Vision and Voyages for Planetary Science in the - Solar System ...

FIGURE 2.6 A natural bridge on the Moon photographed by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
SOURCE: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Arizona State University.
Within the planetary science program there have been and will likely continue to be peer
reviewed missions selected that are destined for likely targets of human exploration. Two relevant
examples are the New Frontiers projects MoonRise—a lunar South Pole-Aitkin Basin sample return
mission—and OSIRIS-REx—an asteroid sample return mission—now under study for eventual down
selection to one mission in 2011. The committee believes that it is vital to maintain the science focus of
such peer-reviewed missions and not to incorporate human exploration requirements after the
mission has been selected and development has begun. If the data gathered by such missions have
utility for human exploration, the analysis should be paid for by the human exploration program and
firewalled from the science budget. Similarly, if the human exploration program proposes a precursor
mission (like LRO) and there is an opportunity for conducting science at the destination, science should
be very cautious about directly or indirectly imposing mission-defining requirements, and be willing to
pay for any such requirements.
The need for caution does not rule out the possibility of carefully crafted collaborations, however.
It may be possible, for example, to put science-focused instrumentation on some of these missions, or for
science missions to certain targets to carry ESMD-funded instrumentation. Also, missions designed to
prepare for future human exploration can be “re-purposed” to address scientific questions once their
primary mission has been completed, as was recently done for LRO.
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