USA
Today: NASA's new Mars rover aims high. It's bigger, more
powerful and more sophisticated than any other robotic vehicle
that has landed on another planet. It will try to answer a big
question: Has life existed elsewhere in the solar system?Its
very ambition has gotten the rover in trouble. Thanks to a mix
of technological setbacks and engineering misjudgments, the
rover's epic scale is matched by epic problems.The new rover,
known as the Mars Science Laboratory, is $235 million, or 24%,
over budget. Work on it has run so late that engineers are
racing to prepare the rover for its blastoff in 2009. After
that, the next good launch window, when Mars and the Earth are
closest, is in 2011."They aimed high, and they got burned,"
says Arizona State University's Phil Christensen, a Mars
scientist who helped review NASA's Mars program.
