JPL Still on Mission of Unmanned Exploration

As NASA reevaluates manned spaceflight, its Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena is pushing ahead with its complex schedule of unmanned missions to the outer reaches of the solar system.

JPL and its 5,100 employees remain on track to launch two land rovers to Mars, a deep-space infrared telescope, a probe that will study a comet and an unmanned spacecraft aimed for Saturn, among other programs, over the next 18 months.

The lab also is a lead developer of a major project for NASA, dubbed Prometheus.

Its unmanned probes would use nuclear-powered electrical propulsion to vastly increase their speed and endurance.

Funding for Prometheus was included in the fiscal 2004 budget proposed by President Bush this week.

“We’re all part of the NASA family, so even though JPL’s involvement with the shuttle is occasional” with some JPL-designed experiments on board, “we feel very keenly a loss like this as well,” JPL spokesman Frank O’Donnell said Tuesday.

JPL had no experiments on Columbia.

“At this point we need to acknowledge the loss, but in time we are going to move forward with our missions,” he said.

Many of its spacecraft launches are timed to coordinate with specific moments in the orbits of planets or other solar-system bodies, “so it’s really not possible to delay,” O’Donnell said.

JPL, with a budget of $1.4 billion, is managed for NASA by Caltech. Employment at JPL has declined over the last decade -- it stood at 7,500 in the early 1990s -- amid only modest increases in NASA’s annual budget over that span.

Even so, JPL is working on considerably more projects than a decade ago.

President Bush’s proposed budget calls for NASA’s funding to rise 3% to $15.5 billion in 2004, with $279 million allocated for the Prometheus project in 2004 and $3 billion over five years.

The proposed first leg for Prometheus is called the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter. That spacecraft, scheduled for launch sometime in the next decade, would study some of Jupiter’s 39 moons on which scientists believe there might be oceans covered by thick layers of ice.

What sets the Prometheus program apart is that its spacecraft, once they are launched by conventional means beyond Earth’s atmosphere, would then use a nuclear-based electrical propulsion system.

It would shorten their travel time to planets and then lengthen the time they could spend in orbits around those planets, said Alan Newhouse, Prometheus’ director at NASA.

“We believe nuclear propulsion of this type is a revolutionary step in our ability to investigate phenomena, the moons and the planets in the solar system,” Newhouse said.

JPL also is gearing up for missions that are nearing their landing targets.

In September, JPL’s Galileo spacecraft will complete its seven-year tour of Jupiter by plunging into the planet.

In April, the lab plans to launch its Space Infrared Telescope, similar to the Hubble Space Telescope except it uses infrared technology, rather than optical light, to view deep into space for such things as young galaxies and forming stars.

In the next month or two, the lab also will launch two new land rovers for Mars. They’re expected to have much more mobility than the 1997 Mars Pathfinder rover and will carry more sophisticated instruments.

The rovers, though identical, will land at different regions of the planet in January.

And another spacecraft, Genesis, will return to Earth next year after collecting samples of solar wind and other material flowing from the sun.

The plan calls for helicopter pilots to catch the samples capsule as it parachutes toward the ground at an Air Force testing range in Utah.