NASA could be forced to impose a roughly $1 billion cap - including launch costs-on any new planetary flagship mission it undertakes this decade, far less tfian the U.S. National Research Council (NRC) recommended for this class of probe in its most recent survey of planetary priorities and more in line with what the agency spends on medium-sized missions. Jim Green, head of the Planetary Science Division at NASA headquarters here, said fiscal hard times necessitate a change in the way die agency develops and builds large-scale missions like the Mars Astrobiology Explorer-Cacher (MAX-C) that topped the NRC's list of flagship-class planetary science priorities.
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