Very bad news.
It's certainly the best way to run the business of cost overruns but even if we are used to these kind of consequences, it's always sad to hear.
NASA cuts LANL sampler from next Mars rover
http://www.lamonitor.com/articles/2007/09/15/headline_news/news02.txt
Edit :
And also...
http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story.jsp?id=news/lab091407.xml&headline=Mars%20Science%20Lab%20Rover%20Trimmed%20&channel=space
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.rss.spacewire.html?pid=25415
... removal of the Mars Descent Imager (MARDI) and the zoom capability on the mast camera...
... SAM and CheMin were cost-capped...
Wow, it sounds like they really stripped out a lot of instrumentation. In addition to those mentioned, other highlights:
"A rock-surface grinder will be replaced with a brushing tool..."
It seems like a real shame though.
I was looking forward to the zoom capability on the camera lens. Maybe they figure that the rover will have enough mobility to let it drive directly up to interesting targets? And it's not as though they'll be landing it any place with steep canyons or cliffs, where it would be completely unable to get a good look without a zoom lens.
I'm sure it will still launch with a good set of instruments to get the job done.
They might as well just re-launch an MER rover now.
Sad to hear all these cuts but at least one of them, cutting out the zoom lens, might be a good thing. I've always felt that adding a zoom lens added unnecessary complexity to maintaining the scale calibration of images taken. Doing away with the zoom factor makes a whole range of image calculations simpler and more reliable.
I wait for comments from the imaging experts.
Steve
The loss of MARDI seems bizarre - because iirc - it's a MARDI derivative that turns into JunoCam. Will Juno have to find cash to get JunoCAM finished and onboard - or will it be dropped there as well?
The loss of zoom on MastCam sucks - because that takes away the potential for wide angle HDTV movies. I guess they'll re-design for a Pancam-similar resolution.
And dropping the grinder...well, surely Honeybee could build to print an MER RAT?
All that said - the vehicle is still far far and away a better platform for exploration than an MER - saying they should just launch one of those instead is an over-reaction.
Doug
If it doesn't make the payload, ChemCam will be surely missed, since it would have helped to bridge the "Burns Cliff" (and now Victoria Crater) gap (between what you can reach with the arm and what you can see with the cameras).
What is the meaning of "cost capping" SAM and CheMin? If they overrun any more, they'll be cut too?
edit: although, I'm probably getting way ahead of the game to think of it being cut. ChemCam has just had its funding halted, but with it already 90% done, I'm sure they'll find a way.
If nothing else, these cuts will put "the fear of God" into every future proposer of a planetary mission. Maybe we'll stop seeing MESSENGER and Dawn- type cost overruns.
Still, it's a shame to see these cuts. If the PI's involved were allowed to be a little more creative in getting funding, they could go to private sources to make up the shortfall. The Keck Foundation put up tens of millions of dollars for their namesake telescope, they could pitch in a couple of million for ChemCam if they chose to. And I hear Tom Hanks is a space enthusiast. I'd contribute a few bucks to a funding drive. It could be done if the will was there, but probably won't.
It's a real shame about ChemCam, but NASA doesn't really have much choice unless Congress loosens the purse strings. The LA Monitor article suggests that alternate funding might come through to keep it on the payload, that would be ideal. As for the RAT descope, I thought that the grinder was to be integrated with the sample collection device so that would prevent using a MER RAT.
Is there a possibility other nations could fund ChemCam like they're doing with Phoenix? Or if not, could it be replaced by a cheaper instrument? Where will the weight savings go?
Well, there was Stern's talk about integrating sample collection capacity for a future sample return into this mission...wonder how much weight they would need to carve out for that.
Stern has asked a tiger team at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., to design sample caching gear to be installed on the Mars Science Laboratory. A small, hockey puck-sized device is being studied, seen as a "secondary payload" to be attached to the rover.
