NASASpaceFlight.com Forum
Robotic Spacecraft (Astronomy, Planetary, Earth, Solar/Heliophysics) => Space Science Coverage => Topic started by: Blackstar on 02/18/2015 12:07 am
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Starting this thread to keep tabs on what proposals are being submitted to the Discovery program this round (which I think closed today).
Here are ones that I am aware of (note that question marks indicate that I've heard of an additional mission proposal, but either do not have details or do not have permission to mention it):
Moon
NanoSWARM–-Cubesat Discovery mission to study space weathering, lunar magnetism, lunar water and small-scale magnetospheres--LPSC 2015 abstract
MARE (Moon Age and Regolith Explorer)--lunar lander: http://www.nature.com/news/five-solar-system-sights-nasa-should-visit-1.17119
Phobos/Deimos
PANDORA (Phobos ANd Deimos ORigin Assessment)--JPL Phobos/Deimos mission disclosed at DPS
PADME--Ames Phobos/Deimos mission disclosed at DPS
Mars-Moons Exploration, Reconnaissance and Landed Investigation (MERLIN)--LPSC 2015 abstract
Venus
Venus Atmosphere and Surface Explorer--Venus atmospheric mission disclosed at DPS
RAVEN (Radar At VENus)--Venus radar mission: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2009AGUFM.P31D..04S
VERITAS (Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR Topography and Spectroscopy)--Venus radar mission: http://www.nature.com/news/five-solar-system-sights-nasa-should-visit-1.17119
Io
Io Volcanic Observer--disclosed at DPS
Telescopes
Whipple--selected for tech funding in last round
NEOCam--JPL mission selected for tech funding in last round
Kuiper--planetary telescope to be discussed at OPAG
Main Belt Asteroids
Psyche--details required
Multiple (9) asteroid mission: http://www.nature.com/news/five-solar-system-sights-nasa-should-visit-1.17119
Trojan Asteroids
Lucy: http://www.nature.com/news/five-solar-system-sights-nasa-should-visit-1.17119
Near Earth Objects
DARe Dark Asteroid Rendezvous--LPSC 2015 abstract
BASiX (Binary Asteroid in-situ Explorer): http://www.nature.com/news/five-solar-system-sights-nasa-should-visit-1.17119
Comets
CORE-COmet Radar Explorer--disclosed at DPS 2014
Enceladus
Enceladus Life Finder--disclosed on a Facebook post by Carolyn Porco - specific NSF discussion thread: http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=36823.0
Mars
Mars Icebreaker Life--Ames mission based on Phoenix lander disclosed on internet
??
Edit/Lar: crosslink to specific discussion thread where known
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My list is a bit longer and includes ESA M4 planetary proposals that I know about. The ESA missions would be approximately the same scope as a Discovery mission, although the ESA program also has many proposals for astrophysics missions.
Venus
3? Discovery radar proposals
EnVision (ESA) radar
Venus Atmosphere and Surface Explorer
Space Telescopes
Kuiper
Sentinel
Moon
Farside (ESA)
Near Earth Asteroids
Marco Polo-D (ESA + China)
BASiX
DARe
Mars
IceBreaker
Phobos and Demos
Merlin
PADME
Pandora
Comets
Reportedly several teams preparing Discovery proposals
Main Belt Asteroids
Psyche
Castila (ESA)
Jovian System
Io Observer
Saturnian System
Enceladus Life Finder
Hera Saturn probe (ESA + USA)
Uranian System
Uranus Pathfinder (ESA + US)
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NASA also is conducting a competition to select a planetary CubeSat mission in addition to the two that are already funded (by a different part of NASA than the planetary program).
I've rounded up a number of the proposals here:
http://futureplanets.blogspot.com/2015/02/planetary-cubesats-begin-to-come-of-age.html
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There's a few listed on the OPAG agenda:
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/opag/feb2015/agenda.pdf
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1-I don't know anything more about this [PRiME]. Is it an actual Discovery mission, or an instrument? What is the mission itself?
3-I have some more information on that (although not much), but I'll have to ask permission to share it.
As I recall, PRiME was a proposed Discovery mission to carry an unusually sensitive mass spectrometer to a comet rendezvous to get much more sensitive measurements than Rosetta's MS will. NASA funded further development on the MS (MASPEX or something like that?). I've seen the instrument listed in other possible proposals, so it may become the new gold standard. PRiME itself could also be re-proposed with the now, presumably, much more mature MS instrument.
PADME appears to be the least ambitious of the three Martian moon proposals I know about. (One other has an orbiter and for another the spacecraft is also a lander.) That could be good if reviewers are positive about the science importance of these moons but conservative on engineering risks. Less good if they like the science but think the other missions are low risk.
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This is such an interesting thread, with so many possible candidates; I often find it reassuring to read proposed Discovery presentations when preparing rather smaller grant applications (for history, hence, the traceability matrix never looks quite as nice).
I would be intrigued to see if MAGIC was proposed? I thought it a very promising idea, though I appreciate also that Mars has been well supported indeed. Perhaps it carrying another relay payload would confer some intangible/unweighted advantage in selection. It does remind me, in an oblique way, not only of HiRISE, but also of the special optics (MIDAS) idea from 2006 OPAG - very powerful camera moving into the <10cm realm. IVO and TiME were my previous most wanted options.
RAVEN was the only Venus radar mission I saw published abstracts on; a large leap in resolution over Magellan. Seemed the most plausible Venus option (surely no lander is plausible for less than NF)? Edit: The EAGLE SAR mission for Mars was also interesting, though again, perhaps there are strong reasons of program balance to spread Discovery a little more widely.
Incidentally, I hope there will be good reports from OPAG this week, regarding Discovery Outer Planets, and EC updates. Awaiting for the presentations page from OPAG meetings get me through the work day!
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Hi Blackstar,
No worries, the abstracts I saw for these were:
MAGIC: www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/marsconcepts2012/pdf/4325.pdf
RAVEN: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2009AGUFM.P31D..04S
And MIDAS was a discussion presentation at the mid-2006 OPAG. The USMF forum had some discussion on it - I was somewhat irrationally captivated by the idea:
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/opag/may_06_meeting/presentations/pitman.pdf
A similar optical system may have been on some of the assorted, and rather optimistic, JIMO instrument ideas: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2004/pdf/1890.pdf and http://cfd.me.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Multiple-Instrument-Distributed-Aperture-Sensor-MIDAS-For-Planetary-Remote-Sensing.pdf
All the best,
Roland
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Here is an LPSC abstract for PANDORA. I had a slide presentation for this that covers the same stuff, but I cannot find it.
Still good to see it. I heard about PADME earlier but not about a second Martian moon mission. Aside from being a robust and dedicated vehicle to the moons, high imaging and spectroscopy are the only 'priorities' mentioned in place of specific instruments.
Here is a related pdf page I discovered but its not much more informative: http://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2015/pdf/2792.pdf (http://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2015/pdf/2792.pdf)
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Personally I'm rooting for any of the Martian moon missions and Io Observer. After them I'd love to see the Uranus Pathfinder but (unless ESA REALLY wants to pay the bill) that's a bit beyond Discovery class. Venus I'd rank next in line, but only because the lack of missions there genuinely deserves some pity.
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[...]
RAVEN was the only Venus radar mission I saw published abstracts on; a large leap in resolution over Magellan. Seemed the most plausible Venus option (surely no lander is plausible for less than NF)?
[...]
Why would a Venus lander be so expensive? It's the easiest planet to reach from a delta-v and launch windows perspective. It has an atmosphere that enables aerobraking with the technology that we already use on Earth. The pressure problem is not that different from deep sea. And we've done 1,000 atmospheres of pressure many times. The real big problem is cooling the electronics. But mechanics, comm, and such are all relatively easy for a planetary mission.
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[...]
RAVEN was the only Venus radar mission I saw published abstracts on; a large leap in resolution over Magellan. Seemed the most plausible Venus option (surely no lander is plausible for less than NF)?
[...]
Why would a Venus lander be so expensive? It's the easiest planet to reach from a delta-v and launch windows perspective. It has an atmosphere that enables aerobraking with the technology that we already use on Earth. The pressure problem is not that different from deep sea. And we've done 1,000 atmospheres of pressure many times. The real big problem is cooling the electronics. But mechanics, comm, and such are all relatively easy for a planetary mission.
Testing isn't going to be cheap. Most spacecraft are tested by putting them in a vacuum chamber. That's not what you do for a Venus spacecraft.
Agree testing would be tough.
Glenn has a new Venus chamber that they were putting the finishing touches on when I was there summer of 2013.
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Starting this thread to keep tabs on what proposals are being submitted to the Discovery program this round (which I think closed today).
What is the overall schedule like again? As you mentioned they're now closed to further proposals so when would the current batch result first with finalists and then the final selection?
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The cooling problem is crippling though, isn't it? No electronics can operate at Venus's temperature, and how/where do you reject the heat?
Why would a Venus lander be so expensive? It's the easiest planet to reach from a delta-v and launch windows perspective. It has an atmosphere that enables aerobraking with the technology that we already use on Earth. The pressure problem is not that different from deep sea. And we've done 1,000 atmospheres of pressure many times. The real big problem is cooling the electronics. But mechanics, comm, and such are all relatively easy for a planetary mission.
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Am I being too pessimistic/paranoid if I feel like they're going to pick another low-complexity/low-cost mars proposal like InSight more-or-less by default, because it's more politically favorable per the mars hype of recent years?
I am generally curious how much a role agency (and higher) politics play in the selection process.
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Hi Blackstar,
No worries, the abstracts I saw for these were:
MAGIC: www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/marsconcepts2012/pdf/4325.pdf
RAVEN: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2009AGUFM.P31D..04S
And MIDAS was a discussion presentation at the mid-2006 OPAG. The USMF forum had some discussion on it - I was somewhat irrationally captivated by the idea:
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/opag/may_06_meeting/presentations/pitman.pdf
A similar optical system may have been on some of the assorted, and rather optimistic, JIMO instrument ideas: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2004/pdf/1890.pdf and http://cfd.me.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Multiple-Instrument-Distributed-Aperture-Sensor-MIDAS-For-Planetary-Remote-Sensing.pdf
All the best,
Roland
Am I being too pessimistic/paranoid if I feel like they're going to pick another low-complexity/low-cost mars proposal like InSight more-or-less by default, because it's more politically favorable per the mars hype of recent years?
I am generally curious how much a role agency (and higher) politics play in the selection process.
I fear that you might be right on this. The IO observer is the mission that catches my interest amongst the proposals listed.
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The cooling problem is crippling though, isn't it? No electronics can operate at Venus's temperature, and how/where do you reject the heat?
Why would a Venus lander be so expensive? It's the easiest planet to reach from a delta-v and launch windows perspective. It has an atmosphere that enables aerobraking with the technology that we already use on Earth. The pressure problem is not that different from deep sea. And we've done 1,000 atmospheres of pressure many times. The real big problem is cooling the electronics. But mechanics, comm, and such are all relatively easy for a planetary mission.
A long term Venus lander would require-
a) Really good insulation.
b) Active cooling with an exotic, high temp heat pump system with a cryogenic compressor and an external heat exchanger made of some exotic metals that can withstand the heat and sulfur in the atmosphere.
c) Electronics stable to 200°c - hard but not impossible with the right chips/board designs.
d) A kick ass power source that can keep the ac running.
I think d is the hardest problem to solve as there isn't that much sun light under the clouds and anything nuclear is just going to exacerbate the thermal issues.
Or we could be okay with a short duration (6 hours?) mission cooled with a tank of a cryogenic substance (something long term storable) and when that's gone the mission is over....
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Am I being too pessimistic/paranoid if I feel like they're going to pick another low-complexity/low-cost mars proposal like InSight more-or-less by default, because it's more politically favorable per the mars hype of recent years?
I am generally curious how much a role agency (and higher) politics play in the selection process.
Well, you need to define what you mean by "politics." I would say that the selection of Discovery and New Frontiers missions are probably the least political selections NASA does. By that I mean that neither the White House nor Congress is telling NASA what to do, the agency is making the selection based upon their determination of the scientific and technical merits of the proposals, how they fit into the overall portfolio of missions, and similar considerations. In fact, the entire purpose of creating the Discovery and New Frontiers program lines was to take the politics out of the equation.
Now you could still call that "political" if you want, because NASA doesn't operate on its own--it is part of the executive branch. It cannot do things that may anger the White House and congressional leadership without facing possible consequences. And there have been situations in the past where Discovery and New Frontiers missions either were, or could possibly have been influenced by bigger "political" issues. The most common political issue is the desire to stay within the budget caps for the programs.
I'll give a few examples:
-Prospector
AA for science Wes Huntress picked the cheapest of the mission proposals because he wanted to send a message to proposers to try to keep costs down. (I heard this from him directly.)
-GRAIL
The mission most likely to stay within the cost cap (and in fact, it came in under budget). It was no secret that AA for science Alan Stern wanted cheaper missions and had warned people repeatedly that he thought that missions going over-budget was hurting the program. So he was sending a message. Also, it was a lunar mission, and the president had announced plans to return humans to the Moon. Maybe that influenced Stern as well. That said, Stern also was interested in lunar missions in general.
-OSIRIS-REx (New Frontiers)
The mission most likely to stay within the cost cap. I don't think the fact that this is an asteroid mission had anything to do with NASA's new focus on asteroids. I think it was simply an effort to stay on budget.
-InSight
The mission most likely to stay within the cost cap. Now you could also suspect that AA for science Grunsfeld had been talking a lot about Mars and that influenced the decision. But I think that it probably really came down to budget. Plus, the ASRGs were starting to run way over budget too, so NASA was possibly going to get stuck with a mission that was very expensive (TiME or Comet Hopper) plus a power source that was going to run over budget.
Now I'd also argue that budget is simply something that has to be considered all the time and because this is government, it is part of the political system by definition. If you go back to my definition of "political," here's the way to look at it: the White House and Congress provide NASA with a budget line for Discovery and New Frontiers. Then they stay hands off. As long as the projects do not go over budget, then OMB and Congress don't pay attention. They leave NASA alone. As soon as the projects go over budget, then OMB in particular starts asking questions. NASA has to start looking for money from other projects to pay for the overruns. And it unbalances the overall portfolio. So the best way for NASA to keep OMB and Congress from poking around in their business is to select programs that will stay within budget, and to manage them carefully so that they don't go over budget.
And this is where once again I will sound the trumpet for the decadal survey process. It works amazingly well at keeping politics out of the selection process as much as possible. The decadal survey is also a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for science programs to happen. If it isn't in the decadal survey, it's very difficult for somebody to come along and whisper in a congressman's ear and get a program to happen. The reason that Mars 2020 exists, and the reason that Europa Clipper now exists, is because the decadal survey said that they were worthwhile programs. And the reason that some other programs did not get approval despite lobbying Congress for them (like New Horizons 2) is because they were NOT in the decadal survey.
It's going to sound maudlin, but the U.S. has developed a pretty good process for picking science missions, and you can be proud of the people--in the White House, Congress, NASA, and the scientific community--who helped establish it over many decades.
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Am I being too pessimistic/paranoid if I feel like they're going to pick another low-complexity/low-cost mars proposal like InSight more-or-less by default, because it's more politically favorable per the mars hype of recent years?
...
I'm glad to be alive at a time when this is a real gripe that people have. :)
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Sweet updates on the IVO Blackstar! It looks eye catching, and I love the idea of 3 probes simultaneously at Jupiter. The Europa plume search is a bonus, no doubt mentioned in light of 'Clipper's selection and the need to confirm whether or not Hubble's discovery is true.
Presuming the concept picture is valid, it looks like they're mimicking Juno's spin design to a degree in addition to radiation tolerance.
A question I'd have would be how they would handle imaging from an inclined orbit; when I asked similar questions to Europa engineers they spoke of the speed differences between the satellite and probe causing trouble, with images becoming 'smeared' one way or another. I'm under the impression the IVO team knows a way to counter this the 'Clipper team can't utilize.
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Here's the public info on IVO: http://pirlwww.lpl.arizona.edu/~perry/io_images/B-IVO-Fact%20Sheet_20150217-public.pdf (http://pirlwww.lpl.arizona.edu/~perry/io_images/B-IVO-Fact%20Sheet_20150217-public.pdf)
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Sweet updates on the IVO Blackstar! It looks eye catching, and I love the idea of 3 probes simultaneously at Jupiter. The Europa plume search is a bonus, no doubt mentioned in light of 'Clipper's selection and the need to confirm whether or not Hubble's discovery is true.
Presuming the concept picture is valid, it looks like they're mimicking Juno's spin design to a degree in addition to radiation tolerance.
A question I'd have would be how they would handle imaging from an inclined orbit; when I asked similar questions to Europa engineers they spoke of the speed differences between the satellite and probe causing trouble, with images becoming 'smeared' one way or another. I'm under the impression the IVO team knows a way to counter this the 'Clipper team can't utilize.
May be it has to do with IVO's 45 inclined orbit? Apparently a luxury that EC didn't had?
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As I mentioned earlier, I'm going to try to keep this thread primarily for information postings, not comments. So I have been deleting my comments after awhile and keeping the information posts. (Feel free to do that with your own posts if you want.) I will also be consolidating my posts. So as I get pdf copies of things like the IVO and Kuiper slides, I'm going to put them into the first post and delete the jpeg version.
These fact sheets are from the LAST Discovery competition, not the current one. These are from the ASRG proposals. TiME and CHopper were the two finalists from this group, but did not get selected. And as we all know, ASRG has now been put on hold. However, IVO has been converted from an ASRG mission during the last round to a solar powered mission this round. It is possible that a couple of these, such as CHopper and maybe Ilion have also been converted to solar power and resubmitted during the current round, although their names may have been changed.
Again, these are from the LAST Discovery competition, not the current one.
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For comparative purposes, does anyone have information on the number and types of proposals submitted in the last Discovery round? I seem to recall it was 28, but was wondering about the breakdown of the targets and how many included ASRGs.
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A number of proposals are discussed in this Nature.com article: http://www.nature.com/news/five-solar-system-sights-nasa-should-visit-1.17119
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A number of proposals are discussed in this Nature.com article: http://www.nature.com/news/five-solar-system-sights-nasa-should-visit-1.17119
Small voting share but I note that for now Io is coming top in the poll attached to the article.
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A number of proposals are discussed in this Nature.com article: http://www.nature.com/news/five-solar-system-sights-nasa-should-visit-1.17119
Small voting share but I note that for now Io is coming top in the poll attached to the article.
I noticed that too, followed by Venus and then the Moon. I don't know how well Io would fit into a Discovery-sized mission but it certainly deserves a visit.
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A number of proposals are discussed in this Nature.com article: http://www.nature.com/news/five-solar-system-sights-nasa-should-visit-1.17119
Small voting share but I note that for now Io is coming top in the poll attached to the article.
I noticed that too, followed by Venus and then the Moon. I don't know how well Io would fit into a Discovery-sized mission but it certainly deserves a visit.
I would love to see an Io mission as well but with my realists hat on it does seem a bit over ambitious for a discovery class mission.:(
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A number of proposals are discussed in this Nature.com article: http://www.nature.com/news/five-solar-system-sights-nasa-should-visit-1.17119
The BASIX concept intrigues me. Is there a list of candidate asteroids for that mission? Both generally curious, and just musing over the idea of a return to Ida after 22 years to beat up poor Dactyl. :P
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A number of proposals are discussed in this Nature.com article: http://www.nature.com/news/five-solar-system-sights-nasa-should-visit-1.17119
Small voting share but I note that for now Io is coming top in the poll attached to the article.
Interesting observation on the poll results. The voting appears to be the inverse of the affordability of a propose mission.
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UPDATE: I updated the list at the beginning of this thread. Based upon that, plus the two others that I know about but don't have confirmation on, plus my assumption that CHopper has been resubmitted without the ASRG, that would be 22 out of the 28 proposals, which is pretty darned good. I suspect that there is also at least one Moon lander (seismology) based upon some things I heard in the past. And it would make sense for there to be at least one or two Mars mission proposals in there as well, because there is still Mars science to be done.
I've heard that there are three comet missions being proposed. CHopper likely would be one. Primitive Material Explorer (PriME) with its MASPEX mass spectrometer would be another. (Note: the MASPEX instrument would also be carried by the Enceladus mission. MASPEX may be the new gold standard.)
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Does anyone have any more resources on Lucy? I did a cursory search and didn't find anything other than the mention here and the nature article linked to from here. The Jovian Trojans are a favourite theme of mine.
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Does anyone have any more resources on Lucy? I did a cursory search and didn't find anything other than the mention here and the nature article linked to from here. The Jovian Trojans are a favourite theme of mine.
No data beyond the Nature summary. Given that it's a tour of asteroids, I suspect that it would be a multi-fly mission. The Decadal Survey mission study discusses possible strategies for Trojan asteroid flybys (although they combined those with at least one rendezvous if I remember correctly).
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Does anyone have any more resources on Lucy? I did a cursory search and didn't find anything other than the mention here and the nature article linked to from here. The Jovian Trojans are a favourite theme of mine.
If you are really interested in trajectory design, there is this thesis: http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1533&context=masters_theses
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I would assume that any 9-flyby mission has a precise launch window without much backup, and I wonder how that factors into the risk calculations for Discovery awards. Mars missions have a few weeks, and worst-case 18 months later (MSL). Even New Horizons, I think, protected for a Pluto trajectory that didn't use the Jupiter gravity assist, although it would've taken a few extra years to get there.
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I would assume that any 9-flyby mission has a precise launch window without much backup, and I wonder how that factors into the risk calculations for Discovery awards. Mars missions have a few weeks, and worst-case 18 months later (MSL). Even New Horizons, I think, protected for a Pluto trajectory that didn't use the Jupiter gravity assist, although it would've taken a few extra years to get there.
They probably would use a solar electric propulsion stage, so there is probably a fair amount of flexibility
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I am likely misremembering, but I seem to recall an REP Trojan mission study, which I can't find at the moment. I think it had an SEP option in it, which was less ambitious, but perhaps the Lucy mission is an evolution of that concept. Not sure if it was DSMCE or New Frontiers; or I could be completely confused.
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Okay, I took the plunge and went to the Wikipedia entry on the Discovery program:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_Program
There's some good stuff in there. There is also some junk. Chasing down the sources is a bit annoying, because it looks like people provided the wrong footnotes in a few cases. I did find this intriguing. It refers to the 2010-11 competition:
"According to the BBC, of the 28 mission proposals, 3 were for the Moon, 4 for Mars, 7 for Venus, 1 Jupiter, 1 to a Jupiter Trojan, 2 to Saturn, 7 to asteroids, and 3 to Comets."
Unfortunately, the reference is not to a BBC source, so I cannot track that down (although I did not try searching the BBC). It is possible to suss some of those out. I think the questions in my mind concern the Moon and Mars proposals. The Mars proposals could include Phobos, so maybe a couple of the Phobos missions this round were actually submitted the last time as well.
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AFAIK Lucy isn't SEP, it would be launched on a ballistic trajectory that would pass through both trojan clouds on successive heliocentric orbits before being ejected on comet-like, barely-bound orbit. It is solar powered, however, so it can't operate much beyond Jupiter.
There were several mission posters at LPSC, though it is always hard to tell how serious they are. There 2 or 3 Phobos/Demos missions that looked low technical risk, but would really raise some cockles about two Discoveries in a row to Mars. Boeing was promoting an asteroid mission concept based on their 702SP SEP bus. There was a solar-powered Enceladus plume sample-return mission (!!!) that I *think* was a Discovery proposal.
On the clearly-not-Discovery-proposal side, there was the RTG-powered Titan submarine; it used a phased-array antenna to communicate Direct-to-Earth from under the surface (methane is transparent to radio). Also, GSFC had Titan orbiter powered by nuclear reactor, plus an SEP stage (because a reactor just isn't enough). And Boeing was busy handing out cards advertising a Uranus Orbiter on SLS...
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As to six that may well be the case but that doesn't stop it being a good idea.:)
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Boeing has been hitting a number of conferences trying to sell their SEP comm sat bus for planetary missions. I've seen descriptions of Venusian, Martian, and Europan missions.
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@Blackstar thanks for that information.
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I'll comment on the stuff that I have some familiarity with:
One of the dirty little secrets of the planetary science program history is that Lockheed Martin has for a long time apparently made very little profit on their NASA planetary spacecraft. They do it for reasons other than making money, like honing their skills, corporate prestige, etc.
Really, you have proof of this? Having worked with LM on prior Discovery proposals, I find this 180-deg from reality. Based on your comment, given how often JPL overruns their missions, their goal must be gouge the taxpayer for everything they can. Does your comment hold true for Ball and Orbital as well given they try to offer lowest cost spacecraft solutions also?
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I'll comment on the stuff that I have some familiarity with:
One of the dirty little secrets of the planetary science program history is that Lockheed Martin has for a long time apparently made very little profit on their NASA planetary spacecraft. They do it for reasons other than making money, like honing their skills, corporate prestige, etc.
Really, you have proof of this? Having worked with LM on prior Discovery proposals, I find this 180-deg from reality. Based on your comment, given how often JPL overruns their missions, their goal must be gouge the taxpayer for everything they can. Does your comment hold true for Ball and Orbital as well given they try to offer lowest cost spacecraft solutions also?
There are many possibilities here, assuming that LM does make little profit here. The two top ones that come to mind are (1) they make little profit compared to their defense contracts (which I *think* are often cost plus) and (2) they under estimate the true cost of planetary spacecraft development and therefore eat into their profit margin to stay within budget. There are also other possibilities.
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Please clarify what "overruns their missions" means,
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Please clarify what "overruns their missions" means,
Cost overruns. I.e., MER, MSL, and now INsight.
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Please clarify what "overruns their missions" means,
Cost overruns. I.e., MER, MSL, and now INsight.
Yeah the other centers and contractors are doing so much better (JPSS, JWST)
InSight is eating its margins but it's basically on time/on budget.
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Yeah the other centers and contractors are doing so much better (JPSS, JWST)
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And this is relevant how? Blackstar was referencing Lockheed Martin. Last time I looked, LM wasn't involved with either JWST or JPSS. My comment was referencing JPL planetary missions as this is clearly Blackstar's home organization and thus JPL's performance is relative to the discussion given his comment about LM. Last time I looked, neither JWST or JPSS was a planetary mission and neither are being run by JPL. So again, how is your comment relevant? Stay on topic and add something of value or don't comment.
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Yeah the other centers and contractors are doing so much better (JPSS, JWST)
And this is relevant how? Blackstar was referencing Lockheed Martin. Last time I looked, LM wasn't involved with either JWST or JPSS. My comment was referencing JPL planetary missions as this is clearly Blackstar's home organization and thus JPL's performance is relative to the discussion given his comment about LM. Last time I looked, neither JWST or JPSS was a planetary mission and neither are being run by JPL. So again, how is your comment relevant? Stay on topic and add something of value or don't comment.
You seem to be uniquely upset about Lockheed/JPL cost and schedule performance, so I suggest looking at the larger context and seeing how poorly other centers and contractors are performing on their programs. I think the comparison is fair game.
More to the point though, I have not seen any information to back up your claims that InSight costs are wildly out of control as you characterize them.
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You seem to be uniquely upset about Lockheed/JPL cost and schedule performance, so I suggest looking at the larger context and seeing how poorly other centers and contractors are performing on their programs. I think the comparison is fair game.
More to the point though, I have not seen any information to back up your claims that InSight costs are wildly out of control as you characterize them.
Upset about LM? No. JPL? Yes. But according to Blackstar, LM's is somehow perpetuating a "dirty little secret" of low-balling planetary missions. I am calling him on that comment. Given NASA planetary missions that LM or any other spacecraft builder can compete on are cost plus award fee contracts with NASA centers as the Project Manager (i.e. JPL), JPL fully knows what LM (or Ball, or Orbital, or Boeing, or anyone else for that matter) costs are and the only thing that is negotiated is the fee. As such, if LM is hiding some dirty little secret, JPL is fully complicit in that act. Seems somewhat curious that a JPL employee (Blackstar) is calling out LM for having a dirty little secret when JPL is often running the show. The fact that Blackstar has yet to come back and provide a basis to support his claim speaks volumes. That you are so quick to come to his defense speaks equally loud, at least from where I am sitting.
Where did I state/characterize that InSight is "wildly out of control"? It will come as no surprise to anyone that InSight will not cross the finish line at or below the Discovery cost-cap. Reserves are gone and they are still in the early stages of ATLO, the instruments are late, and most cost overruns accrue during ATLO as the project scrambles to make their launch date, whatever it takes. Whether this over-run is 2% or 20% or 100% remains to be seen. My response merely stated that InSight will have a cost over-run. You might want to brush up on your reading comprehension skills and stop projecting your thoughts on to other posters.
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Seems somewhat curious that a JPL employee (Blackstar) is calling out LM for having a dirty little secret when JPL is often running the show.
Whether this over-run is 2% or 20% or 100% remains to be seen. My response merely stated that InSight will have a cost over-run. You might want to brush up on your reading comprehension skills and stop projecting your thoughts on to other posters.
1) Blackstar doesn't work for JPL and so far as I know never has.
2) According to the latest GAO report on major NASA projects, project cost growth rate is 2.4-3% (excluding JWST) for the last two years.
3) The InSight PI has been open about their development challenges. I agree, they appear to be on the edge and almost everything may to need to go right not to go over. Whether they may go over by a trivial amount or a significant amount remains to be seen.
4) Blackstar said that LM said that their profit margins on planetary missions are lower than for other business. Perhaps NASA drives a harder bargain than DoD. Perhaps science missions in general have lower profit margins than on other spacecraft or aircraft businesses. Perhaps science missions are harder to forecast costs for than other types of spacecraft. Many businesses accept that different business units have different rates of returns.
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http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2722/1
Discovery lives
by Jason Callahan
Monday, March 30, 2015
Last month, teams of scientists from around the United States submitted proposals for the thirteenth mission in NASA’s Discovery program. Discovery is a class of small planetary science missions, with costs capped for this round of proposals at $450 million (not including the cost of a launch vehicle.) There is no pre-specified target list for Discovery missions, but they must be based on the scientific questions highlighted in the National Research Council’s Planetary Science Decadal Survey in order to be competitive.
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So apparently there are 28 total proposals in this round! Obviously that will be cut down significantly, but it's wonderful to know Discovery indeed lives on, as the title of that article Blackstar posted implies.
2 Lunar, 3 Phobos/Deimos, 3 Venusian, 2 to the Outer Solar System, 4 for asteroids/comets, 1 Martian Lander (again based off Phoenix), and even 2 telescopes...that's quite a batch and barely half of that 28!
