http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2008/dec/HQ_M08-244_MSL_Update.html
From the wording of this announcement, MSL is clearly still on, which is a good thing. We'll have to wait and see.
Doug
I know a lot of people involved with MSL lurk here, so our thoughts and best wishes go out to you guys during this difficult period of uncertainty and speculation, etc. It must be a million times harder for you than for us. We're with you, ok?
Might be a delay announcement
I guess they can report on whether the actuators needed by the end of November to keep on track for a 2009 launch got there.
It does sound more like a delay
especially in light of other recent official NASA comments, the naming contest, the landing site selection and this NASA MSL posting from Dec 1
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/spotlight/20081201.html
This will be a great science mission when it launches. given the complexities, better to complete the testing and prudently delay as warrented
my best wishes to the team
ken
Anyone here who wants to watch the briefing but hasn't got a link to a good NASA TV site, here you go...
http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/nasa/index.html
That's the one I use most.
And it's official -- launch delay to 2011, primarily due to the delay in actuator delivery.
-the other Doug
NO !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I understand the feeling.
In addition, there is a prospective cost of about $400 million generated simply by the delay. That cost will be absorbed first by the Mars program and after that, if necessary, by the rest of the planetary program.
-the other Doug
Disappointing, I know, but much, much better to delay the launch and have all the problems sorted out than to have a "mad dash to launch" and send something to Mars that's not ready. This is a flagship mission, remember; if it crashed and burned it would crucify the Mars exploration program, especially in the current financial climate.
Teeth-gnashing news for us, but very hard on the people actually involved in MSL, many of whom are lurking here, or drop in on us now and again, so I hope others here will join with me in sending them support and best wishes. We'll get there, just not as soon as we wished.
Charles Elachi -- "It doesn't matter if you're one day short, or one week short, or one month short, you have to wait 26 months."
-the other Doug
You sure, Mike? Griffin says that the coast thermal vac tests are going ahead on their current schedule. I'm assuming the calibrations would be part of that series of tests.
-the other Doug
The 2011 launch window is in December, right? Does anybody know if it stretches into 2012?
--Emily
And for those of you who are hoping that your pet instrument might now be added onto MSL, per Doug McCuistion, "Is this an opportunity to update the payload? No." There will be no re-scoping or changes to the payload that aren't driven by engineering concerns that arise out of continued testing. In other words, no changes to the science payload.
On the other hand, Ed Weiler says that this delay is the perfect opportunity (albeit for the wrong reasons) to begin to design the architecture for MSR, Mars Sample Return.
-the other Doug
When asked why it's so important to have the actuators at this point for an '09 launch, McCuistion says "The actuators do everything we do on Mars. They turn the wheels, they stop the wheels, they move the robotic arm. If we get to Mars and we can't move, we can't move the arm, we can't take samples, we just have about a metric ton of junk on the Martian surface."
And someone just asked about the 2011 launch window -- McCuistion says the window extends from October through December, with highest likelihood of late October through early November. Sounds like it won't extend into 2012.
-the other Doug
2011 window is October to December - yet to be determined where in that window.
Doug
My question was answered. 2011 goes from Oct through December potentially; most likely is late october to early november.
--Emily
OK, Mike -- thanks. I just figured that since the cruise thermal vac was including the entire stack, with the assembled rover inside the aeroshell, that anything you'd be doing to calibrate the instruments on it would be involved with the T/V. Thanks for the correction.
-the other Doug
Dammit, they didn't get to me on the phone questions. These guys are too long-winded.
I got one in but not my other one, which was: When MSL arrives, MRO will have been in orbit for 6 years and no future telecom orbiter is planned. Isn't there risk in assuming MRO will survive for long enough to support MSL communications?
Spoke too soon, there, eh, Emily? Good to hear your voice!
-the other Doug
Damn good question Emily.
Also good to hear that the decay of the plutonium in the RTG will have an insignificant impact, and that they may well wait a while before fueling the MMRTG.
-the other Doug
Is 5% insignificant, given the fact that the traverses were already going to be power-limited?
I've been wondering that too Emily.
