NASA’s Mission: Think Small

It’s the year 2021 and NASA’s swarm of miniature probes has just crash-landed (by design) on Mars. Dozens of lipstick-sized penetrators sink into the soft, red soil and begin searching for microscopic fossils of ancient life forms and traces of frozen water that once might have formed canals. Several microprobes are destroyed on impact, but no one cares. They’re cheap, expendable.

Meanwhile, another flock of pint-sized satellites have aligned themselves into an enormous array just outside Earth’s orbit. When they are in place, huge inflatable telescopes begin to unfurl from canisters, gathering light from distant stars, as well as beaming information back to eager scientists on Earth.

This spacey fairy tale may not be quite as farfetched as one might think. In fact, one could say that such plans are on the drawing board--if NASA hadn’t already largely dispensed with drawing boards as a hopeless relic of its former, stodgy self.

In what amounts to a 180-degree shift, the agency is turning its back on a flashy legacy of spectacular successes and sometimes spectacular failures for a slimmer, simpler future.

No longer will billion-dollar spacecraft festooned with dozens of scientific experiments embark on once-in-a-decade missions. Instead, the agency is turning to cheaper, high-tech, disposable spacecraft.

In the process, it is taking chances on new technology in a way that it hasn’t in 20 years.

The strategy, called the New Millennium Program, involves launching a dozen or more spacecraft a year, each designed to road-test cutting edge technology. Instead of having elaborate fail-safe systems on board or backups on Earth, the new crafts would find safety in sheer numbers: So many would fly that losing a few wouldn’t matter. “I hope we have failure,” said NASA chief Dan Goldin. “Otherwise, we’re not pushing hard enough.”

The news that NASA is finally about to take chances on such technology will come as a surprise to people who thought that the space agency already was at the forefront. As space cognoscenti have long known, however, much of the technology used by NASA in the last two decades is distressingly obsolete.

The space shuttle chugs along like a 1967 Dodge Dart, spewing out pollutants and navigating with equipment less sophisticated than that found on many passenger jets. The docking system that linked the shuttle Atlantis and the Russian Mir space station in June was essentially the same as the one designed 20 years ago for the Apollo-Soyuz linkup. Satellites are far more bulky than they need to be because NASA has relied on trusty, conservative technology rather than stepping boldly into the future.

“We want to be on the cutting edge of technology, where we used to be in the ‘60s and ‘70s,” Goldin said.

The program is specifically designed to encourage advanced approaches to space exploration: Self-navigating craft that chart their own courses by sighting on asteroids; flocks of satellites flying in formation like birds to create a single enormous telescope; solar propulsion systems that do not require the heavy baggage of chemical fuel; thumbnail-sized instrumentation hardy enough to withstand being “sprinkled” all over a planet, and swarms of spacecraft that would surround a planet or asteroid and sample its chemistry, climate and seismic activity all at once.

Although its current funding is merely a $50-million drop in a $13.8-billion NASA budget, the new program clearly has captured the heart of the space agency’s chief. If he weren’t NASA administrator, Goldin said, heading NMP is the job he’d want most. In fact, as the Galileo probe plunged into Jupiter last month, Goldin talked mostly about his vision of a born-again NASA’s future.

Futuristic Concept

Many scientists are ecstatic at the prospect of a truly futuristic space program--for example, Barbara Wilson, who oversees the Microdevices Lab, a Lilliputian workshop of dime-sized cameras and egg-sized seismometers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. “Before, we were in the background. Now, we’re central,” she said with obvious delight. Another enthusiastic backer is Caltech space scientist Bruce Murray. “It’s scary, but I think we can do it,” he said.

Others are more nervous about such a radical departure from the past. After Goldin described his approach earlier in the year at JPL, “people walked away shaking their heads,” Murray said. JPL Director Ed Stone admits the changes are major. “It’s not a small refinement. It’s a revolution.”

To get an idea of the scale of changes, look at the $1.5-billion Galileo, which reached Jupiter on Dec. 7. Planning on the project started more than 20 years ago. Billion-dollar missions meant that NASA could launch only one or two per decade, said Jeffrey L. Smith, manager of the Project Design Center at JPL. “There was enormous pressure on scientists: ‘You’d better get on that spacecraft or we’re not going to get back to you for 10 years.’ And because you had these huge missions, and everyone was relying on you, you didn’t want to try new technology.”