Oh the suspense...
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1) Blackstar doesn't work for JPL and so far as I know never has.
2) According to the latest GAO report on major NASA projects, project cost growth rate is 2.4-3% (excluding JWST) for the last two years.
3) The InSight PI has been open about their development challenges. I agree, they appear to be on the edge and almost everything may to need to go right not to go over. Whether they may go over by a trivial amount or a significant amount remains to be seen.
4) Blackstar said that LM said that their profit margins on planetary missions are lower than for other business. Perhaps NASA drives a harder bargain than DoD. Perhaps science missions in general have lower profit margins than on other spacecraft or aircraft businesses. Perhaps science missions are harder to forecast costs for than other types of spacecraft. Many businesses accept that different business units have different rates of returns.
1. Ok. If my guestimate is wrong, so be it. Based on past comments from him/her, it seemed logical. I don't think that really changes the basis of my argument.
2. For the last two years? That is a pretty short timespan for projects that typically take 4-5 years to complete (Discovery/NF) or more (Flagships). Not sure that statistic means a whole lot. How many "major" programs does that timespan cover? MAVEN? O-REx? GRAIL?
3. I think that is what I said also so not sure what you are trying to add. But if reserves are shot by the time you start ATLO, which is where InSight is, then cost overruns are all but certain. Especially if instruments are late or suffer any failure during system-level testing as there is very little time to resolve the problem and thus money gets thrown at it to accelerate the process.
4. I don't think that is what he said. Of course I can no longer verify as his post has been removed (hmmm, wonder why ...?) But he/she would have no way of knowing what LM profit margins are across all of their USG programs so to say that Planetary missions are lower would be assuming facts not in evidence. Further, my recollection was that his/her position was that LM purposely cut their profit margins in order to hone shills, provide marketing fodder for other USG missions, etc. and that was the "dirty little secret" he/she was complaining about. Hard to say as he/she seems unwilling or unable to defend their comments.
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4) Blackstar said that LM said that their profit margins on planetary missions are lower than for other business. Perhaps NASA drives a harder bargain than DoD. Perhaps science missions in general have lower profit margins than on other spacecraft or aircraft businesses. Perhaps science missions are harder to forecast costs for than other types of spacecraft. Many businesses accept that different business units have different rates of returns.
LM treats NASA science missions as PR opportunities and not to make money. One NASA mission every few years pales against 3-6 DOD spacecraft per year.
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4) Blackstar said that LM said that their profit margins on planetary missions are lower than for other business. Perhaps NASA drives a harder bargain than DoD. Perhaps science missions in general have lower profit margins than on other spacecraft or aircraft businesses. Perhaps science missions are harder to forecast costs for than other types of spacecraft. Many businesses accept that different business units have different rates of returns.
LM treats NASA science missions as PR opportunities and not to make money. One NASA mission every few years pales against 3-6 DOD spacecraft per year.
But surely they are still going to want too make some kind of margin on them, I can't see them building craft purely at a price that covers their costs and nothing else.
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LM treats NASA science missions as PR opportunities and not to make money. One NASA mission every few years pales against 3-6 DOD spacecraft per year.
You are confusing revenue with profit margin. As far as the NASA space science missions as PR argument, you are grossly ill-informed ...
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You are confusing revenue with profit margin. As far as the NASA space science missions as PR argument, you are grossly ill-informed ...
Me thinks you are a bit confused.
a. The margins are higher on the DOD spacecraft.
b. As for the PR, there is no argument, it is a fact that you must be ignorant of. I was told* directly by LM management that it does NASA missions for the PR and the good will, since the money is not worth the work and headaches. Even if the margin is higher, it doesn't really show up on the ledger since it is overshadowed by the DOD side of the house.
* which mean I was not ill-informed much less grossly
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As for the PR, there is no argument, it is a fact that you must be ignorant of. I was told* directly by LM management that it does NASA missions for the PR and the good will, since the money is not worth the work and headaches. Even if the margin is higher, it doesn't really show up on the ledger since it is overshadowed by the DOD side of the house.
One problem with planetary spacecraft is that there are a reasonable number of vendors to choose from: in house at JPL or APL, Orbital, LM, etc. This will cap profit margins.
It is also possible that the margins LM gets are not bad for many businesses. DoD work is reputed to be especially profitable, especially for highly technical, classified work.
It's also important to remember that LM worked very hard to get back into the position of a prefered vendors after the failed missions of 1999. If this wasn't a business they wanted to be in for reasons important to LM, they could have exited then.
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Me thinks you are a bit confused.
a. The margins are higher on the DOD spacecraft.
b. As for the PR, there is no argument, it is a fact that you must be ignorant of. I was told* directly by LM management that it does NASA missions for the PR and the good will, since the money is not worth the work and headaches. Even if the margin is higher, it doesn't really show up on the ledger since it is overshadowed by the DOD side of the house.
* which mean I was not ill-informed much less grossly
Pray tell, what do you think the fee percentage is for DoD spacecraft? For civil space spacecraft? Let's see if your guesses are even close to being what I know they are.
"LM Management"? Hewson spoke to you directly? You must be quite an important person then. I guess her and the Space System Company Exec VP, Ambrose, are on different pages. Given you state this as a known "fact" that I am ignorant of (apparently I should have known you had a conversation with Hewson, or her stand-in, having never met with or spoken with you before), please share the conversation with everyone (names, places, dates) so we can all be as well informed as you are.
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Spaceflightnow has a run down of known Discovery proposals. http://spaceflightnow.com/2015/04/06/diverse-destinations-considered-for-new-interplanetary-probe/
Most of the missions are covered in this thread, but here's some info on the Psyche mission:
Lindy Elkins-Tanton, director of the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, leads the science team behind the Psyche mission.
She said in an interview that the spacecraft — built by Space Systems/Loral — would take five years to cruise from Earth to Psyche in the 2020s. If approved, the probe will carry ion engines to guide itself toward the asteroid belt and rendezvous with Psyche, where it will enter orbit for at least a year.
The mission is tasked to find out if Psyche was once a larger body that had its crust and mantle stripped away, exposing the metallic core.
“This is one of the few missions (proposed) that’s truly exploration,” Elkins-Tanton said in March at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. “Nobody has ever seen a metal world before. We have no idea what it’s going to look like.”
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Spaceflightnow has a run down of known Discovery proposals. http://spaceflightnow.com/2015/04/06/diverse-destinations-considered-for-new-interplanetary-probe/
Most of the missions are covered in this thread, but here's some info on the Psyche mission:
Lindy Elkins-Tanton, director of the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, leads the science team behind the Psyche mission.
She said in an interview that the spacecraft — built by Space Systems/Loral — would take five years to cruise from Earth to Psyche in the 2020s. If approved, the probe will carry ion engines to guide itself toward the asteroid belt and rendezvous with Psyche, where it will enter orbit for at least a year.
The mission is tasked to find out if Psyche was once a larger body that had its crust and mantle stripped away, exposing the metallic core.
“This is one of the few missions (proposed) that’s truly exploration,” Elkins-Tanton said in March at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. “Nobody has ever seen a metal world before. We have no idea what it’s going to look like.”
I'm not going to lie, the Psyche mission is the one I've been most interested in seeing since I started hearing about it a few years back. What surprises me is that no one seems to have proposed a dedicated M-class mission (to Psyche, obviously, or 1950 DA, if you'd rather visit an NEO) before this round, though maybe that has to do with the radar studies? IIRC, Psyche was only radar-imaged recently...
But you'd think with all the interest in asteroid mining for the last few decades and the fact that they're one of the three major classes of asteroids that there would have been more proposals to visit one.
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The agenda for the the next Small Bodies Assesment Group meeting has a fairly long list of short presentations to be delivered on possible Small Bodies Discovery missions. I think most (but not all?) have been mentioned already:
Proposed Discovery Mission Concepts (Presentations from additional small- body-related Discovery proposal teams are welcome; email Nancy Chabot)
BASiX, PI: Dan Scheeres
MERLIN, PI: Scott Murchie
Psyche, PI: Lindy Elkins-Tanton
Comet Radar Explorer, PI: Erik Asphaug
MANTIS, PI: Andy Rivkin
Proteus, PI: Karen Meech
Pandora, PI: Carol Raymond
Lucy, PI: Hal Levison
NEOCam, PI: Amy Mainzer
CHagall, PI: Jessica Sunshine
Kuiper, PI: Jim Bell
PADME, PI: Anthony Colaprete
Whipple, PI: Charles Alcock
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/sbag/meetings/jun2015/agenda.pdf
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Here is what I found about those not mentioned already:
CHagall (Comet Hartley Analyses to Gather Ancient Links to Life) (http://www.cometarysciencenews.org/#chagall:-a-discovery-mission-proposal)
MANTIS (The Main-belt Asteroid and NEO Tour with Imaging and Spectroscopy) (http://www.dlr.de/pf/Portaldata/6/Resources/lcpm/abstracts/Abstract_Rivkin_A.pdf)
Proteus (http://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/abscicon2015/pdf/7433.pdf)
MANTIS seems to be the multiple asteroid mission mentioned in the nature.com article.
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Some Discovery proposals will be presented at the Low-Cost Planetary Mission Conference (http://www.dlr.de/pf/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-9887/). Among others, there is the Advanced Jovian Asteroid eXplorer (AJAX) which I haven't seen mentioned before:
http://www.dlr.de/pf/Portaldata/6/Resources/lcpm/abstracts/Abstract_Mustard_J.pdf
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Here is what I found about those not mentioned already:
CHagall (Comet Hartley Analyses to Gather Ancient Links to Life) (http://www.cometarysciencenews.org/#chagall:-a-discovery-mission-proposal)
Here is the actual link:
http://www.cometarysciencenews.org/issues/issue-0002.html#chagall:-a-discovery-mission-proposal
And the summary:
CHagall: A Discovery Mission Proposal
CHagall – Comet Hartley Analyses to Gather Ancient Links to Life– is a voyage of discovery that generates an abundance of essential scientific insights into comets, the ancient organic- and volatile-rich building blocks of our Solar System, thereby bringing us closer to answering the question: “Where did we come from?” The CHagall mission interactively explores the heterogeneity of the highly active comet 103P/Hartley 2, the only comet whose water is known to match terrestrial isotopic ratios. Spending 95% of its mission life within 10 km of the comet, CHagall makes repeated, detailed measurements of the subsurface, surface, and innermost coma as the comet transitions from minimal to maximum activity. CHagall literally and figuratively breaks new scientific ground by repeatedly probing the variability of subsurface compositions, structures, and thermal properties before explosively excavating more primitive materials from depth for analysis by CHagall’s suite of remote sensing instruments. As the first integrated study of the physical and compositional heterogeneity of the surface and sub-surface of a comet, the CHagall mission will revolutionize our understanding of cometary formation and evolution, while paving the way for future missions to return cryogenic samples of highly volatile ices that are uniquely preserved on comets.
Jessica Sunshine, Principal Investigator
University of Maryland
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There's nothing in that link about that mission.
I would note that the PI for that proposal is Jessica Sunshine, who was the PI for the Comet Hopper mission last time. I assumed that Jessica would re-propose CHopper in some way. This must be it.
Look at the previous issue
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We know that there were 28 Discovery proposals.
I now count 22 publicly acknowledged Discovery missions. I know of two more (one asteroid, one Venus) not publicly acknowledged. So that leaves me with only four unknown missions. The unusual thing to me is the low number of Mars missions and lunar missions. I suspect that there's at least one more lunar mission that we don't know about.
But 22 out of 28 is a pretty high number.
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Here's a Space News article on the Io Volcano Observer Discovery proposal:
"Bypassing Chance for Double the Dollars, PI Pushes Io Volcano Observer for NASA Discovery Program"
http://spacenews.com/exploring-jupiters-volcanic-moon-io-on-615000-a-day/
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Here's some more information on some of the proposals.
Here are all 16 proposed Discovery missions presented to the SBAG June 30, including name, principal investigator, proposed operations, and, when divulged, the would-be prime contractor. Proposals are sorted alphabetically by destination type.
http://spacenews.com/small-bodies-dominate-nasas-latest-discovery-competition/#sthash.SY2h5gAA.dpuf
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Time for a recap. Of the 28 proposals, looks like at least 24 have been publicly identified. Let me know if I missed any. By target:
Telescopes:
• Kuiper
• NEOCam
• Whipple
Moon:
• MARE (Moon Age and Regolith Explorer)
• NanoSWARM
Venus:
• RAVEN (Radar At VENus)
• VASE (Venus Atmosphere and Surface Explorer)
• VERITAS (Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR Topography and Spectroscopy)
Mars:
• Mars Icebreaker Life
Mars moons:
• MERLIN (Mars Moon Exploration, Reconnaissance, and Landed Investigation)
• PADME (Phobos and Deimos and Mars Environment)
• PANDORA (Phobos and Deimos Origin Assessment)
Asteroid(s):
• AJAE (Advanced Jovian Asteroid Explorer)
• BASiX (Binary Asteroid In-Situ Explorer)
• DARe (Dark Asteroid Rendezvous)
• Lucy
• MANTIS (Main Belt Asteroid and NEO Tour With Imaging and Spectroscopy).
• Psyche
Comet:
• CHAGALL (Comet Hartley Analysis to Gather Ancient Links to Life)
• CORE (Comet Radar Explorer)
• Primitive Material Explorer
Comet and asteroid:
• Proteus
Outer planet moon:
• ELF (Enceladus Life Finder)
• IVO (Io Volcanic Observer)
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This proves that I cannot count. I was counting 22, not 24 (maybe SBAG added two more to the agenda and I missed them in my count). Anyway, I know for certain that there is one more (although I only know the name and target, not any details), and I have indications that there was another small bodies one, although I think that one is iffy (meaning I don't know if it was actually submitted, and why it was not briefed at SBAG).
So that leaves two more unaccounted for. I wonder what they could be? I think that the last Discovery round included a lunar seismic lander, but I don't know if that got submitted again this time.
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This proves that I cannot count. I was counting 22, not 24 (maybe SBAG added two more to the agenda and I missed them in my count). Anyway, I know for certain that there is one more (although I only know the name and target, not any details), and I have indications that there was another small bodies one, although I think that one is iffy (meaning I don't know if it was actually submitted, and why it was not briefed at SBAG).
So that leaves two more unaccounted for. I wonder what they could be? I think that the last Discovery round included a lunar seismic lander, but I don't know if that got submitted again this time.
Thinking out loud: If we presume that all the small body proposals (except for maybe the questionable one you hinted at) also presented at SBAG, then it follows that the remaining unidentified proposals don’t involve small bodies. What does stand out to me is the drop in Venus proposals — last time there were seven of them, this time apparently only three or four. What happened to the rest of those concepts?
The BBC story said that there were only three moon proposals last time. Presumably one of those was JEDI, which required ASRGs and thus likely isn’t entered this time. Did MARE and/or NanoSWARM enter last time?
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Thinking out loud: If we presume that all the small body proposals (except for maybe the questionable one you hinted at) also presented at SBAG, then it follows that the remaining unidentified proposals don’t involve small bodies. What does stand out to me is the drop in Venus proposals — last time there were seven of them, this time apparently only three or four. What happened to the rest of those concepts?
The BBC story said that there were only three moon proposals last time. Presumably one of those was JEDI, which required ASRGs and thus likely isn’t entered this time. Did MARE and/or NanoSWARM enter last time?
Yeah, that's the way to come at it--4 unacknowledged ones. I know that one was Venus. I have iffy information that another was an asteroid mission. So that leaves two unknown. That implies that they were not small bodies, meaning they were either Moon, Mars or Venus.
It is possible that we'll get some more info on these in the future, although it might be vague.
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Thinking out loud: If we presume that all the small body proposals (except for maybe the questionable one you hinted at) also presented at SBAG, then it follows that the remaining unidentified proposals don’t involve small bodies. What does stand out to me is the drop in Venus proposals — last time there were seven of them, this time apparently only three or four. What happened to the rest of those concepts?
The BBC story said that there were only three moon proposals last time. Presumably one of those was JEDI, which required ASRGs and thus likely isn’t entered this time. Did MARE and/or NanoSWARM enter last time?
Yeah, that's the way to come at it--4 unacknowledged ones. I know that one was Venus. I have iffy information that another was an asteroid mission. So that leaves two unknown. That implies that they were not small bodies, meaning they were either Moon, Mars or Venus.
It is possible that we'll get some more info on these in the future, although it might be vague.
Could either have been an outer planets mission like the IO one?
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Could either have been an outer planets mission like the IO one?
It's certainly possible, but the non-availability of ASRGs would be a limiting factor. Probably more likely though that the two or three unidentified proposals are Moon, Mars, or Venus.
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Could either have been an outer planets mission like the IO one?
It's certainly possible, but the non-availability of ASRGs would be a limiting factor. Probably more likely though that the two or three unidentified proposals are Moon, Mars, or Venus.
Yes but missions to Jupiter at least could be solar powered.
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Yes but missions to Jupiter at least could be solar powered.
I think this is more accurate: Some missions to Jupiter at least could be solar powered. It’s challenging in any case to put a mission together to the harsh environment around Jupiter that produces enough good science within the Discovery budget cap. Trying to do it with solar cells can make it even harder.
Because of the difficult scope of such missions given the budget cap, I’d also argue that they’re more likely to have broken cover, with the aim being to build support and develop the concept for the next Discovery round or the next decadial survey to ramp it up to the New Frontiers level.
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This article talks about how hard they've worked to fit the Io mission into the Discovery budget.
http://spacenews.com/exploring-jupiters-volcanic-moon-io-on-615000-a-day/
I take this from the article.
Part of IVO’s problem in 2010, McEwen speculated, was the mission’s plan to use an Advanced Stirling Radioisotope (ASRG) power supply, a next-generation nuclear battery, instead of solar panels.
The ASRG was still in development during the last Discovery competition and NASA invited proposers to include the unit on their spacecraft as government furnished equipment. Ultimately, NASA went with the solar-powered Insight and canceled ASRG development altogether about a year later.
Solar power is mandatory for the 2015 Discovery competition, so IVO shifted power supplies. The mission would also carry an experimental optical communications payload NASA has incentivized Discovery competitors to test by offering to cover the estimated $30 million needed to install the hardware.
Now, McEwen said, IVO “is in much better shape than it was in 2010.”
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I've just published my post on the small body Discovery proposals
http://futureplanets.blogspot.com/2015/07/discovery-proposals-to-explore-solar.html
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Something that I have been thinking about producing is a table listing all the missions, their targets, their PI's, their contractors, etc. We've got such great information we could produce something pretty comprehensive.
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Planetary Society post about the MERLIN proposal:
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs/van-kane/20150810-merlin-proposal-to-explore-the-martian-moons.html
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Planetary Society post about the MERLIN proposal:
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs/van-kane/20150810-merlin-proposal-to-explore-the-martian-moons.html
Thanks for that, an interesting read. Behind the IO proposal this is probably my next choice down.
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This is a really interesting set of missions and it is a great pity that only one can be afforded. My favorite of these is the trip to the metal asteroid Psyche. First of all, this looks like a reasonable proposal for a Discovery budget. There are a number of proposals that look to be lowballing the cost. For example, based on Insight, we know a Mars lander costs at least $600 million. I also really don't believe that the Enceladus or Io missions can be done for $450 million.
I think there would be a lot of public interest in a metal asteroid because of the potential economic value of the metal. For scientists, this would provide a look at the kind of material that makes up planetary cores. However the measured density of Psyche, at 3.5g/cc, is much lower than the 8g/cc typical of nickel-iron alloy, so maybe the scientific theories about the origin of Psyche are all wrong. Finally, Psyche is thought to be a major source of metallic meteorites than hit the earth. If the elemental abundance matches that of meteorites that we already have, then we can identify pieces of Psyche that are already on earth. This lets us do sample return science without the costs.
MANTIS, the survey mission which flies by 9 asteroids, is another favorite of mine. Once again, it seems realistic for a Discovery budget. The current classification system for asteroids is based on spectroscopy, and it seems to be a real mess. There doesn't seem to be a good link between the spectroscopic properties and asteroid properties like density and composition. If asteroids could be studied up close with imaging spectrometers, and their densities measured directly, then interpretation of spectra taken from earth would get much better. The diversity of the asteroid belt and the origins of asteroids would be much better understood. If an approaching asteroid threatens to impact earth, then damage projections and deflection plans will depend upon being able to interpret observations made by earth based telescopes to work out the density and composition of the approaching object. Impact processes are very important in planetary science, and understanding would be improved by knowing the impactor population better.
Finally I want to mention the Enceladus mission ELF and the Kuiper telescope. The claim that we have the tools to detect life in Enceladus is very interesting and I hope that this becomes part of a future Saturn orbiter. Enceladus is a far better target than Europa because it throws its waters out into space and it doesn't live in a nasty radiation environment.
Kuiper is a proposal for a 1.2m UV/optical telescope located at L2. I have noticed many similar proposals over the years. I suspect that an enhanced version of Kuiper could serve a broad range of astronomical observing programs, including exoplanet transit science. It should be funded outside the planetary science budget.
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Kuiper is a proposal for a 1.2m UV/optical telescope located at L2. I have noticed many similar proposals over the years. I suspect that an enhanced version of Kuiper could serve a broad range of astronomical observing programs, including exoplanet transit science. It should be funded outside the planetary science budget.
Take a look at the CASTOR space telescope, about the same size, spectral range, and resolution as Kuiper's imager, but aiming for a wide-angle design (imaging 1200x as much sky) with a gigapixel camera and no spectrograph.
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It's interesting to see how some targets are doubled or tripled up by mission proposals and the wide range of approaches that is taken amongst these proposals.
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It's interesting to see how some targets are doubled or tripled up by mission proposals and the wide range of approaches that is taken amongst these proposals.
Yeah. We obviously don't know how many of these proposals are actually viable. I was impressed that there seemed to be a lot of well-thought-out ones, but that could be my ignorance of the science issues and how they approached them.
I think that in general the number and breadth of proposals tells a great story of how rich the Discovery program is. And by extension, this also indicates that Discovery needs to be preserved. There is a risk right now that Mars 2020 and a Europa mission could eat up everything else in the planetary budget. And it's easy to neglect Discovery and New Frontiers because they don't seem terribly sexy. But there's a lot of great science that can be done with Discovery as these proposals demonstrate.
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It's interesting to see how some targets are doubled or tripled up by mission proposals and the wide range of approaches that is taken amongst these proposals.
Yeah. We obviously don't know how many of these proposals are actually viable. I was impressed that there seemed to be a lot of well-thought-out ones, but that could be my ignorance of the science issues and how they approached them.
I think that in general the number and breadth of proposals tells a great story of how rich the Discovery program is. And by extension, this also indicates that Discovery needs to be preserved. There is a risk right now that Mars 2020 and a Europa mission could eat up everything else in the planetary budget. And it's easy to neglect Discovery and New Frontiers because they don't seem terribly sexy. But there's a lot of great science that can be done with Discovery as these proposals demonstrate.
Wouldn't New Horizons be more at risk than the Discovery ones due to the relatively lower costing of the latter over the former.
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Wouldn't New Horizons be more at risk than the Discovery ones due to the relatively lower costing of the latter over the former.
If you go back about five years, when the planetary budget went down, the first thing to get the axe was Discovery. Then the community complained to Congress and Congress put money into Discovery, forcing the administration's hand. So NASA now has a Discovery call out. But then New Frontiers took a hit and was out of the budget. But due to some complaining, New Frontiers is now due for another call in about a year or two.
It is partially determined by what is up next. But the Discovery cadence has been cut way back to about 2-3 per decade now. So Discovery took a hit.
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I wrote my earlier post rather late and was not totally clear. But
It's interesting to see how some targets are doubled or tripled up by mission proposals and the wide range of approaches that is taken amongst these proposals.
I didn't make all the points I wanted to make in my earlier post. Back around 2011-12 there was a lot of concern that after Curiosity NASA was going to be out of the Mars business. Part of the argument was also that NASA (JPL) was going to lose the crucial Mars landing skills base that the agency spent a long time and a lot of money developing. Then NASA got Mars 2020. After that the outer planets community complained that because Europa got axed, there were no new outer planets missions in the planning and development stages and that community was going to suffer (after the end of Cassini and Juno). Then they got the Europa mission (sorta--it's still not safe).
But part of the result of all this was that Discovery got slashed. Discovery is the perfect program for Moon, Venus, and particularly asteroid missions. So cutting back on Discovery meant that inevitably the asteroid community would take a hit.
As you noted, there are a lot of diverse proposals. Even if you discount half of them as not very good science or technically unworkable, that still means that there are a lot of viable Discovery asteroid/small bodies missions that can be done. Discovery is important for that.
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NASA seems to lack a system for deciding how funds are best split between Discovery, New Horizons and Flagship missions.
Let's say that Europa Clipper costs the same as three Discovery missions. The question that needs asking is can we put together a portfolio of three Discovery missions that is more attractive than Europa Clipper? To simplify things, I will assume that all cost numbers are honest and that all the Discovery proposals are technically and scientifically sound.
My first pick would be the Enceladus Life Finder. It is the only mission proposal around that has even a modest shot at finding life. Mars 2020 would have to be extremely lucky and Europa Clipper has no chance.
My second pick would be an asteroid or comet mission. Some of these bodies are left over debris from the accretion disk which formed the planets, so they are good for studying Solar System origins. They are also potential resources for metals and water, and potential threats as impactors. I like the Psyche mission, but there are a bunch of solid choices.
My third pick would be a Venus radar mapper. Imagine trying to understand the Grand Canyon with only 120m resolution imagery. You would see a big hole in the ground, but you couldn't see the river in the bottom. The river is the reason the canyon is there. Understanding the current state of Venus is worth doing because it is an example of how terrestrial planets can evolve.
I think that those three missions together are more attractive than Europa Clipper. With the moons, the planets and the magnetosphere the Jupiter system is full of interesting targets, and a Jupiter orbiter would do good science. I think we should be realistic though, about the prospects for finding life on Europa. A submarine that melts through the ice to explore the ocean beneath is bad science fiction. It will never happen. The surface is in an extremely nasty radiation environment, and any robot that operates there will be dead within a month. The radiation will destroy organic molecules on the surface. Enceladus and possibly Ceres are much better targets right now. In the case of Enceladus, you don't even have to land.
NASA should delay Europa Clipper and fly some Discovery missions first.
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NASA seems to lack a system for deciding how funds are best split between Discovery, New Horizons and Flagship missions.
NASA is not the only party involved in making these decisions.
NASA should delay Europa Clipper and fly some Discovery missions first.
When Congress gives NASA money specifically for Europa, NASA can't just go and spend it on Discovery.
edit:
I suspect that an enhanced version of Kuiper could serve a broad range of astronomical observing programs, including exoplanet transit science. It should be funded outside the planetary science budget.
AFAIK, the point of proposing it as a discovery mission is that most of the observing time will be dedicated to planetary.
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NASA seems to lack a system for deciding how funds are best split between Discovery, New Horizons and Flagship missions.
Let's say that Europa Clipper costs the same as three Discovery missions. The question that needs asking is can we put together a portfolio of three Discovery missions that is more attractive than Europa Clipper? To simplify things, I will assume that all cost numbers are honest and that all the Discovery proposals are technically and scientifically sound.
My first pick would be the Enceladus Life Finder. It is the only mission proposal around that has even a modest shot at finding life. Mars 2020 would have to be extremely lucky and Europa Clipper has no chance.
My second pick would be an asteroid or comet mission. Some of these bodies are left over debris from the accretion disk which formed the planets, so they are good for studying Solar System origins. They are also potential resources for metals and water, and potential threats as impactors. I like the Psyche mission, but there are a bunch of solid choices.
My third pick would be a Venus radar mapper. Imagine trying to understand the Grand Canyon with only 120m resolution imagery. You would see a big hole in the ground, but you couldn't see the river in the bottom. The river is the reason the canyon is there. Understanding the current state of Venus is worth doing because it is an example of how terrestrial planets can evolve.
I think that those three missions together are more attractive than Europa Clipper. With the moons, the planets and the magnetosphere the Jupiter system is full of interesting targets, and a Jupiter orbiter would do good science. I think we should be realistic though, about the prospects for finding life on Europa. A submarine that melts through the ice to explore the ocean beneath is bad science fiction. It will never happen. The surface is in an extremely nasty radiation environment, and any robot that operates there will be dead within a month. The radiation will destroy organic molecules on the surface. Enceladus and possibly Ceres are much better targets right now. In the case of Enceladus, you don't even have to land.
NASA should delay Europa Clipper and fly some Discovery missions first.
No it should you don't look a gift horse in the mouth, if they given money for it then they are going to use it. Not as if they have much choice anyway.
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NASA seems to lack a system for deciding how funds are best split between Discovery, New Horizons and Flagship missions.
Let's say that Europa Clipper costs the same as three Discovery missions. The question that needs asking is can we put together a portfolio of three Discovery missions that is more attractive than Europa Clipper? To simplify things, I will assume that all cost numbers are honest and that all the Discovery proposals are technically and scientifically sound.
My first pick would be the Enceladus Life Finder. It is the only mission proposal around that has even a modest shot at finding life. Mars 2020 would have to be extremely lucky and Europa Clipper has no chance.
My second pick would be an asteroid or comet mission. Some of these bodies are left over debris from the accretion disk which formed the planets, so they are good for studying Solar System origins. They are also potential resources for metals and water, and potential threats as impactors. I like the Psyche mission, but there are a bunch of solid choices.
My third pick would be a Venus radar mapper. Imagine trying to understand the Grand Canyon with only 120m resolution imagery. You would see a big hole in the ground, but you couldn't see the river in the bottom. The river is the reason the canyon is there. Understanding the current state of Venus is worth doing because it is an example of how terrestrial planets can evolve.
I think that those three missions together are more attractive than Europa Clipper. With the moons, the planets and the magnetosphere the Jupiter system is full of interesting targets, and a Jupiter orbiter would do good science. I think we should be realistic though, about the prospects for finding life on Europa. A submarine that melts through the ice to explore the ocean beneath is bad science fiction. It will never happen. The surface is in an extremely nasty radiation environment, and any robot that operates there will be dead within a month. The radiation will destroy organic molecules on the surface. Enceladus and possibly Ceres are much better targets right now. In the case of Enceladus, you don't even have to land.
NASA should delay Europa Clipper and fly some Discovery missions first.
