THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, February 26, 1996 TAG: 9602260030
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JAMES SCHULTZ, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: HAMPTON LENGTH: Medium: 74 lines
Fleets of micromachines fan out across the solar system and beyond. Cheap, collapsible space telescopes unfurl like umbrellas and see continents on yet-to-be-discovered planets light years away. Incredible shrinking spacecraft think on their own as they fly, adapting to changing conditions much like their human inventors.
These are no crackpot notions put forth by starry-eyed dreamers. They're hard-headed plans being developed by NASA for a revolutionary generation of miniature, unmanned spacecraft.
The so-called New Millennium program was described Friday at NASA Langley Research Center by Carl A. Kukkonen, director of the Center for Space Microelectronics Technology at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
Locally, NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia's Eastern Shore could benefit from the literal downsizing. Proponents have long hoped that the Eastern Shore rocket range, one of only three in the continental United States, could become home to a thriving launch business.
``In the future we'll be launching small spacecraft twice a month,'' Kukkonen said. ``Small launch sites like Wallops should be highly in the running as one of the sites. We don't need the Cape (Canaveral, in Florida) to launch bread boxes.''
Langley also stands to gain. Although the Hampton center specializes in aeronautical research, NASA is using Langley's expertise to design air-braking and parachute systems that will be used in the Mars Pathfinder mission, scheduled for a December launch.
Kukkonen said later missions, particularly those designed to explore other planets in the solar system, also will involve Langley scientists and engineers.
Born of NASA's need to live with pared budgets, the miniaturization initiative has been generally lost in the hubbub over government gridlock. Now, however, NASA is moving to set New Millennium timetables and launch schedules that will kick in over the next five to 10 years.
``Space missions costing $1 billion are a thing of the past. The country isn't able to meet those large commitments,'' Kukkonen said. ``What we're doing is taking the technology in your laptop and cell phone and trying to use it to aggressively miniaturize spacecraft. It's nifty. It's new stuff.''
New also will be cheaper. Mars Pathfinder, for instance, is about the size of an old-style telephone booth and will cost about $150 million, Kukkonen said. Contrast that, he says, with the last of the big ``flagship'' probes, the school-bus-size, $1 billion Cassini mission to Saturn, scheduled for launch in 1997.
Smaller still will be a grenade-size probe that will bury itself in Martian soil during a mission scheduled for 1998. Eventually, because of miniaturization, launch costs should plunge to perhaps $10 million to $20 million per mission, a fraction of the usual several hundred million.
``The key is making the scientific instruments correspondingly small,'' Kukkonen said. ``We are accepting some risk, and little or no redundancy because they're so inexpensive. If a little one blows up, we'll launch another little one.''
The agency is not getting rid of manned missions, Kukkonen said. But space science cannot be ignored by NASA, even as it continues to spend large sums ensuring the safety of the humans it puts in orbit.
Sometime early in the next century, Kukkonen says, NASA engineers are likely to be working with cameras the size of dimes, complex sensors little bigger than a quarter and ``neural nets'' that mimic in silicon and software the function and flexibility of the human brain.
``We're doing things now we wouldn't have dreamed of,'' he said. ``The coin of the realm is innovation. If one day we can put out a truly adaptable and intelligent spacecraft, this will be a whole new age.'' by CNB