Author Topic: New Frontiers 4  (Read 152936 times)

Offline Space Ghost 1962

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Re: New Frontiers 4
« Reply #360 on: 12/24/2017 12:57 am »
You almost make it sound like it’s a dying art that may get lost in future government cutbacks and the expansion of commercial space?
Spend time advancing planetary missions (absent smart scientists who sometimes insist on being stupid) and you'll find this perspective.

Offline Blackstar

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Re: New Frontiers 4
« Reply #361 on: 12/24/2017 01:39 am »
OSIRIS-REx samples directly from the surface of the asteroid.  For a comet, the sample needs to be taken some depth below the surface to get unaltered volatiles.  Based on Philae, there may also be a hard crust that needs to be punched through.  As I recall, the other two proposed comet sample return missions essentially shot a sampling mechanism into the surface (one from within an arm and the other as an actual harpoon). 

When we did the decadal, I think we were aware of three potential comet sampling mechanisms, two that were public and one that was proprietary and that we were not allowed to know about, but which was provided to the cost estimators with an NDA. I can only remember one of the two public ones, and it involved a kind of wire brush and scoop mechanism--think of it like a vacuum cleaner with wire brushes up front that would scoop the sample into the collector. The strength of such a mechanism is that it works with multiple samples. If the surface is snow, it scoops it right up. If the surface is hard ice, it scrapes it up. I think the downside is that what you get is an aggregated sample (I'm probably using the wrong word). It's a collection of all the stuff mixed together. What you may want is a small ice core from one spot, and some snow from another spot, and some ice chunks from another spot. So maybe you use this method and you use some other sampling device.

With regards to the other comment about "anchoring," that may not be necessary. In talking to somebody involved in OREX (I may be misremembering this a bit because it was awhile ago) one of the things they did with OREX is worked out the relationship between the spacecraft body and the sampling arm and how to use the mass together when touching the surface. So you push the sampling mechanism against the surface and use the spacecraft mass to anchor it there, but carefully control all that so that you're balancing everything out as you do it.

Offline Blackstar

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Re: New Frontiers 4
« Reply #362 on: 12/24/2017 01:49 am »
I am asking if it is possible to do useful science by designing the payload only, not the delivery mechanism.  We do that already for launchers, but not for cruise and not for orbiters or landers. (yes, some start from commercial buses but they are not off the shelf)

Suppose it comes to pass that one of the NASA initiatives for cargo service to Luna actually happens, and it's possible to buy "land X tonnes at location Y without subjecting it to more than these forces". At that point, does it still make sense to design and develop custom lunar landers?

If you still don't get what I am asking, do us all a favor and don't be snarky about it. (Ultraviolet9 got it just fine and was able to discuss rationally what some of the issues were without being cavalierly dismissive)

No, I got it. You were asking an ideologically-driven question based upon the ideology that "the government doesn't have to do everything, government is inefficient and sloppy and populated by lazy bureaucrats and commercial can do stuff better," and not understanding how New Frontiers is done in the first place. NASA is not designing the mission, a PI is. And it is up to the PI to come up with the science instruments and the mission implementation (which are tightly intertwined). That means that the PI puts together a team to design the instruments and finds a spacecraft builder to assemble the spacecraft. That spacecraft team can be a contractor like Lockheed Martin or Boeing, or even a NASA center like Goddard. It's the PI's responsibility for doing all this stuff. (Recognizing that the target list is prioritized at the beginning of the competition.)

This is the science section and the New Frontiers thread, so I thought I'd keep the discussion to New Frontiers.

Offline Blackstar

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Re: New Frontiers 4
« Reply #363 on: 12/24/2017 01:58 am »
And to win, it's considerable effort on those study contracts.

Seven years ago a little bird who worked at JPL told me that they spent on average $500K per Discovery proposal and $750K per New Frontiers proposal. I'm sure it's considerably higher now. If you go back and count how many JPL Discovery proposals there were in the last round, you get a sense of how much internal money JPL spent. That's not counting all the other participants who are doing things like the instrument proposals. I'll just ballpark it and figure that each New Frontiers proposal probably costs $1.5 million to put forth, and each Discovery proposal is probably a million dollars. And that's not including sweat equity.

