The Committee to Nuke Elysium

The 2022 probe, which is needed to upgrade NASA’s aging Mars telecommunications network, also will have a “robust” science component, Watzin said…

Watzin offered no further details about the planned Mars 2022 probe, which in some ways is at least conceptually similar to the canceled Mars Telecommunications Orbiter. That mission, scrapped in 2005 to clear room in NASA’s budget for other missions, would have launched in 2009.

Currently, NASA leans heavily on the 13-year-old Mars Odyssey orbiter to relay data collected by the landers and rovers on Mars to Earth. There is real concern that the aging spacecraft might fail, Fuk Li, Director of the Mars Exploration Directorate at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told MEPAG after Watzin spoke.

One of Odyssey’s four reaction wheels — used to keep the spacecraft properly oriented — failed in 2012, and ever since, the craft has made do with three. The Mars Atmospheric Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, orbiter that arrived in martian orbit in September to study the planet’s upper atmosphere could serve as a backup communications relay in a pinch, but NASA would prefer not to take that route.

“We never wanted to use MAVEN for relay operations unless there was a sudden emergency,” Li said. However, “we [will] probably have to invoke the capability that MAVEN has” if older Mars satellites such as Odyssey fail.