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Mission to Mars delayed

NASA has delayed the launching of a mission to Mars by two years, to 2013, because of an undisclosed conflict of interest involved in one of two final proposals, officials said on Friday.

Postponing the Mars Scout program mission means that NASA will miss an opportunity to launch a flight to Mars for the first time in more than a decade, Doug McCuistion, director of the agency's Mars Exploration Program, said at a news conference.

Mars and Earth only get close enough to efficiently launch explorations every 26 months.

After reducing 26 mission proposals to two and entering an evaluation period this fall to select a winner, McCuistion said an unspecified conflict of interest arose concerning one proposal and the assessment group.

Resolving the conflict, the nature of which McCuistion said he could not discuss, required disbanding the review panel and forming a new one.

This process, he said, in setting back a selection by at least four months, meant that keeping to the original launch date would put undue cost and schedule pressure on the winner.

"Delaying the next Scout mission is allowing the mission planning teams to replan their proposed missions," he said. "It will also reduce the risk of cost overruns driven by the tight mission schedule."

The teams, one at the University of Colorado and the other from the Southwest Research Institute branch in Boulder, Colorado, have until August to submit their new proposals. NASA will make a final selection in December.

Both groups are proposing similar spacecraft to orbit Mars and study why the planet's thin atmosphere is escaping into space. The five-year, US$475 million mission is part of the Scout program to send missions with relatively modest costs to regularly explore Mars. McCuistion said the delay could add as much as US$40 million to the cost of the mission.
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