No it should you don't look a gift horse in the mouth, if they given money for it then they are going to use it. Not as if they have much choice anyway.
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NASA seems to lack a system for deciding how funds are best split between Discovery, New Horizons and Flagship missions.
That system is called the budgetary process. It is a negotiation between NASA, Congress and the OMB. That's how it works.
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Fascinating as Enceladus is, I think the assumption that liquid water = life is a highly suspicious one, considering that every theory of the origin of life on Earth requires the interaction of multiple surfaces and chemistries to accomplish various parts of the process. I would not neglect Europa, which has a good chance for a more diverse internal chemistry and more robust energy source, in favor of Enceladus.
And, as said previously, Congress has begun to allocate funds specifically for a Europa mission. Let's not blow it.
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Even if Congress is earmarking money for Europa, it doesn't change my point that the Discovery proposals are very competitive in terms of value for money.
Europa Clipper could be done more cheaply. The current data for Europa is crap. When the antenna on the Galileo orbiter failed, 99% of the data return was lost. Europa today is mapped at 1-2 km/ pixel, which is weather satellite resolution. Studies of the surface of the earth use at least 200 m/pixel. Imaging sensors, particularly in the infrared, have improved enormously since the early 1980s when Galileo was built. Big improvements won't be hard.
The basics are a camera for surface morphology, an imaging infrared spectrometer for a compositional map, and a uv spectrometer to keep an eye on the magnetosphere and look at the composition of plumes from Europa and Io. Instruments similar to the New Horizons Pluto probe should be perfectly adequate. The main thing that needs to be added is radiation shielding, which I am assuming is cheap but heavy. You might opt for a larger antenna. Fill the rest of the mass budget with fuel, which gives you options for an interesting tour. That's it. It might be doable for a little more than the cost of New Horizons, or $900 milllion, which makes it worth two Discovery missions. Given all the interesting things to see in the Jupiter system, it is probably a good option at that price.
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@Ilanitedave...The only guarantee is that you are not going to find life without liquid water (or another polar solvent). We have no idea how life formed on Earth, and we know damn all about the internal chemistry of Europa. We don't know much about Enceladus either, but it kindly saves us the trouble of landing by throwing material into the path of passing space probes. It's easier to study.
@ Star One...You've heard of the story of the Trojan Horse, right?
@hop & Burninate Kuiper looks like a really solid proposal to me. What would make it really compelling, would be if it has the capability to study exoplanet atmospheres by the method of transit photometry. There was another proposal, for a MIDEX mission called FINESSE which called for a 50cm telescope at L2 that would take spectra in the 1-3 micron range with very stable photometry. As proposed Kuiper might already have that capability, or maybe it could be added at low cost.
Some years ago there was another proposal for a telescope dedicated to reverberation mapping of quasars. This needs 120 days of observations with access to the far ultraviolet. Kuiper would be well suited for this. There have also been a couple of proposals focused on high resolution wide field imaging, for mapping star forming regions and for dark energy research. The CASTOR survey is one I wasn't aware of.
Whipple and NEOCam also look like interesting proposals. I'll write more about them later.
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Even if Congress is earmarking money for Europa, it doesn't change my point that the Discovery proposals are very competitive in terms of value for money.
Europa Clipper could be done more cheaply. The current data for Europa is crap. When the antenna on the Galileo orbiter failed, 99% of the data return was lost. Europa today is mapped at 1-2 km/ pixel, which is weather satellite resolution. Studies of the surface of the earth use at least 200 m/pixel. Imaging sensors, particularly in the infrared, have improved enormously since the early 1980s when Galileo was built. Big improvements won't be hard.
The basics are a camera for surface morphology, an imaging infrared spectrometer for a compositional map, and a uv spectrometer to keep an eye on the magnetosphere and look at the composition of plumes from Europa and Io. Instruments similar to the New Horizons Pluto probe should be perfectly adequate. The main thing that needs to be added is radiation shielding, which I am assuming is cheap but heavy. You might opt for a larger antenna. Fill the rest of the mass budget with fuel, which gives you options for an interesting tour. That's it. It might be doable for a little more than the cost of New Horizons, or $900 milllion, which makes it worth two Discovery missions. Given all the interesting things to see in the Jupiter system, it is probably a good option at that price.
The type of camera system is driven by the mission's goals. It would be possible to use a cheaper camera system from a more modern probe and gain imagery significantly better than what Galileo returned. However that imagery is not good enough for landing a probe. If Europa Clipper flies with a very high resolution camera then there don't need to be any further reconnaissance mission before landing. However if a less capable camera was flown now another billion dollar plus mission would need to be flown before a lander mission to get the necessary imagery. NASA was asked to see if the mission could be done for $1 billion dollars and what they found was that the science return was not worth the money. The value just wasn't there.
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Even if Congress is earmarking money for Europa, it doesn't change my point that the Discovery proposals are very competitive in terms of value for money.
Europa Clipper could be done more cheaply. The current data for Europa is crap. When the antenna on the Galileo orbiter failed, 99% of the data return was lost. Europa today is mapped at 1-2 km/ pixel, which is weather satellite resolution. Studies of the surface of the earth use at least 200 m/pixel. Imaging sensors, particularly in the infrared, have improved enormously since the early 1980s when Galileo was built. Big improvements won't be hard.
The basics are a camera for surface morphology, an imaging infrared spectrometer for a compositional map, and a uv spectrometer to keep an eye on the magnetosphere and look at the composition of plumes from Europa and Io. Instruments similar to the New Horizons Pluto probe should be perfectly adequate. The main thing that needs to be added is radiation shielding, which I am assuming is cheap but heavy. You might opt for a larger antenna. Fill the rest of the mass budget with fuel, which gives you options for an interesting tour. That's it. It might be doable for a little more than the cost of New Horizons, or $900 milllion, which makes it worth two Discovery missions. Given all the interesting things to see in the Jupiter system, it is probably a good option at that price.
Cutting corners on a mission like Europa Clipper is an utter waste of time if you're going to do something like this you do it properly not in some half arsed way as you appear to be suggesting.
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Yeah, this isn't the Europa thread, so maybe that discussion should be taken there?
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http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2808/1
The unnatural selection of planetary missions
by Ralph Lorenz
Monday, August 17, 2015
"Eyes narrowing, her pulse quickens—she senses a weakness in her prey—the chase is on! With instincts evolution-honed by generations of collaborative hunting, she closes in, flicking pages back and forth. There it is—an inconsistent mass number—triumph! Tonight this proposal reviewer will not go to bed hungry.
But then they rarely do, which is the problem. Cooped up in an anonymous hotel with two dozen other reviewers for a week, they are kept well-fed to sustain long hours of dissection, poring over hundreds of tightly-written pages of proposals. It’s tough work, leaving little time for exercise or relaxation. “I’ve gained 10 pounds, I’m just sitting and reading all the time,” rues one anonymous reviewer. After they individually read dozens of proposals at their home institutions and identify strengths and weaknesses, they caucus in teleconferences that are often seven hours long—sometimes 13 hours—to reconcile different opinions and correct misunderstandings, and agree on wording of their reviews. In a couple of plenary meetings at the aforementioned anonymous hotel, the reviewers present their assessments to NASA, to help it decide its next planetary exploration missions."
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I'll take further discussion of Europa Clipper over to the Europa thread.
Let me write a little more about the telescopes. I think that Kuiper has a lot of value for astronomy. If the astronomers gave up their current SMEX proposal, they could afford to buy in, getting maybe 40% of the time in return for providing 40% of the funding. If planetary slips their next New Frontiers, this could allow them to do Kuiper in addition to another Discovery mission. As an L2 mission, Kuiper should provide about twice the observing time as Hubble, so there would be plenty to go around. When Hubble dies, Kuiper would provide astronomy with uv and visible light capabilities than the Webb won't have. It is likely to be more stable and therefore better for exoplanet transit studies than Hubble. It looks like a bargain for the capability.
NEOCam is a great mission in many ways, but I don't see why planetary should fund it. NASA should be trying to spot hazardous near earth objects. Human spaceflight is considering them as destinations, and should be trying to find the most interesting ones to visit. NEOCam has a passively cooled telescope and uses a new technology passively cooled IR sensor that operates in the 6-10 micron range. That is a useful wavelength for astronomers, because it shows warm dust rather than stars. They lost their capability in that area when Spitzer's coolant ran out. If you added a spectrometer with good photometric accuracy, this could be a wonderful instrument for studying exoplanet atmospheres. There are interesting spectral features all the way from 0.8 to 10 microns. The European EChO proposal was designed for exoplanet work, and proposed a 1.2m telescope operating from .55 to 11 micron at L2. NEOCam proposes a .5m telescope operating from 1 to 10 micron at L1. NEOCam is a little smaller, but I suspect it would be good enough for the job.
The Whipple proposal is another new technology sensor which proposes to spot Oort cloud objects when they pass in front of background stars and cause the starlight to briefly flicker. It is a high speed photometer which needs a 1m class telescope in a high orbit. If the money was there, it might be possible to combine it with Kuiper.
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The Space Review: CubeSats to Mars and beyond - Jeff Foust
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2814/1
"One example of an interplanetary CubeSat mission she discussed is one that would fly as a secondary payload on a proposed Discovery-class mission called Kuiper, a space telescope that would operate at the Earth-Sun L-2 point. The 6U CubeSat would carry out some initial technology demonstrations at L-2, then fire its thrusters to gradually drift to the L-5 point, which has yet to be explored but could host dust clouds or small asteroids. “We think this is a great opportunity to potentially explore that space with a low-cost spacecraft that has already completed its primary tech demonstration,” she said."
The article also covers the MarCO CubeSats added to Insight, the Discovery mission currently under development. I wonder if any of the other 2015 Discovery proposals also present opportunities for CubeSat piggy-back missions (besides NanoSWARM, which is a cubesat mission)?
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The article also covers the MarCO CubeSats added to Insight, the Discovery mission currently under development. I wonder if any of the other 2015 Discovery proposals also present opportunities for CubeSat piggy-back missions (besides NanoSWARM, which is a cubesat mission)?
Yeah, there's at least one. I think that one or two of the asteroid missions includes a CubeSat sub-payload. I'm trying to remember which ones.
I'm told that all the JPL proposals have a CubeSat and a mission enhancement option.
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In light of todays news, ELFs case should be strengthened, no ?
I like their 'free sample' sticker on page 11 here :)
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In light of todays news, ELFs case should be strengthened, no ?
I like their 'free sample' sticker on page 11 here :)
With the announcement of the finalists within the next two weeks, all the analysis of the proposals is done. They probably have the finalist list in a near final form subject to further senior management review.
To get selected as a finalist, a proposal needs top scores for both science and implementability (to invent a word). ELF presumably has the first but the second given a mission to Saturn for $450M may be much harder. I say presumably on the first because reviewers may have spotted a weakness in the science proposal or the methods to address the questions. This competition is *tough*.
In writing blog posts about most of the missions, my one big learning is that several proposals that I initially thought of as a bit blah I've come to view as scientifically very exciting.
My personal hopes are for a mission to be selected that either has a long flight time (I'm almost sixty and there's a couple of missions I really want to see the results from), provide large datasets that can be widely mined by the scientific community, or finally help out the Venus science community.
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I suspect that most of the proposals will score either high or very high on scientific merit. It is the cost and technical feasibility factors that will kill them.
Do you know if they simply provide a science merit score or if they actually do a ranking of proposals on science merit? I suspect the latter, even if informally done. If 50% of the proposals are very high, then there's little to distinguish those ~14 proposals from each other based on science merit.
Or they may defer any science ranking until they see the results on implementability, which is the harder test (but JPL and others would have also examined their proposals for this, too). No need to sweat over which 5 proposals are truly outstanding science merit until you know how many pass the engineering assessment. This was essentially the process done by ESA on their last Medium mission finalist selection.
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I know i'm dreaming but i'm seeing this mission selection as a perfect opportunity for a wealthy person or a fund to make their mark on history. Pick a runner up and fund it - there aren't many better ways to spend one's money. IMHO of course
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Was the selection of Discovery finalists due to come out soon? If it wasn't due in September does anyone recall when we're supposed to get an update?
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Was the selection of Discovery finalists due to come out soon? If it wasn't due in September does anyone recall when we're supposed to get an update?
Yep, targeted date for step 1 selection announcement is September 2015 according to the current schedule.
See: http://discovery.larc.nasa.gov/ao_schedule.html (http://discovery.larc.nasa.gov/ao_schedule.html)
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This seems to indicate that some news is out now:
https://twitter.com/PlanetDr/status/648874237026025473
Uh, wow, a lot of public gripes about the selection process aired in this thread and around it
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This seems to indicate that some news is out now:
https://twitter.com/PlanetDr/status/648874237026025473
Uh, wow, a lot of public gripes about the selection process aired in this thread and around it
There isn't a Saturn probe in the current Discovery line up. I believe that this refers to the Homesteader New Frontiers solicitation for technology maturation for the next New Frontiers competition. The number of proposals versus the number of possible awards was really high (i.e., very low funding rate). NASA has said that these awards would be made by the end of the Fiscal Year (i.e., tomorrow as I write this).
We may also hear about the Discovery selections tomorrow, too. My fingers are crossed for my favorites.
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I hope one of the Martian moons missions makes it. There's so much talk of Phobos yet no commitment to properly survey it. If there's to be synergy between probes and HSF, that would be one example.
Alot of the missions have potential, so it won't be an easy choice. Venus and Io I hope reach the finals. We'll find out soon enough I suppose!
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I hope one of the Martian moons missions makes it. There's so much talk of Phobos yet no commitment to properly survey it. If there's to be synergy between probes and HSF, that would be one example.
Alot of the missions have potential, so it won't be an easy choice. Venus and Io I hope reach the finals. We'll find out soon enough I suppose!
There are so many proposals for Mars moon missions (Discovery, ESA, Russia, China) that within the next decade, I believe that a mission is almost certain.
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This seems to indicate that some news is out now:
https://twitter.com/PlanetDr/status/648874237026025473
Uh, wow, a lot of public gripes about the selection process aired in this thread and around it
There isn't a Saturn probe in the current Discovery line up. I believe that this refers to the Homesteader New Frontiers solicitation for technology maturation for the next New Frontiers competition.
Yep, my bad, she actually said so in the follow-up here
https://twitter.com/PlanetDr/status/648906227943129088
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I hope one of the Martian moons missions makes it. There's so much talk of Phobos yet no commitment to properly survey it. If there's to be synergy between probes and HSF, that would be one example.
Alot of the missions have potential, so it won't be an easy choice. Venus and Io I hope reach the finals. We'll find out soon enough I suppose!
There are so many proposals for Mars moon missions (Discovery, ESA, Russia, China) that within the next decade, I believe that a mission is almost certain.
And that's why I rather a Discovery proposal with another more uncommon target got through.
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I hope one of the Martian moons missions makes it. There's so much talk of Phobos yet no commitment to properly survey it. If there's to be synergy between probes and HSF, that would be one example.
Alot of the missions have potential, so it won't be an easy choice. Venus and Io I hope reach the finals. We'll find out soon enough I suppose!
There are so many proposals for Mars moon missions (Discovery, ESA, Russia, China) that within the next decade, I believe that a mission is almost certain.
And that's why I rather a Discovery proposal with another more uncommon target got through.
I imagine the glares the Venus group gives whenever Mars gets another mission. :P ;)
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I imagine the glares the Venus group gives whenever Mars gets another mission. :P ;)
I was somewhat stunned to learn that this Homesteader/NF awards round talked about above does not actually include a Mars mission at all
http://spacenews.com/nasa-to-jump-start-new-frontiers-competition-with-homesteader-awards/
But thats off topic for Discovery
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I imagine the glares the Venus every group gives whenever Mars gets another mission. :P ;)
Fixed
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I imagine the glares the Venus group gives whenever Mars gets another mission. :P ;)
I was somewhat stunned to learn that this Homesteader/NF awards round talked about above does not actually include a Mars mission at all
http://spacenews.com/nasa-to-jump-start-new-frontiers-competition-with-homesteader-awards/
But thats off topic for Discovery
I don't actually recall Mars being in the listing for NF now that you mention - up until Curiosity it was always either a Discovery or Discovery-sized mission.
I imagine the glares the Venus every group gives whenever Mars gets another mission. :P ;)
Fixed
Perhaps, but you have to factor in the groan factor multiplied by the number of missed opportunities. ;)
Only the Uranus/Neptune crowd has reason to groan as much as the 'Venusians' in regards to 'Martian' victories.
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NASA Selects Investigations for Future Key Planetary Mission
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-selects-investigations-for-future-key-planetary-mission
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Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging (DAVINCI)
The Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy mission (VERITAS)
Psyche would explore the origin of planetary cores by studying the metallic asteroid Psyche
NEOCAM would discover ten times more near-Earth objects than all NEOs discovered to date.
Lucy would perform the first reconnaissance of the Jupiter Trojan asteroids
Also: JPL 3, Goddard 2
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2 Venus and 3 Asteroid proposals selected. Exciting.
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Hooray, I can at last cast off my paranoia that pressure to fulfill the JourneyToMars hype would lead to the selection of a Mars mission!
Glad to see Psyche made the cut. Shame no outer planets missions, though (unless you count Lucy, but that's not going to an outer planet) Still, Venus is at last getting some attention.
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Shame the Io proposal didn't get through.
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Shame the Io proposal didn't get through.
There seems to be some manner of fright of the outer planets floating around. Fears that a mission to such a distant dangerous destination won't be achievable in the given cost cap, I guess. I would have loved to see IVO or ELF.
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Shame the Io proposal didn't get through.
There seems to be some manner of fright of the outer planets floating around. Fears that a mission to such a distant dangerous destination won't be achievable in the given cost cap, I guess. I would have loved to see IVO or ELF.
They always seem to err far too much on the conservative side with their choices, it's all very well being cautious but sometimes it seems to squeeze out more interesting proposals especially if it involves going anywhere near the outer planets.
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Glad to see Psyche made the cut. Shame no outer planets missions, though (unless you count Lucy, but that's not going to an outer planet) Still, Venus is at last getting some attention.
It is good to see that Venus is getting attention indeed; two finalists for the sister planet.
I mourn the loss for the Phobos/Deimos missions, but this is a good variety of finalists regardless. If I had to pick one from this bunch, I'd like to see Lucy win out if not either of the Venusian probes. We have as vague an idea what the Trojan asteroids are like as we do the Kuiper belt objects (sans Pluto nowadays). If Lucy wins, it's supposed to visit 3 such asteroids (2 of which are binary) plus a main belt flyby; a good sequel to Dawn.
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Three things that jump out at me:
• From the press release: “NASA has selected five science investigations for refinement during the next year as a first step in choosing one or two missions for flight opportunities as early as 2020.” (Emphasis added.) So it would appear that there could be two missions selected, not just one.
• DAVINCI was not on the list of proposals that had previously been publicly identified.
• The press release says that “A panel of NASA and other scientists and engineers reviewed 27 submissions.” Previously we’d heard that there were 28 proposals.
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I really really doubt they'll pick two, honestly. At least, not for the same timeframe. Maybe they'd push one out to a different launch window and thus be able to postpone the next selection round that much longer...
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Well, they did name five finalists, which seems like a lot if you’re only going to pick one.
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• DAVINCI was not on the list of proposals that had previously been publicly identified.
• The press release says that “A panel of NASA and other scientists and engineers reviewed 27 submissions.” Previously we’d heard that there were 28 proposals.
DAVINCI was one that I had heard about but all I knew was that it related to Venus. I had no other information.
As to why 27 and not 28, my guess is that for some reason one of them did not meet the qualification criteria to be considered a formal proposal. Maybe a part of their proposal was incomplete and they were not qualified. Whether that was one of the unknown ones, or one of the ones we heard about, who knows?
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I really really doubt they'll pick two, honestly. At least, not for the same timeframe. Maybe they'd push one out to a different launch window and thus be able to postpone the next selection round that much longer...
This story by Eric Hand confirms they hope to pick two
http://news.sciencemag.org/space/2015/09/mission-bizarre-metal-asteroid-among-winners-nasa-discovery-competition
But this time the agency may choose two winners instead of the usual one, says Michael New, Discovery program scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. The two winners’ development and launch would be staggered. “It depends on what our budgets in the out years look like,” he says. “Based on what we’ve seen to date, it looks like we’ll be able to do two.”
and also that one of the 28 wasn't compliant
Of the 27 Discovery proposals that were evaluated (28 were proposed in February but one was non-compliant)...
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So, the second thing I said then. Stagger them, push the next Discovery selection back farther.
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I am going to assume it's going to be either or on the Venus proposals, that we aren't going to get them both.
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Yeah, if two, I would expect one of the Venus and one of the Asteroid proposals to be selected. I suppose that means the Venus proposals have a half chance instead of 1/3...
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As usual with these cost-capped missions, I expect the one(s) least likely to blow up the cost cap to get picked.
I will not be terribly surprised if NEOCAM gets the/a nod, given that it received instrument development money in the last Discovery round.
DAVINCI sounds like it may be trying to take advantage of one of the Government-provided, gets-you-extra-money-above-and-beyond-the-cap technology infusions - the new woven TPS material. Note - no inside knowledge here, just a guess.
My personal favorite would be VERITAS, but all of them sound like solid missions.
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I want NEOCAM. But I wonder if they would consider a dual launch mission (like the two Venus missions). It would not save anything from each mission's cap, but it would save at least 120M from launch services. A Falcon v1.1 could do 2.6 tonnes to Venus, and that was before the Full Thrust. If they can do 30%, that's 3.3tonnes. They could surely fit two Discovery missions in there. But I digress.
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Two missions being selected seems unusual. Have they ever done that before? I'm going to presuming a winner/s has/have not been selected yet. So are they saving the time and cost of another competition? If so that's too bad in a way cause there were some interesting proposals not selected which might do better next time around.
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Two missions being selected seems unusual. Have they ever done that before? I'm going to presuming a winner/s has/have not been selected yet. So are they saving the time and cost of another competition? If so that's too bad in a way cause there were some interesting proposals not selected which might do better next time around.
Selecting two missions at a time was common early in the program. Then the budget became squeezed and the selections became more spread out (~5 years) and for a single mission.
I presume that some combination of the following is leading NASA to look at selecting two missions:
- More money than expected in future budgets (but given peak Mars 2020, rising Europa, and the start of a New Frontiers funding, I'd don't see this in the budgets as I understand them)
- The cost to NASA and the community for these competitions is so high that NASA has decided to delay the next competition and use the proposals from this competition
- One or more of the proposals is well under the maximum cost cap, allowing more missions within the existing budget
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The cost of the competitions is not as high as the cost of making a selection and then delaying it. They did that with Juno and I think that the 2-year delay cost over $70 million.
I heard Jim Green say at a conference that the delay turned out to be an opportunity. For two years, the design got refined and many of the problems that typically are found later in the project were found during this period. If you look at the proposed funding ramp for the next New Frontiers mission, it assumes a longer ramp. Green said that this is done intentionally based on the experience with Juno.
Given this, the Europa mission should have no design problems by the time they actually start building it. :)
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I heard Jim Green say at a conference that the delay turned out to be an opportunity. For two years, the design got refined and many of the problems that typically are found later in the project were found during this period.
Missions apparently benefit by spending more time in Phase A.
However, it did cost a lot of money, and whether it actually saved any money is unknown. In addition, that money came from elsewhere, so there was an opportunity cost as well.
Around that period--2004-2007--there were a few bad decisions by NASA that did some damage to their program. One was putting out a Discovery call when they had no money to fund an actual mission (they wasted all the proposers' time and money) and another was picking a New Frontiers mission when they lacked the funding to actually start it. The goal is to make sure that if you hold a competition to select a mission you can follow through and actually do it. In both cases NASA failed at that.
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round that period--2004-2007--there were a few bad decisions by NASA that did some damage to their program. One was putting out a Discovery call when they had no money to fund an actual mission (they wasted all the proposers' time and money) and another was picking a New Frontiers mission when they lacked the funding to actually start it. The goal is to make sure that if you hold a competition to select a mission you can follow through and actually do it. In both cases NASA failed at that.
I had always thought that the Discovery call with no mission awards (I think only a mission of opportunity) was because there were no missions worth flying within the budget. The next call, as I remember, significantly increased the mission budget.
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I had always thought that the Discovery call with no mission awards (I think only a mission of opportunity) was because there were no missions worth flying within the budget. The next call, as I remember, significantly increased the mission budget.
No, they screwed up. And then (I think) they did a bad job of explaining what happened, implying that the mission proposals they received were poor when it was their own fault--blaming somebody else for their own mistake. I think that what really happened was not that their budget got cut, but that they did a bad job of figuring out how much money they would have available until after they had put out the call.
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Found some details on the Lucy mission finally: https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/resources/NASA/Lucy_Flyer.pdf (https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/resources/NASA/Lucy_Flyer.pdf)
It's even more ambitious than expected in terms of its targets; in addition to flying by a main-belt asteroid as a small bonus, it will be visiting both of the Trojan asteroid groups! I hope to hear more about this.
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Found some details on the Lucy mission finally: https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/resources/NASA/Lucy_Flyer.pdf (https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/resources/NASA/Lucy_Flyer.pdf)
It's even more ambitious than expected in terms of its targets; in addition to flying by a main-belt asteroid as a small bonus, it will be visiting both of the Trojan asteroid groups! I hope to hear more about this.
There was a Trojan tour optimization paper, not sure if it fed into this proposal
https://engineering.purdue.edu/people/kathleen.howell.1/Publications/Conferences/2014_AAS_StuHowWil.pdf
One identified target, 3548 Eurybates is common. PI Harold F. Levison is certainly a prolific scientists gentleman (https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=B2ikkHgAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate)
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I'm pleased that the Psyche and Venus radar missions have been picked. The other three proposals also look strong. Out of all these, I think the Venus radar would be my top choice. The reason to look at Venus is to see how the rate of volcanism varies with the size of a terrestrial planet. Mars has many virtues, but all the volcanoes are dead, as you would expect for a smaller body. Venus has a lot of volcanoes, and there are lots of indications they are still active. Volcanoes outgas carbon and sulfur dioxides and water, so that influences atmospheric evolution. Also, the highland areas on Venus might have been formed by the same kind of process that builds continents on earth.
VERITAS would address these questions by producing the kind of high resolution topographic map that Mars Global Surveyor made for Mars. It also has infrared sensors that should be able to look through the clouds and spot lava lakes.
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What I really want to see is a Venus lander or rover. There must be a way of getting a vehicle to last a longer time on the surface of Venus these days.
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What I really want to see is a Venus lander or rover. There must be a way of getting a vehicle to last a longer time on the surface of Venus these days.
There are proposals for increasing the lifetime of a spacecraft on Venus to at least several days. It requires tech development. A rover is really tricky. Moving parts in a hot, corrosive environment create a lot of problems.
Power source would be a major issue, it would have to be nuclear.
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Power source would be a major issue, it would have to be nuclear.
I've seen a proposal for what essentially is a power system supported by fuel burning that reportedly could keep a Venus lander alive for a few Earth days.
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Power source would be a major issue, it would have to be nuclear.
I've seen a proposal for what essentially is a power system supported by fuel burning that reportedly could keep a Venus lander alive for a few Earth days.
Hmm, an internal combustion engine? Would like to hear more.
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Power source would be a major issue, it would have to be nuclear.
I've seen a proposal for what essentially is a power system supported by fuel burning that reportedly could keep a Venus lander alive for a few Earth days.
Hmm, an internal combustion engine? Would like to hear more.
The Von Braun proposals for the Colliers Moon missions in the early 1950s used IC (diesel) engines for the Lunar Tanks for ground traverses. Hopefully, without a certain German software package aboard!
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Here's a B612 Foundation statement on the selection of NEOCam (which has roughly similar goals to the Sentinel mission they are trying to fund) as one of the 2015 Discovery finalists:
http://sentinelmission.org/featured-posts/neocam-note/
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Power source would be a major issue, it would have to be nuclear.
I've seen a proposal for what essentially is a power system supported by fuel burning that reportedly could keep a Venus lander alive for a few Earth days.
Hmm, an internal combustion engine? Would like to hear more.
See http://www.lpi.usra.edu/opag/meetings/aug2015/posters/3-NIAC.pdf
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A combination of IC power generation and canny use of waste heat looks very promising - though I still like the old suggestions for Venusian straandwalkers and mobile windmills!
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Listening to Jim Green talk at today's NAC Planetary Subcommittee meeting. He said that if two missions are selected, then the next competition would be pushed out from the currently planned AO in FY17. Selecting two in this round depends on funding from Congress, cost of the missions, launch opportunities, etc.
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More from Jim Green. While not Discovery, New Frontiers program is on track to release AO for NF 4 before the end of FY16 and time the selection of the NF5 to occur before the end of the current Decadal period (~2023).
Green also announced the winners of the Homesteader grants to mature instruments for NF 4. See attached slide. Not that Lori Glaze who has a finalist proposal for Discovery -- the Venus atmospheric probe DAVINCI -- for a NF venus probe.
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Blog post with additional info on the selected missions.
http://futureplanets.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/finalists-for-next-nasa-discovery.html?m=1
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Listening to Jim Green talk at today's NAC Planetary Subcommittee meeting. He said that if two missions are selected, then the next competition would be pushed out from the currently planned AO in FY17. Selecting two in this round depends on funding from Congress, cost of the missions, launch opportunities, etc.
Thanks for that. It now (mostly) answers the question. That also reminds me that I think I heard somebody--maybe Green--say at OPAG that they were concerned about how much time and effort and money went into each competition. So maybe they heard some complaints that a lot of money was spent producing 27 proposals and they decided to see if they could pick two instead of going through this all again in a couple of years.
I imagine that they're also assessing Discovery overall as a program. They have the decadal survey that said try to get to a selection every 24 months, and they have their budget level that I think is supporting them at about every 48 months or less. And then they have a large number of proposals. But what they also have--which we don't because it is proprietary--is the evaluation results. If, for instance, the reviews show that many of the proposals are mature (not just the five they picked), then that is sort of an argument for selecting more and holding fewer selections, because otherwise they're just making people work twice as hard.
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... they have their budget level that I think is supporting them at about every 48 months or less. And then they have a large number of proposals. But what they also have--which we don't because it is proprietary--is the evaluation results. If, for instance, the reviews show that many of the proposals are mature (not just the five they picked), then that is sort of an argument for selecting more and holding fewer selections, because otherwise they're just making people work twice as hard.
Green has said a number of times that they think they can do Discovery missions about every 36 months, and he repeated that today.