I just checked in, can anyone give me the short answer?
EDIT: (or blog about it later today )
OK, and here's one more question that I wouldn't have gotten a straight answer to anyway. Can anybody here think of what planetary missions there are that would have big budgets in 2010 and 2011 for MSL to raid? The only one I can think of is Juno.
--Emily
Wasn't there talk of Maven being delayed? Another question - will they need a bigger launch vehicle for 2011? I have an idea 2009 was a low energy trajectory year..
Ah, I hadn't realized that. Thanks. --Emily
The only other Mars mission NASA is currently developing is MAVEN, and that doesn't launch until 2013, so I would assume it doesn't start costing a ton of money until 2012 and 2013.
And I think the question about the flagship mission has already been asked and answered by somebody official, and you're right, ugordan, there's not a lot of money for it in 2010 and 2011. I don't think.
--Emily
Key point I got was that the $400m is not in addition to the $200m to finish in 09 - but it's instead of it. And instead of being $200M to find in FY09 - it's $400m to find over FY09,10,11,12,13 and 14 (if I heard Doug right) - so a much easier thing to manage.
Taking the $1.65B (the '06 figure when the mission was confirmed) +25% over-spend that was required for an '09 launch - (2.1B) - the mission will actually be $2.3 - 43% over - not great, but not totally un-known in this field. All things considered, appropriate for the flagship mission that it is (in everything but name)
MSL was NEVER a $600m mission. Smart Lander was - but Smart Lander isn't happening, MSL is. Lots of miss-information out there.
It's somewhat disappointing to see that MSL has been delayed to a 2011 launch, but the upside is that there will be more time for testing of critical elements like the actuators which are critical and the all important skycrane which is a brand new technology.
It is better in my opinion for MSL to have a delay and a flawless flight/landing/surface operations than a rushed job resulting perhaps in at best a faulty rover that can't do good science on Mars and at worst a failed landing attempt and the consequences of that disaster. Beagle 2 and Mars Polar Lander paid the price of corner cutting and a big rush to launch.
That said, Emily's question regarding the riskiness of relying on MRO to support data downlink from MSL is very important. Might there now be a need to launch a dedicated Mars telecoms orbiter to support the surface missions , a plan that was scrapped a while back?
It doesnt sound like NASA has funds for the Telecoms orbiter now. On another thread here someone calculated that MRO/MO have plenty of time left (decades), just based on mono-propellant usage - providing the rest of the craft holds out. If they did decide to do something maybe they should speak to the ESA, who will need an orbiter there for ExoMars in 2016 (Send it with Beagle-3 :-) ). MSL will have a direct to earth comms too, although that would be expensive in DSN time, I guess. I was rather looking forward to Oppy still being running for MSL arrival - I wonder what the odds are now? Worst of all would be if some bright spark ressurected the "turn off a rover" idea..
Does anyone know if the launcher-power remains the same for '11?
EDIT: MEX was going to be Beagles phone-home, and ESA did ask NASA for help trying to talk to Beagle with MGS, so I would guess the ESA would gladly reciprocate. There is a Chinese orbiter going with Phobos-Grunt too - now *that* would be tricky politics.. :-)
A failure of MODY, MRO AND MEX in 4 years? Highly unlikely.
Yeah, I've little doubt that, barring some really really bone-headed error, MRO will be around when MSL lands. But MSL's prime mission is two years long. It could last a long, long time beyond that. It's those "out" years that I'm more worried about.
--Emily
By then, hopefully, we'll have Maven
But we may need to delay Maven to pay for MSL. There's a hole in my bucket, dear Liza.. :-)
(Edit: There's a hole in my Budget, dear Liza..)
I just got an official reply to my question from Dwayne Brown, the PAO for SMD.
Overall I was encouraged by the decisions and progress announced at the press conference.
The mantra is "Failure is not an option" for this Flagship mission. The MSL team will do what it takes to be successful to the best of their ability. we cant ask for more.
These are difficult projects by design, so we attain valuable new science and technology. As they mentioned: The easy things have been done and we wont learn much by repeating that.
