The Low-Cost Planetary Missions Conference is the 7th in an IAA-sponsored series that focuses on robotic scientific exploration of the solar system. The 7th conference will be held on the campus of the California Institute of Technology in the heart of beautiful Pasadena, California, on September 12-14, 2007.

In the US the dawn of the current era of low-cost robotic exploration of the solar system occurred in the early 1990s with NASA's first two Discovery-class missions, Mars Pathfinder with its Sojourner rover, and the Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) missions. Since that time NASA has flown several more Discovery missions and one, the Dawn mission, is in final assembly for launch in early summer 2007.

In addition to Discovery, NASA has created a new low-cost mission program called Mars Scout. The first Mars Scout mission called Phoenix is scheduled for launch in late summer 2007. Space agencies in Europe and Japan have launched their own low-cost mission programs with robotic probes that are currently in operation in deep space, and India will launch its first planetary mission, to orbit the Moon, in the next year or so. The space agencies of Russia and China have also announced plans for low-cost planetary probes.

The 7th Low-Cost Planetary Missions Conference is devoted to these programs of missions that cost less than $0.5B US, including launch, operations, science data analysis, and all relevant mission-specific technology development. The conference is a forum for planetary scientists, technologists, engineers, managers and agency officials to gather to exchange information and ideas for making this class of robotic mission richer scientifically while remaining affordably low-cost.

Bookmark this page and check back frequently, as new information will be added as it becomes available.

For more information, please contact the LCPM7 Secretariat:
lcpm7@jpl.nasa.gov