I think that another factor for selecting 2 this time is that they have at least 5 (the finalists) Category 1 (highest ranking for both science, engineering, and cost) and none seem to require new technologies (as both CHopper and TiME did last time for ASRGs). The only one I wonder about in my naivety is DAVINCI just because high pressure vessels are hard and entry shields for sizable probes are reasonably expensive I hear. However, to get to Cat 1, Glaze's team must have had good answers to those issues.
My guess is that the final selection will come down to program balance and Grunsfeld's and company's priorities. I think they have a good crop here.
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They should put the DAVINCI entry probe onto the VISAR orbiter. Those two proposals kind of look like they should be together.
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More from Jim Green. While not Discovery, New Frontiers program is on track to release AO for NF 4 before the end of FY16 and time the selection of the NF5 to occur before the end of the current Decadal period (~2023).
Green also announced the winners of the Homesteader grants to mature instruments for NF 4. See attached slide. Not that Lori Glaze who has a finalist proposal for Discovery -- the Venus atmospheric probe DAVINCI -- for a NF venus probe.
Thanks for posting those NF Homesteader results. We had proposed, but got a rejection notice a week ago, and I was curious who won. Looks like a pretty solid round of selections, so it doesn't feel quite so bad that we weren't selected. :-)
~Jon
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They should put the DAVINCI entry probe onto the VISAR orbiter. Those two proposals kind of look like they should be together.
That is at least a New Frontiers class mission (or around two Discovery missions). There might be relay problems, especially if you want your probe to go in over a particular location.
The VERTIAS orbiter already is as wide as the launch vehicle permits for the radar booms. Don't know if the design could accomodate a probe.
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They should put the DAVINCI entry probe onto the VISAR orbiter. Those two proposals kind of look like they should be together.
That is at least a New Frontiers class mission (or around two Discovery missions). There might be relay problems, especially if you want your probe to go in over a particular location.
The VERTIAS orbiter already is as wide as the launch vehicle permits for the radar booms. Don't know if the design could accomodate a probe.
For both to launch on the same rocket they would both have to be ready in time unless one waits around for the other. It doesn't seem like the budget supports starting two Discovery missions at the same time. Having one sit in a warehouse waiting for a few years will also incur costs for the mission.
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Here's a slide used by Jim Green to summarize the Discovery finalists.
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Interesting, it looks like DAVINCI has a relay spacecraft along with the lander. That dish antenna is too big to be needed for a cruise bus like what the various recent Mars landers have had. If I had to guess it would be a flyby relay like the Soviet Verneras had. I wonder if it has to do with entering Venus on the far side from Earth or to get more data over the limited time the probe will be operational?
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Interesting, it looks like DAVINCI has a relay spacecraft along with the lander. That dish antenna is too big to be needed for a cruise bus like what the various recent Mars landers have had. If I had to guess it would be a flyby relay like the Soviet Verneras had. I wonder if it has to do with entering Venus on the far side from Earth or to get more data over the limited time the probe will be operational?
The big antenna is for probe data relay (we know that much). The probe will be collecting potentially large amounts of data in descent images and spectra (the atmospheric composition measurements by comparison are typically fairly small amounts of data). Direct to Earth probe relay would result in much less data being returned. However, if the probe's descent is visible from Earth, then Earth stations may track for Doppler measurements to calculate wind speeds.
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Interesting, it looks like DAVINCI has a relay spacecraft along with the lander. That dish antenna is too big to be needed for a cruise bus like what the various recent Mars landers have had. If I had to guess it would be a flyby relay like the Soviet Verneras had. I wonder if it has to do with entering Venus on the far side from Earth or to get more data over the limited time the probe will be operational?
The big antenna is for probe data relay (we know that much). The probe will be collecting potentially large amounts of data in descent images and spectra (the atmospheric composition measurements by comparison are typically fairly small amounts of data). Direct to Earth probe relay would result in much less data being returned. However, if the probe's descent is visible from Earth, then Earth stations may track for Doppler measurements to calculate wind speeds.
That makes enough sense to me. They were able to detect the communication between Huygens and Cassini while tracking Huygens, but there was no way little Huygens could transmit its full data load directly to Earth. I know similar proposals to DAVINCI definitely wanted a kind of flyby relay so I'd presume the same here.
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I hope NEOCam gets selected. I think it has a good chance. It's time for it to either win or stop clogging up the pipeline.
I also really like DAVINCI, but I'm concerned it will be considered too risky.
I like PSYCHE, but I'm already worried about the potential PR disaster when it arrives and 16 Psyche turns out to look like just another space potato.
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I hope NEOCam gets selected. I think it has a good chance. It's time for it to either win or stop clogging up the pipeline.
I also really like DAVINCI, but I'm concerned it will be considered too risky.
I like PSYCHE, but I'm already worried about the potential PR disaster when it arrives and 16 Psyche turns out to look like just another space potato.
What should it matter what it looks like, that isn't really that important to the science.
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You know, with each of these missions, it seems like they're reaching further and further to come up with some cutesy acronym to give their mission a memorable name. Of the current crop, NEOCam is the only one that you can somewhat deduce what its mission is from the name.
What ever happened to the good old days, when a probe designed to orbit the Moon and send back pictures and data was called Lunar Orbiter? Or just Luna? These days, the Lunar Orbiter program would have some reach-for-it name like LOMAX, for Lunar Orbital Mapping and Apollo eXamination... sigh...
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What ever happened to the good old days, when a probe designed to orbit the Moon and send back pictures and data was called Lunar Orbiter? Or just Luna? ..
Ranger Mariner Pioneer Surveyor Viking Voyager ..
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What ever happened to the good old days, when a probe designed to orbit the Moon and send back pictures and data was called Lunar Orbiter? Or just Luna? ..
Ranger Mariner Pioneer Surveyor Viking Voyager ..
Oh, I know. My tongue was at least loosely in cheek. But still -- I can counter with Mars Observer, Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Climate Orbiter, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Exploration Rover, Mars Science Laboratory, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, Venera (1 through n), Mars (1 through n), Phobos, Phobos-Grunt, Landsat (aka Earth Resources Test Satellite, for the first one), Long Duration Exposure Facility, Orbiting Astronomical Observatory... and dozens more from both the early and recent days of space exploration.
Sometimes I think the courage to name your probe after what it does, and let the acronyms be unpronounceable and have no relation to anything except what they stand for (as, from above, MO, MGS, MCO, MRO, MER, MSL, LRO, ERTS, LDEF and OAO, among many others), is rare out there... ;)
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(snip)
I like PSYCHE, but I'm already worried about the potential PR disaster when it arrives and 16 Psyche turns out to look like just another space potato.
A "PR disaster" is what happens every other day when NASA results get little coverage and results are quickly forgotten.
If the probe gets there and people hear that the scientists find it exciting, they will be excited if they are so inclined. That it may or may not meet some technical criterion buried in the proposal will indeed be forgotten.
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I don't know if it's a criteria but the NEOCam mission seems to fit nicely into the Administration's priorities.
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I don't know if it's a criteria but the NEOCam mission seems to fit nicely into the Administration's priorities.
The administration has had a number of years to fund it to satisfy those priorities. The fact that they have not funded it should give you a hint about those priorities.
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I hope NEOCam gets selected. I think it has a good chance. It's time for it to either win or stop clogging up the pipeline.
I also really like DAVINCI, but I'm concerned it will be considered too risky.
I like PSYCHE, but I'm already worried about the potential PR disaster when it arrives and 16 Psyche turns out to look like just another space potato.
What should it matter what it looks like, that isn't really that important to the science.
Agree that it will be scientifically fascinating regardless.
Just a challenge for PAO. 16 Psyche could be one of the most remarkable objects we've ever seen, with sheets of solidified metallic ejecta. Or it could look like a grey lump. Have to be careful what you promise; the team has set the bar pretty high with the concept art in their proposal.
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"You know, with each of these missions, it seems like they're reaching further and further to come up with some cutesy acronym to give their mission a memorable name. "
Yes... MESSENGER and OSIRIS-REX come to mind as well. Too contrived. Too much nym and not enough acro.
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PI-led missions tend to either have names or overly-clever acronyms. Directed missions, meaning that they are usually run out of a NASA center, often simply go for descriptive names, sometimes resulting in boring acronyms--like LRO and MRO.
There is a clear reason for this: the directed missions, the ones that come out of NASA centers, are often run by civil servants who are scared that if they get too clever somebody may complain. The old adage of "if they notice us, they will cut our budget" often rules in those places. I'm not kidding, there are two general attitudes that prevail, either people think that publicity and public outreach and being clever and inventive is a good thing, or people think that they need to be good bureaucrats and keep their heads down and color in between the lines.
I wish that when the Science Mission Directorate had taken over LRO they had held a naming contest and given it a clever name. It's easier to identify with a name than an acronym.
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I don't know if it's a criteria but the NEOCam mission seems to fit nicely into the Administration's priorities.
The administration has had a number of years to fund it to satisfy those priorities. The fact that they have not funded it should give you a hint about those priorities.
It was funded as a Discovery technology development program in 2010. But does a mission like this one have to go through a Discovery proposal?
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It was funded as a Discovery technology development program in 2010. But does a mission like this one have to go through a Discovery proposal?
Discovery is just one program that NASA has. It's a science program.
HEOMD officially wants to do an asteroid mission. One of the requirements that they identified as far back as 2010 was to find more asteroids. The only good way of finding more asteroids, especially within the timeframe they set for doing their asteroid mission, is to build and fly a space-based telescope to detect asteroids. NEOCam has existed as a concept since before 2009. If NASA wanted to find more asteroids, they could have funded NEOCam on its own, and did not have to wait for it to possibly be selected as a Discovery program. They did not do that. Draw your own conclusions.
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Presser:
SSL IS JPL INDUSTRIAL PARTNER FOR nasa asteroid exploration MISSION OPPORTUNITY
PALO ALTO, Calif. – October 26, 2015 — Space Systems/Loral (SSL), a leading provider of commercial satellites, today announced that it is the industrial partner for a project in the running to be NASA’s next Discovery mission. SSL will work for Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to support Principal Investigator Dr. Lindy Elkins-Tanton, director of Arizona State University’s (ASU) School of Earth and Space Exploration, in a mission to research Psyche, a massive asteroid made of iron and nickel, which is believed to be the only place in the solar system where a metal planetary core can be studied.
“The Psyche mission represents the first time that SSL will be the primary industrial partner for a Discovery-class NASA exploration mission,” said John Celli, president of SSL. “This growing position as a supplier to NASA reflects our success in demonstrating how SSL can help the agency meet its goal of bringing the benefits of commercial industry to its missions.”
Recent successes as a subsystems provider have helped SSL prove its value to NASA. The company provided the propulsion system for NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft, which successfully ended its 100-day mission in 2014.
The NASA Discovery Program goal is to deepen the knowledge of our solar system by launching modest cost-capped missions on a routine cadence. The Psyche mission concept was one of five selected for comprehensive study via Phase A contracts.
SSL will support JPL, working within a multi-institution team to conduct concept design studies and analyses. Based on the results, in late 2016 NASA will select one or two of the five Discovery missions for flight, to launch in the early 2020s.
For the Psyche mission, SSL would provide the “power-propulsion chassis,” a highly capable composite structure spacecraft bus equipped with a high-power electric propulsion system. The basic spacecraft design has been proven on 100 missions, and it will have the performance to deliver the science package and beam back the results.
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I am curious. Has someone ever proposed or studied a gps occultation mission to Venus by sending one source orbiter and maybe two receiving orbiters?
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GPS radio occultation works because radio waves are refracted by the atmosphere differently due to temperature, pressure, and water vapor. I am not sure that any experiment or mission has been studied with the exactly the same setup as done around Earth, in other words with two satellites in orbit of Venus. However geometry is replicable with a space craft in orbit around Venus and a ground station on Earth. This is how the VERA instrument aboard Venus Express worked.
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NEOCam presentation at the January SBAG meeting.
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/sbag/meetings/jan2016/presentations/Mainzer.pdf
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Lucy presentation at the January SBAG meeting.
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/sbag/meetings/jan2016/presentations/Levison.pdf
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Psyche presentation at the January SBAG meeting.
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/sbag/meetings/jan2016/presentations/Elkins-Tanton.pdf
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After looking over all three of the presentations, I'm greedy. I want all three to go forward. ;D
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Impressive proposals. I'd still hope one of the Venus options wins out, simply because that planet remains unvisited by American probes, but I'd be interested to see Lucy win since it'd be seeing several of the Trojans, which have yet to be decently photographed. If it weren't for the fact Lucy will see 7 asteroids all together versus just 1 large (yet enigmatic) asteroid, I'd rank Psyche higher. Psyche may yet win since it seems to be a simpler mission that presumably is a clone of Dawn but with a magnetometer.
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Impressive proposals. I'd still hope one of the Venus options wins out, simply because that planet remains unvisited by American probes.....
Apart from Mariners 2, 5, and 10, Pioneer Venus A and B, and Magellan. Cassini was partly a US spacecraft and flew past Venus twice.
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Impressive proposals. I'd still hope one of the Venus options wins out, simply because that planet remains unvisited by American probes.....
Apart from Mariners 2, 5, and 10, Pioneer Venus A and B, and Magellan. Cassini was partly a US spacecraft and flew past Venus twice.
I should have stated 'unvisited since the Magellan of the late '80s and '90s.' Messenger and Cassini flew by Venus, but neither were intended to contribute specifically to Venus studies. Venus is in the state of attention Mars was ~20 years ago during the vacuum between Viking and Pathfinder; hence why a Discovery mission venturing there is well warranted.
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Impressive proposals. I'd still hope one of the Venus options wins out, simply because that planet remains unvisited by American probes.....
Apart from Mariners 2, 5, and 10, Pioneer Venus A and B, and Magellan. Cassini was partly a US spacecraft and flew past Venus twice.
I should have stated 'unvisited since the Magellan of the late '80s and '90s.' Messenger and Cassini flew by Venus, but neither were intended to contribute specifically to Venus studies. Venus is in the state of attention Mars was ~20 years ago during the vacuum between Viking and Pathfinder; hence why a Discovery mission venturing there is well warranted.
Maybe it's time to form a "Venus Underground?"
The Mars Underground was instrumental at re-starting the engine of US robotic exploration of Mars during the 80's.
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The Venus community has been trying to do that for at least a decade. The have created plans for ambitious flagship missions to menus of discovery mission concepts
Compared to Mars, the Venus community has a couple of challenges: no chance for life (except for some creative ideas about stratospheric microbes) and technical challenges (hot, high pressure surface, clouds that prevent optical mapping from orbit)
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The Venus community has been trying to do that for at least a decade. The have created plans for ambitious flagship missions to menus of discovery mission concepts
Compared to Mars, the Venus community has a couple of challenges: no chance for life (except for some creative ideas about stratospheric microbes) and technical challenges (hot, high pressure surface, clouds that prevent optical mapping from orbit)
Yeah, it helps to think of various missions in terms of costs vs. benefits, and how much it costs to get even a minimal benefit. One of the things working against Venus is that the low hanging fruit has been picked and in order to take the next steps you have to send something to the surface, and that costs a lot. Just in general, getting a little bit more science out of Venus costs more than getting just a little bit more science out of a lot of other solar system targets.
Add to that the fact that scientifically, Venus is not as interesting as Mars (for instance, no possibility of life), and you can see why Venus just has not fared well over the decades. It's not for lack of trying, and it's not like there is an anti-Venus movement. It's just that Venus has fewer benefits and higher costs, putting it at a comparative disadvantage.
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Basically Venus is done good enough in comparison to most other targets in the solar system.
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Yeah, it helps to think of various missions in terms of costs vs. benefits, and how much it costs to get even a minimal benefit. One of the things working against Venus is that the low hanging fruit has been picked and in order to take the next steps you have to send something to the surface, and that costs a lot. Just in general, getting a little bit more science out of Venus costs more than getting just a little bit more science out of a lot of other solar system targets.
In general, I agree with Blackstar, especially as you move to more expensive missions. There will be more data, much more, from a $2B rover on Mars than from a similarly priced Venus lander.
However, the two Venus Discovery finalists do, I believe, compete well with the other Disovery finalists in terms of science per $. Atmospheric composition measurements are key to understanding planetary formation and evolution. The measurements made in the late 1970s by Pioneer Venus are like the Viking orbiter images from the same period at Mars. Today's atmospheric composition measurements are as much advanced as HiRise's images are higher resolution than Viking's.
Orbital radar mapping instruments have also undergone a revolution since the Magellan era, allowing much more advanced mapping (higher resolution, mapping ground swelling and depression, etc) on a Discovery or ESA Medium mission budget.
For Venus landers, though, they can measure only one small area for a few hours at best. The community will need to make the case that a single lander's science can better understand the solar system than the other missions that will be proposed for the upcoming New Frontiers competition
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NEOCam for the win. Huge boatload of science, much of practical use (is the SMOD coming soon?). Also could ID many candidates for future exploration. But all three proposals have merit. Thank you for posting them, Blackstar.
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NEOCam for the win. Huge boatload of science, much of practical use (is the SMOD coming soon?). Also could ID many candidates for future exploration. But all three proposals have merit. Thank you for posting them, Blackstar.
I'd rather this be done by commercial space. As of all them this is the most likely done as part of the exploitation their resources.
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NEOCam for the win.
I'd rather this be done by commercial space. As of all them this is the most likely done as part of the exploitation their resources.
I would agree, except commercial space isn't near the capabilities of NEOCam. Planetary Resources will have little telescopes in orbit eventually, if they hold on as a business, but they won't have anywhere near the sensitivity of NEOCam.
We've all seen the Chelyabinsk videos and pictures of mushroom clouds over Jupiter when SL 9's fragments hit. Finding potentially hazardous asteroids is basically a form of national defense, except we can help protect the whole species. I'm very happy to have commercial companies exploit NEOCam's data. Think of it as Landsat for asteroids, or some other government research program that has direct commercial benefits, like much of what the USGS does.
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Yeah, it helps to think of various missions in terms of costs vs. benefits, and how much it costs to get even a minimal benefit. One of the things working against Venus is that the low hanging fruit has been picked and in order to take the next steps you have to send something to the surface, and that costs a lot. Just in general, getting a little bit more science out of Venus costs more than getting just a little bit more science out of a lot of other solar system targets.
In general, I agree with Blackstar, especially as you move to more expensive missions. There will be more data, much more, from a $2B rover on Mars than from a similarly priced Venus lander.
However, the two Venus Discovery finalists do, I believe, compete well with the other Disovery finalists in terms of science per $. Atmospheric composition measurements are key to understanding planetary formation and evolution. The measurements made in the late 1970s by Pioneer Venus are like the Viking orbiter images from the same period at Mars. Today's atmospheric composition measurements are as much advanced as HiRise's images are higher resolution than Viking's.
Orbital radar mapping instruments have also undergone a revolution since the Magellan era, allowing much more advanced mapping (higher resolution, mapping ground swelling and depression, etc) on a Discovery or ESA Medium mission budget.
For Venus landers, though, they can measure only one small area for a few hours at best. The community will need to make the case that a single lander's science can better understand the solar system than the other missions that will be proposed for the upcoming New Frontiers competition
I was speaking in more broad and general terms to try and explain--very broadly--why Venus has not gotten the attention that other targets have. Simply put, you can get more science, and often more interesting science, per dollar spent on a lot of other targets. That's why I think that Venus has come up short. That is not to say that the current Discovery proposals are without merit. I'd be happy to see one of them chosen, simply because the planetary science community should conduct a balanced program of solar system exploration and not neglect any particular target or set of targets.
But this raises another issue that is worth discussing, which is the duration of the science observations made by a mission. A Venus lander mission would only collect science data for a short period of time. A Saturn Probe mission would only collect data for a brief period. And a South Pole-Aitken Basin sample return mission would only bring back samples from a single location. Now does this mean that those missions are without merit? In the case of Saturn Probe and SPABSR, scientists consider the data to be fundamental to understanding some major questions about solar system formation and evolution, so in those cases, it is sort of a yes/no option, without the data, you are really in the dark. I don't think that Venus lander data is the same, so the data is not going to be viewed as importantly by the community.
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While we're discussing Venus, I'm surprised something like a balloon mission hasn't been proposed. In terms of environmental conditions it's the closest compromise you'll find with current technology that brings something closer to Venus without melting. Also, if there's any airborne life this'd be the best bet to find it. I can only assume a matter of deployment and mission lifetime are the variables.
Somehow a surface mission needs to be developed but I doubt that will happen soon enough, not with lead-melting temperatures fouling everything. A Venusian equivalent of Insight would be useful to see if the sister planet's interior is akin to ours, or rock boring to get a chemical analysis akin to Phoenix or Curiosity; but obviously both types of science need more than a handful of hours to do a proper job. If a lander could be made to survive 24 hours on Venus what could it do within that time frame?
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Discovery balloon missions have been proposed by at least Baines at jpl. Not sure if they made it past the internal jpl reviews.
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Was the selection of Discovery finalists due to come out soon? If it wasn't due in September does anyone recall when we're supposed to get an update?
Yep, targeted date for step 1 selection announcement is September 2015 according to the current schedule.
See: http://discovery.larc.nasa.gov/ao_schedule.html (http://discovery.larc.nasa.gov/ao_schedule.html)
Does this schedule still hold merit? Will we start hearing about the Discovery finalists again in July, and the final selection (between either 1 or 2 missions) by year's end?
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Was the selection of Discovery finalists due to come out soon? If it wasn't due in September does anyone recall when we're supposed to get an update?
Yep, targeted date for step 1 selection announcement is September 2015 according to the current schedule.
See: http://discovery.larc.nasa.gov/ao_schedule.html (http://discovery.larc.nasa.gov/ao_schedule.html)
Does this schedule still hold merit? Will we start hearing about the Discovery finalists again in July, and the final selection (between either 1 or 2 missions) by year's end?
Well, if you click on the link it shows that a number of the dates have slipped. Announcement by December, not September. I don't know why the slip in dates. One possibility is that they wanted more time to figure out the impact of the InSight delay and whether that would provide enough money to select two.
I do know that some of the key events have been happening, although I don't know if they've slipped. For instance, I know of at least one of the teams that was undergoing review a few weeks ago. I think the way that works is that the proposal team has to sit down with a review team and the reviewers ask "You said that you would solve problem A by doing it like this, but how do you know that solution A is better than this other solution B?" There's also a site visit in there somewhere. I don't know if those have occurred yet.
Keep in mind that a bunch of things are being evaluated in these proposals. It's not just the proposal idea or the concept, but also the team and their solutions. So reviewers might look at a team and determine that it lacks the proper expertise to do certain things, or that they have missed certain important factors. I was talking with one of the early proposals PIs (one that did not get down-selected) and he said that they had gotten dinged for their science observations--reviewers did not think that the mission as proposed would be able to accomplish all the things that the proposers had claimed. That kind of examination gets more intense in the second phase.
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Jeff Foust @jeff_foust
NASA’s Jim Green at #SBAG: will do everything I can to convince the selecting official to pick 2 Discovery missions late this year
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As above they are still hoping to select two missions this December.
https://mobile.twitter.com/jeff_foust/status/757642441809809408
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Will there be any significant decisions made this month regarding Discovery missions?
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Will there be any significant decisions made this month regarding Discovery missions?
The schedule http://discovery.larc.nasa.gov/ao_schedule.html says, and has said for some time, that downselection will happen in December. So probably nothing new this month.
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Will there be any significant decisions made this month regarding Discovery missions?
The schedule http://discovery.larc.nasa.gov/ao_schedule.html says, and has said for some time, that downselection will happen in December. So probably nothing new this month.
The initial schedule when the AO was released had the final selection about this time. For the last few months, the date has been pushed back to the end of the year. The only other comment has been Green saying that he is doing everything he can to have to missions selected.
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http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2016-230
"NASA's budget for InSight was $675 million. The instrument redesign and two-year delay add $153.8 million. The additional cost will not delay or cancel any current missions, though there may be fewer opportunities for new missions in future years, from fiscal years 2017-2020."
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http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2016-230
"NASA's budget for InSight was $675 million. The instrument redesign and two-year delay add $153.8 million. The additional cost will not delay or cancel any current missions, though there may be fewer opportunities for new missions in future years, from fiscal years 2017-2020."
Green's recent positive comments on selecting two missions surprised me, but I had heard that there were some other opportunities to fund the InSight overrun from other accounts. Also, the additional amount needed for InSight is something like 6 months of peak Discovery mission funding, so just pushing out the launch of one of the two selected missions a few months might be another approach
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http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2016-230
"NASA's budget for InSight was $675 million. The instrument redesign and two-year delay add $153.8 million. The additional cost will not delay or cancel any current missions, though there may be fewer opportunities for new missions in future years, from fiscal years 2017-2020."
Green's recent positive comments on selecting two missions surprised me, but I had heard that there were some other opportunities to fund the InSight overrun from other accounts. Also, the additional amount needed for InSight is something like 6 months of peak Discovery mission funding, so just pushing out the launch of one of the two selected missions a few months might be another approach
I suppose it's good to get these two going before the Europa mission(s) start eating all the planetary budget.
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So the effect of InSight is either going to be a single new Discovery mission or two with future selections pushed back for a time.
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http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2016-230
"NASA's budget for InSight was $675 million. The instrument redesign and two-year delay add $153.8 million. The additional cost will not delay or cancel any current missions, though there may be fewer opportunities for new missions in future years, from fiscal years 2017-2020."
Green's recent positive comments on selecting two missions surprised me, but I had heard that there were some other opportunities to fund the InSight overrun from other accounts. Also, the additional amount needed for InSight is something like 6 months of peak Discovery mission funding, so just pushing out the launch of one of the two selected missions a few months might be another approach
I have the gut feeling that the budgeting issues are more complex than that.
And remember that NASA has to get its budget proposals approved by OMB. NASA could come up with a way to creatively fund two Discovery missions and they might be told no by OMB. Not saying that will happen, but don't assume it is a done deal.
In a couple of weeks you may get more clarity on this.
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http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2016-230
"NASA's budget for InSight was $675 million. The instrument redesign and two-year delay add $153.8 million. The additional cost will not delay or cancel any current missions, though there may be fewer opportunities for new missions in future years, from fiscal years 2017-2020."
Green's recent positive comments on selecting two missions surprised me, but I had heard that there were some other opportunities to fund the InSight overrun from other accounts. Also, the additional amount needed for InSight is something like 6 months of peak Discovery mission funding, so just pushing out the launch of one of the two selected missions a few months might be another approach
I have the gut feeling that the budgeting issues are more complex than that.
And remember that NASA has to get its budget proposals approved by OMB. NASA could come up with a way to creatively fund two Discovery missions and they might be told no by OMB. Not saying that will happen, but don't assume it is a done deal.
In a couple of weeks you may get more clarity on this.
Blackstar -
Blackstar, I agree that the budgeting issues are complex. Having seen Green in action, I don't think he'd be raising the possibility of two selections, though, unless he thought it was a reasonable possibility. I haven't seen him let the community get their hopes up on hope only. We will know if he pulled a rabbit out of the hat or not in December.
But I think OMB likes the Discovery program?
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Blackstar, I agree that the budgeting issues are complex. Having seen Green in action, I don't think he'd be raising the possibility of two selections, though, unless he thought it was a reasonable possibility. I haven't seen him let the community get their hopes up on hope only. We will know if he pulled a rabbit out of the hat or not in December.
But I think OMB likes the Discovery program?
What I mean is that OMB may not let him do what he wants to do. Do not underestimate their ability to throw sand in the gears. He has to give them a credible program and they have to agree to it.
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NASA official says new mission selections on track despite InSight woes
http://spaceflightnow.com/2016/09/07/nasa-official-says-new-mission-selections-on-track-despite-insight-woes/
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Although not related to the upcoming downselection in (I think is still) December, a surprise about one of the candidate asteroid missions' target:
http://www.astrowatch.net/2016/10/psyche-unexpected-discoveries-on-metal.html (http://www.astrowatch.net/2016/10/psyche-unexpected-discoveries-on-metal.html)
Apparently the metal asteroid, Psyche, may have a dab of water.
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pop-science coverage of Discovery selections by TMRO
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPa_6OKuPXc
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I assumed that the Psyche mission was pronounced "siii kee," but the guy in the video pronounces it "sike."
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I assumed that the Psyche mission was pronounced "siii kee," but the guy in the video pronounces it "sike."
Your assumption was correct. He's mistaken in his pronunciation.
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I assumed that the Psyche mission was pronounced "siii kee," but the guy in the video pronounces it "sike."
Your assumption was correct. He's mistaken in his pronunciation.
Thank you. I will now use that information to impress women and small dogs.
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I assumed that the Psyche mission was pronounced "siii kee," but the guy in the video pronounces it "sike."
Your assumption was correct. He's mistaken in his pronunciation.
They get that a lot ( see latest episode about Schiaparelli ) ..
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I assumed that the Psyche mission was pronounced "siii kee," but the guy in the video pronounces it "sike."
It is pronounced Ψυχή and it means Soul. Psi - hi
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Thank you. I will now use that information to impress women and small dogs.
I'd suggest letting the women know that you can identify animals with a proper appreciation of orthoepy. That is your more impressive talent.
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Thank you. I will now use that information to impress women and small dogs.
I'd suggest letting the women know that you can identify animals with a proper appreciation of orthoepy. That is your more impressive talent.
I was not being orthoeptic, I was being pedantic.
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Jeff Foust – @jeff_foust
Green: selection process for Discovery competition remains on time. New science AA, Thomas Zurbuchen, is the selecting official. #LEAG16
https://mobile.twitter.com/jeff_foust/status/793511406607867904
As we haven't got a thread for this I might as well put this here.
Jeff Foust – @jeff_foust
Green: next New Frontiers announcement of opportunity looks to be on time; final AO will come out by end of January. #LEAG16
https://mobile.twitter.com/jeff_foust/status/793512742787256320
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Jeff Foust – @jeff_foust
Green: selection process for Discovery competition remains on time. New science AA, Thomas Zurbuchen, is the selecting official. #LEAG16
https://mobile.twitter.com/jeff_foust/status/793511406607867904
As we haven't got a thread for this I might as well put this here.
I still am unsure what "on time" means since the timeline for Discovery was shifted a while ago. I can only assume something will happen in December.
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I still am unsure what "on time" means since the timeline for Discovery was shifted a while ago. I can only assume something will happen in December.
Just talked to somebody on one of the teams--site visits are going on this month with the plan still being to down-select in December.
