NASA Nixes Mission To Land on Comet
By MATTHEW FORDAHL
AP Science Writer

LOS ANGELES (AP) _ A $240 million NASA mission to land a probe on the surface of a comet for the first time and drill beneath its surface was scrapped Monday, a victim of the space agency's tight budget. The mission was axed to make more money available for other projects' cost overruns _ a Hubble Space Telescope repair mission and future Mars exploration, said Edward Weiler, head of NASA's space science program. ``What we're trying to do is solve our own problems,'' said Weiler, who added the canceled project was still in its early development phase. ``Nobody is coming to our rescue from somewhere else in the government.'' Space Technology 4/Champollion's demise means it may be more than a decade before a robotic explorer lands on one of the huge icy snowballs that circle the sun _ and sometimes collide with Earth with devastating impact, said project manager Brian Muirhead at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. ``We know very little about how comets are formed and what their constituency is,'' he said. ``If you're serious about planetary protection, you have to know more about comets than we do today.'' The spacecraft, which had been scheduled to launch in 2003 for late-2005 arrival, also would have tested 10 new technologies, ranging from futuristic tools for landing on a comet to ion propulsion. NASA already has sent a probe, named Stardust, to sweep through the tail of a comet and collect material for return to Earth. The European Space Agency also plans a mission that will attempt to land on a comet in 2012.