Quote from: Don2 on 11/30/2022 07:24 pmThis is a JPL mission. They are trying to manage budget and industrial base shortages. I suspect that NEOS is on the losing side of the trade offs that need to be made. It is good to see that Congress cares about the mission.The review board was clear. No new missions until the engineering staffing to projects ratio is fixed (and that's more than just hiring new engineering bodies; they have to become effective within the JPL culture and on their particular projects).NEOS currently isn't a mission in development, so it would fall under that rule.
This is a JPL mission. They are trying to manage budget and industrial base shortages. I suspect that NEOS is on the losing side of the trade offs that need to be made. It is good to see that Congress cares about the mission.
Quote from: vjkane on 11/30/2022 09:47 pmQuote from: Don2 on 11/30/2022 07:24 pmThis is a JPL mission. They are trying to manage budget and industrial base shortages. I suspect that NEOS is on the losing side of the trade offs that need to be made. It is good to see that Congress cares about the mission.The review board was clear. No new missions until the engineering staffing to projects ratio is fixed (and that's more than just hiring new engineering bodies; they have to become effective within the JPL culture and on their particular projects).NEOS currently isn't a mission in development, so it would fall under that rule.How is JPL involved and do they need to be? This mission came out of Univ. of Arizona
A NASA infrared space telescope specifically designed to locate Earth-threatening asteroids and comets cleared a critical review last week and is now an official NASA program. NASA announced today that the Near Earth Object Surveyor is approved to move into Phase C of development, but with a two-year delay from 2026 to 2028 and associated cost increase. Instead of $500-600 million, it is now $1.2 billion not including launch.
[snip]How is JPL involved and do they need to be? This mission came out of Univ. of Arizona
[snip] I seem to remember that the sensors required significant technical development.
1/2 At SBAG, Q comes up abt pricetag of NEO Surveyor growing from ~$600M to $1.2B. How do we in community explain it to others?Lori Glaze, NASA Plan Sci Div Dir, says she (i.e. NASA HQ) will take ownership of that bc it's due to delays caused by HQ.2/2 Survey Director Amy Mainzer adds: This is a problem we know how to solve. How many global problems do we know how to solve for $1 billion?
It does sound shockingly expensive for a such a small passively cooled telescope with a single instrument (even if the camera is large for IR).
Quote from: ttle2 on 01/25/2023 03:07 pmIt does sound shockingly expensive for a such a small passively cooled telescope with a single instrument (even if the camera is large for IR).Delaying projects hugely inflates costs. JWST's cost was significantly impacted by budget delays (read over a billion dollars). EVERYONE involved in the project needs to stay on the payroll until their part is done. If it takes 3x longer to do that stuff, you have to pay them all that time. Personal is one of if not the biggest cost of building space craft.So cutting 10% can increase cost 30% overall. Congress usually just doesn't care
Even $600 million sounded kinda steep, almost twice what WISE cost.
In regards to the first slide:H2RG detectors are mature, established technology, even with the substrate removed. (circa 2007?)Sidecar ASICs are mature, established technology.Cryogenic IR beamsplitters are mature, established technology.Cryogenic to ambient flex cables are mature, established technology.The optical configuration, not discussed here, is new, but not remarkably large, and the technology is mature and established.Been there, flown that. (approximately)I don't get the enormous cost, or the doubling for two or three year delay.And saying that "solving a world problem is worth a billion dollars" is reprehensible and very self-important.PS What is the significance of the Arecibo slide?They hit their stride finding more than 20 Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) each year.(In every direction because there was no problem for radar observations to point inward in the solar system, unlike optical observations.)Was it that the unaffordable cost of rebuilding Arecibo would be a fraction of the increase in cost of NEOS?
Quote from: ttle2 on 01/25/2023 03:16 pmEven $600 million sounded kinda steep, almost twice what WISE cost.There's a lot of mud in the numbers being thrown around. I think some of the early numbers did not include launch costs, and they may have also excluded the Phase E (operations) costs. So the costs are not always comparing the same things. Also, some of the delays came at very bad times in terms of their effects on costs. (Put differently, if the delay had been announced a few months earlier, the cost impact would have been lower.) Finally, there is a lot that was going on behind the scenes in terms of programmatic decisions at HQ that has not become public, and probably never will, and that drove up the costs.
Thats right. Won't it be a little harder to compare new mission prices to any existing ones since the decadal brought up the idea of including phase E costs into the original cost? And all existing/previous missions didn't have to account for that?