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Robotic explorers (2)
little update on planetary exploration
THE JET PROPULSION LABORATORY - A LOOK AT THE MURRAY YEARS
William Pickering had been the emblematic boss of JL for three decades. His successor was the ebulient Bruce Murray. Murray become boss in 1976 against a triumphant background. JPL had kicked Ames ass as the sole and only NASA center tasked with robotic exploration of the solar system. Voyager and Viking were unmitigated triumphs.
In 1977 a bumbling Murray disclosed what he called the purple pigeons, extremely ambitious robotic missions that would catch the public eyes just like Voyager and Viking did.
The Viking rover was seen as a precursor to Mars sample return, and this was bolstered by the Soviet similar Mars 4NM and 5NM program. The second purple pigeon was a mission to Halley comet in 1986, and there Murray thought big, too. To make a long story short, the Japanese, European and Soviet probes did a ballistic flyby of Halley. But Murray disliked ballistics. He strongly believed that ballistic flybys of Halley were not worth the money. They would just happen too fast – closing velocity was just too high.
A revolutionnary propulsion system was needed to slow done the Halley probe – either electric propulsion or, even better, a solar sail. That belief that ballistic flyby was unworthy become engrained in the JPL psyche, even if experience proved it to be totally wrong. The Euro-Soviet-Japanese Halley armada did a superb job. The JPL belief ultimately proved a disaster, since both electric propulsion and solar sails proved costly and unproven. In the end America send zero probe to Halley.
The combination of the costly Mars rover and the sterile Halley debate proved deadly. The biggest casualty was Venus. In 1974 the Viking rover killed Pioneer-Venus; in 1978 the overly ambitious Halley probe killed VOIR, the Venus Orbiting Imaging Radar.
Another collateral victim of the Viking rover was the Jupiter Orbiter with Probe – JOP, like VOIR, was postponed to the decade of the 80's. Much like the Voyagers and Pioneers before them, the Saturn and Jupiter orbiters Cassini and Galileo become twins. The sheer cost of the two flagships however wrecked the 80's and ensured VOIR was postponed again. Venus become a total loss, even bitter since the Soviet launched a bunch of successful Veneras there.
Then a much less glamourous project by contrast survived against all odds. A joint project between ESA and NASA, the solar probe was approved in 1978, pushing both VOIR and JOP into the 80's. The solar probe was approved in FY79 because ESA involvement made it less expensive at a time when the Mars rover and the overambitious Halley probe devoured NASA budget. Ulysses was launched in 1985 and flew out of the ecliptic. It was a very successfull, if unglamourous, mission.