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Weirdly the proposed Discovery mission to Psyche has been picked up by the British tabloid newspaper The Mirror.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/science/nasa-could-send-rocket-metal-9298092
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Weirdly the proposed Discovery mission to Psyche has been picked up by the British tabloid newspaper The Mirror.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/science/nasa-could-send-rocket-metal-9298092
A few other times the Psyche's been mentioned in articles too. It's apparently becoming a "popular" mission; whether or not that increases its prospects of being chosen I don't know.
My personal opinion is split between VERITAS , Lucy, and Psyche at this point.
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The attention will not change the selection. Several of the missions have gotten attention. Astronomy magazine, for instance, did a cover story on the Venus proposals. NEOCam has gotten mention in numerous places. I think that Lucy has gained the least coverage.
Awhile back I got some insight into the issues that affect selection. They are far more specific and esoteric than those of us on the outside would guess. People think "well, subject X is in favor these days, so it has a better chance of getting selected." But the selection process looks at a lot of issues, like the resumes of the team members, and the track record of the companies that will build the instruments, and how well each science objective is likely to be achieved with the instruments. We never see those details, but they can be very important for the final decision.
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The attention will not change the selection. Several of the missions have gotten attention. Astronomy magazine, for instance, did a cover story on the Venus proposals. NEOCam has gotten mention in numerous places. I think that Lucy has gained the least coverage.
Awhile back I got some insight into the issues that affect selection. They are far more specific and esoteric than those of us on the outside would guess.
That is good to hear. While the management of some aspects of NASA seem questionable (examples: HSF, ARM, Moon v.s. Mars debate), more science-driven areas like Discovery seemed pleasantly steadfast and more removed from fickle politics. They at least debate like we'd assume scientists would.
I can see how, from either an engineering or scientific perspective, one mission could seem better than another.
For example, from an engineering perspective NEOCam would be a good choice because it's simple and 'proven.' A space telescope isn't nearly as complex or as challenged as say a Mars rover. It will naturally need to be accurate, but its targets are local compared to the majority of Hubble's, so the issues it focuses on would be thermal and gyroscopic; otherwise it floats not roves.
I am curious how DAVINCI or VERITAS would be rated against each other. VERITAS would have superior radar compared to Magellan, but it is far from the first orbiter around the second planet, not to mention the deeper mysteries of Venus call for surface investigation. DAVINCI has the disadvantage of being short-lived, but it could literally sniff out whether volcanoes are active, verify crucial differences from Earth's atmosphere, and provide the first images of the Venusian surface in over 30 years (the last being the Soviet Vegas).
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For example, from an engineering perspective NEOCam would be a good choice because it's simple and 'proven.' A space telescope isn't nearly as complex or as challenged as say a Mars rover. It will naturally need to be accurate, but its targets are local compared to the majority of Hubble's, so the issues it focuses on would be thermal and gyroscopic; otherwise it floats not roves.
I am curious how DAVINCI or VERITAS would be rated against each other. VERITAS would have superior radar compared to Magellan, but it is far from the first orbiter around the second planet, not to mention the deeper mysteries of Venus call for surface investigation. DAVINCI has the disadvantage of being short-lived, but it could literally sniff out whether volcanoes are active, verify crucial differences from Earth's atmosphere, and provide the first images of the Venusian surface in over 30 years (the last being the Soviet Vegas).
But you're still thinking of this at the high level. The teams are being evaluated according to a lot of criteria, and we don't know what all of those are. But as an example, the reviewers might look at a proposal and say "They have 15 scientists listed, and they are all good, but none of them is an expert on specific item X that is listed as the most important question they are trying to answer. I would be much more likely to recommend them if they had an expert on specific item X on their team."
Similarly, maybe they say that their spacecraft will contain instrument Y and it will be built by company Q. But the reviewers note that the last time that company built that kind of instrument, they ran into many problems and ended up over budget.
It's a big report card that they fill out, evaluating a whole bunch of criteria. And there could be a few things way down in the details that might give the proposal a slightly lower grade.
As for NEOCam, the PI has said that the primary challenge for that is crunching the data. Yeah, it's a telescope, but the sensor and processor are apparently quite advanced. The sensor has already been built with previous NASA Discovery money, which gives them a plus-up for their evaluation.
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That is good to hear. While the management of some aspects of NASA seem questionable (examples: HSF, ARM, Moon v.s. Mars debate), more science-driven areas like Discovery seemed pleasantly steadfast and more removed from fickle politics. They at least debate like we'd assume scientists would.
I'd caution to separate out the issue of prioritization and selection from issues of management.
A big problem for NASA's human spaceflight program is that prioritization always shifts (Moon? No, Mars! No, Moon!), and lots of people want to mess with it. That constantly shifting landscape makes management of individual programs like Orion and SLS more difficult.
The space sciences, however, have a system for setting priorities (the decadal survey process). And the politicians trust it enough to not screw with it. They allow NASA to manage it mostly unmolested. And NASA is pretty good at managing its space science programs. Look at the past five years and you'll see no major cost overruns, and only minor schedule problems (like InSight). In fact, a number of space science projects have come in under budget. They're quite good at this.
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A space telescope isn't nearly as complex or as challenged as say a Mars rover.
I sort of understand what you mean, but literally taken this statement is very far from being true in general.
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As for NEOCam, the PI has said that the primary challenge for that is crunching the data. Yeah, it's a telescope, but the sensor and processor are apparently quite advanced. The sensor has already been built with previous NASA Discovery money, which gives them a plus-up for their evaluation.
So we should definitely keep NEOCam in mind as much as the others. It isn't as sexy as Lucy or DAVINCI, but obviously you point out how it has engineering merits and it serves a useful function (safeguarding humanity from impact being one benefit).
Whichever wins, I REALLY hope to hear some fresh news on Discovery matters (and not just another Astronomy or British space article).
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As for NEOCam, the PI has said that the primary challenge for that is crunching the data. Yeah, it's a telescope, but the sensor and processor are apparently quite advanced. The sensor has already been built with previous NASA Discovery money, which gives them a plus-up for their evaluation.
So we should definitely keep NEOCam in mind as much as the others. It isn't as sexy as Lucy or DAVINCI, but obviously you point out how it has engineering merits and it serves a useful function (safeguarding humanity from impact being one benefit).
I know people involved in 3 out of the 5 proposals under consideration (maybe more, but I'm just not aware of them). I know the NEOCam PI personally--she was on a study that I ran. She has her head screwed on straight.
I have my favorites for the Discovery missions, but I keep mum about them because I know people involved and don't want to offend.
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I have my favorites for the Discovery missions, but I keep mum about them because I know people involved and don't want to offend.
Well we basically have 2 main camps in this selection: Venus and Asteroids. I'm sure you know how, if it had been a case of a Mars mission winning again, every other group under the sun would be unanimous in their loathing. ;)
If I wished to be fair I think one for Venus and one for the Asteroid ought to win. I almost wish for both Venus missions to win, but something like Lucy would generate completely fresh data on numerous bodies, namely the enigmatic Trojans, and NEOCam would as importantly pin down the asteroid count like a Gaia survey for the asteroid belt. Good, but tough, choices.
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I have my favorites for the Discovery missions, but I keep mum about them because I know people involved and don't want to offend.
Well we basically have 2 main camps in this selection: Venus and Asteroids. I'm sure you know how, if it had been a case of a Mars mission winning again, every other group under the sun would be unanimous in their loathing. ;)
If I wished to be fair I think one for Venus and one for the Asteroid ought to win. I almost wish for both Venus missions to win, but something like Lucy would generate completely fresh data on numerous bodies, namely the enigmatic Trojans, and NEOCam would as importantly pin down the asteroid count like a Gaia survey for the asteroid belt. Good, but tough, choices.
And what's wrong with the Psyche mission, as a utterly unique object I believe it should take precedence in study over some of these more generalist proposals. In fact I would like to see it take precedence over all of them with one of the other asteroid relsted missions taking the other slot.
The two Venus proposals should be in one mission and not separate and that's as good as reason as any for me to think neither should get through. If that means they have to compete in the next New Horizons competition instead because of increased cost then so be it.
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The two Venus proposals should be in one mission and not separate and that's as good as reason as any for me to think neither should get through. If that means they have to compete in the next New Horizons competition instead because of increased cost then so be it.
I guess it's too bad you're not king, huh?
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The two Venus proposals should be in one mission and not separate and that's as good as reason as any for me to think neither should get through. If that means they have to compete in the next New Horizons competition instead because of increased cost then so be it.
I guess it's too bad you're not king, huh?
And isn't it more logical to have them both in one. At the moment each one sounds like one half of a better mission. How is it a good use of resources to go all the way to Venus just to put a probe into its atmosphere, surely it would be better to do this and then carry out what the other proposal for Venus is putting forward.
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Isn't it more logical to do several asteroids with one mission, like Dawn has done? At they moment Psyche is like one half (or less!) of a better mission. How is it a good use of resources to put a probe out there to look at only one asteroid, when there are so many out there? Besides, 'Psyche' has a letter 'y'; I don't like 'y's.
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And isn't it more logical to have them both in one. At the moment each one sounds like one half of a better mission. How is it a good use of resources to go all the way to Venus just to put a probe into its atmosphere, surely it would be better to do this and then carry out what the other proposal for Venus is putting forward.
Possibly, but then again there's been a trend to segregate orbiters and landers since the late 1990s to minimize mission loss; after all the Galileo had it's probe plugging its rocket engine. There's plans for a Saturn probe to fly solo for example too. DAVINCI might require a steeper trajectory than VERITAS can accommodate as an example of a complication.
And what's wrong with the Psyche mission, as a utterly unique object I believe it should take precedence in study over some of these more generalist proposals. In fact I would like to see it take precedence over all of them with one of the other asteroid relsted missions taking the other slot.
It didn't take precedence over either Vesta or Ceres either, which both could be labeled unique asteroids too. And Lucy's Trojans haven't even been flown by before, and nowadays they're consistered planetary fossils or something like a "missing link" between KBOs and the asteroid belt.
Like I said before, it's a tough call. Regarding the asteroid missions, Psyche's obviously visiting the only giant-size metal asteroid, Lucy aims to visit multiple Trojans, and NEOCam might identify the next direct threat to Earth in its Gaia-esque survey of asteroids.
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Isn't it more logical to do several asteroids with one mission, like Dawn has done? At they moment Psyche is like one half (or less!) of a better mission. How is it a good use of resources to put a probe out there to look at only one asteroid, when there are so many out there? Besides, 'Psyche' has a letter 'y'; I don't like 'y's.
Yes and no. Dawn was able to take advantage of an alignment between Vesta and Ceres and use its ion drive to push it out to both asteroids. Galileo, the first asteroid visitor, just cruised by whatever happened to be near its own path. Sometimes you can plan multiple asteroid visits, other times it's a lucky mission extension.
Lucy is going to be visiting at least 4 asteroids, 1 stony and the others Trojans. It won't have the same extensive science Dawn did at Vesta and Ceres, but it will be comparing a wider collection of objects.
Psyche, with a nice big Y ;) , is a large asteroid worthy of solo attention; it's a whole world, not a mere pebble.
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And isn't it more logical to have them both in one. At the moment each one sounds like one half of a better mission. How is it a good use of resources to go all the way to Venus just to put a probe into its atmosphere, surely it would be better to do this and then carry out what the other proposal for Venus is putting forward.
Possibly, but then again there's been a trend to segregate orbiters and landers since the late 1990s to minimize mission loss; after all the Galileo had it's probe plugging its rocket engine. There's plans for a Saturn probe to fly solo for example too. DAVINCI might require a steeper trajectory than VERITAS can accommodate as an example of a complication.
And what's wrong with the Psyche mission, as a utterly unique object I believe it should take precedence in study over some of these more generalist proposals. In fact I would like to see it take precedence over all of them with one of the other asteroid relsted missions taking the other slot.
It didn't take precedence over either Vesta or Ceres either, which both could be labeled unique asteroids too. And Lucy's Trojans haven't even been flown by before, and nowadays they're consistered planetary fossils or something like a "missing link" between KBOs and the asteroid belt.
Like I said before, it's a tough call. Regarding the asteroid missions, Psyche's obviously visiting the only giant-size metal asteroid, Lucy aims to visit multiple Trojans, and NEOCam might identify the next direct threat to Earth in its Gaia-esque survey of asteroids.
By the way sorry if my above post sounded cranky. As an excuse these days I get a lot of feet and back problems which lead to cranky posts. So apologies.
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And isn't it more logical to have them both in one.
Cost.
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And isn't it more logical to have them both in one.
Cost.
It just seems a shame to cut a good proposal in half.
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And isn't it more logical to have them both in one.
Cost.
It just seems a shame to cut a good proposal in half.
Likewise a beautiful theory can be slain by facts.
The thought had crossed my own mind before on physically pairing up the 2 Venus missions; after all the Pioneer Venus, Venera, Vega, and Viking missions were all combination orbiter/lander (Pioneer Venus technically being an impactor-bus). However, Pathfinder and Mars Global Surveyor were launched separately and performed their respective missions just fine. DAVINCI may be a probe simply too large for VERITAS to accommodate, but under the unlikely assumption BOTH are picked to begin with it, I'd rank it a 50/50 chance but only because I'm unaware of the physical needs of the probes.
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"At they moment Psyche is like one half (or less!) of a better mission."
Extended Mission. That's all you need. Like Deep Impact and Stardust, both going on to examine second objects in an extended mission. If the spacecraft is working well after Psyche you can be sure efforts will be made to identify a good extended mission target. But it's not part of the primary mission so not in the proposal.
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Possibly, but then again there's been a trend to segregate orbiters and landers since the late 1990s to minimize mission loss; after all the Galileo had it's probe plugging its rocket engine. There's plans for a Saturn probe to fly solo for example too. DAVINCI might require a steeper trajectory than VERITAS can accommodate as an example of a complication.
Yeah. Discovery is cost-capped. Proposers always try to maximize the science, meaning they stuff the mission with as many goals and instruments as they think they can fit under the cost cap. (In fact, that's a source of criticism, because it can cause missions to go over a cost cap, and it also means that missions always spend all that money, and cheaper missions do not win. PADME was an effort to do a Discovery mission to Phobos and come in substantially under the cost cap, but it did not get selected, possibly because its science return was considered too low.)
Simply put: if a Venus radar team thought that they could afford an atmosphere probe and still stay in the Discovery cost cap, they would have done it. They did not.*
*Several years ago a senior JPL engineer--somebody you've probably heard of--explained extemporaneously that Venus radars are curiously more expensive than you'd think. There's complicated stuff lurking in their designs that make them non-cheap.
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If I was forced to pick I'd go for VERITAS just because it looks like it would produce more science for its buck. But it's a horrible choice to make.
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There's five fundable missions here. Some will emerge from the evaluations better than others, but I'm pretty sure that if NASA had the money, they could fund all five missions and all five would almost certainly work as promised.
Hopefully we'll get two funded out of this round. And if the new administration wants to throw some more money at planetary science, maybe they'll fund a third.
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"At they moment Psyche is like one half (or less!) of a better mission."
Extended Mission. That's all you need. Like Deep Impact and Stardust, both going on to examine second objects in an extended mission. If the spacecraft is working well after Psyche you can be sure efforts will be made to identify a good extended mission target. But it's not part of the primary mission so not in the proposal.
Maybe I should mention that my post was a not entirely serious response to Star One's complaints about Venus missions.
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(...)
*Several years ago a senior JPL engineer--somebody you've probably heard of--explained extemporaneously that Venus radars are curiously more expensive than you'd think. There's complicated stuff lurking in their designs that make them non-cheap.
Care to elaborate? Is it the bandwidth restriction or the impossibility of making a true SSO orbit? I'm particularly interested because I'm studying the Argentine SAOCOM.
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(...)
*Several years ago a senior JPL engineer--somebody you've probably heard of--explained extemporaneously that Venus radars are curiously more expensive than you'd think. There's complicated stuff lurking in their designs that make them non-cheap.
Care to elaborate? Is it the bandwidth restriction or the impossibility of making a true SSO orbit? I'm particularly interested because I'm studying the Argentine SAOCOM.
I can't elaborate--I don't know anything more. He simply said that JPL had worked on various proposals for Venus radar mappers to follow Magellan and they were never cheap. I think this was in response to somebody asking if it could be done for $200 million. His response was that $200 million was not possible. I think he said that the missions really push the Discovery cost cap if you want to do them right (for different definitions of "doing them right."). That was about five years ago.
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Brand new 4-minute video about proposed Venera-D Venus mission. Should also be posted to the Russian thread, but since we're discussing Venus here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=47&v=HYM3y5bFtHY
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Brand new 4-minute video about proposed Venera-D Venus mission. Should also be posted to the Russian thread, but since we're discussing Venus here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=47&v=HYM3y5bFtHY
Looks like a Russian re-hash of ideas they largely had to put aside. Ever since the Phobos-Grunt disaster, most of the side options in that video were dropped. According to the most recent updates I could find there was going to be an orbiter, mini-sat, and the lander. As for the lander an old Russian plan was to have it last 30 days whereas now 24 hours is considered a rough baseline.
Still, I hope it can be made to happen. On the note of Venusian descent vehicles, I assume the majority of DAVINCI's science is done while airborne? I know it's supposed have a slow descent not unlike Huygens at Titan that's at least an hour long.
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Here is a refresher.
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Blackstar - When you attended the recent VEXAG meeting, did you hear anything about how the budget continuing resolution may affect the timing of either the Discovery selection or the release of the next New Frontiers AO? CR's don't allow the start of new projects, but I don't know if the selection of a new mission under an existing program counts as a new project. Also, a tweet hinted that the CR might affect the timing of the NF AO release.
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I don't think that the CR is going to affect the Discovery selection. I think that the Discovery budget itself is included as an ongoing activity. It's a program line, not an entirely new project. And considering that we've had CRs lots of times in the past, I don't think it's that big a deal.
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I just posted a refresher on the proposals in light of the eminent announcement (expected this month) at my blog. I also tried to provide links to the most recent summaries of each of the proposals.
http://futureplanets.blogspot.com/2016/12/countdown-to-next-nasa-discovery.html
You might also be interested in the results of the reader poll on their preferred missions: VERITAS was the clear favorite (48% of votes) followed by Psyche (19%), DAVINCI (14%), Lucy (9%), and NEOCAM (7%).
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Which pretty much guarantees that NEOCAM will be the selected mission. ;D
Joking aside, in light of Blackstar pointing out in an earlier thread that the mission(s) most likely to be selected are the one(s) least likely to blow up the budget, my money would be on NEOCAM if this were Vegas.
YMMV...
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Which pretty much guarantees that NEOCAM will be the selected mission. ;D
Joking aside, in light of Blackstar pointing out in an earlier thread that the mission(s) most likely to be selected are the one(s) least likely to blow up the budget, my money would be on NEOCAM if this were Vegas.
YMMV...
What about a second choice as is it not two.
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I'm not as connected to the programmatic side of these as Van or Blackstar, but if I had to guess which of them is most likely to run into budget trouble it would be DAVINCI or Lucy.
My personal favorite is VERITAS, but I'm giving it even odds with Psyche.
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I'm not as connected to the programmatic side of these as Van or Blackstar, but if I had to guess which of them is most likely to run into budget trouble it would be DAVINCI or Lucy.
My personal favorite is VERITAS, but I'm giving it even odds with Psyche.
My own personal fav would be Lucy. Assuming 2 selections are made, I would hope the other is a Venus mission; VERITAS would be the better choice for that although DAVINCI might bring some revelations in its mission. All the same, I like Lucy's idea to visit multiple Trojans.
So my overall list of hopes would rank:
1) Lucy
2) VERITAS
3) DAVINCI
4) Psyche
5) NEOCam
Just my would-be-ranking, although I have to admit something like NEOCam could haul some unique science. I don't envy the managers selecting these; all aren't bad ideas in the end.
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I'm not as connected to the programmatic side of these as Van or Blackstar, but if I had to guess which of them is most likely to run into budget trouble it would be DAVINCI or Lucy.
My personal favorite is VERITAS, but I'm giving it even odds with Psyche.
My own personal fav would be Lucy. Assuming 2 selections are made, I would hope the other is a Venus mission; VERITAS would be the better choice for that although DAVINCI might bring some revelations in its mission. All the same, I like Lucy's idea to visit multiple Trojans.
So my overall list of hopes would rank:
1) Lucy
2) VERITAS
3) DAVINCI
4) Psyche
5) NEOCam
Just my would-be-ranking, although I have to admit something like NEOCam could haul some unique science. I don't envy the managers selecting these; all aren't bad ideas in the end.
What's your thinking on ranking the Psyche mission there?
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I'd much prefer NEOCam. Seriously- if you haven't watched the Chelyabinsk videos in a while, go back and do that.
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So my overall list of hopes would rank:
1) Lucy
2) VERITAS
3) DAVINCI
4) Psyche
5) NEOCam
Just my would-be-ranking, although I have to admit something like NEOCam could haul some unique science. I don't envy the managers selecting these; all aren't bad ideas in the end.
What's your thinking on ranking the Psyche mission there?
I rank the Venus missions higher than it because Venus desperately deserves attention. Psyche is a unique asteroid in that we haven't seen a metallic asteroid before, especially one of its mass. It seems to be a surprisingly popular mission although popularity isn't an actual indicator of mission selection. By comparison to Psyche, I favor Lucy more because we know even less about the Trojans than the metallic asteroids; after all since when have we had material land on Earth we can confirm as being Trojan in nature?
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So my overall list of hopes would rank:
1) Lucy
2) VERITAS
3) DAVINCI
4) Psyche
5) NEOCam
Just my would-be-ranking, although I have to admit something like NEOCam could haul some unique science. I don't envy the managers selecting these; all aren't bad ideas in the end.
What's your thinking on ranking the Psyche mission there?
I rank the Venus missions higher than it because Venus desperately deserves attention. Psyche is a unique asteroid in that we haven't seen a metallic asteroid before, especially one of its mass. It seems to be a surprisingly popular mission although popularity isn't an actual indicator of mission selection. By comparison to Psyche, I favor Lucy more because we know even less about the Trojans than the metallic asteroids; after all since when have we had material land on Earth we can confirm as being Trojan in nature?
Thank you. My ranking of Psyche at the top for me is purely on the basis of it being a unique object as a probable proto-planetary core.
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Psyche Spacecraft Deployment
SSL
Published on Dec 9, 2016
The spacecraft that SSL has proposed for travel to the asteroid Psyche deploys its electric thrusters and solar arrays in this animation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GIuYSUcFd4
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So the Discovery selection is going to be announced this week (not sure if it is Tuesday or Wednesday).
The way this works is that the selection panel makes its recommendation. My guess is that they would do that in the form of a range, like two missions scored green, two yellow, and one red, or tier 1, 2, 3, or so on. That recommendation goes to the associate administrator for space science. At the same time, the head of the Planetary Science Division can also make his recommendation, which is based upon external factors, such as "doing mission X would allow us to then cooperate with the Europeans on a mission concerning Y..."
But ultimately it is the AA who makes the final selection based upon his own evaluation of the material in front of him.
Keep in mind that we're not privy to either the selection committee recommendations or the other inputs, and we never will be. And so although people will endlessly speculate that "they chose mission X because of Y," you don't really know that. It is entirely possible that they chose mission X because the other missions all had problems with their technical designs, or had a problem with their development team (like a conclusion that they lacked the required expertise to carry out the development). We'll never know.
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So the Discovery selection is going to be announced this week (not sure if it is Tuesday or Wednesday).
The way this works is that the selection panel makes its recommendation. My guess is that they would do that in the form of a range, like two missions scored green, two yellow, and one red, or tier 1, 2, 3, or so on. That recommendation goes to the associate administrator for space science. At the same time, the head of the Planetary Science Division can also make his recommendation, which is based upon external factors, such as "doing mission X would allow us to then cooperate with the Europeans on a mission concerning Y..."
But ultimately it is the AA who makes the final selection based upon his own evaluation of the material in front of him.
Keep in mind that we're not privy to either the selection committee recommendations or the other inputs, and we never will be. And so although people will endlessly speculate that "they chose mission X because of Y," you don't really know that. It is entirely possible that they chose mission X because the other missions all had problems with their technical designs, or had a problem with their development team (like a conclusion that they lacked the required expertise to carry out the development). We'll never know.
Given that timeframe, it is very likely that the announcement will be Tuesday at lunchtime at the NASA Townhall at the AGU conference. Unfortunately, I will not arrive at the conference until the next day, so I won't be able to report on the announcement first hand.
Some additional influences beyond what Blackstar suggested would be programmatic balance (three NASA missions to asteroids since the last NASA mission to Venus), priority in the Decadal Survey (nod to the Lucy Trojan asteroid mission since a Trojan mission was the only new mission candidate added to the New Frontiers list), and a Congressional mandate for NASA to find near Earth asteroids. Just so the Psyche proposers don't feel left out, the Decadal Survey does list visiting this world as a priority for asteroid missions.
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So the Discovery selection is going to be announced this week (not sure if it is Tuesday or Wednesday).
And so the excitement reaches its boiling point at last... 8)
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Some additional influences beyond what Blackstar suggested would be programmatic balance...
Those are the kinds of things that the selection committee does not address, but they would be things that the head of PSD would consider and the AA would take into account.
I'd add another one that was suggested to me earlier in the week by a prominent Venus scientist: if NASA selected both Venus missions, that would effectively cover most of the Venus science goals and "would take Venus off the map" for a couple of decades. I think that the only remaining science goals would be the surface ones included in the New Frontiers program (and those alone probably would be insufficient to justify that mission). So the science community would consider Venus "done" for the time being. That would be a pretty impressive programmatic decision.
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But... and I'm going to keep belaboring the point: keep in mind that just because something is not selected does not mean that there was a bias against it by the senior leadership. A mission that is not selected could have scored low in some technical or managerial rating, making it very difficult for the selecting official (the AA) to choose it over other proposals that scored higher in those categories.
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But... and I'm going to keep belaboring the point: keep in mind that just because something is not selected does not mean that there was a bias against it by the senior leadership. A mission that is not selected could have scored low in some technical or managerial rating, making it very difficult for the selecting official (the AA) to choose it over other proposals that scored higher in those categories.
True. I almost wept when none of the Phobos/Deimos missions got selection, but compared to something like NEOCam they were not quite up to par. Out of these remaining 5 choices Lucy is probably has the most against it from a technical point of view as another example with Davinci second, although the scientific payoff from either would be grand being the trade-off.
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I'd add another one that was suggested to me earlier in the week by a prominent Venus scientist: if NASA selected both Venus missions, that would effectively cover most of the Venus science goals and "would take Venus off the map" for a couple of decades. I think that the only remaining science goals would be the surface ones included in the New Frontiers program (and those alone probably would be insufficient to justify that mission).
Of the 2 Venus missions, I'd like to assume VERITAS is the better choice: mapping via both radar and infrared, potential for extended long-term studies. What would truly surprise me, during this selection, would be if DAVINCI won out instead (if not both winning) since it is the "riskier" of the 2 Venus probes not to mention a shorter, one-shot mission. Excluding any work with Huygens (which was more of an ESA project), the last atmospheric entry attempted by NASA was via Galileo, twenty-some years ago. It would be a worthwhile gamble, especially for the USA/NASA to achieve a first in photographing Venus themselves; but it'd be the most surprising choice to me.
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I'd add another one that was suggested to me earlier in the week by a prominent Venus scientist: if NASA selected both Venus missions, that would effectively cover most of the Venus science goals and "would take Venus off the map" for a couple of decades. I think that the only remaining science goals would be the surface ones included in the New Frontiers program (and those alone probably would be insufficient to justify that mission).
Of the 2 Venus missions, I'd like to assume VERITAS is the better choice: mapping via both radar and infrared, potential for extended long-term studies. What would truly surprise me, during this selection, would be if DAVINCI won out instead (if not both winning) since it is the "riskier" of the 2 Venus probes not to mention a shorter, one-shot mission. Excluding any work with Huygens (which was more of an ESA project), the last atmospheric entry attempted by NASA was via Galileo, twenty-some years ago. It would be a worthwhile gamble, especially for the USA/NASA to achieve a first in photographing Venus themselves; but it'd be the most surprising choice to me.
It strikes me as too be one shot in nature. That's why in my own personal ranking I've put it at the bottom.
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It strikes me as too be one shot in nature. That's why in my own personal ranking I've put it at the bottom.
True, but all our direct knowledge about the Venusian surface comes from not even 24 hours of activity between 6 Soviet landers, each of them "one shot" natured due to the extreme conditions.
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It strikes me as too be one shot in nature. That's why in my own personal ranking I've put it at the bottom.
True, but all our direct knowledge about the Venusian surface comes from not even 24 hours of activity between 6 Soviet landers, each of them "one shot" natured due to the extreme conditions.
I don't think that any of the Venusian scientists would consider this mission a "one shot." I think they would argue that there is only one way to gather that data, and direct sampling of the atmosphere would provide substantial scientific information on the planet.
I too have a problem with a short-lived mission, but I don't think the actual scientists think of things this way.
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Am I the only one who hopes that the next selection won't be an asteroid mission...
Please, not... please, not another boring asteroid mission...
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What would truly surprise me, during this selection, would be if DAVINCI won out instead (if not both winning) since it is the "riskier" of the 2 Venus probes
I'm not sure that it is "riskier." If you consider it riskier because it involves atmospheric entry, consider that we have a lot of data on atmospheric entry. It's been done many times, and this is not a maneuvering vehicle or a complex shape.
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True. I almost wept when none of the Phobos/Deimos missions got selection, but compared to something like NEOCam they were not quite up to par.
I was hoping for a Phobos/Deimos mission in the mix myself. The only clue I got was that the PI for the PADME mission publicly hinted that they were shorted for their lower science return. I think that their philosophy was that the spacecraft would save a lot of money (it was small) and they could squeak in on that argument. But historically that tends to be a bad approach. What everybody usually tries to do is maximize their science return up to the cost cap for the Discovery program. You don't get extra points for saving money, although in some cases you might get extra points for having a higher confidence level that you will not exceed the cost cap.
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True. I almost wept when none of the Phobos/Deimos missions got selection, but compared to something like NEOCam they were not quite up to par. Out of these remaining 5 choices Lucy is probably has the most against it from a technical point of view as another example with Davinci second, although the scientific payoff from either would be grand being the trade-off.
NASA ranks proposals into three categories with Cat 1 meaning a compelling scientific, technical, and cost proposal without any serious flaws. In this Discovery round, there were seven Cat 1 proposals. All 5 finalists were presumably Cat 1. In addition, I have been told that the Merlin Phobos lander and the MANTIS main belt/inner solar system asteroid tour were also Cat 1, but that NASA's managers felt that seven finalists would be too many.
