are:

James Arnold, Deputy Director, Aerospace Directorate, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA
Thomas Brackey, Executive Director for Technical Operations, Hughes Space and Communications Co., Los Angeles, CA
Michael Carr, planetary geologist, U.S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park, CA
Douglas Dwoyer, Associate Director for Research and Technology Competencies, NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA
Gen. Ronald Fogelman, U.S. Air Force (retired)
Maj. Gen. Ralph Jacobsen, U.S. Air Force (retired) and president emeritus of the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory
Herb Kottler, Associate Director, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, MA
Peter Lyman, consultant, Pasadena, CA
Joanne Maguire, Vice President for Group Development, TRW Space & Technology Group, Redondo Beach, CA
Robert Pattishall, Director of Advanced Systems and Technology, National Reconnaissance Office, Chantilly, VA
Larry Soderblom, planetary scientist, U.S. Geological Survey, Flagstaff, AZ
Peter Staudhammer, Vice President for Science and Technology, TRW Inc., Cleveland, OH
Kathy Thornton, Assistant Dean for Graduate Programs, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, and retired NASA astronaut
Peter Wilhelm, Director of the Naval Center for Space Technology, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC
Brian Williams, Assistant Professor, MIT Space Systems Laboratory, Cambridge, MA
Maria Zuber, Professor of Geophysics and Planetary Sciences, MIT

The team will evaluate several recent successful and unsuccessful NASA missions to deep space, including Mars Pathfinder, Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Climate Orbiter, Mars Polar Lander, Deep Space 1 and Deep Space 2. It will analyze the budgets, content, schedule, management structure and scientific organization of these missions. It will then assess how these roles and responsibilities are related to mission safety, reliability and success.

It will also review proposed revisions to NASA's existing Mars exploration program architecture as options are developed by a group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA.

The team will brief the NASA administrator on their findings by mid-March 2000.

MSNBC, "The Fallout from Space Failures"

James Oberg, "NASA Faster, Cheaper, but Not Better" --

The Australian, "Look, Mars! No Airbags"

Mars Polar Lander

EARTH INVADES MARS
Mars Delayed, Not Lost
Cameron Park - December 20, 1999 - In the previous two installments of this series, I discussed the possible causes of the Mars Polar Lander failure, and whether in combination with the MCO failure and others, it indicated that NASA should consider ditching its philosophy of "better faster cheaper". My answer to that last question was that it depends on which part of the "BFC" philosophy you're talking about. In the field of unmanned space exploration, chopping missions into smaller, less ambitious individual pieces is usually better -- however other kinds of cost-cutting measures may not be.

Process: Not Newton To Blame

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