NASA's Curiosity rover—the centerpiece of a $2.5 billion flagship mission—raced across the Martian sky, undergoing a half-dozen rapid-fire changes in configuration before an untried “Sky Crane” landing system paused just above the terrain to lower the one-metric-ton robot geologist to the surface.
Three days later, Morpheus, an unpiloted NASA prototype for a multimission planetary lander, crashed moments after lifting off from a simulated lunar landscape at the Kennedy Space Center. (Morpheus is seen above during a March 13 tether test.)
At the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., Curiosity's control team received well-deserved praise from President Barack Obama following the rover's breathtaking arrival. Pop culture exploded with new personalities, including the Mohawk scientist, from JPL's boisterous but failure-weary control room.
In Florida, the Morpheus team stepped back from their charred wreckage. In relative obscurity, they vowed to regroup at their Johnson Space Center base in Texas, assemble a replacement and return to Florida to finish their work: an ambitious pairing of Morpheus with the equally cutting-edge Autonomous Landing and Hazardous Avoidance Technology (Alhat).
As envisioned, Morpheus, working in concert with the light-detection and ranging-based Alhat, could autonomously steer a payload more massive than Curiosity to an alien terrain by skimming along at low altitude, dodging boulders and crater rims as it navigates its own course to a propulsive touchdown within a few meters of its target.
Cost so far? $7 million over 2.5 years.
White House “attaboys” and new cult personalities? None, yet.
But let's look ahead, as Obama did when he addressed the JPL team: “Our expectation is that Curiosity is going to be telling us things we did not know before and laying the groundwork for an even more audacious undertaking in the future and that is a human mission to the red planet.”
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