Mars Scout Program

The Mars Scout program was part of NASA's Mars exploration program from 2005 to 2010. Within the Mars program, the Mars Scout missions were the least expensive projects, each costing a maximum of 500 million US dollars .

Missions

The missions of the Mars Scout Program were each selected through a competition in which various, as innovative as possible, proposals from international scientists were to compete with one another. In addition to the Phoenix probe, a Mars aircraft, an orbiter for the search for volcanic activity and a sampling mission for the Martian atmosphere were finalized for the first Mars Scout mission.

Phoenix (Mars Scout 1) on Mars (artist's impression)

Mars Scout 1

The first mission of the program was the Phoenix lander , which launched on August 4, 2007 and successfully landed on Mars on May 25, 2008 (UTC). The total price of the mission, including the launch vehicle and the mission implementation, was planned to be around $ 420 million. Phoenix was active until November 2, 2008.

Mars Scout 2

MAVEN (Mars Scout 2) (artist's impression)

For the second mission, a preselection of two mission concepts was made in January 2007 from 26 mission proposals:

• Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN): An orbiter should answer questions about the Martian climate and the habitability of the planet as well asimprovethe understanding of dynamic processes in the upper Martian atmosphere and ionosphere .
• The Great Escape : The mission concept is also designed as an orbiter. The space probe would study the structure and dynamics of the upper Martian atmosphere, and potentially biogenic components of the atmosphere (e.g. methane ) would be measured.

In September 2008, NASA selected the MAVEN probe from these two. In 2010 the Mars Scout program was discontinued; However, MAVEN launched on November 18, 2013 and reached Mars in September 2014.

See also

• Chronology of the missions to Mars
• New Frontiers Program
• Discovery program

Web links

• Mars Exploration: Missions ( Memento from August 10, 2009 in the Internet Archive )

Individual evidence

1. ^ Mars Exploration Design Reference Mission Set: Mission Classes for Mars Exploration ( Memento from September 29, 2006 in the Internet Archive ). NASA, accessed September 1, 2019.
2. ↑ Space Today: Exploring the Red Planet - Phoenix Mars Lander 2007 . Space Today, accessed August 20, 2006.
3. ↑ Phoenix launch press kit . NASA, August 2007 (PDF; 6.5 MB)
4. ↑ Mission of the US Mars probe Phoenix ended . Spectrum.de, November 11, 2008, accessed September 1, 2019.
5. ^ NASA Selects Proposals for Future Mars Missions and Studies . NASA, Jan. 11, 2007
6. ^ Ann Beardsley, C. Tony Garcia, Joseph Sweeney: Historical Guide to NASA and the Space Program . Rowman & Littlefield, 2016 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).