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What would truly surprise me, during this selection, would be if DAVINCI won out instead (if not both winning) since it is the "riskier" of the 2 Venus probes
I'm not sure that it is "riskier." If you consider it riskier because it involves atmospheric entry, consider that we have a lot of data on atmospheric entry. It's been done many times, and this is not a maneuvering vehicle or a complex shape.
I talked at a conference with a senior engineering manager backing another Discovery mission and I asked him if DAVINCI might be too complex (carrier/relay spacecraft, entry system, high pressure/high temperature probe). He said he was confident that the mission could be done within the Discovery cost cap.
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I'd add another one that was suggested to me earlier in the week by a prominent Venus scientist: if NASA selected both Venus missions, that would effectively cover most of the Venus science goals and "would take Venus off the map" for a couple of decades. I think that the only remaining science goals would be the surface ones included in the New Frontiers program (and those alone probably would be insufficient to justify that mission).
Of the 2 Venus missions, I'd like to assume VERITAS is the better choice: mapping via both radar and infrared, potential for extended long-term studies. What would truly surprise me, during this selection, would be if DAVINCI won out instead (if not both winning) since it is the "riskier" of the 2 Venus probes not to mention a shorter, one-shot mission. Excluding any work with Huygens (which was more of an ESA project), the last atmospheric entry attempted by NASA was via Galileo, twenty-some years ago. It would be a worthwhile gamble, especially for the USA/NASA to achieve a first in photographing Venus themselves; but it'd be the most surprising choice to me.
It strikes me as too be one shot in nature. That's why in my own personal ranking I've put it at the bottom.
Don't underestimate the importance of atmospheric composition probes -- these measurements are considered key by the scientific community. These measurements were key goals for the Viking and Curiosity missions, a major goal of the Galileo and Pioneer Venus missions, the focus of two prioritized Decadal Survey missions (Saturn and Venus atmospheric probes), and the top priority for a future Uranus and/or Neptune mission.
These missions aren't sexy to the general public, but they provide absolutely foundational science.
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I'd add another one that was suggested to me earlier in the week by a prominent Venus scientist: if NASA selected both Venus missions, that would effectively cover most of the Venus science goals and "would take Venus off the map" for a couple of decades. I think that the only remaining science goals would be the surface ones included in the New Frontiers program (and those alone probably would be insufficient to justify that mission). So the science community would consider Venus "done" for the time being. That would be a pretty impressive programmatic decision.
I've thought about this, too. Here are the goals for the Venus probe for the next New Frontiers mission from the AO, reordered by approximate elevation:
• Understand the physics and chemistry of Venus’s atmosphere through measurement of its composition, especially the abundances of sulfur, trace gases, light stable isotopes, and noble-gas isotopes;
• Understand the properties of Venus’s atmosphere down to the surface and improve understanding of Venus’s zonal cloud-level winds;
• Search for evidence of past hydrological cycles, oceans, and life and constraints on the evolution of Venus’s atmosphere.
• Constrain the coupling of thermochemical, photochemical, and dynamical processes in Venus’s atmosphere and between the surface and atmosphere to understand radiative balance, climate, dynamics, and chemical cycles;
• Understand the weathering environment of the crust of Venus in the context of the dynamics of the atmosphere of Venus and the composition and texture of its surface materials; and
• Understand the physics and chemistry of Venus’s crust;
I believe that DAVINCI addresses all the goals above the break. So if those goals were fulfilled, what might a future surface oriented mission look like? A mission that focuses only on surface measurements could drop over half of the mass of the instruments of the likely full New Frontiers mission, allowing for a smaller probe. The current proposals I've seen for landed instruments include a Raman/Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) for surface chemistry plus a descent and panoramic cameras. Would it be possible to reduce the cost and complexity enough to do a smaller probe as a future Discovery mission or fly more than one probe on a New Frontiers mission?
An alternative approach would be to fly multiple probes that use imagery and remote sensing spectrometers to evaluate composition during the descent but not survive the surface impact. This would allow much higher spectral and spatial measurements than could be done from orbit. (I believe that because of atmospheric scattering, the spectral measurements from orbit have a ~50 km resolution and are limited to a very few spectral bands.)
There's also the question of programmatic balance. If a Venus mission is selected as the Discovery mission, then I suspect there would be a desire to pick another target for the New Frontiers mission. The same issue would apply for the Lucy mission and a New Frontiers Trojan mission.
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I talked at a conference with a senior engineering manager backing another Discovery mission and I asked him if DAVINCI might be too complex (carrier/relay spacecraft, entry system, high pressure/high temperature probe). He said he was confident that the mission could be done within the Discovery cost cap.
Thanks for pointing out something that I forgot to mention (it has been awhile since I looked into the instruments), which is that sometimes a single instrument could be very risky. So EDL might be no problem for DAVINCI, but there might be something in the details that we on the outside don't appreciate, but could be harder to do.
A great example is InSight. Seismometers are easy, right? We have them on Earth, right? Who would have thought that the mission would have gotten hung up on somebody's inability to build a good vacuum container for the instrument? It's the stuff like that that those of us without the technical insight cannot truly appreciate.
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There's also the question of programmatic balance. If a Venus mission is selected as the Discovery mission, then I suspect there would be a desire to pick another target for the New Frontiers mission. The same issue would apply for the Lucy mission and a New Frontiers Trojan mission.
That would actually raise a question for NASA: if either of those missions is selected, would they rewrite the science goals for those respective NF missions? And how would they do that? I assume that they would have to rewrite the goals, or drop the missions from competition. But messing with the New Frontiers list is a bit dicey. NASA is generally wary to do that without scientific community input. So they would have to gain that input somehow. (Yeah, I know about Ocean Worlds, but that also illustrates the problem. And I didn't want to get deep into that discussion here. It belongs in another thread.)
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It strikes me as too be one shot in nature. That's why in my own personal ranking I've put it at the bottom.
True, but all our direct knowledge about the Venusian surface comes from not even 24 hours of activity between 6 Soviet landers, each of them "one shot" natured due to the extreme conditions.
I don't think that any of the Venusian scientists would consider this mission a "one shot." I think they would argue that there is only one way to gather that data, and direct sampling of the atmosphere would provide substantial scientific information on the planet.
I too have a problem with a short-lived mission, but I don't think the actual scientists think of things this way.
Surely these days it would be possible to engineer a lander that could survive for sometime on the surface.
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Surely these days it would be possible to engineer a lander that could survive for sometime on the surface.
Anything more than an hour or two probably is a Flagship mission with current technology. But with LBIS, the current surface goals can be done in an hour or less.
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It strikes me as too be one shot in nature. That's why in my own personal ranking I've put it at the bottom.
True, but all our direct knowledge about the Venusian surface comes from not even 24 hours of activity between 6 Soviet landers, each of them "one shot" natured due to the extreme conditions.
I too have a problem with a short-lived mission, but I don't think the actual scientists think of things this way.
Surely these days it would be possible to engineer a lander that could survive for sometime on the surface.
Here's a proposal (https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1611/1611.03365.pdf)for a long life lander, to do seismology for many months. The key technology is electronics that can work at the ambient temperature of Venus.
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Weirdly the proposed Discovery mission to Psyche has been picked up by the British tabloid newspaper The Mirror.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/science/nasa-could-send-rocket-metal-9298092
That was so poorly proofed that it actually hurt a little trying to read it.
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Am I the only one who hopes that the next selection won't be an asteroid mission...
Please, not... please, not another boring asteroid mission...
I don't consider them "boring." We've learned a lot from Dawn. I think Psyche is a very fascinating body. What the heck is it? I'm a bit more ambivalent about the Trojan mission--scientifically it is important, but what I understand about the Lucy mission is that it will give a quick view of a bunch of them, but nothing in detail, and a more detailed study is what is needed. I think that NEOCam really should be funded as a directed (non-Discovery) mission as part of the agency's NEO monitoring and mitigation program. If Congress really wants that mission done, then they should pay for it separately. But NEOCam is, from everything I've heard, a good mission.
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About Dawn - Vesta and Ceres turned out to be close to planets, rather than dull rocks most NEOs are.
NEOCam should be funded according to what you said, so I agree with you.
But damnit, I dream about a mission to Venus :)
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About Dawn - Vesta and Ceres turned out to be close to planets, rather than dull rocks most NEOs are.
NEOCam should be funded according to what you said, so I agree with you.
But damnit, I dream about a mission to Venus :)
My hope is one of each group is selected, assuming 2 Discovery missions are allowed in the end.
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So the Discovery selection is going to be announced this week (not sure if it is Tuesday or Wednesday).
Any news on the Discovery selection(s) now that it is Tuesday?
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So the Discovery selection is going to be announced this week (not sure if it is Tuesday or Wednesday).
Any news on the Discovery selection(s) now that it is Tuesday?
NASA announced the selection of the GRAIL mission at the NASA Townhall at the AGU conference some years ago. This conference is happening this week. So if they follow the same procedure this time, the announcement will come at the Townhall that happens from noon to 1pm today.
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NASA announced the selection of the GRAIL mission at the NASA Townhall at the AGU conference some years ago. This conference is happening this week. So if they follow the same procedure this time, the announcement will come at the Townhall that happens from noon to 1pm today.
I just "tuned in"--I found this Livestream link (https://livestream.com/accounts/2831286/events/6704756) labeled "AGU FM2016 Press Conferences." I watched the end of a press conference that seemed to be about an expedition onto the Arctic sea-ice. (They were talking about their ice floe suddenly breaking apart in the midst of their camp.)
Will the Town Meeting appear here, or will the Discovery announcement be discussed here in a press conference following the Town Hall?
Also, as the conference is in San Francisco, the times referred to would be Pacific Standard Time = UTC - 8 hours?
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Will the Town Meeting appear here, or will the Discovery announcement be discussed here in a press conference following the Town Hall?
Also, as the conference is in San Francisco, the times referred to would be Pacific Standard Time = UTC - 8 hours?
It doesn't look like it with "Arctic Report Card 2016" being the upcoming item.
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Is anyone on these forums at the AGU? Perhaps to give updates at 1230? :)
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Will the Town Meeting appear here, or will the Discovery announcement be discussed here in a press conference following the Town Hall?
Also, as the conference is in San Francisco, the times referred to would be Pacific Standard Time = UTC - 8 hours?
It doesn't look like it with "Arctic Report Card 2016" being the upcoming item.
I should clarify--not next at 10:30 am PST, but later (Tuesday Town Meetings 12:30-1:30 pm, according to the schedule at https://fallmeeting.agu.org/2016/files/2016/10/Schedule-at-a-Glance.pdf )
I just found the press conference schedule at http://fallmeeting.agu.org/2016/media-center/press-conferences/ . Apparently, no AGU press conference is scheduled.
Never mind. (There is "News from Gale Crater" 11:30 am to 12:30 pm PST.)
***
EDIT Never mind the "never mind."
The schedule shows tomorrow 11:30 AM -12:30 PM: Thomas Zurbuchen. Unless I'm mistaken, he's the associate administrator for the SMD who has the final call in the selection.
Thomas Zurbuchen (Media Availability)
Wednesday, 14 December
11:30 a.m.
Thomas Zurbuchen was named NASA Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate in October. He oversees the agency’s research programs in astrophysics, heliophysics, and planetary and Earth sciences.
Participant:
Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C., U.S.A.
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The schedule shows tomorrow 11:30 AM -12:30 PM: Thomas Zurbuchen. Unless I'm mistaken, he's the associate administrator for the SMD who has the final call in the selection.
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The schedule shows tomorrow 11:30 AM -12:30 PM: Thomas Zurbuchen. Unless I'm mistaken, he's the associate administrator for the SMD who has the final call in the selection.
Thomas' bit is about to come up.
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The schedule shows tomorrow 11:30 AM -12:30 PM: Thomas Zurbuchen. Unless I'm mistaken, he's the associate administrator for the SMD who has the final call in the selection.
Thomas' bit is about to come up.
Not a word about Discovery selection there.
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Not a word about Discovery selection there.
Indeed. Now it's Sally Jewell. No idea who she is.
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Not a word about Discovery selection there.
Indeed. Now it's Sally Jewell. No idea who she is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Jewell
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Sadly it's not looking like the Discovery selection is going to be announced today.
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Early this morning I realized that usually before they make an announcement they put out a heads-up. So we should have seen something like "Discovery selection announcement today" appear either yesterday afternoon or this morning. When we did not, I started to suspect that Zurbuchen would not make that announcement. I am also now starting to suspect that the announcement will not happen until next week.
That said, go look at the information coming out about Curiosity and Mars organics. That's a big deal.
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A discussion on Twitter from someone who attended the Town Hall on Tuesday:
https://twitter.com/hauck/status/808776236323377152 (https://twitter.com/hauck/status/808776236323377152)
Looks like the announcement might not be made until end of January.
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A discussion on Twitter from someone who attended the Town Hall on Tuesday:
https://twitter.com/hauck/status/808776236323377152 (https://twitter.com/hauck/status/808776236323377152)
Looks like the announcement might not be made until end of January.
I hope that's wrong, but I will say it makes the last 48 hours of anticipation appear a waste of time.
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A discussion on Twitter from someone who attended the Town Hall on Tuesday:
https://twitter.com/hauck/status/808776236323377152 (https://twitter.com/hauck/status/808776236323377152)
Looks like the announcement might not be made until end of January.
I hope that's wrong, but I will say it makes the last 48 hours of anticipation appear a waste of time.
If they are trying to do two selections, then every bit of budget clarification they can get is useful
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A discussion on Twitter from someone who attended the Town Hall on Tuesday:
https://twitter.com/hauck/status/808776236323377152 (https://twitter.com/hauck/status/808776236323377152)
Looks like the announcement might not be made until end of January.
I hope that's wrong, but I will say it makes the last 48 hours of anticipation appear a waste of time.
If they are trying to do two selections, then every bit of budget clarification they can get is useful
That is my suspicion. I'd also add that I noticed the chatter suddenly die down on this (meaning people that I know who are involved in proposals didn't say anything). So my guess is that they were told that there would be a delay.
One other possibility is that the transition team people finally showed up at HQ this week and maybe there is a rule that nobody makes major contract decisions while the transition team is still doing its work.
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Alexandra Witze – Verified account @alexwitze
So, for those of you keeping score at home, expect a Discovery announcement by end-January, possibly two missions.
https://mobile.twitter.com/alexwitze/status/809420947060965376
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Alexandra Witze – Verified account @alexwitze
So, for those of you keeping score at home, expect a Discovery announcement by end-January, possibly two missions.
https://mobile.twitter.com/alexwitze/status/809420947060965376
End of January once Trump is in office. I wonder if that is related.
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Alexandra Witze – Verified account @alexwitze
So, for those of you keeping score at home, expect a Discovery announcement by end-January, possibly two missions.
https://mobile.twitter.com/alexwitze/status/809420947060965376
End of January once Trump is in office. I wonder if that is related.
It is possible that they were told no major decisions until after the transition. But I have a little difficulty believing that. They should not have any impediments like that. I find budget issues to be more plausible.
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Looks like the winner(s) might be announced this week. From the Psyche mission Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1667858460179738&id=1598743977091187 (https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1667858460179738&id=1598743977091187)
...Some time this week I and the other four Principal Investigators of NASA Discovery mission concepts will learn which projects have been selected for flight. Might be one, might be two.
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Looks like the winner(s) might be announced this week. From the Psyche mission Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1667858460179738&id=1598743977091187 (https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1667858460179738&id=1598743977091187)
...Some time this week I and the other four Principal Investigators of NASA Discovery mission concepts will learn which projects have been selected for flight. Might be one, might be two.
The update greatly appreciated! I hope it will indeed be this week.
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Winner(s) to be announced tomorrow(Wednesday) January 4th at 4pm EST.
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-to-hold-media-call-for-discovery-program-announcement (https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-to-hold-media-call-for-discovery-program-announcement)
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Winner(s) to be announced tomorrow(Wednesday) January 4th at 4pm EST.
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-to-hold-media-call-for-discovery-program-announcement (https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-to-hold-media-call-for-discovery-program-announcement)
*throws confetti all over the place*
ABOUT TIME!!
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Winner(s) to be announced tomorrow(Wednesday) January 4th at 4pm EST.
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-to-hold-media-call-for-discovery-program-announcement (https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-to-hold-media-call-for-discovery-program-announcement)
*throws confetti all over the place*
ABOUT TIME!!
It is very important that this be done right.
And by "right" I mean that NASA has to cross all the t's and dot all the i's. Several years ago I was at a semi-public meeting with Charlie Bolden and somebody asked him about how come it takes NASA so long to make contract decisions. Bolden had a good answer: no major NASA contract decision has been reversed on appeal during his watch (and that probably goes back a lot further). What Bolden did not say--because he did not need to--is that this was NOT true for the Department of Defense, where a number of major contract decisions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KC-X ) got reversed after the losing company appealed. Bolden said that NASA is very careful so that this does not happen.
In fact, about a decade or so ago there was some NASA selection announcement that got halted and then re-done because of something that had happened during the review process (I don't remember the details, but I think I heard that one of the reviewers got a job with a university that was involved in part of the competition, so NASA decided to play it extra safe and start all over again). That was awkward and unpleasant, but they did it so that the final selection would withstand any challenge, and it did.
So we had to wait awhile. I have no idea why, but it is better that than having the selection get reversed several months later.
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Considering we got our first direct hint off Psyche's page, (thanks for the find morecowbell89!) I'm assuming there's a heavy chance it may have won since, presumably, they'd only invite the winning principal investigators to attend.
Blackstar, do you know how they handle 'selection etiquette' in who they inform or invite to announcements like this?
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I am hoping to see up close pictures and analysis of Psyche. There is enough iron and nickel there to build the steel frames of 600 billion world trade centers.
Matthew
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Considering we got our first direct hint off Psyche's page, (thanks for the find morecowbell89!) I'm assuming there's a heavy chance it may have won since, presumably, they'd only invite the winning principal investigators to attend.
Blackstar, do you know how they handle 'selection etiquette' in who they inform or invite to announcements like this?
I think everybody finds out at pretty much the same time. They have probably told every PI "give us a phone number where we will call you at time X." Nobody will know more than a few minutes before anybody else, I think.
But I'm guessing.
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Considering we got our first direct hint off Psyche's page, (thanks for the find morecowbell89!) I'm assuming there's a heavy chance it may have won since, presumably, they'd only invite the winning principal investigators to attend.
Blackstar, do you know how they handle 'selection etiquette' in who they inform or invite to announcements like this?
I think everybody finds out at pretty much the same time. They have probably told every PI "give us a phone number where we will call you at time X." Nobody will know more than a few minutes before anybody else, I think.
But I'm guessing.
The announcement says that the PI(s) will be at the briefing, so they presumably already know.
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As per NASA's Facebook account:
"We're announcing a new science mission to explore our solar system. Join us at 4 p.m. EST on Wednesday to learn more. http://go.nasa.gov/2iAhQsi Questions? #askNASA"
If that wording is correct sounds like only one mission got picked. Was hoping for 2 but I suppose the Insight delay might have put the kibosh on that?
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In fact, about a decade or so ago there was some NASA selection announcement that got halted and then re-done because of something that had happened during the review process...
This was the phase A downselect for the Mars Scout 2011 mission. http://spacenews.com/conflict-interest-concerns-delay-mars-scout-selection/
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As per NASA's Facebook account:
"We're announcing a new science mission to explore our solar system. Join us at 4 p.m. EST on Wednesday to learn more. http://go.nasa.gov/2iAhQsi Questions? #askNASA"
If that wording is correct sounds like only one mission got picked. Was hoping for 2 but I suppose the Insight delay might have put the kibosh on that?
There is a bullet point stating:
Principal investigator(s) of the selected mission(s)
So still seems like possibility of two missions to me.
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The announcement says that the PI(s) will be at the briefing, so they presumably already know.
It's a telecon and I believe that all of the PIs have been told to be available by phone, so we know nothing more at this point.
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The announcement says that the PI(s) will be at the briefing, so they presumably already know.
I have vague recollections that the last time they did this, they informed the groups a few hours before the announcement. Maybe less.
In this age, the news would travel really fast: tell a PI that they did not get selected and they will email their team, and somebody on the team will tweet a frowny-face emoticon and soon it would be on Facebook and then there's really no embargo anymore. So NASA will try to control that as best they can.
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How is there not a poll for this anywhere ?
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How is there not a poll for this anywhere ?
Check out my blog at http://futureplanets.blogspot.com/ and look in the upper right corner.
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As per NASA's Facebook account:
"We're announcing a new science mission to explore our solar system. Join us at 4 p.m. EST on Wednesday to learn more. http://go.nasa.gov/2iAhQsi Questions? #askNASA"
If that wording is correct sounds like only one mission got picked. Was hoping for 2 but I suppose the Insight delay might have put the kibosh on that?
The briefing will be streamed on NASA Live:
Wednesday, Jan. 4, 4 p.m. - NASA media briefing on Discovery Program announcement. Streaming audio of the briefing will be available on this page.
https://www.nasa.gov/nasalive
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Lucy and Psyche:
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-selects-two-missions-to-explore-the-early-solar-system
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Poor Venus.
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WOW. Did not expect that selection (thought for sure it would be NEOCam and one of the Venus missons). Awesome!!
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I guess this means that the Trojan tour mission is pretty much out of the next New Frontiers competition and conversely, chances for the Venus In Situ Explorer have improved.
The announcement says that NASA will also fund one more year of NEOCam development. I'm wondering if they're hoping that NEOCam gets special funding from somewhere else than planetary science budget.
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Okay, so 2 missions selected - good.
Lucy and Psyche were equally interesting but totally different missions so selecting between them would have been difficult and unfair - so, good.
Venus was the biggest loser, again - bad.
But somehow I have a feeling that Venus might get compensation later in some form...?
(*krhm!* new frontiers! *krhm!*)
So, NF Round 4 might be the charm for Venus. I somehow have that feeling.
And that is why they went all-asteroid now to get that "off the table" so to speak?
At least this will remove the need for Trojan mission for NF4.
And comet missions are already on the way and plenty.
So it really does not leave much serious competition left for NF Venus mission.
Outer Solar System is still just for Flagships anyway...
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Poor Venus.
Well to me at least as I have said before on this thread the two Venus missions really look like they should be combined into one more substantive mission.
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Poor Venus.
Well to me at least as I have said before on this thread the two Venus missions really look like they should be combined into one more substantive mission.
And that's where NF4 kicks in...
I hope. :)
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Lucy and Psyche:
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-selects-two-missions-to-explore-the-early-solar-system
WHOA! I thought the selection wasn't until 2 or more hours yet!
I'm pleasantly surprised about LUCY tying with Psyche; both types of bodies are unvisited and warrant investigation.
I feel the fact we heard the announcement news from Psyche the day before could have been the hunch it'd win, but just a hunch, the decision itself is what matters.
As for Venus, I hope New Frontiers goes in their favor; they deserve it for certain.
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Two asteroid missions... and not a single one to Venus! That's a huge shame for planetary exploration. I dearly hope the new Trump administration will stop this asteroid lunacy and will give us a meaningful lunar program instead leading to grand planetary adventures.
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Two asteroid missions... and not a single one to Venus! That's a huge shame for planetary exploration. I dearly hope the new Trump administration will stop this asteroid lunacy and will give us a meaningful lunar program instead leading to grand planetary adventures.
Nonsense. Presidents don't deal at those levels. It is a shame that people think they know better than those who put together the decadal surveys.
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1-I guess this means that the Trojan tour mission is pretty much out of the next New Frontiers competition and conversely, chances for the Venus In Situ Explorer have improved.
2-The announcement says that NASA will also fund one more year of NEOCam development. I'm wondering if they're hoping that NEOCam gets special funding from somewhere else than planetary science budget.
1-While the first part of your comment is probably true, the second part does not follow. Keep in mind that these are ALL individual competitions and individual teams and they are evaluated on their merits at the time. Remember that as recently as, well, an hour ago, people assumed that Venus would have a leg up this time because there had not been a NASA Venus mission in 25 years. That did not get a Venus mission selected, right?
2-NEOCam can help fulfill the requirements of the George E. Brown Act (technically, that was not a standalone act, but was rolled into a NASA bill). I think that NASA is keeping it warm in case either the new administration or Congress decides that they want to do a survey to detect NEO asteroids, and they decide to earmark funding for it.
(I might have a bit more to say about that later.)
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Poor Venus.
Well to me at least as I have said before on this thread the two Venus missions really look like they should be combined into one more substantive mission.
And that's where NF4 kicks in...
I hope. :)
Well it sounds a logical path to follow. If you're going to go Venus you might as well go "fully tooled up" so to speak.
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1-I guess this means that the Trojan tour mission is pretty much out of the next New Frontiers competition and conversely, chances for the Venus In Situ Explorer have improved.
1-While the first part of your comment is probably true, the second part does not follow. Keep in mind that these are ALL individual competitions and individual teams and they are evaluated on their merits at the time. Remember that as recently as, well, an hour ago, people assumed that Venus would have a leg up this time because there had not been a NASA Venus mission in 25 years. That did not get a Venus mission selected, right?
I meant that Venus In Situ Explorer's chances, and those of four other candidates, are improved because Trojan tour NF4 mission now seems unlikely so there's one less competitor.
Regarding NF4, the deadline for proposals is in April I think. I guess a Trojan tour concept will be submitted, but I can't imagine writing the proposal would be very inspiring with little hope of winning.
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Presidents don't deal at those levels. It is a shame that people think they know better than those who put together the decadal surveys.
Allow me... (long dramatic pause) to draft a lecture.
(pause while everybody sighs in exasperation)
One of the truly great things about the decadal surveys in space science is that the politicians have all collectively decided that politicians are not very good at setting science priorities and so they have delegated that responsibility to the scientific community and NASA.
The result is that NASA now works with the scientific community--through the decadal survey process--to develop space science priorities for the next decade. And as long as NASA and the scientific community do their jobs properly, as long as they don't screw anything up, and as long as they declare their rules ahead of time and then follow those rules, the decision makers (meaning the president and Congress) let them set the priorities without interfering.
The wonderful thing about this is that presidents and members of Congress don't screw around with the decisions based upon things like whether the spacecraft is going to be built in their state. They trust the people who are involved. Now that does NOT mean that there are no politics involved. But the politics usually have more to do with how much to fund, and when to start a mission development, and NOT what specific mission to choose. If you look at the past 15 or so years of planetary science missions, you don't see any missions that got selected based upon a politician's involvement that were not already blessed by the science community. That's a really good thing. It results in scientifically valuable missions and not ones that have limited science value. Even in the case of the Europa mission, you'll note that the last decadal survey put a Mars sample caching rover in first place and the Europa mission in second place, and that is the order that they ultimately got funded, and not the other way around.
But we should also keep in mind where the Discovery program fits into the overall decadal survey process: the decadal survey only recommended that a) there should be a Discovery program, and b) it should have a number of missions in the next decade. It did NOT pick any specific missions or say that Venus was more important than asteroids, or asteroids are more important than lunar missions. Discovery is an open competition and NASA can run that process on its own rules. We just have to trust that they will make the decisions based upon sound scientific, technical, and budget assessments. (And I personally trust that they do.)
People who are very familiar with the decadal survey process can acknowledge that it is not perfect, but also marvel at how well it works. In fact, it is the envy of people whose primary interest is human spaceflight. The human spaceflight enthusiasts look at how often human spaceflight plans get changed and canceled and reversed (usually by politicians) and they wish that they had a system that worked as good as the decadal survey process does.
(lecture over, you can all stop rolling your eyes)
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Pleased for Lucy and Psyche, but I'm really disappointed NEOcam didn't make it.
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I'm happy with these, mostly because they were long poles. Lucy will be doing flybys from 2027 to 2033 and Psyche will be getting to 16 Psyche in 2030. That's 10-16 and 13 years from now, respectfully. For perspective, Spirit landed on Mars 13 years ago today. Remember that? A Venus or NEO survey mission is certainly plausible within that timeframe. One or more Discovery missions may fly after these two, yet still get to their destination first.
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Pleased for Lucy and Psyche, but I'm really disappointed NEOcam didn't make it.
Actually, read this bit from the same announcement as Lucy and Psyche:
In addition to selecting the Lucy and Psyche missions for formulation, the agency will extend funding for the Near Earth Object Camera (NEOCam) project for an additional year. The NEOCam space telescope is designed to survey regions of space closest to Earth’s orbit, where potentially hazardous asteroids may be found.
NEOCam might survive in a manner outside of Discovery. I remember Blackstar saying their team was actually quite organized. My guess is it was enough to make them decide to do 2-and-a-half missions, the half being at least studying the NEOCam idea further. You MIGHT see a win after all....
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Presidents don't deal at those levels. It is a shame that people think they know better than those who put together the decadal surveys.
Allow me... (long dramatic pause) to draft a lecture.
(pause while everybody sighs in exasperation)
[...]
(lecture over, you can all stop rolling your eyes)
How did the decadal process get created? Was planetary science always that independent of congressional pressure?
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Pleased for Lucy and Psyche, but I'm really disappointed NEOcam didn't make it.
I am also a fan of the NEOcam mission. However, I was extremely pleased with this result. I am quite confident that, as redliox and Blackstar allude, NEOcam or a mission like it will happen sooner or (slightly) later. It is necessary for planetary protection, not just science.
I am less certain that a mission like Psyche would happen had it been passed over this time.
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How did the decadal process get created? Was planetary science always that independent of congressional pressure?
Started with astronomy back in the 1960s. The astronomers have done a bunch of them. Planetary and helio have each done two. Earth science is now doing their second. They were enshrined in legislation awhile back (I cannot remember when, but maybe the early 2000s?), so now NASA has to do them.
Planetary was not always independent of congressional pressure or of executive pressure either. There was an Academies-led process for establishing priorities before the 2001 decadal survey, but it was not as prominent. And there have been a number of times when individual scientists have tried to get a planetary mission earmarked into legislation. That is really hard to do now, especially if such a mission is not already on the prioritization list. So, Joe Smith, who wants to build a really cool spacecraft to go to a comet, cannot go and talk a member of Congress into putting that into the budget. Joe Smith instead has to convince a whole bunch of scientists that it is a good mission to do, and then they have to bless it, and then there will be a competitive process (where Joe Smith might compete, but is not guaranteed to win).