The final study results from the Ames team on the caching hardware are due by the end of July or early August, reported Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at the space agency field center who is helping to assess the feasibility of the Mars Science Laboratory add-on. Preliminary discussions also are under way with officials in the European Space Agency's ExoMars rover project to carry similar sample caching equipment on board that 2013 mission.
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070726_mars_samplereturn.html
If it turns out that ChemCam doesn't make it onto MSL, I think it will be the equivalent of when the Raman spectrometer was dropped from the MER rovers. I know Steve Squyres really regretted not being able to fly that instrument, and I'm sure it did hurt the science return, since it would have been the only instrument able to identify organic molecules in the MER payload. But look at what we did get from Spirit and Opportunity: a rich science return beyond what anyone anticipated. Most people don't think of MER as a compromised mission these days. I really hope ChemCam does fly in '09, but I have no doubt MSL will still be a spectacular mission if it doesn't.
It does seem fishy that Dr. Stern found the money to design and add a sample cache to MSL at the same time there wasn't enough to finish an already approved instrument.
Or - if you look at it another way - having a cache eliminates the need for a scientific rover when doing sample return, and simply a simple rover to collect the sample and return it to the MAV.
Doug
Exactly. My comment wasn't to be snarky...I think there is a very good argument that the science return from a sample return mission that collects the best bits of MSL rocks would be greatly superior to a sample return mission that cannot be initiated until the samples are collected.
I think that the total amount of money available is only part of the equation. The other part is the money allocated for each instrument and how much you're willing to allow overruns. By the looks of it ChemCam is pretty far over budget and finally Stern just said "Enough already." Don't get me wrong, I think losing ChemCam would be a tremendous blow to MSL--especially its remote sensing capabilities. But you have to at least give Stern credit for having a consistent philosophy when it comes to funding science with a limited pot of money. In some sense, he gets paid to make tough decisions.
"Making a cache almost guarantees funding for a mission to go fetch the cache."
Actually, I was looking at the opposite point of view, that a Mars sample return mission may never take place, due to its $2-3 billion cost, and the fact that there will always be a subgenre of the environmentalists who will say that even an infinitesmal risk of introducing Martian microbes to the Earth's biosphere is unacceptable under any circumstances
(I am not one of those people, BTW). I remember many years ago when the baseline was for an unmanned Mars mission to return its sample to Earth orbit, then be brought aboard the space station for initial analysis and a long quarantine as a safety enhancement. Because of the obvious higher cost of that scenario, nobody talks about it anymore. (I even remember a proposal to return the sample to a manned lunar base).
My point is that there will always be some opposition to an unmanned Mars sample return mission, and combined with the high price, it will be all too easy for policticians to keep pushing it off to the indefinite future. Putting a sample cache on MSL when there is no approved sample return mission could turn out to be a complete waste of precious weight and money the project obviously can't spare.
Kieth Cowing, www.nasawatch.com has a bit of a rant on this whole subject and has invited comments. One particularly good line in his rant:
"Or should there be no rules - except the one where the project that screams the loudest gets the money? That's management by megaphone. "
oooh.. well put.
I agree that we really don't know much about what went on behind closed doors.
But to suggest that Alan Stern is "just and administrator" who only cares about how many missions he gets to fly seems unfair since the man is first and foremost a planetary scientist himself. Clearly this is a guy who wants to see as much scientific return as possible. I rather doubt he would be so simplistic as to just count the number of launches as a measure of sucess.
One story I'd like to share is a conversation I had several years ago. I was at the JPL Open house (probably in 2005, if memory serves). A friend and I were speaking to an engineer who was working on MSL. I asked him what the cost estimates were for the mission.
He said that they thought it would only cost the same as MER - aka 800 million. When I expressed surprise at such a low figure, he explained that among other factors there was going to be only one vehicle, hence only one launch vehicle, one set of tests, etc etc.
I was rather doubtful at the time. About a year later I read in Aviation Week that the mission was estimated at 1.2 billion. Then the year after that the number is 1.6 billion.
Now we have 1.7 billion.
At least one article I have read this week stated that this was the third cost overrun that had made it's way up to headquarters on this project. That certainly matches what I had been suspecting all along.