All things considered, that's ultimately rather cheap. The JIMO/Prometheus contract proposal by Northrop Grumman cost $80 million.* The Future Imagery Architecture reconnaissance satellite proposal cost Boeing $100 million. (You can look up the results of both of those contracts.) It's not unusual for large aerospace contractors to spend a hundred million bucks on a contract that will ultimately be worth billions.







*Told to me by somebody who was on the NG team. The really shocking thing is that they fully knew that the program was going to be canceled, but they spent the money in order to not anger the NASA administrator by making a no-bid.

Offline Dalhousie

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Re: New Frontiers 4
« Reply #364 on: 12/24/2017 02:04 am »
And that's not even mentioning our current limits in building spacecraft for outer planet missions, where the best we can do, built upon decades of concerted work, isn't good enough for such long lived, hostile environment, missions.

Huh?  Not ONE outer planet mission has failed prior to completing it's primary mission, barring Juno, which still has several months to go.  All the others (barring Huygens with lts limited battery life) have had their mission extended, often multiple times.
Apologies in advance for any lack of civility - it's unintended

Offline Blackstar

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Re: New Frontiers 4
« Reply #365 on: 12/24/2017 02:08 am »
Seven years ago a little bird who worked at JPL told me that they spent on average $500K per Discovery proposal and $750K per New Frontiers proposal. I'm sure it's considerably higher now. If you go back and count how many JPL Discovery proposals there were in the last round, you get a sense of how much internal money JPL spent. That's not counting all the other participants who are doing things like the instrument proposals. I'll just ballpark it and figure that each New Frontiers proposal probably costs $1.5 million to put forth, and each Discovery proposal is probably a million dollars. And that's not including sweat equity.

Allow me to comment on my own post...

This high cost of proposals is actually an argument for having fewer competitions for Discovery and selecting two each time instead of one. The reason is that if you have a competition every couple of years, then proposers are spending a lot of money each round for a low selection rate.

Put it this way: suppose you hold one competition in 2016, and then another competition in 2018, and each time you have 28 proposers and you select one winner each time. For those two competitions the proposers have spent $56 million for two winners over two years. Instead, if you do one competition in 2016 and another in 2020 and you select two winners each time, over four years you've spent $56 million, but selected four winners. It's a more efficient approach and it doesn't kill everybody putting together proposals. Of course, this also assumes that you have the budget to support more missions, and you might not. But NASA is aware that a lot of non-NASA money is being spent for each competition and they want to maximize effectiveness.

New Frontiers doesn't benefit the same way. The decadal recommended two NF selections this decade, and NASA is not on course to do that. But New Frontiers is also a much higher cost cap, and it's not really possible to select two during one competition.

Offline Space Ghost 1962

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Re: New Frontiers 4
« Reply #366 on: 12/24/2017 02:33 am »
And that's not even mentioning our current limits in building spacecraft for outer planet missions, where the best we can do, built upon decades of concerted work, isn't good enough for such long lived, hostile environment, missions.

Huh?  Not ONE outer planet mission has failed prior to completing it's primary mission, barring Juno, which still has several months to go.  All the others (barring Huygens with lts limited battery life) have had their mission extended, often multiple times.
Yes I know. So I've in more detail, more cases, more loudly (but diplomatically) ... said.

But when you propose even more taxing missions ... you get this thrown in your face. How do you prove a potential negative?

Offline Lar

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Re: New Frontiers 4
« Reply #367 on: 12/24/2017 03:34 am »
No, I got it.
No, you didn't.

My question, which wasn't ideological at all, however much you might want it to be, was answered satisfactorily by people who aren't as quick to misjudge as you. And I agree with those that say that this process for deciding what science missions to fund is superb.

Subtopic closed as far as I am concerned.
« Last Edit: 12/24/2017 03:34 am by Lar »
"I think it would be great to be born on Earth and to die on Mars. Just hopefully not at the point of impact." -Elon Musk
"We're a little bit like the dog who caught the bus" - Musk after CRS-8 S1 successfully landed on ASDS OCISLY

Offline vapour_nudge

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Re: New Frontiers 4
« Reply #368 on: 12/24/2017 04:12 am »
And that's not even mentioning our current limits in building spacecraft for outer planet missions, where the best we can do, built upon decades of concerted work, isn't good enough for such long lived, hostile environment, missions.