UPDATE: I should also add that if you look back at all the astronomy decadal surveys and look at the top recommendations in each of them and then what actually got approved, you would see that they have a remarkable success rate: NASA may not always build the mission in that decade, but there is a very high probability that they will build it at some point. That success rate was noticed by the other science disciplines.
-
Presidents don't deal at those levels. It is a shame that people think they know better than those who put together the decadal surveys.
Allow me... (long dramatic pause) to draft a lecture.
(pause while everybody sighs in exasperation)
One of the truly great things about the decadal surveys in space science is that the politicians have all collectively decided that politicians are not very good at setting science priorities and so they have delegated that responsibility to the scientific community and NASA.
The result is that NASA now works with the scientific community--through the decadal survey process--to develop space science priorities for the next decade. And as long as NASA and the scientific community do their jobs properly, as long as they don't screw anything up, and as long as they declare their rules ahead of time and then follow those rules, the decision makers (meaning the president and Congress) let them set the priorities without interfering.
The wonderful thing about this is that presidents and members of Congress don't screw around with the decisions based upon things like whether the spacecraft is going to be built in their state. They trust the people who are involved. Now that does NOT mean that there are no politics involved. But the politics usually have more to do with how much to fund, and when to start a mission development, and NOT what specific mission to choose. If you look at the past 15 or so years of planetary science missions, you don't see any missions that got selected based upon a politician's involvement that were not already blessed by the science community. That's a really good thing. It results in scientifically valuable missions and not ones that have limited science value. Even in the case of the Europa mission, you'll note that the last decadal survey put a Mars sample caching rover in first place and the Europa mission in second place, and that is the order that they ultimately got funded, and not the other way around.
But we should also keep in mind where the Discovery program fits into the overall decadal survey process: the decadal survey only recommended that a) there should be a Discovery program, and b) it should have a number of missions in the next decade. It did NOT pick any specific missions or say that Venus was more important than asteroids, or asteroids are more important than lunar missions. Discovery is an open competition and NASA can run that process on its own rules. We just have to trust that they will make the decisions based upon sound scientific, technical, and budget assessments. (And I personally trust that they do.)
People who are very familiar with the decadal survey process can acknowledge that it is not perfect, but also marvel at how well it works. In fact, it is the envy of people whose primary interest is human spaceflight. The human spaceflight enthusiasts look at how often human spaceflight plans get changed and canceled and reversed (usually by politicians) and they wish that they had a system that worked as good as the decadal survey process does.
(lecture over, you can all stop rolling your eyes)
Other than the fact that your next president is not your typical politician is he, I would think all bets are off now.
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This is exactly what I wanted to happen, right down to NEOcam possibly living on (but not necessarily as a Discovery mission). Weird.
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Other than the fact that your next president is not your typical politician is he, I would think all bets are off now.
I wouldn't. We still have a Constitution.
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Just the two I hoped would be selected; so, doubleplussgood! :) I am really surprised, though, that one of the Venus missions was not selected instead of one of the asteroid missions.
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I had to laugh at this post by Mike Brown as a minor part (as he self-describes) of the Lucy mission.
Mike Brown – @plutokiller
Whoa. I'm a little stunned. As a telescope-using kind of an astronomer I've never been involved in a space mission before. Will be fun!
https://mobile.twitter.com/plutokiller/status/816715169367785473
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As per NASA's Facebook account:
"We're announcing a new science mission to explore our solar system. Join us at 4 p.m. EST on Wednesday to learn more. http://go.nasa.gov/2iAhQsi Questions? #askNASA"
If that wording is correct sounds like only one mission got picked. Was hoping for 2 but I suppose the Insight delay might have put the kibosh on that?
The briefing will be streamed on NASA Live:
Wednesday, Jan. 4, 4 p.m. - NASA media briefing on Discovery Program announcement. Streaming audio of the briefing will be available on this page.
https://www.nasa.gov/nasalive
Started.
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Updates from the briefing.
Jeff Foust @jeff_foust
Elkins-Tanton notes Psyche mission plans to carry optical communications experiment payload; test it out at 3 AU.
Jeff Foust @jeff_foust
Levison: selected chemical propulsion over electric for improved performance, “have to cover a lot of real estate” out at Trojans.
Jeff Foust @jeff_foust
Green: NEOCam funding for 1-yr extended Phase A study will let them address issues identified in evaluation of proposal.
Jeff Foust @jeff_foust
Levison: we’ll do flybys of Trojan asteroids; fits into the NASA philosophy of exploration that starts with flybys before orbiters/landers.
Jeff Foust @jeff_foust
Green notes that while no Venus missions made the Discovery cut, Venus is one of the potential next New Frontiers missions.
Jeff Foust @jeff_foust
Green: looking to do a cadence of 32-36 months for the Discovery program going forward, similar to decadal recommendations.
Jeff Foust @jeff_foust
NASA’s Jim Green: delighted to have the opportunity to select 2. Tough decisions to make.
Jeff Foust @jeff_foust
Lindy Elkins-Tanton, on the Psyche mission to the metal asteroid of the same name: we have never seen a metal world.
Jeff Foust @jeff_foust
Hal Levinson notes that the diversity of Trojans is a blessing and a curse (which he later amends to a “challenge”) for a mission like Lucy.
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Something I will add about the possibility that now that a Trojan asteroid mission has been selected for Discovery, there is unlikely to be a Trojan mission selected for New Frontiers:
You really need to look at the scientific requirements for the New Frontiers Trojan mission and compare it to what the Lucy Trojan mission will do. You cannot do 100% New Frontiers level science on a Discovery-class budget. So the question really is what will not be done by Lucy that is still important? And is it important enough to justify a New Frontiers-class Trojan mission?
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I am impressed they are going to try out optical communications from 3 AU.
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We also get a bonus main belt asteroid flyby in 2025 with Lucy. (Donaldjohanson - 52246)
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We also get a bonus main belt asteroid flyby in 2025 with Lucy. (Donaldjohanson - 52246)
Did he say that in extended mission Lucy could even fly by Psyche?
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I recorded the last half hour of the briefing (i.e., I missed about 15 minutes):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NknU14v5iJ8&t=5s
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We also get a bonus main belt asteroid flyby in 2025 with Lucy. (Donaldjohanson - 52246)
Did he say that in extended mission Lucy could even fly by Psyche?
Yes, Levison said that one of the possible extended mission targets is Psyche.
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NASA Selects Two New Discovery Missions
01.04.2017
NASA has selected two missions that have the potential to open new windows on one of the earliest eras in the history of our solar system – a time less than 10 million years after the birth of our Sun. The missions, known as Lucy and Psyche, were chosen from five finalists and will proceed to mission formulation, with the goal of launching in 2021 and 2023, respectively.
“Lucy will visit a target-rich environment of Jupiter’s mysterious Trojan asteroids, while Psyche will study a unique metal asteroid that’s never been visited before,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “This is what Discovery Program missions are all about – boldly going to places we’ve never been to enable groundbreaking science.”
Lucy, a robotic spacecraft, is scheduled to launch in October 2021. It’s slated to arrive at its first destination, a main belt asteroid, in 2025. From 2027 to 2033, Lucy will explore six Jupiter Trojan asteroids. These asteroids are trapped by Jupiter’s gravity in two swarms that share the planet’s orbit, one leading and one trailing Jupiter in its 12-year circuit around the sun. The Trojans are thought to be relics of a much earlier era in the history of the solar system and may have formed far beyond Jupiter’s current orbit.
“This is a unique opportunity,” said Harold F. Levison, principal investigator of the Lucy mission from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “Because the Trojans are remnants of the primordial material that formed the outer planets, they hold vital clues to deciphering the history of the solar system. Lucy, like the human fossil for which it is named, will revolutionize the understanding of our origins.”
Lucy will build on the success of NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, using newer versions of the RALPH and LORRI science instruments that helped enable the mission’s achievements. Several members of the Lucy mission team are veterans of the New Horizons mission. Lucy also will build on the success of the OSIRIS-REx mission to asteroid Bennu, with the OTES instrument and several members of the OSIRIS-REx team.
The Psyche mission will explore one of the most intriguing targets in the main asteroid belt – a giant metal asteroid, known as 16 Psyche, about three times farther away from the Sun than is the Earth. This asteroid measures about 130 miles in diameter and, unlike most other asteroids that are rocky or icy bodies, is thought to be comprised mostly of metallic iron and nickel, similar to Earth’s core. Scientists wonder whether Psyche could be an exposed core of an early planet that could have been as large as Mars, but which lost its rocky outer layers due to a number of violent collisions billions of years ago.
The mission will help scientists understand how planets and other bodies separated into their layers – including cores, mantles and crusts – early in their histories.
“This is an opportunity to explore a new type of world – not one of rock or ice, but of metal,” said Psyche Principal Investigator Lindy Elkins-Tanton of Arizona State University in Tempe. “16 Psyche is the only known object of its kind in the solar system, and this is the only way humans will ever visit a core. We learn about inner space by visiting outer space.”
Psyche is targeted to launch in October of 2023, arriving at the asteroid in 2030, following an Earth gravity assist spacecraft maneuver in 2024 and a Mars flyby in 2025.
In addition to selecting the Lucy and Psyche missions for formulation, the agency will extend funding for the Near Earth Object Camera (NEOCam) project for an additional year. The NEOCam space telescope is designed to survey regions of space closest to Earth’s orbit, where potentially hazardous asteroids may be found.
“These are true missions of discovery that integrate into NASA’s larger strategy of investigating how the solar system formed and evolved,” said NASA’s Planetary Science Director Jim Green. “We’ve explored terrestrial planets, gas giants, and a range of other bodies orbiting the Sun. Lucy will observe primitive remnants from farther out in the solar system, while Psyche will directly observe the interior of a planetary body. These additional pieces of the puzzle will help us understand how the Sun and its family of planets formed, changed over time, and became places where life could develop and be sustained – and what the future may hold.”
NASA’s other missions to asteroids began with the NEAR orbiter of asteroid Eros, which arrived in 2000, and continues with Dawn, which orbited Vesta and now is in an extended mission phase at Ceres. The OSIRIS-REx mission, which launched on Sept. 8, 2016, is speeding toward a 2018 rendezvous with the asteroid Bennu, and will deliver a sample back to Earth in 2023. Each mission focuses on a different aspect of asteroid science to give scientists the broader picture of solar system formation and evolution.
https://discovery.nasa.gov/news/index.cfml?ID=1171
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SwRI to lead NASA’s Lucy mission to Jupiter’s Trojans
Small, primitive worlds orbiting near Jupiter to provide clues about origins of the solar system
Boulder, Colo. — January 4, 2017 — NASA has selected Southwest Research Institute® (SwRI®) to lead Lucy, a landmark Discovery mission to perform the first reconnaissance of the Trojans, a population of primitive asteroids orbiting in tandem with Jupiter. The Lucy spacecraft will launch in 2021 to study six of these exciting worlds.
“This is a unique opportunity,” said Dr. Harold F. Levison, a program director and chief scientist in SwRI’s Boulder office and the principal investigator of the mission. “Because the Trojans are remnants of the primordial material that formed the outer planets, they hold vital clues to deciphering the history of the solar system. Lucy, like the human fossil for which it is named, will revolutionize the understanding of our origins.”
Lucy will use a proven Lockheed Martin spacecraft and remote-sensing instrument suite to study the geology, surface composition, and bulk physical properties of these bodies at close range. The payload includes three complementary imaging and mapping instruments, including a color imaging and infrared mapping spectrometer from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), a high-resolution visible imager from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, and a thermal infrared spectrometer from Arizona State University. In addition, Lucy will perform radio science investigations using its telecommunications system to determine the masses and densities of the Trojan targets.
“One of the most puzzling characteristics of the Trojans is that they are very different from one another,” said Levison. “This diversity was caused by the evolution of the outer planets and, as such, can be used to detangle their history.” To realize the full scientific potential of the Trojans requires studying all types.
“Understanding the causes of the differences between the Trojans will provide unique and critical knowledge of planetary origins, the source of volatiles and organics on the terrestrial planets, and the evolution of the planetary system as a whole,” said Dr. Catherine Olkin, a planetary scientist in SwRI’s Space Science and Engineering Division and the mission’s deputy principal investigator.
“The Lucy mission is one of those rare moments where a single mission can have a major impact on our understanding of such fundamental questions,” added Dr. Keith Noll, chief of the GSFC Planetary Systems Laboratory and a project scientist for the mission.
Lucy will launch in October 2021 and fly by its targets between 2025 and 2033. In all, Lucy will study six Trojans and one main belt asteroid. SwRI is the principal investigator institution and will lead the science investigation. GSFC will provide overall mission management, systems engineering, and safety and mission assurance. Lockheed Martin Space Systems of Denver will build the spacecraft.
Editors: Images to accompany this release are available at: http://www.swri.org/press/2017/nasa-lucy-mission-jupiter-trojan.htm.
For more information, contact Deb Schmid, (210) 522-2254, Communications Department, Southwest Research Institute, PO Drawer 28510, San Antonio, TX 78228-0510.
http://www.swri.org/9what/releases/2017/nasa-lucy-mission-jupiter-trojan.htm
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ASU to lead NASA space exploration mission for 1st time
By Karin Valentine — January 4, 2017
Arizona State University’s Psyche Mission, a journey to a metal asteroid, has been selected for flight under NASA’s Discovery Program, a series of lower-cost, highly focused robotic space missions that are exploring the solar system.
The mission’s spacecraft is expected to launch in 2023, arriving at the asteroid in 2030, where it will spend 20 months in orbit, mapping it and studying its properties.
It is the first time ASU will lead a NASA space exploration mission. The project is capped at $450 million.
“This mission, visiting the asteroid Psyche, will be the first time humans will ever be able to see a planetary core,” said principal investigator Lindy Elkins-Tanton, director of ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE). “Having the Psyche Mission selected for NASA’s Discovery Program will help us gain insights into the metal interior of all rocky planets in our solar system, including Earth.”
Psyche, an asteroid orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter, is made almost entirely of nickel-iron metal. As such, it offers a unique look into the violent collisions that created Earth and the other terrestrial planets.
The scientific goals of the Psyche mission are to understand the building blocks of planet formation and explore firsthand a wholly new and unexplored type of world. The mission team seeks to determine whether Psyche is a protoplanetary core, how old it is, whether it formed in similar ways to the Earth’s core, and what its surface is like.
“The knowledge this mission will create has the potential to affect our thinking about planetary science for generations to come,” ASU President Michael M. Crow said. “We are in a new era of exploration of our solar system with new public-private sector partnerships helping unlock new worlds of discovery, and ASU will be at the forefront of that research.”
https://vimeo.com/198087979
Psyche — a window into planetary cores
Every world explored so far by humans (except gas giant planets such as Jupiter or Saturn) has a surface of ice or rock or a mixture of the two, but their cores are thought to be metallic. These cores, however, lie far below rocky mantles and crusts and are considered unreachable in our lifetimes.
Psyche, an asteroid that appears to be the exposed nickel-iron core of a protoplanet, one of the building blocks of the sun’s planetary system, may provide a window into those cores. The asteroid is most likely a survivor of violent space collisions, common when the solar system was forming.
Psyche follows an orbit in the outer part of the main asteroid belt, at an average distance from the sun of about 280 million miles, or three times farther from the sun than Earth. It is roughly the size of Massachusetts (about 130 miles in diameter) and dense (7,000 kg/m³).
“Being selected to lead this ambitious mission to the all-metal asteroid Psyche is a major milestone that reflects ASU’s outstanding research capacity,” said Sethuraman Panchanathan, executive vice president and chief research and innovation officer at ASU. “It speaks to our innovative spirit and our world-class scientific expertise in space exploration.”
Mission instrument payload
The spacecraft's instrument payload will include magnetometers, multispectral imagers, a gamma ray and neutron spectrometer, and a radio-science experiment.
The multispectral imager, which will be led by an ASU science team, will provide high-resolution images using filters to discriminate between Psyche's metallic and silicate constituents. It consists of a pair of identical cameras designed to acquire geologic, compositional and topographic data.
The gamma ray and neutron spectrometer will detect, measure and map Psyche's elemental composition. The instrument is mounted on a 7-foot (2-meter) boom to distance the sensors from background radiation created by energetic particles interacting with the spacecraft and to provide an unobstructed field of view. The science team for this instrument is based at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University.
The magnetometer, which is led by scientists at MIT and UCLA, is designed to detect and measure the remnant magnetic field of the asteroid. It’s composed of two identical high-sensitivity magnetic field sensors located at the middle and outer end of the boom.
The Psyche spacecraft will also use an X-band radio telecommunications system, led by scientists at MIT and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This instrument will measure Psyche's gravity field and, when combined with topography derived from onboard imagery, will provide information on the interior structure of the asteroid.
The Psyche mission team
In addition to Elkins-Tanton, ASU SESE scientists on the Psyche mission team include Jim Bell, deputy principal investigator and co-investigator, co-investigator Erik Asphaug, and co-investigator David Williams.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory managed by Caltech is the managing organization and will build the spacecraft with industry partner Space Systems Loral (SSL). JPL’s contribution to the Psyche mission team includes over 75 people, led by project manager Henry Stone, project scientist Carol Polanskey, project systems engineer David Oh and deputy project manager Bob Mase. SSL contribution to the Psyche mission team includes over 50 people led by SEP Chassis deputy program manager Peter Lord and SEP Chassis program manager Steve Scott.
Other co-investigators are David Bercovici (Yale University), Bruce Bills (JPL), Richard Binzel (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), William Bottke (Southwest Research Institute — SwRI), Ralf Jaumann (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft — und Raumfahrt), Insoo Jun (JPL), David Lawrence (Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Laboratory — APL), Simon Marchi (SwRI), Timothy McCoy (Smithsonian Institution), Ryan Park (JPL), Patrick Peplowski (APL), Thomas Prettyman, (Planetary Science Institute), Carol Raymond (JPL), Chris Russell (UCLA), Benjamin Weiss (MIT), Dan Wenkert (JPL), Mark Wieczorek (Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris), and Maria Zuber (MIT).
https://sese.asu.edu/about/news/article/2196
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We also get a bonus main belt asteroid flyby in 2025 with Lucy. (Donaldjohanson - 52246)
Did he say that in extended mission Lucy could even fly by Psyche?
Yes, Levison said that one of the possible extended mission targets is Psyche.
The long durations of the missions, extending into the 2030s, are factored into NASA’s long-term budgeting, Green said. Both have options for extended missions, which could perhaps bring the two together at some point in the future. Levison said that an extended mission for Lucy could include additional flybys of Trojan and main belt asteroids, one of which, he said, is the asteroid Psyche.
“We should be able to do more at the end of the mission,” he said, “if NASA agrees.”
- See more at: http://spacenews.com/nasa-selects-two-asteroid-missions-for-discovery-program/#sthash.ZU20sABF.dpuf
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So excited for these missions! Though I'm wondering, will Lucy be on a solar escape trajectory since it's a flyby mission towards an outer planet?
I reckon this mission won't last long once the spacecraft gets past Jupiter after completing its objectives (since it'll apparently be powered by solar arrays). But I'm intrigued at what the fate of this probe will be...assuming that it doesn't end up in a long ellliptical orbit around the Sun instead.
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So excited for these missions! Though I'm wondering, will Lucy be on a solar escape trajectory since it's a flyby mission towards an outer planet?
No, it's on a very long tour. See this image from http://www.swri.org/press/2017/nasa-lucy-mission-jupiter-trojan.htm
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Thanks for the heads-up.
So Lucy will apparently wander along in a heliocentric orbit after its mission. That's cool.
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I was a bit emotional yesterday, so I couldn't clarify my thoughts. But...
Yes, there's no doubt that these two asteroids missions would be scientifically viable. It's a big deal to visit a metallic asteroid, or a Jupiter trojan asteroid. No doubt it will enrich human knowledge.
However, we must step outside science to realize that the decision of NASA is harmful concerning public engagement. The public just doesn't care about asteroids. A Venus mission on the other side would be both scientifically meaningful and would engage the public.
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So excited for these missions! Though I'm wondering, will Lucy be on a solar escape trajectory since it's a flyby mission towards an outer planet?
No, it's on a very long tour. See this image from
I know neither of these missions will do, but still I would like to see some spacecraft in that region sometime in the future doing Pallas flyby at the mission extension...
That said, I am very glad Dawn was kept around Ceres and not going elsewhere.
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I was a bit emotional yesterday, so I couldn't clarify my thoughts. But...
Yes, there's no doubt that these two asteroids missions would be scientifically viable. It's a big deal to visit a metallic asteroid, or a Jupiter trojan asteroid. No doubt it will enrich human knowledge.
However, we must step outside science to realize that the decision of NASA is harmful concerning public engagement. The public just doesn't care about asteroids. A Venus mission on the other side would be both scientifically meaningful and would engage the public.
The level of public engagement is as it should be utterly irrelevant to such a decision.
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How to summarize the finale of the Discovery selection...
(http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/adventuretimewithfinnandjake/images/3/39/S3e1_Cutie_charge.gif)
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A Venus mission on the other side would be both scientifically meaningful and would engage the public.
Unsubstantiated. A Venus mission would not. There would be no images.
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A Venus mission would not. There would be no images.
There would probably be imaging of the cloud tops, and the surface is somewhat visible in the some bands in the infrared, but I agree with you that public interest in that kind of imaging is low. I don't see any evidence that public interest in Venus in general is noticeably higher than it is for any other solar system body.
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However, we must step outside science to realize that the decision of NASA is harmful concerning public engagement. The public just doesn't care about asteroids. A Venus mission on the other side would be both scientifically meaningful and would engage the public.
The public seemed fairly excited about Rosetta and Philae. I don't remember any particular interest in Venus Express, or in Akatsuki. Magellan was a bit before my time--does anyone remember any real public engagement in that spacecraft?
Why do you think that a Venus mission would engage the public more than a mission to one or more asteroids?
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However, we must step outside science to realize that the decision of NASA is harmful concerning public engagement. The public just doesn't care about asteroids. A Venus mission on the other side would be both scientifically meaningful and would engage the public.
Apart from learning more about the greenhouse effect, the public just doesn't care about Venus either. Thinking long-term, it's inhospitable to astronauts... We can colonize asteroids someday when the technology and political will warrants it.
And if NASA truly wanted to engage the public, it would've approved a Titan mission... Particularly that Titan boat (TiME) that lost to yet another Mars mission (InSight) more than 4 years ago.
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And if NASA truly wanted to engage the public, it would've approved a Titan mission... Particularly that Titan boat (TiME) that lost to yet another Mars mission (InSight) more than 4 years ago.
That is also unsubstantiated.
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However, we must step outside science to realize that the decision of NASA is harmful concerning public engagement. The public just doesn't care about asteroids. A Venus mission on the other side would be both scientifically meaningful and would engage the public.
Apart from learning more about the greenhouse effect, the public just doesn't care about Venus either. Thinking long-term, it's inhospitable to astronauts... We can colonize asteroids someday when the technology and political will warrants it.
And if NASA truly wanted to engage the public, it would've approved a Titan mission... Particularly that Titan boat (TiME) that lost to yet another Mars mission (InSight) more than 4 years ago.
Titan is one of the NF4 targets so all is not lost.
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And if NASA truly wanted to engage the public, it would've approved a Titan mission... Particularly that Titan boat (TiME) that lost to yet another Mars mission (InSight) more than 4 years ago.
That is also unsubstantiated.
Not sure how it could be substantiated, but I think a boat sailing on an alien sea is a pretty easy sell. A mast that could take opportunity style mosaic selflies would create a lot of magazine covers.
Matthew
edited because the spell checker turned "selfies" into "selfless"
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The level of public engagement is as it should be utterly irrelevant to such a decision.
Agreed, science should be the driver. However, NASA does encourage missions to do education/public outreach, since "No Buck Rogers -> No Bucks -> No Buck Rogers." Are E/PO plans not part of the proposals? I thought they were, at least for a time.
The example of Rosetta/Philae came up in the thread, and it's a great case. The public cared. People liked the little cartoon characters, even though there wasn't all that much data released real-time during the mission. As much as I've groused about ESA PR, they ended up doing a half-decent job.
If you look at it from the perspective on a taxpayer, about all a regular person can hope to get from a mission is a few gee-whiz moments. Scientists are wise to do all they can to provide those moments. It's really not that hard to give a "thank you" to the people who paid the bills, because it makes them more willing to pony up next time. I'm confident the two selected missions are going to garner interest.
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The level of public engagement is as it should be utterly irrelevant to such a decision.
Agreed, science should be the driver. However, NASA does encourage missions to do education/public outreach, since "No Buck Rogers -> No Bucks -> No Buck Rogers." Are E/PO plans not part of the proposals? I thought they were, at least for a time.
The example of Rosetta/Philae came up in the thread, and it's a great case. The public cared. People liked the little cartoon characters, even though there wasn't all that much data released real-time during the mission. As much as I've groused about ESA PR, they ended up doing a half-decent job.
If you look at it from the perspective on a taxpayer, about all a regular person can hope to get from a mission is a few gee-whiz moments. Scientists are wise to do all they can to provide those moments. It's really not that hard to give a "thank you" to the people who paid the bills, because it makes them more willing to pony up next time. I'm confident the two selected missions are going to garner interest.
Very true. But not to be overly harsh on Venus but there are going to be more publicly saleable targets like Titan or Enceladus from that narrow perspective.
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If you look at it from the perspective on a taxpayer, about all a regular person can hope to get from a mission is a few gee-whiz moments. Scientists are wise to do all they can to provide those moments. It's really not that hard to give a "thank you" to the people who paid the bills, because it makes them more willing to pony up next time. I'm confident the two selected missions are going to garner interest.
I reckon that these missions will have "Send Your Names Into Space" campaigns to gain additional public interest...just like Dawn, InSight, OSIRIS-REx and other projects did. The Planetary Society (whose president Jim Bell is involved with both Lucy and Psyche) will probably be tasked with this outreach effort
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Several years ago I heard a senior space engineer (somebody who ran a very big program once and later went on to an aerospace corporation and also headed up a lot of senior reviews of major space programs including NASA, USAF, and NRO) observe that when it comes to space, the public only cares about astronauts, Hubble, and maybe the Mars rover. Other than that, they don't know and they don't pay attention to all the other things going on. And even now they only pay attention to astronauts when they get killed.
I think his observation is generally correct. The public doesn't care. I've noticed over the past ten+ years that despite all the wonderful photos from Cassini, that mission has gotten very little public exposure. I never saw it on the evening news (back when I watched the evening news). Never.
Now the public did pay attention to New Horizons and certainly to the seven minutes of terror before Curiosity landed (and then they forgot). And they paid attention to Philae. But that's just about it. They don't care about Mars orbiters or landers. They don't care about asteroids of Venus or Jupiter. They just don't care.
Now it is possible for a new and novel mission to spend some money on publicity and to hit the sweet spot and suddenly get a lot of attention. And it helps if the public affairs people are geniuses--they are geniuses at JPL and the ESA people who did Philae were geniuses too (their PR campaign with the cartoon was brilliant).
But, not to sound snarky about it, who cares? We don't do this stuff to entertain, we do it to fill in the text books and to expand our knowledge. So what is most important is the science content of the missions. And I think that even though both of these missions are "space potatoes," as a friend of mine called them, Psyche in particular can interest the public if it is sold right. It's a GIANT METAL PLANET. That's how you sell it. There's lots of cool imagery you can do with that idea. Heck, I'd sponsor a metal band called Psyche. Get them to bash out awful tunes.
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Now it is possible for a new and novel mission to spend some money on publicity and to hit the sweet spot and suddenly get a lot of attention. And it helps if the public affairs people are geniuses--they are geniuses at JPL and the ESA people who did Philae were geniuses too (their PR campaign with the cartoon was brilliant).
Good public outreach wins the day. To add some examples, both MOM and Yutu were hugely popular with their respective audiences.
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Now it is possible for a new and novel mission to spend some money on publicity and to hit the sweet spot and suddenly get a lot of attention. And it helps if the public affairs people are geniuses--they are geniuses at JPL and the ESA people who did Philae were geniuses too (their PR campaign with the cartoon was brilliant).
Good public outreach wins the day. To add some examples, both MOM and Yutu were hugely popular with their respective audiences.
Those were firsts for the countries involved though.
Matthew
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I know that I've mentioned this before, but I think it is important for people to understand about how most of these missions get selected:
NASA is not picking missions to be popular. It is not picking missions that will excite the public. And also, more generally, NASA is not picking targets. On that last point, NASA was not picking an asteroid as opposed to Venus, the targets were essentially irrelevant in the end.
What NASA does is pick mission proposals. And it does this based upon a bunch of criteria, including cost, technical maturity, and science implementation. If all things are equal, if you had five missions that all scored equal on everything, then NASA could pick based upon targets, and I think that in that case, the selecting officials would probably have wanted to select a Venus mission just to get it back into the portfolio (because it has been so long since Magellan).
So the senior NASA officials looked at the evaluations of each of these proposals, and some of them were stronger than others, and they picked the stronger ones. You probably could have covered over the names on the proposals and just showed the scores to the selecting officials and they could have selected based upon the scores only.
That's generally true for many other competed space science missions in the other sciences--the agency is selecting the best proposals, not the specific targets that they are going to. Good management requires that they do it that way.
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One last thing: in my last post I mentioned "science implementation." That's a specific term that I was reminded of by Jim Green's comments yesterday. It is not strictly the science that the mission is going to do, it is whether or not they will achieve their science goals by doing what they say they are going to do. That can be tricky to evaluate. I know somebody who made a previous mission proposal who lost. I asked him why, and his response was (paraphrasing) "I said that we were going to answer questions A, B, and C, and they gave me a low score because they believed that the instruments that I had on the spacecraft would not answer question C."
When people get deep into designing a spacecraft, they develop a "traceability matrix" that starts with the science question to be answered, and the proceeds to show what kind of data that needs to be collected to answer that (which could be something like observing an atmosphere at a specific wavelength), then on to the instrument that will collect that data, and how often it will collect the data during the mission, and so on. These matrices can get really big and complex. And often to answer a scientific question like "How did Jupiter get created?" you have to gather a bunch of pieces of data and combine them. A review team is going to look at that and they might find holes. They might determine that the spacecraft is not going to make enough observations during its orbits to gather all that data. And so they give the mission proposal a lower score.
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Now it is possible for a new and novel mission to spend some money on publicity and to hit the sweet spot and suddenly get a lot of attention. And it helps if the public affairs people are geniuses--they are geniuses at JPL and the ESA people who did Philae were geniuses too (their PR campaign with the cartoon was brilliant).