Given how tough some of this mission must be (particularly the Skycrane) I'm not surprised by one or two cost overruns. But I have a lot of sympathy for Mr. Stern's position when the third cost overrun showed up on his desk.
Some commentary byhttp://www.livescience.com/blogs/2007/09/23/mars-science-laboratory-tough-love-mad-scientists/ featuring quotes from what appears to be a fairly annoyed Jim Bell.
It's an interesting dilemma for the administration though - eliminating budget overruns is a good thing but that probably will lead to some good missions being significantly reduced in scope or eliminated. I hate to think that MSL will end up being less capable than the MER's in terms of instrumentation but how else can all of the project teams be shown that the new budget management regime is serious?
This Falcon stuff is all totally off-topic for MSL. Could we move it to some appropriate place, please?
You're right Mike - http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=4626
Meanwhile - how much of what we're reading about is spin, and how much of it is actual cuts. If you limit a project (and in this case I use the term to describe an instrument) budget to add additional margin, then surely you're doing a cut - because the point of margin is to get things finished. And which ever way you butter it - the loss of MARDI is a cut. We can pretend that HiRISE renders it redundent - but even as just an EPO tool, it would be gold dust. Can you imagine any news station in the world not showing it time after time?
I'm still trying to understand how this all comes together - and I can see Alan's problem with budgets - but I do worry that this may well be a pound-foolish situation. Bad analogy - you don't buy the best motherboard, the best hard drive, the best case, the best graphics card and amazing PSU and a Blu-Ray drive....and then fit a £30 CPU and drive a 14" CRT with it.
Doug
Trying to find some meat for this whole issue is like finding meat in a vegitarians fridge...
From http://spacespin.org/article.php/msss_msl
"The MastCam instrument will be developed and operated by Malin Space Science Systems, Inc., of San Diego, CA, under a $17.0 million (current year) contract, with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA. The MAHLI instrument will be developed and operated by MSSS under a similar $12.9 million contract. MARDI will cost $7.9 million and will also be developed by MSSS under JPL contract."
That's an early story from the first selection. Not sure how much the budgets will have changed since then - but it's a starting point.
Doug
That $1M figure for the sample collection basket seems on the high side. Seems like I could go off to the local walmart and find something suitable which could be epoxied to the frame for under $20. The usual sort of testing and validation seems unnecessary here.
I really hope the zoom feature can be preserved within the cost cap.
This is from a recent MEPAG article titled "Mars Science Laboratory Project Changes Respond to Cost Increases, Keep Mars Program on Track":
MSL RESCOPED PAYLOAD SEPTEMBER 2007
MastCam // Zoom capability deleted and cost capped
MAHLI // Cost capped
MARDI // Instrument deleted
APXS // No change
ChemCam // No funding beyond FY'07 after a 77% cost growth
CheMin // Cost capped after a 160% cost growth
SAM // Cost capped after a 60% cost growth
RAD // No change
DAN // No change
REMS // No change
The change to the three imaging instruments is "After a combined 60% cost growth" to MastCam, MAHLI, and MARDI.
These are considerably worse overruns than I had imagined, but in fairness I would say that these are very ambitious instruments of types never flown before, so estimating their development costs must have been extremely difficult. I doubt any team deliberately low-balled their initial estimate.
They Low Ball all the time or they would never get approved..
For those wondering - it's here : http://mepag.jpl.nasa.gov/msl.html
What I don't understand is this..
MC : " I think as part of all three instruments being selected, the total cost was significantly lower."
and
MEPAG : "after a combined 60% cost growth"
Now cost 'growth' seems a careful selection of words. Where was the genesis for this growth. Was it from the top asking for changes, or at the instrument level just getting the budget estimation wrong from the start? Something doesn't scan here.
Doug
I was told by one of the participants in the 2nd MSL workshop that all the PI's in the mission requested the return of ChemCam...
Let's see in what this results...
Great article, Rui.