Indeed, when the $2-billion Mars Observer disappeared into space two years ago just as it was getting ready to slip into orbit around the planet, one of NASA’s worst nightmares came true. Observer, like Galileo, was crammed with experiments and carried the hopes of dozens of scientific teams.

“The day I arrived [in 1992] I was concerned about Observer because we put all our marbles into one basket,” Goldin said. NASA was using well-tested technology to make it safe, he said--and that meant it was 10 years old by the time it flew.

Observer was a major turning point for NASA, said Louis Freedman, president of the Planetary Society, a nonprofit space interest group. “It was the old way of doing things; we realized it was a mistake. And Mr. Goldin basically said: No more.”

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Instrument designer Michael Hecht of JPL likes to say that NMP really stands for “No Moving Parts.” And the designs he’s working on for a Mars lander mission are fiendishly simple.

This probe has no parachute, no rockets, no mechanical arms; it’s small enough to carry on an airplane. And that’s the point.

If you dropped a TV set on a table, said Hecht, “it would be smashed to bits.” But drop a pencil, and it comes to no harm--a vivid example of how small things can crash-land without getting hurt.

To save launch costs, the probe will piggyback a ride on another Mars mission in 1998, then separate and drop to the planet’s surface. Although it will land with the impact of a driven golf ball, the soft Martian soil will cushion its arrival. And instead of carrying insulation, it will penetrate far enough into the soil to use the ground as protection from extreme temperatures. To collect its sample, the open tube simply gathers up whatever dirt happens to fall into it during the impact, “like a specimen cup,” Hecht said. To see if there is water in the sample, a coil powered by a battery will heat it up and “see if steam comes out.”

The probe’s temperature and pressure sensors are similar to those on a standard Casio watch.

Fleets of micro-crafts costing less than a quarter of a million dollars each can get the kind of planetary profiles that one craft--no matter how complicated--cannot hope to match.

“You can’t land once on Earth and say you’ve studied the Earth,” Stone said. “What if you landed in the desert?”

Fleets of satellites can also align themselves into larger formations--which vastly increase seeing power. When several telescopes combine their information via computer, the result can be an image equivalent to what could be produced from a single, enormous telescope. In space, NMP manager Kane Casani points out, “we can put them as far apart as we want.” Such a flying formation of telescopes, he says, would be able to see planets around other suns as clearly as we see Jupiter.

The leap, he says, will be as big as that between Galileo’s first images of the moons of Jupiter to today’s Hubble telescope images of stars being born.

Flying telescopes in formation requires a great number of other high-tech tricks, and labs at JPL are trying to tackle them. For example, getting a telescope-size object into space seems to preclude a smaller, faster, cheaper approach. But NMP engineers are designing what they call “inflatable hardware” to fit the bill.

In a small basement lab, Arthur Chmielewski, who develops so-called “gossamer structures” for the NMP, shows off a model of an inflatable antenna/receiver to be tested on the shuttle this year. It looks like a wad of rubber crammed into a rough white wooden box. But as compressed air is pumped in, it begins to expand like a foil pan of Jiffy Pop.

The person-sized “dish” part is supported by orange rubber struts; in space, these struts will be “rigidized”--perhaps by coating them with a kind of gelatin that will dry into a hard surface.

Developing inflatable structures that work will be central to the NMP approach--not only for telescopes but also for sending information from missions deep into space, which requires enormous transmitters.

“NASA is trying to build all these spacecraft the size of coffee cans,” Chmielewski said. “But what point is it to deploy a coffee can with an antenna on it the size of a Jacuzzi? Instead, we want to develop a coffee-can-sized thing that inflates to the size of a Jacuzzi.”

The new craft will also handle information more efficiently. Instead of sending back streams of digital bits to be analyzed by teams of graduate students on the ground, they will carry microprocessors and libraries on board that will allow them to come to their own conclusions about what they see. Instead of examining a sample and transmitting numbers, the probe would beam back the message: “It’s clay.”

And then there’s the matter of getting around in space. Solar electric propulsion systems, which use the energy of the sun to power a spacecraft’s thrusters, have been around--at least in prototype--for a long time. “It has a long history,” said JPL’s Marc Rayman, flight engineer for the first NMP mission. “But nobody ever tried these things [on real missions] because it was too risky.”