Good public outreach wins the day. To add some examples, both MOM and Yutu were hugely popular with their respective audiences.
Those were firsts for the countries involved though.
Matthew
I'm not sure that has a lot of significance, pretty much every deep space mission is a first. We don't re-fly the same craft over and over often. In contrast to early days when Pioneer's, Explorers, Ranger's, Luna's, Veneras etc were actual series, but even then the details of the missions differed.
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Several years ago I heard a senior space engineer (somebody who ran a very big program once and later went on to an aerospace corporation and also headed up a lot of senior reviews of major space programs including NASA, USAF, and NRO) observe that when it comes to space, the public only cares about astronauts, Hubble, and maybe the Mars rover. Other than that, they don't know and they don't pay attention to all the other things going on. And even now they only pay attention to astronauts when they get killed.
I think his observation is generally correct. The public doesn't care. I've noticed over the past ten+ years that despite all the wonderful photos from Cassini, that mission has gotten very little public exposure. I never saw it on the evening news (back when I watched the evening news). Never.
Now the public did pay attention to New Horizons and certainly to the seven minutes of terror before Curiosity landed (and then they forgot). And they paid attention to Philae. But that's just about it. They don't care about Mars orbiters or landers. They don't care about asteroids of Venus or Jupiter. They just don't care.
Now it is possible for a new and novel mission to spend some money on publicity and to hit the sweet spot and suddenly get a lot of attention. And it helps if the public affairs people are geniuses--they are geniuses at JPL and the ESA people who did Philae were geniuses too (their PR campaign with the cartoon was brilliant).
But, not to sound snarky about it, who cares? We don't do this stuff to entertain, we do it to fill in the text books and to expand our knowledge. So what is most important is the science content of the missions. And I think that even though both of these missions are "space potatoes," as a friend of mine called them, Psyche in particular can interest the public if it is sold right. It's a GIANT METAL PLANET. That's how you sell it. There's lots of cool imagery you can do with that idea. Heck, I'd sponsor a metal band called Psyche. Get them to bash out awful tunes.
That sounds a bit overly pessimist to me as I do notice online interest in things like Cassini & Juno etc outside of here. I don't think the public are complete mass of disinterested parties. Sometimes you just have to package it right and you can capture quite a crowd. Nature programmes from the BBC have being doing this for years with climate science and other environmental topics.
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I am happy with the selections. I like the fact that both missions are targeting celestial bodies that have never been visited before.
I wish that NEOCam had been chosen. But the fact that its funding has been extended by a year gives me hope that NEOCam may perhaps survive under a different program.
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I'm not sure that has a lot of significance, pretty much every deep space mission is a first. We don't re-fly the same craft over and over often. In contrast to early days when Pioneer's, Explorers, Ranger's, Luna's, Veneras etc were actual series, but even then the details of the missions differed.
It isn't about the first mission to a target. It's about firsts for a country by category. A big reason for MOM getting so much attention is that a successful mission beyond the earth-moon system is much more technically challenging. MOM let India portray itself as on an even footing with the great post-industrial powers. The fact that they pulled it off on their first try was an added bonus. Yutu had other advantages. China could claim to be doing what no one had managed since the space race (soft landing on the lunar surface). It also helps when the government in question directly controls the national media.
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I am happy with the selections. I like the fact that both missions are targeting celestial bodies that have never been visited before.
Ditto. I favored Lucy from the get-go because the Trojans have:
A) Never been visited before
B) Might be the outer solar system's fossil bed (thanks to Jupiter collecting junk for eons)
I wish that NEOCam had been chosen. But the fact that its funding has been extended by a year gives me hope that NEOCam may perhaps survive under a different program.
I suspect it will. NASA was directed to find threatening asteroids before and NEOCam is a good way to do it; sort of like a Kepler mission for asteroids.
I pity the Venus teams, but I also believe they should redouble their efforts now on the New Frontiers project. At the very least, the larger budget will allow them to invest in studying how to survive the surface. I cross my fingers for them there as our sister planet is well overdue for a proper visit (ESA's and JAXA's missions not withstanding). There are some surprising proposals that's use Venus' thick atmosphere to study quakes...FROM THE AIR! It'd be interesting to see what they try for NF.
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I am happy with the selections. I like the fact that both missions are targeting celestial bodies that have never been visited before.
Ditto. I favored Lucy from the get-go because the Trojans have:
A) Never been visited before
B) Might be the outer solar system's fossil bed (thanks to Jupiter collecting junk for eons)
I wish that NEOCam had been chosen. But the fact that its funding has been extended by a year gives me hope that NEOCam may perhaps survive under a different program.
I suspect it will. NASA was directed to find threatening asteroids before and NEOCam is a good way to do it; sort of like a Kepler mission for asteroids.
I pity the Venus teams, but I also believe they should redouble their efforts now on the New Frontiers project. At the very least, the larger budget will allow them to invest in studying how to survive the surface. I cross my fingers for them there as our sister planet is well overdue for a proper visit (ESA's and JAXA's missions not withstanding). There are some surprising proposals that's use Venus' thick atmosphere to study quakes...FROM THE AIR! It'd be interesting to see what they try for NF.
But it's up against targets that may be locations of possible life outside Earth that whether people like it or not makes them 'sexy' to many eyes.
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It isn't about the first mission to a target. It's about firsts for a country by category...
Trying to fit robotic deep space probes in categories is a fools errand IMHO.
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Venus scientists “just trying to hold on” after new NASA rejections
“Our community is passionate about Venus, but we’re getting pretty thin.”
http://arstechnica.co.uk/science/2017/01/after-latest-nasa-rejection-venus-scientists-face-more-years-of-darkness/
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Venus scientists “just trying to hold on” after new NASA rejections
“Our community is passionate about Venus, but we’re getting pretty thin.”
http://arstechnica.co.uk/science/2017/01/after-latest-nasa-rejection-venus-scientists-face-more-years-of-darkness/
That's a pretty interesting article. Thanks for posting. I have gone to a number of VEXAG meetings and he's right about attendance and excitement--both are down. The big missions fund a lot of people, and so OPAG and MEPAG (outer planets and Mars) have a lot of attendees.
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Venus scientists “just trying to hold on” after new NASA rejections
“Our community is passionate about Venus, but we’re getting pretty thin.”
http://arstechnica.co.uk/science/2017/01/after-latest-nasa-rejection-venus-scientists-face-more-years-of-darkness/
That's a pretty interesting article. Thanks for posting. I have gone to a number of VEXAG meetings and he's right about attendance and excitement--both are down. The big missions fund a lot of people, and so OPAG and MEPAG (outer planets and Mars) have a lot of attendees.
If it misses out on the next New Frontiers do you think that's game over for Venus in NASA for a generation?
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If it misses out on the next New Frontiers do you think that's game over for Venus in NASA for a generation?
Most likely to be frank, but the fact they succeeded in reaching the finalists for Discovery could be a sign they're getting better coordinated at their proposals. With a little more refinement, they could succeed at winning the NF contest. I'd rank Venus as a target as difficult as Jupiter to survive, therefore a little more effort than a Discovery mission may be required, especially if you need to land to get the science.
Anyway, the Discovery selection is over so we may as well retire this thread and the Venusians should start talking on the New Frontiers thread more since that is Venus' best hope for the current generation.
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I'm listening to Jim Green's program update at SBAG. He has now said several times that the asteroid missions were selected because they were "most technically ready" and "best fit into a cost capped program".
If you look at Lucy and Psyche, the spacecraft are straightforward, the instruments are all near copies of existing instruments, and the data return rates are likely pretty modest. The latter is one of the key drivers of spacecraft cost.
DAVINCI had the challenge of having a carrier probe (simple in itself, but another element), a high pressure vessel, and expensive composition instruments that had to be modified to work with high pressure, high temperature gasses.
VERITAS was using a modification of radar systems used at Earth, but I don't know if any modifications were required. The biggest challenge, I suspect, was the data return rate which would have driven the cost and complexity of the entire spacecraft system. (Ralph Lorenz published a great paper on how data rate is the driver of planetary mission costs.)
Following the cost overruns of the last decade following the selection of more ambitious missions, NASA's managers appear to have become more conservative. While surprises happen (InSight, for example), in general this has worked.
But I am so disappointed that a Venus mission didn't make the cut.
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If it misses out on the next New Frontiers do you think that's game over for Venus in NASA for a generation?
Rather than try and answer that question, I'll use it as a springboard to point out that the way we explore the solar system results in some rather arbitrary divisions. For instance, we have divided the community up into Mars experts, outer planets experts, Venus experts, and so on. The reality is that somebody who focuses on planetary atmospheres is going to be interested in Venus _AND_ Titan and other planets. So if you are a "Venus expert" you can hopefully find other planetary bodies to work on while there are no Venus missions. So the community itself is going to exist, but dispersed. In fact, that's happened previously--there were a lot of "lunar scientists" during and immediately after Apollo. Then we stopped doing Moon stuff and most of them ended up working on Viking. Then Viking was over and a lot of them were either pushed out of the field or doing bits and pieces during the 1980s when there was not much of a planetary program other than the Voyagers.
I think that the current composition of planetary expert communities is a relatively recent thing. It has really only been around for the past couple of decades when NASA started doing a lot of planetary missions. This is all my long-winded way of saying that these communities are not static over long periods of time and they have and will continue to adapt.
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1-VERITAS was using a modification of radar systems used at Earth, but I don't know if any modifications were required.
2-Following the cost overruns of the last decade following the selection of more ambitious missions, NASA's managers appear to have become more conservative. While surprises happen (InSight, for example), in general this has worked.
1-At VEXAG I seem to remember hearing that they "only" needed to modify the antenna size, but that it was the same radar as used before.
2-So this is actually an issue worth more discussion. There are people in the science community--I think not just planetary but elsewhere--who will tell you that the pendulum has moved too far in one direction towards cost control. The goal of NASA's science programs should be to large extent to "do good science while taking cost into consideration." But if cost is the be all and end all factor, then the end result is that the only missions that get selected are ones that do not use any new technology and do not push any boundaries. I heard that complaint about MAVEN--nothing new in terms of technology.
I do think that this cost control attitude is most focused at OMB and by extension at NASA HQ. Congress is a bit more open-minded on it. They will tolerate higher costs if you can make a case for them. But the selection of competed missions is done at the NASA level, so they enforce those cost caps.
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Rather than try and answer that question, I'll use it as a springboard to point out that the way we explore the solar system results in some rather arbitrary divisions. For instance, we have divided the community up into Mars experts, outer planets experts, Venus experts, and so on. The reality is that somebody who focuses on planetary atmospheres is going to be interested in Venus _AND_ Titan and other planets.
I hear what you're saying, but as we learn more and more details, it's a lot harder to be a generalist--you don't live long enough to become expert at too many things. It's like not asking a dentist to perform brain surgery. If you spend 6 years in graduate school learning the kinds of chemistry and geology applicable to Mars' surface, for instance, the grossly different conditions at Venus mean you have to do an awful lot more learning. To go from being really good at one kind of planetary science, for example, to another, takes years. The splintering, or "pigeon-holing," as I usually put it, is a natural yet unfortunate result of increasing knowledge.
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New article on the Discovery picks.
Space Systems/Loral of Palo Alto, California, will manufacture the Psyche spacecraft with a suite of ion thrusters to steer the probe toward its destination. Based on the company’s 1300-series design for commercial communications satellites, Psyche is the first spacecraft SSL will build for a NASA Discovery-class interplanetary mission.
http://spaceflightnow.com/2017/01/11/two-asteroid-missions-get-nod-from-nasa/
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I hear what you're saying, but as we learn more and more details, it's a lot harder to be a generalist--you don't live long enough to become expert at too many things. It's like not asking a dentist to perform brain surgery. If you spend 6 years in graduate school learning the kinds of chemistry and geology applicable to Mars' surface, for instance, the grossly different conditions at Venus mean you have to do an awful lot more learning. To go from being really good at one kind of planetary science, for example, to another, takes years. The splintering, or "pigeon-holing," as I usually put it, is a natural yet unfortunate result of increasing knowledge.
I don't think that's the case, and I don't think it should be the case. A few reasons:
-a major aspect of planetary science is comparative across planets: seismology on Venus, Mars and Io, or atmospheres of Venus, Titan and Jupiter. Focusing too much on one thing reduces the relevance of the science.
-focusing too much on one thing makes you vulnerable to funding uncertainties; if all you do is Venus and there is no Venus mission, you are out of a job.
Indeed, many planetary scientists are spread out like this because they have to be for funding purposes. Ideally, many of them should also be doing Earth-based work as well in case planetary sciences gets cut overall. Younger scientists focus on a few things and then discover that having their grant proposal rejected means they have to go live in their parents' basement. Older scientists have learned how to diversify better. What I've occasionally seen among some younger scientists is that they don't understand that their profession is actually a luxury, it is not a necessity. Their work is not directly relevant to making the world a better place, so they have to look beyond extreme specialization and learn how to survive, and that means diversifying a bit. There's a change in attitude as they gain experience, often the experience of hard knocks. I heard one senior scientist complain that graduate school professors were not impressing upon their students that they needed to diversify, including getting Earth science funding as well.
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Venus can wait: Jilted scientists face years without NASA return to Earth’s neighbor
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/01/venus-can-wait-jilted-scientists-face-years-without-nasa-return-earth-s-neighbor
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Sending an instrument to Psyche by the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.
https://youtu.be/Rct5dav5Z1E
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"-a major aspect of planetary science is comparative across planets: seismology on Venus, Mars and Io, or atmospheres of Venus, Titan and Jupiter. Focusing too much on one thing reduces the relevance of the science."
I agree with this, and another way to look at it is that there are two different ways to specialize. You can be a Mars specialist, or an icy moon specialist, but you can also be a cratering specialist or a tectonics specialist. The second group of specialists are likely to cover many worlds.
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From the report giving details on the 2018 House Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill:
http://docs.house.gov/meetings/AP/AP00/20170713/106248/HRPT-115-HR-p1.pdf
Near Earth Object Camera (NEOCam).
—The Committee is supportive of the NEOCam mission, which follows a 2010 National Academy of Sciences report regarding space-based infrared survey telescopes required to discover asteroids that pose a hazard to Earth. NEOCam will also assist NASA in meeting the congressionally mandated directive to detect and characterize hazardous near Earth objects. The Committee understands that NEOCam has been approved for extended Phase A studies that are intended, in part, to review projected overall cost estimates. NASA shall provide a report no later than 120 days after enactment of this Act regarding estimated life cycle costs, including schedule and milestones toward a projected 2020 launch date.
Discovery.
—The recommendation includes $335,800,000 for the Discovery program. The current cost cap for these missions is $450,000,000 plus launch costs. The Discovery program currently has two operational spacecraft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and Dawn; one flight mission in development, the Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport; and two newly selected missions, Lucy and Psyche, which are in formulation.
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From the report giving details on the 2018 House Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill:
http://docs.house.gov/meetings/AP/AP00/20170713/106248/HRPT-115-HR-p1.pdf
Near Earth Object Camera (NEOCam).
—The Committee is supportive of the NEOCam mission, which follows a 2010 National Academy of Sciences report regarding space-based infrared survey telescopes required to discover asteroids that pose a hazard to Earth. NEOCam will also assist NASA in meeting the congressionally mandated directive to detect and characterize hazardous near Earth objects. The Committee understands that NEOCam has been approved for extended Phase A studies that are intended, in part, to review projected overall cost estimates. NASA shall provide a report no later than 120 days after enactment of this Act regarding estimated life cycle costs, including schedule and milestones toward a projected 2020 launch date.
Projected 2020 launch date? That seems pretty much impossible to me at this point.
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From the report giving details on the 2018 House Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill:
http://docs.house.gov/meetings/AP/AP00/20170713/106248/HRPT-115-HR-p1.pdf
Near Earth Object Camera (NEOCam).
—The Committee is supportive of the NEOCam mission, which follows a 2010 National Academy of Sciences report regarding space-based infrared survey telescopes required to discover asteroids that pose a hazard to Earth. NEOCam will also assist NASA in meeting the congressionally mandated directive to detect and characterize hazardous near Earth objects. The Committee understands that NEOCam has been approved for extended Phase A studies that are intended, in part, to review projected overall cost estimates. NASA shall provide a report no later than 120 days after enactment of this Act regarding estimated life cycle costs, including schedule and milestones toward a projected 2020 launch date.
Projected 2020 launch date? That seems pretty much impossible to me at this point.
Yeah, that's not really likely. If you assume that they started spending money the day the budget is signed, and launched on December 31, 2020, that would be three whole years, which is too fast for any large spacecraft. 2021 would be doable.
And I'd note that NEOCam is not funded.
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Discovery.
—The recommendation includes $335,800,000 for the Discovery program. The current cost cap for these missions is $450,000,000 plus launch costs. The Discovery program currently has two operational spacecraft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and Dawn; one flight mission in development, the Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport; and two newly selected missions, Lucy and Psyche, which are in formulation.
That's a minor mistake: LRO was not a Discovery mission, although I believe it is now funded in the Discovery budget line.
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So not a mistake, then. When LRO transitioned to the SMD it was funded from the Discovery budget (as a mission of opportunity, I think). Not Discovery to start with, but it is now.
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So not a mistake, then. When LRO transitioned to the SMD it was funded from the Discovery budget (as a mission of opportunity, I think). Not Discovery to start with, but it is now.
Okay, I'll give it if it is currently within the Discovery program, although it was created as a strategic, non-science program. LRO has been tremendously successful and hopefully will continue.
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I'm pleased to see the nod to NEOCam. It's an important project.
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Posted by JPL
Discovery “2018” Potential Concepts
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory invites principal investigator candidates for the next Discovery opportunity (AO expected in fall 2018), including PIs from NASA centers, to explore possibilities for collaboration with JPL.
Please describe your interest to Dr. Christophe Sotin, Chief Scientist, JPL Solar System Exploration Directorate, [email protected], no later than September 10, 2017.
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From the report giving details on the 2018 House Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill:
http://docs.house.gov/meetings/AP/AP00/20170713/106248/HRPT-115-HR-p1.pdf
Near Earth Object Camera (NEOCam).
—The Committee is supportive of the NEOCam mission, which follows a 2010 National Academy of Sciences report regarding space-based infrared survey telescopes required to discover asteroids that pose a hazard to Earth. NEOCam will also assist NASA in meeting the congressionally mandated directive to detect and characterize hazardous near Earth objects. The Committee understands that NEOCam has been approved for extended Phase A studies that are intended, in part, to review projected overall cost estimates. NASA shall provide a report no later than 120 days after enactment of this Act regarding estimated life cycle costs, including schedule and milestones toward a projected 2020 launch date.
Projected 2020 launch date? That seems pretty much impossible to me at this point.
Yeah, that's not really likely. If you assume that they started spending money the day the budget is signed, and launched on December 31, 2020, that would be three whole years, which is too fast for any large spacecraft. 2021 would be doable.
And I'd note that NEOCam is not funded.
"large"??
It's only got a 50 cm (19.6 in) mirror.
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From the report giving details on the 2018 House Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill:
http://docs.house.gov/meetings/AP/AP00/20170713/106248/HRPT-115-HR-p1.pdf
Near Earth Object Camera (NEOCam).
—The Committee is supportive of the NEOCam mission, which follows a 2010 National Academy of Sciences report regarding space-based infrared survey telescopes required to discover asteroids that pose a hazard to Earth. NEOCam will also assist NASA in meeting the congressionally mandated directive to detect and characterize hazardous near Earth objects. The Committee understands that NEOCam has been approved for extended Phase A studies that are intended, in part, to review projected overall cost estimates. NASA shall provide a report no later than 120 days after enactment of this Act regarding estimated life cycle costs, including schedule and milestones toward a projected 2020 launch date.
Projected 2020 launch date? That seems pretty much impossible to me at this point.
Yeah, that's not really likely. If you assume that they started spending money the day the budget is signed, and launched on December 31, 2020, that would be three whole years, which is too fast for any large spacecraft. 2021 would be doable.
And I'd note that NEOCam is not funded.
NEOCam isn't funded (except for a "small" amount won during the 2015 Discovery competition), but I wonder if the text in the report is a hint that someone in the House is interested in funding it later?
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NEOCam isn't funded (except for a "small" amount won during the 2015 Discovery competition), but I wonder if the text in the report is a hint that someone in the House is interested in funding it later?
It's intended as encouragement to the White House to fund it.
There's some really clever stuff in this budget bill. Some of the most clever stuff is what is _not_ being said.
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"large"??
It's only got a 50 cm (19.6 in) mirror.
It's a $450 million spacecraft. It's not a cubesat. Building something like this is best done in four years, not three.
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"large"??
It's only got a 50 cm (19.6 in) mirror.
It's a $450 million spacecraft. It's not a cubesat. Building something like this is best done in four years, not three.
It's not a cubesat, but it's not all that big.
Building something like this is best done in four years, not three.
I disagree, particularly since NEOCam has been kicking around since 2009. Its design should be pretty much complete by now.
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It's not a cubesat, but it's not all that big.
Building something like this is best done in four years, not three.
I disagree, particularly since NEOCam has been kicking around since 2009. Its design should be pretty much complete by now.
It has been in definition for nearly a decade. That's not the same as a design.
I believe that it is in Phase A now so that NASA can get a firm cost estimate. Both Psyche and Lucy are require about 4 years to go from Phase A to launch; so will NEOCam. And the earliest that substantial funding would be available is if Congress adds money in the FY*19* budget, so add ~4 years to that.
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I disagree, particularly since NEOCam has been kicking around since 2009. Its design should be pretty much complete by now.
Look at how much time missions like this actually take to go from approval to launch.
As an example, WISE was selected for extended Phase A in Q1 2003 (as NEOCAM was in January this year), was selected in Q1 2004, and launched in Q4 2009. WISE descended from proposals and studies that had been kicking around for many years prior.
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"large"??
It's only got a 50 cm (19.6 in) mirror.
It's a $450 million spacecraft. It's not a cubesat. Building something like this is best done in four years, not three.
It's not a cubesat, but it's not all that big.
Building something like this is best done in four years, not three.
I disagree, particularly since NEOCam has been kicking around since 2009. Its design should be pretty much complete by now.
Concepts for spacecraft don't go pass the proposal stage unless they are funded. So a proposal that was done in 2009 is still a proposal today unless it gets selected and funded to do further work. Proposal teams only have money to put a proposal together and do no more. The team members move on to other work and projects if not selected.
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Building something like this is best done in four years, not three.
I disagree, particularly since NEOCam has been kicking around since 2009. Its design should be pretty much complete by now.
Okay, provide some evidence of unique spacecraft of this size produced in that amount of time (3 years) that were successful.
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The National Academy of Sciences is conducting a midterm assessment of the current Decadal Survey. In a May meeting, the Analysis Groups presented their views on how well the goals of the Decadal Survey are being met. Both the VEXAG and OPAG presentations included information on the evaluation and selection of Discovery missions to Venus and the outer solar system. I've reproduced the contents of their slides here:
Venus
Discovery Selection Outcome
•SMD AA Zurbuchen reached out to VEXAG a few days after the selection announcement. He stated that the results were not due to lack of interest about Venus and he offered a meeting.
•Chair Grimm met in person with AA Zurbuchen and Director Green in mid-Feb, with Deputy Chair Gilmore participating remotely.
•AA Zurbuchen explained his selection rationale.
–We were instructed not to repeat it – he will promulgate.
–After his top selection, the remainder followed his programmatic choices.
–All missions were selectable.
–There was no bias against Venus or for asteroids.
•Chair/Deputy Chair: This decision rationale should be fully explained to the planetary-science community, as it affects everybody
My take: In an email to me, Lori Glaze, one of the PIs for Discovery proposal told me that both of the Venus finalists proposals were found to be fully selectable. NASA passed them over for asteroid missions for reasons that have not been made public to my knowledge. This does give hope for Venus in the next Discovery selection, which I believe will start next year with the release of the Announcement of Opportunity. Later in the presentation, a recommendation is made that NASA should, "Clarify criteria for mission selection, esp. Discovery."
OPAG
The problem with Discovery for OPAG
Congressional Direction:
From the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill, 2016:
“...The Committee directs NASA to create an Ocean World Exploration Program whose primary goal is to discover extant life on another world using a mix of Discovery, New Frontiers and flagship class missions consistent with the recommendations of current and future Planetary Decadal surveys.”
Outer Planet Missions in Discovery?
•LUCY will go to 5 AU but does not visit a planetary system
•Missions proposed but declined:
–INSIDE Jupiter (evolved into Juno in New Frontiers)
–Titan Mare Explorer (TiME) (made it to step-2; ASRGs)
–Journey to Enceladus and Titan (JET)
–Enceladus Life Finder (ELF)
–Life Investigation for Enceladus (LIFE)
–Io Volcano Observer (IVO)
–Kuiper (UV to NIR telescope)
•Outer Planets exploration is challenging via Discovery
–Mission/instrument lifetime requirements
•Discovery 13 change putting Phase E outside cost cap has helped, but still need to demonstrate lifetime of S/C and instruments
–High radiation environment at Jupiter
–Cold environments (plus hot during Earth/Venus gravity assists)
–Challenging for power at >5 AU
•Very large LILT solar arrays or radioisotope power
–Need large propulsion system to be captured into orbit
–Need large telecom system to return significant amounts of data
•Either NASA needs to change the AO rules or Discovery will not help OPAG or Ocean Worlds (e.g., congressional language)
–RTGs as GFE without cost cap penalty?
–Raise Discovery cost cap for challenging missions?
–Accept higher risk?
•Fly an extra New Frontiers mission in place of 2 Discovery missions?
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Building something like this is best done in four years, not three.
I disagree, particularly since NEOCam has been kicking around since 2009. Its design should be pretty much complete by now.
Okay, provide some evidence of unique spacecraft of this size produced in that amount of time (3 years) that were successful.
Discovery 3: Lunar Prospector, 1.4 m x 1.2 m. Selected in February 1995, launched January 1998. 2 years 11 months
Discovery 4: Stardust, 1.6 m x 0.66 m. Selected in November 1995, launched February 1999. 3 years 3 months
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Big change for next time around.
NASA to allow nuclear power systems for next Discovery mission
Green, speaking March 19 at a town hall meeting during the 49th Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference at The Woodlands, Texas, said NASA went back to the Department of Energy to review current and projected supplies of plutonium-238. The status of production of the isotope, as well as projected demands, led him to conclude that it would be feasible to allow the use of radioisotope power systems on the next Discovery mission, in the form of two multi-mission radioisotope thermoelectric generators, or MMRTGs.
“The confluence of when that would happen, and when these two programs would really move out, just seemed to come together a little bit for us and would enable us to move in this direction,” he said, referring to demands from Discovery and any future, but undefined, lunar missions.
Aiding that decision, he said, was the progress being made by the Department of Energy of restarting plutonium-238 production. “That’s gone well,” he said, in spite of concerns expressed by the Government Accountability Office in October 2017 about scaling up production to meet that goal of 1.5 kilograms a year.
http://spacenews.com/nasa-to-allow-nuclear-power-systems-for-next-discovery-mission/
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I believe that it is in Phase A now so that NASA can get a firm cost estimate. Both Psyche and Lucy are require about 4 years to go from Phase A to launch; so will NEOCam. And the earliest that substantial funding would be available is if Congress adds money in the FY*19* budget, so add ~4 years to that.
I haven't seen any informed comment on how NEOCam will have any of its original scope removed by data from GAIA and LSST, GAIAs nominal full data release of solar system bodies, and LSST coming online about the same time as a nominal launch.
Is there only limited overlap?
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Big change for next time around.
NASA to allow nuclear power systems for next Discovery mission
Depends on what NASA plans to charge the missions for using RPGs. If it is the same rates as before, then it likely will be hard to propose a competitive mission and incur those costs. You might note that for the recent New Frontiers competition that also allowed RPGs, the two Enceladus plus the Titan orbiter missions would have gone with solar power, and the NF budget is much larger. So far as I know, only the Dragonfly mission actually proposed to use an RPG, and it had no other choice given that it must operate under Titan's smog and clouds.
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From the report giving details on the 2018 House Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill:
http://docs.house.gov/meetings/AP/AP00/20170713/106248/HRPT-115-HR-p1.pdf
Near Earth Object Camera (NEOCam).
—The Committee is supportive of the NEOCam mission, which follows a 2010 National Academy of Sciences report regarding space-based infrared survey telescopes required to discover asteroids that pose a hazard to Earth. NEOCam will also assist NASA in meeting the congressionally mandated directive to detect and characterize hazardous near Earth objects. The Committee understands that NEOCam has been approved for extended Phase A studies that are intended, in part, to review projected overall cost estimates. NASA shall provide a report no later than 120 days after enactment of this Act regarding estimated life cycle costs, including schedule and milestones toward a projected 2020 launch date.
Discovery.
—The recommendation includes $335,800,000 for the Discovery program. The current cost cap for these missions is $450,000,000 plus launch costs. The Discovery program currently has two operational spacecraft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and Dawn; one flight mission in development, the Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport; and two newly selected missions, Lucy and Psyche, which are in formulation.
Following up on my NeoCAM budget report language update from last summer, the recent report giving details on the 2018 Omnibus spending bill from the House includes the following:
"Within amounts currently available in the Planetary program and from funds provided in this Act, no more than $35,000,000 is for the Near-Earth Object Camera (NEOCam) mission to complete a system requirement review and mission design review, and associated follow-up work."
Also, for the Discovery program:
"The agreement provides up to $335,800,000 for Discovery"
http://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20180319/DIV%20B%20CJS%20SOM-%20FY18-OMNI.OCR.pdf
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White House releases near Earth object action plan
Here’s the part relevant to this thread.
NEOCam remains in this “extended Phase A” study phase, Johnson said, to reduce risk in key technologies like its infrared camera and data processing systems. He didn’t disclose when NASA might decide to proceed with development of NEOCam as a directed mission or allow it to participate in the next Discovery competition.
NEOCam is billed as a follow-on to NEOWISE, an extended mission for NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft devoted to studying near Earth objects. NEOWISE has faced some recent criticism after research led by Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer at Microsoft, concluded that size estimates for asteroids observed by NEOWISE were inaccurate.
Johnson defended the NEOWISE effort. “The scientific community tells us what the credibility of that analysis is. All of the NEOWISE work has been peer-reviewed,” he said. “Their database is very large and extensively utilized by the overall scientific community as the best data available on the population of near Earth asteroids as we know them.”
http://spacenews.com/white-house-releases-near-earth-object-action-plan/