It's a damn shame that projects (not just space!) always, always require this sort of contention & debate to preserve original requirements. However, if the PIs present a unified front, they most likely will prevail. Question then becomes where the trade-off happens given that performance is preserved: cost or schedule? Hate to say it, but in the current climate I could see MSL slipping to the 2011 launch window in lieu of throwing more money at it...
I can't find the link now, but I've seen a table that showed the insturmentation suite on MSL, and listed for each one the percentage cost overrun.
Many of the instruments were signifigantly over budget. Some by 60-70 percent and more.
Of course the scientists on the project want Chem Cam back, and I sympathize. I hope it is restored.
But consider, this is not the first, nor second, cost overrun on MSL that has made it's way to headquaters. It is the third. And given how late in the game we are, the managers on MSL had to have seen this coming a while ago.
Space missions are tough, and I don't want to play armchair quarterback. MSL has a lot of challenges, and some new technolgies. That can be a real bear to manage and know how much it's going to cost.
But how many cost overruns is a mission supposed to have before someone in charge has to stay "enough" ? How much extra money does MSL get at the expense of some other project that is staying within budget? Isn't that rewarding a project that is in trouble, by punishing ones that are not?
It was a tough call for Alan Stern. I don't envy him the job.
I don't think anyone at NASA, including Alan Stern, expects MSL to launch without ChemCam. But NASA is playing a high stakes game of bluff expecting someone else to come in and pay for its overrun. France is a major partner on the instrument. What if they say "we don't have any extra money either"? Everyone can live with all of the other MSL descopes, but losing ChemCam would be a major blow to the science return of the mission.
I thought NASA was trying to keep its international partners happy. This is not the way to do it.
Not to play PM here, but what's causing the overruns? Is it technology development/risk alone, or is there some sort of management issue? (Usually the default position when inquiries begin, but I dislike taking that view, esp. when considering UMSF & developmental articles).
This constantly happens. When budget issues come up, both within NASA and when Congress is funding NASA (as well as just about every other program), they will often threaten to cut things to see if anyone screams, showing that the program or item has a constituency that cares about it. It is annoying process, but one I don't see changing.
ChemCam and MARDI have been reinstated as MSL instruments:
http://www.marstoday.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=25991
A difficult trade - but I'm very very glad that MARDI is back. No word on MastCam though sadly.
Doug
I am very happy to see ChemCam back. The process is annoying (if nothing else) but NASA managed to get other partners to cover ~80% of the cost overrun which is a huge help given the state of science budgets.
I found an interesting report and perspective from Los Alamos (project lead for ChemCam) titled "ChemCam Status October 2007" ( full report at "libs.lanl.gov/ChemCam_status.html"). Here's an excerpt:
"NASA's reason for cutting off funding was stated as "cost overruns." However, NASA Headquarters may have based their judgement only on the proposal total of $6.9 M rather than ChemCam's Management Plan, signed by JPL, LANL, and CNES. The Management Plan included upscoping the management, QA, and systems engineering. It also included a change of construction materials requested by the MSL project. This was done to help the MSL project's mass budget, and was done at an agreed upon cost increase of several hundred thousand dollars. ChemCam only made this change at the request of the MSL project. The changes incorporated in the Management Plan are not cost overruns."
It hardly seems fair to require an instrument team to make an expensive change, then criticize them for going over budget. There's a lot more of interest in the report. I was most impressed by this: "ChemCam is built for up to 14,000 analyses compared to the ~75 analyses for the in-situ instruments."
At this time do we know if James Cameron's hi def video camera is going to be on MSL?
MastCam is going to be on there - but as to the exact status of the Zoom ( or, if descoped as we've been told, what the fixed focal length will be ) I don't know. As I understand it, the mission changed the requirements to include a wider latitude range. This meant significant engineering changes (particularly regarding lubrication) so the 'over runs' were caused by a shift of goal-posts. Mastcam's zoom being the only moving part of the instrument I'd guess, fell at this hurdle.
Doug
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7500371.stm
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