Huh?  Not ONE outer planet mission has failed prior to completing it's primary mission, barring Juno, which still has several months to go.  All the others (barring Huygens with lts limited battery life) have had their mission extended, often multiple times.
Galileo didn’t do too well but these weren’t all New Frontiers missions which is the topic
« Last Edit: 12/24/2017 04:15 am by vapour_nudge »

Offline Dalhousie

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Re: New Frontiers 4
« Reply #369 on: 12/24/2017 08:21 am »
And that's not even mentioning our current limits in building spacecraft for outer planet missions, where the best we can do, built upon decades of concerted work, isn't good enough for such long lived, hostile environment, missions.

Huh?  Not ONE outer planet mission has failed prior to completing it's primary mission, barring Juno, which still has several months to go.  All the others (barring Huygens with lts limited battery life) have had their mission extended, often multiple times.
Galileo didn’t do too well but these weren’t all New Frontiers missions which is the topic

Apart from the antenna problem (due to storage) it performed very well and was twice extended.
Apologies in advance for any lack of civility - it's unintended

Offline vjkane

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Re: New Frontiers 4
« Reply #370 on: 12/24/2017 02:08 pm »
When we did the decadal, I think we were aware of three potential comet sampling mechanisms, two that were public and one that was proprietary and that we were not allowed to know about, but which was provided to the cost estimators with an NDA. I can only remember one of the two public ones, and it involved a kind of wire brush and scoop mechanism--think of it like a vacuum cleaner with wire brushes up front that would scoop the sample into the collector. The strength of such a mechanism is that it works with multiple samples. If the surface is snow, it scoops it right up. If the surface is hard ice, it scrapes it up. I think the downside is that what you get is an aggregated sample (I'm probably using the wrong word). It's a collection of all the stuff mixed together. What you may want is a small ice core from one spot, and some snow from another spot, and some ice chunks from another spot. So maybe you use this method and you use some other sampling device.
For really small bodies such as P67 or Bennu, sampling is a challenge.  The gravity is too low to hold the spacecraft on the body, so you can take your time and use a scoop or a drill.  You have a very brief contact in which the momentum of the spacecraft is pressing your sampling mechanism to the surface.  OSIRIS-REx uses a blast of gas to push material off the surface and into the sample container.  To get a sample from depth at a comet, at least two proposed sampling mechanisms shot a tube/harpoon into the surface.  (On was at the end of an arm, the other was an actual tethered harpoon.)  This had the added advantage of preserving the stratigraphy of the sample.

For a larger body such as Phobos, the gravity is sufficiently high that the spacecraft can sit on  the surface and use more conventional approaches.  This is what JAXA's MMX mission will do.

Offline vjkane

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Re: New Frontiers 4
« Reply #371 on: 12/24/2017 02:43 pm »

Allow me to comment on my own post...

This high cost of proposals is actually an argument for having fewer competitions for Discovery and selecting two each time instead of one. The reason is that if you have a competition every couple of years, then proposers are spending a lot of money each round for a low selection rate.

Put it this way: suppose you hold one competition in 2016, and then another competition in 2018, and each time you have 28 proposers and you select one winner each time. For those two competitions the proposers have spent $56 million for two winners over two years. Instead, if you do one competition in 2016 and another in 2020 and you select two winners each time, over four years you've spent $56 million, but selected four winners. It's a more efficient approach and it doesn't kill everybody putting together proposals. Of course, this also assumes that you have the budget to support more missions, and you might not. But NASA is aware that a lot of non-NASA money is being spent for each competition and they want to maximize effectiveness.
NASA has announced its intention to begin its next Discovery selection in about a year leading to a launch no later than 2025.  Any decisions on whether to select one or two missions would likely be made closer to the time of the selection when future funding flows would be better understood.

Two popular categories of proposals from the last competition may not be in this new one.  With JAXA's Phobos sample return/Deimos multiple flyby MMX mission, these two destinations would seem to be out of the running.  From an OPAG presentation this past summer, the outer planets community appears to have concluded that Discovery missions to those destinations don't fit within the budget cap.  I expect retries for Venus and more comet and asteroid proposals.  Not sure if a meaningful Ceres follow on mission can fit within the budget cap, but there are those main belt comets...  And I expect more Mars proposals.  The Next Mars Orbiter SDT identified several priority orbital studies, and the Mars community is making noise about stationary landers for sites with current water or ice (with attention to planetary protection) or small rovers to explore the diversity of ancient aqueous sites.

