Mars Sample Deferred

摘要

The early successes of the Mars lander Curiosity - including the apparent discovery of long-lived, fast-running streams in Gale Crater - are astonishing. Mars scientists are rightly upset about NASA's decision to indefinitely defer their next flagship-class mission: a several-billion-dollar effort to retrieve samples from Mars and return them safely to Earth. Another key NASA decision was to better coordinate management and funding of automated missions with long-term preparations for a scientific outpost on or near Mars. That has rightly been humanity's goal since the earliest beginnings of spaceflight.