Former Mars Czar Tapped To Lead NASA's Mars Reboot

摘要

NASA's former director of solar system exploration, Orlando Figueroa, will lead a group tasked with planning the scaled-back robotic Mars mission the agency is pursuing after its withdrawal from an international campaign to return a Mars sample to Earth. Figueroa, a one-time NASA Mars czar who left the agency in 2010 to become a consultant, will head the Mars Program Planning Group. In late March, the group will present NASA science chief John Grunsfeld with a concept for a $700 million Mars mission that melds science, technology and human spaceflight goals and launches in either 2018 or 2020. Figueroa's appointment was announced by Grunsfeld at a Feb. 27 meeting here of the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG), a community forum for Mars scientists.