This is a major reversal--to some, a welcome one. “To me, it encapsulates everything NASA has been saying it wants to do,” said Sara Gavitt, chief of the Mars probe mission. “There might not be anything on this mission that has ever flown. We’ve never done anything like this before.”

Whatever merits of the NMP approach, molting into a new NASA will not be easy--especially when it comes to shedding the agency’s old constituencies--military, industry, the need to put a space project in every pot to please every member of Congress. “People didn’t think he [Goldin] could change that,” Murray said.

But the chief can be shockingly honest about his agency’s former bloated self. “NASA was serving NASA more than [it was] serving space,” he said. And while NASA has taken more than its share of budget cuts recently, “money isn’t the magic ingredient here,” Goldin said. “We want to measure output.”

Russian Approach

Perhaps ironically, one of the main factors that make the metamorphosis possible is the very force behind NASA’s former glory days in the ‘60s and ‘70s: the Cold War.

While the United States was battling the Evil Empire, “we wanted to show the world that we had the biggest and the best,” said JPL’s David Lehman.

“There’s a simple perception that large and complex is more advanced,” Stone said.

Now, it’s a more Russian approach that’s leading the way. As Murray points out, the Russian program is statistically the safest. Their rockets “are not very fancy, but they work.” Because the Russians fly so many missions, and so frequently, their disaster rate is far lower than NASA’s.

Goldin also would like to find a New Millennium-style approach to putting people into space--but risk takes on a whole new meaning when human life is at stake. Still, he says, “it’s shameful that human spaceflight is so expensive.”

Until now, Friedman said, the risk involved in manned flight has been dangerously underplayed. “There was a lot of hype that went into the space program in the ‘80s and to some extent we got hoist on our own petard,” he said. “Space is not a routine place. We’re not going to send tourists there.”

The attempt to put a schoolteacher into space--with its tragic ending in the explosion of the shuttle Challenger 10 years ago--was probably premature, Goldin said.

In fact, he is the first to admit that risk is inherent in the enterprise. In today’s cloudy fiscal climate, however, NASA can’t afford not to take chances. “Give the American people credit,” Goldin said. “We’re not wimps.”

Many NASA watchers say it’s not just technology at stake with the New Millennium Program: It’s NASA’s spirit.

“Five years ago there was a sense of tiredness,” Friedman said. “Hubble wasn’t working. There was a sense that the agency was questioning its competence.”

New Millennium, he said, has brought back a lot of the lost vitality.

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NASA’s New Space Age

Burdened by outdated technology, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is hoping finally to enter a new space age with the New Millenium Program--intended to encouraged advanced, even far-out, approaches to space exploration. Unlike the huge, expensive missions of the last 30 years, NMP will focus on missions that are small, cheap and numerous. Here is a look at how this new era is shaping up.

SELF-NAVIGATING SPACECRAFT

A roomful of computers and engineers currently track spacecraft and tell them when and how to make course corrections. Future craft will be programmed with maps of asteroids and other celestial objects to be used as reference points. Like a sailor with a sextant, the craft makes its own navigation decisions to find its location and zoom in on its target, for example, the planet Mars.

DESCENT TO MARS

New Millennium microprobes will hitch a ride to Mars on the 1998 lander mission for their first test flight. Future missions could sprinkle dozens of probes around the planet. The Martian soil will cushion their landing and insulate instruments from extreme temperatures.

INFLATABLE SATELLITE DISH

Will be economical in terms of cost and room on the spacecraft. It will unfold to a size larger than the spacecraft and beam data back to Earth.

SMALLER AND CHEAPER

Future interplanetary missions will involve swarms of miniature spacecraft carrying tiny instruments that are able to analyze conditions on a planet’s surface and beam the data back to Earth. All microinstruments are drawn actual size.

Microseismometer

This instrument will detect “Marsquakes” on the Martian surface.

Micromachined dewpoint hygrometer

This instrument will detect moisture in soil and atmosphere of a planet or asteroid.

Free Flying Magnetometer

Hundreds or thousands of these miniature detectors will measure the strength and direction of magnetic fields over huge areas of space.

Micromachined pressure sensor

This device will detect and analyze the barometric pressure on the surface.

Sources: NASA, Boeing, Rockwell