Canadian scientists shooting for Mars
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/08/2007 (6864 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
OTTAWA– A network of Canadian universities plans to launch an all-Canadian mission to Mars in 2009, using corporate funding to build a robot that will search for water and life on the Red Planet.
Northern Light plans to use the same launch method that satellites use: A commercial rocket, likely a very reliable type called Rockot, made from converted Soviet ballistic missiles. But the spacecraft that flies on to Mars, and likely the mission control for the period after it lands on Mars, would be all Canadian, with headquarters at York University in Toronto.
The price: an estimated $20 million, or possibly less if another country shares the rocket. NASA’s Mars Phoenix mission, now underway, costs $420 million US.
If they can pull it off, the spacecraft would be a stunning achievement for Canadian space science. It was a dream of Marc Garneau as president of the Canadian Space Agency in 2001, when he urged Canada’s space community: “Allons-y! Let’s go to Mars!”
Project leader Ben Quine of York University said the Canadians can do a smaller and far cheaper mission than NASA by manufacturing their own machinery “in-house” at universities, testing them there as well, and designing a smaller robot.
The Northern Light robot would be 35 kilograms; NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers are some 200 kg each.
“It would go late in 2009. We’re aiming to have all our hardware together a year from now, and that will give us a year to integrate and shake out the bugs,” he said on Tuesday. “We seem to be on schedule. We’ve been working on this since 2001.”
The Canadian Space Agency confirmed it knows of the project but has no involvement in it. It could be invited later, Quine said.
“In a two-year time frame, it’s definitely do-able,” said Ed Cloutis of the University of Winnipeg’s geography department, one of the 50 scientists involved. “A lot of it (Northern Light) is based on existing things, so the basic spacecraft is based on the Beagle lander, the ones the Europeans put up there.”
Beagle-2 was a British Mars lander that was lost during its landing attempt in 2003.
— CanWest News Service