New Frontiers For Huntsville 

I was surprised to read this bit of news in the paper this weekend:
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. has been selected as the site of NASA's Discovery and New Frontiers Program Office. ...
The Discovery initiative includes focused, scientific investigations that complement NASA's larger planetary exploration. Its goal is to launch numerous small missions with a faster development phase -- each for considerably less than the cost of larger missions. The Discovery program has launched numerous missions to date, including the Mars Pathfinder, Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous-Shoemaker, and Genesis missions.
The New Frontiers initiative addresses high-priority investigations identified by the National Academy of Sciences. NASA's first New Frontiers mission is called New Horizons, which will fly by the Pluto-Charon system in 2014, and then target other Kuiper belt objects. NASA recently selected two mission proposals under the New Frontiers program for pre-formulation study, leading to a selection of the second New Frontiers mission in May, 2005.
Without saying too much about this, this is a new area for Marshall, one which does not appear immediately to play off the center's traditional strengths. Of course, the one area of overlap is that Marshall has done a lot of work on next-generation propulsion methods, which may mean that the agency is looking for ways to speed up implementation of those methods in solar system exploration.
A fascinating bit of news, indeed.
And here's more about it from The Huntsville Times.

:: :: 09:34 :: David :: [permalink] ::