Fast Response Keeps Champollion On Track

Engineering ingenuity and dawn-to-dusk efforts over the past few weeks have
resulted in a successful and lifesaving redesign of Space Technology
4/Champollion, a proposed mission to land on a comet nucleus.

The mission will feature a single spacecraft instead of a mother ship and
lander as part of newly announced, reconfigured mission architecture. Some
of JPL's most creative solutions come out of the crucible of rigid budget
and engineering constraints, and Space Technology 4/Champollion has emerged
from the fire a leaner and meaner mission.

Changes in the mission plan will allow Space Technology 4/Champollion to
accomplish all of its technology validation and science goals while working
within budget limits of approximately $158 million, excluding launch costs
and operations.

Earlier plans had assumed that industry and/or government agencies would
partner with the project in some key areas of technology. When such partners
failed to materialize, the mission was faced with a significant funding
shortfall.

On March 19, NASA headquarters formally requested a plan on how the
ambitious comet rendezvous mission could be kept at its roughly $158 million
cap.

Project Manager Brian Muirhead and his team rolled up their sleeves and got
to work. "Within one week, the team had brainstormed, developed 18 pages of
options, narrowed them down, arrived at what we thought was the most likely
option to succeed and fleshed that option out," Muirhead said. "We then took
two more weeks to detail the concept, estimate its mass and cost it."

A successful pair of presentations to NASA's Office of Space Science on
April 8 and 14 led to reauthorization for JPL to proceed with formulating
the mission based on the concept as presented.

"The ST4/Champollion team developed a revised mission plan that was capable
of meeting the budget constraints," Muirhead said. "We went from a
two-spacecraft paradigm to a single spacecraft, which gives us a simpler set
of hardware that's easier to test on the ground. The new design is more
robust, and our chances of a successful landing are as good or better than
they were before.

"We received offers of support from all over the Lab, especially the
technical divisions," he added. "JPL is really at its best when it's focused
on supporting a project during a crisis."

The lifesaving transformation of the mission recalls similar resurrections
of past JPL missions that had been threatened with cancellation. The Galileo
mission, for example, was completely replanned several times due to changes
made in launch configurations and upper stages, most dramatically after the
Space Shuttle Challenger accident in 1986. The Cassini mission, too, was
completely restructured in 1992 in response to a new budget squeeze and the
cancellation of its sister mission, Comet Rendezvous Asteroid Flyby.

Attempting a feat never done before, Space Technology 4/Champollion will
land on a comet's nucleus after surveying and mapping it for several months.
The key to the success of this mission is a suite of 10 technologies that
must work together as a system to deliver a payload safely to the surface of
an active comet. These technologies-including multi-engine ion propulsion
(building from Deep Space 1), a large, 10-kilowatt, high-efficiency solar
array using inflatables and precision guidance and landing using a miniature
scanning laser altimeter-have wide application to other future space science
missions.

Once on the surface, the spacecraft will take images of its surroundings,
drill for material below the surface of the nucleus and perform scientific
experiments to determine the composition of this untouched material from the
original solar nebula.

For further details about Space Technology 4/Champollion, visit

http://nmp.jpl.nasa.gov/st4

-end-