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[i]NASA has decided to push back the launch of the robotic part of its Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) by a year to late 2021 to allow for more time for studies of the mission concept and its key technologies, an agency official said March 2. At a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council's human exploration and operations committee here, Michele Gates, program director for ARM at NASA Headquarters, said the delay in the robotic part of ARM would also postpone a later crewed mission to the boulder the robotic mission would return to cislunar space. "That is intended to enable the early design study work for the spacecraft bus," Gates said of the delay in the robotic mission launch. It will, she added, also allow for more planning work on the mission ahead of later reviews. Gates said the delay specifically will stretch out ongoing work in the robotic mission's phase A, which will culminate in a review known as Key Decision Point B planned for this summer. NASA will also extend phase B, which will start after that review. "We think that buys us some risk buy-down," she said of the extended schedule. Under the new schedule, the ARM robotic mission would launch in December 2021, instead of December 2020 as previously planned. That would delay later crewed mission by a year as well, to December 2026. "We understand this, we're accepting this, and we're folding that into our early preformulation work that we're beginning to do" on the crewed mission, she said. That delay will not affect the mission's cost.[/i]
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