Offline Star One

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New Frontiers 4
« Reply #372 on: 12/24/2017 03:12 pm »

Allow me to comment on my own post...

This high cost of proposals is actually an argument for having fewer competitions for Discovery and selecting two each time instead of one. The reason is that if you have a competition every couple of years, then proposers are spending a lot of money each round for a low selection rate.

Put it this way: suppose you hold one competition in 2016, and then another competition in 2018, and each time you have 28 proposers and you select one winner each time. For those two competitions the proposers have spent $56 million for two winners over two years. Instead, if you do one competition in 2016 and another in 2020 and you select two winners each time, over four years you've spent $56 million, but selected four winners. It's a more efficient approach and it doesn't kill everybody putting together proposals. Of course, this also assumes that you have the budget to support more missions, and you might not. But NASA is aware that a lot of non-NASA money is being spent for each competition and they want to maximize effectiveness.
NASA has announced its intention to begin its next Discovery selection in about a year leading to a launch no later than 2025.  Any decisions on whether to select one or two missions would likely be made closer to the time of the selection when future funding flows would be better understood.

Two popular categories of proposals from the last competition may not be in this new one.  With JAXA's Phobos sample return/Deimos multiple flyby MMX mission, these two destinations would seem to be out of the running.  From an OPAG presentation this past summer, the outer planets community appears to have concluded that Discovery missions to those destinations don't fit within the budget cap.  I expect retries for Venus and more comet and asteroid proposals.  Not sure if a meaningful Ceres follow on mission can fit within the budget cap, but there are those main belt comets...  And I expect more Mars proposals.  The Next Mars Orbiter SDT identified several priority orbital studies, and the Mars community is making noise about stationary landers for sites with current water or ice (with attention to planetary protection) or small rovers to explore the diversity of ancient aqueous sites.

By the time those Mars projects get to the red planet Elon Musk could have his booted feet everywhere so maybe other destinations not due an influx of humans full of microorganisms might be a more worthy bet if you’re looking for life or anything in that line.

It might well be the case that any scientific missions to the moon and Mars from the mid-2030s onwards is liable to face the challenge that these destinations will be seen as the primary remit of private industry. Let’s not even start on the possibilities of asteroid mining. Hopefully by then the technology will be ready that Venus becomes a primary focus of scientific missions again as I really can’t see any private industry interest in it.

Perhaps some form of informal slicing up of the solar system will have to take place to avoid standing on each other’s toes when it comes to targets of interest.
« Last Edit: 12/24/2017 03:17 pm by Star One »

Offline Lar

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Re: New Frontiers 4
« Reply #373 on: 12/24/2017 03:39 pm »
It would be foolish to completely discount the possibility of regular cargo transport to multiple destinations by 2030. It would also be foolish to count on it. So it seems like a challenging time for mission planning. 

Venus might well be of commercial interest, as a source of volatiles if nothing else. But probably not for a while.
« Last Edit: 12/24/2017 03:40 pm by Lar »
"I think it would be great to be born on Earth and to die on Mars. Just hopefully not at the point of impact." -Elon Musk
"We're a little bit like the dog who caught the bus" - Musk after CRS-8 S1 successfully landed on ASDS OCISLY

Offline redliox

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Re: New Frontiers 4
« Reply #374 on: 12/24/2017 09:22 pm »
Borderline off topic to bring Musk into this thread, although you guys have a point in that the launch industry may be more competitive and flexible in the coming decade.

Well for better or worse it looks like the upcoming Frontier and Discovery missions will be about comets, Titan, and asteroids.  Titan was the definite wildcard.  Given how all the respective missions, while not the first to visit any of these types of targets, are all doing something unique in their missions.

Regarding New Frontiers let's focus the discussion to Dragonfly and CAESAR.  They're the finalists and both are pretty ambitious.  As for Venus and it's second kick in its asteroid deposit those complaints in the Venus threads.  I feel as much for Venus as I do the overlooked Deimos/Phobos missions in the Discovery lineup, but the choice is made and the (space) traveler shall come.
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Offline Star One

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New Frontiers 4
« Reply #375 on: 12/24/2017 10:14 pm »
Borderline off topic to bring Musk into this thread, although you guys have a point in that the launch industry may be more competitive and flexible in the coming decade.

