NASA Dawn asteroid mission told to ‘stand down’ |
NASA Dawn asteroid mission told to ‘stand down’ |
Nov 7 2005, 03:55 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 370 Joined: 12-September 05 From: France Member No.: 495 |
NASA Dawn Asteroid Mission Told To ‘Stand Down’ .
The decision to stand down, according to SPACE.com sources, appears related to budget-related measures and workforce cutbacks at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/051107_dawn_qown.html Rakhir |
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Nov 8 2005, 06:33 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 220 Joined: 13-October 05 Member No.: 528 |
The Discovery missiong cap of 350 million really does need to go up, or NASA's expectations for a Discovery Mission need to go down.
Several years ago I remember reading a summary of a meeting between NASA Discovery program officials and members of teams who had particiapated in Discovery missions. The meeting was a review of how Discovery was working, what wasn't working, and troubles on the horizon. One of the major points that the participants made was that Discovery mission scopes had been inflating since the start of the program. Everyone felt that in the early days of Discover, they could propose something modest (such as a Lunar Prospecter) and compete with the other teams. But now the winners were at the Messenger and Dawn level. Lunar Prospecter was a spin stabalized lunar orbiter, a simple instrument package, and no onboard computer. Compare that to the 3-axis stabilized Messenger Mercury orbiter sent out on a 6 year mission with 7 instruments and operating in a fairly hostile space environment compared to Lunar Orbit. In order to compete, the proposers had to come up with extremely aggressive missions and overly optimistic cost and schedule estimates. NASA seemed to agree, but made some general statement of "well, that is something to worry about, but we don't know how to address it right now". Seems simple enough. Either you down scope, and start being more open to the CONTOUR type mission proposals again (well, hopefully better funded and carefully executed than CONTOUR) ... or you raise your mission cap. Just as an outside observer, I'd be fine with raising the cap to 450 million and flying a little less often. But then again, there hasn't been a Discovery mission selected in 4 years, so a little less often seems to be turning into never. |
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