NASA's Discovery Program: The First Twenty Years of Competitive Planetary Exploration - Softcover

Nasa's Discovery Program: The First Twenty Years of Competitive Planetary Exploration

Zustand: Very Good. The Discovery Program is the most important NASA robotic planetary spacecraft program most laypeople have never heard of. Started in the early 1990s, this program has funded a series of relatively small, focused, and innovative missions to the planets and small bodies of the solar system. Notable ones include Mars Pathfinder, NEAR (Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous) Shoemaker, Deep Impact, MESSENGER, and the Kepler space telescope. At the end of the 1980s, there was growing discomfort in the science community with NASA's planetary exploration program. Almost the whole planetary budget went to a handful of large, expensive missions, which had been significantly delayed by the national policy of using only the Space Shuttle as a launch vehicle. An attempt to create a lower-cost Planetary Observer spacecraft series produced only one mission, Mars Observer, which significantly overran its budget, in part because it had to be redesigned for an expendable booster after the Challenger shuttle accident of January 1986. Opportunities for small, relatively simple missions were absent.A new attempt to create a low-cost planetary program came primarily from two would-be reformers: Stamatios "Tom" Krimigis, a space physicist heliophysics at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), and Wesley T. Huntress, head of NASA's Solar System Exploration Division and then Associate Administrator for Space Science. By the end of the 1990s, the program's approach to cutting-edge, low-cost missions jibed well with then-NASA Administrator Dan Goldin's push for a "faster, better, cheaper" approach to spacecraft development.Researched and written initially by the late Susan Niebur, the former Discovery program scientist, this book takes an in-depth look at the innovative management techniques that program engineers and scientists used to stimulate creative spacecraft designs that yielded useful scientific data about our solar system. David Brown polished the raw manuscript, which was largely based on insightful oral histories that Niebur had conducted with other program personnel, making it accessible to lay readers. Artikel-Nr. 00106941869

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