Well for better or worse it looks like the upcoming Frontier and Discovery missions will be about comets, Titan, and asteroids.  Titan was the definite wildcard.  Given how all the respective missions, while not the first to visit any of these types of targets, are all doing something unique in their missions.

Regarding New Frontiers let's focus the discussion to Dragonfly and CAESAR.  They're the finalists and both are pretty ambitious.  As for Venus and it's second kick in its asteroid deposit those complaints in the Venus threads.  I feel as much for Venus as I do the overlooked Deimos/Phobos missions in the Discovery lineup, but the choice is made and the (space) traveler shall come.

Thinking to talk of such missions without considering the wider world especially when the industry is likely to change so greatly over the coming decade or two seems a curious argument to make. Even such a basic element of launch cost which has often been a large factor in such projects cost projections is liable to greatly be impacted. One might almost think someone was seeking to stifle debate.
« Last Edit: 12/24/2017 10:16 pm by Star One »

Offline ccdengr

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Re: New Frontiers 4
« Reply #376 on: 12/24/2017 10:45 pm »
One might almost think someone was seeking to stifle debate.
It's not a debate, it's just a tiresome rehash of every other SpaceX thread on this forum.

If launch costs decrease, I'm sure NASA's planetary program will take advantage of it to the extent that it politically can.

Offline Star One

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New Frontiers 4
« Reply #377 on: 12/24/2017 10:51 pm »
One might almost think someone was seeking to stifle debate.
It's not a debate, it's just a tiresome rehash of every other SpaceX thread on this forum.

If launch costs decrease, I'm sure NASA's planetary program will take advantage of it to the extent that it politically can.

It is a topic for debate unless you somehow think the New Horizons program exists in some kind of magical bubble outside of the changing reality of the industry.

By the way I am not sure why you thought anyone was automatically referring to Space X being as the changes are larger than one company.
« Last Edit: 12/24/2017 10:54 pm by Star One »

Offline hop

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Re: New Frontiers 4
« Reply #378 on: 12/24/2017 11:00 pm »
Thinking to talk of such missions without considering the wider world especially when the industry is likely to change so greatly over the coming decade or two seems a curious argument to make. Even such a basic element of launch cost which has often been a large factor in such projects cost projections is liable to greatly be impacted. One might almost think someone was seeking to stifle debate.
One of the NF finalists will be selected in 2019. Final design and construction will follow immediately, with little margin to meet launch dates in '24 or '25. Existing or firmly planned LVs with appropriate capabilities need to be identified by the time the mission is selected, and actual LV selection needs to happen not terribly long after that.

This isn't about "stifling debate" it's about timescales that real missions development actually happens on. NF class missions take ~4 years to build. Speculative new capabilities arriving after ~2020 or so are irrelevant to NF4 missions that need to meet a hard launch date in the '24-'25 timeframe.

Offline Lar

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Re: New Frontiers 4
« Reply #379 on: 12/24/2017 11:08 pm »
Borderline off topic to bring Musk into this thread, although you guys have a point in that the launch industry may be more competitive and flexible in the coming decade.

Well for better or worse it looks like the upcoming Frontier and Discovery missions will be about comets, Titan, and asteroids.  Titan was the definite wildcard.  Given how all the respective missions, while not the first to visit any of these types of targets, are all doing something unique in their missions.

Regarding New Frontiers let's focus the discussion to Dragonfly and CAESAR.  They're the finalists and both are pretty ambitious.  As for Venus and it's second kick in its asteroid deposit those complaints in the Venus threads.  I feel as much for Venus as I do the overlooked Deimos/Phobos missions in the Discovery lineup, but the choice is made and the (space) traveler shall come.

Titan and the various asteroids are not likely to see routine cargo service by the time these missions fly. Mars by 2030 maybe. But not in time for the 2020 rover... So mostly moot for this round.
« Last Edit: 12/24/2017 11:14 pm by Lar »
"I think it would be great to be born on Earth and to die on Mars. Just hopefully not at the point of impact." -Elon Musk
"We're a little bit like the dog who caught the bus" - Musk after CRS-8 S1 successfully landed on ASDS OCISLY

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