I was lucky to ask questions at the end. And i'm very encouraged that Ed Weiler said NASA will cooperate with ESA for future Mars missions. In response he said very likely this could include EXO MARS in a 2016 launch opportunity. The odds of a 2016 launch of something to mars have significantly increased compared to a few weeks ago
ken
So it sounds like they can use MEX too. I did have the idea I read (at the time) that Beagle was going to use MGS/MO for long term comms too..
Does the two Year delay change the time of Year at which MSL would land at Southern Hemisphere landing sites?
I ask the question because I understand that if MSL had landed in 2010 at the Southern Hemisphere Eberswalde and Holden crater sites then the landing would have been in the depths of Winter and MSL might have been virtually immovable for the 6 months following the landing.
Does landing in 2012 move the time of landing in Southern sites to a more favourable season of the Year?
MER passes were typically 30 - 90 minutes, and MER peaked at 16.6 kbps via its HGA, so 59 Mbits/hour at that rate.
Doug
True, but you had an orbiting satellite which has a relative velocity of it's own involved. I would intuitively expect that the DTE sessions would be longer.
That is DTE session.
UHF sessions with orbiters are 10-15 minutes, 128 or 256kbps, and anything from 1 to about 150 Mbits
Oppy & Spirit will still be Trucking Along in 2012
Hmm. You know, if (a big if indeed, I know) the MERs are still doing their thing in 2012, can we in a worst-case scenario of being down to one relay orbiter still get max data return from three rovers?
The MERs are on opposite hemispheres, of course, but MSL's gonna be somewhere in between them. The surviving orbiter's transceiver would have to work pretty hard; does it have a duty cycle? Might be difficult to select an optimal orbital plane to maximize coverage as well.
Just curious to know if any modeling of such a contingency situation has been done.
As much as I love and admire the MERs, I think having three rovers and one orbiter in 2012 is a much less likely scenario than having three orbiters and one rover.
--Emily
True, Emily. Playing "what-if" is a very popular & actually addictive game in space systems engineering, though...
Mike, thanks for the answer. I assume then that the limiting factor is the orbiter-Earth link bitrate, not the rover-orbiter link?
If I'm interpreting Ed Weiler correctly, NASA and ESA working jointly on a 2016 ExoMars rover would not only greatly help ESA's funding problems, but would save NASA a tremendous amount of money in not sending its own Mars rover in 2016. That could really help NASA pay back money it will "borrow" from the Mars program to pay for the MSL delay.
A little aside: I'm delighted that there will now be two extra years of MRO (especially HiRISE) returning maximum science data from Mars. I didn't want it to happen this way, but you might as well be an opportunist about such things.
It's a good question but I don't know what the landing date would be. Hazarding a guess that it'd be midsummer 2012, you're looking at Ls around 130, which is midwinter in the southern hemisphere. That's bad for power (because MSL would have to use lots of power just to warm up motors before moving), but depending on how you look at things it might not be as bad as it would be for a 2009 launch, where it'd arrive in early winter. The 2010 landing might have better temperature conditions on the day of landing, but there'd be a long period of things not getting better after landing. The 2012 landing might have about the worst temperature conditions of the year on the day of landing, which should be steadily improving with time, so there would be a shorter period of relative inactivity following landing.
--Emily
3 of the landing sites currently being considered are in the southern hemisphere (Mawrth is in the north).
However should they decide to take Gale it would spare them the brunt of the southern winter when they land during the assumed Ls 130 (at -4.49 degrees)
Alan Stern had something to say about this today: http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/081205-msl-delay-nasa.html
I would like notice that the postponement Mars Science Laboratory mission and the consequent increase costs may cause the termination of the mission Opportunity and Spirit. The consequences of this delay will be unpredictable, and Spirit and Oppy may be their first victims. I expect that shortly will begin dispute in NASA about this topic. The future does not look too good in my oppinion.
PS.
I know that I can be banned by Doug due spreading defeatism. But that's not defeatism, we must be realistic. I think that this option we should also take into account.
At the risk of continuing this divergence in the thread, I'll point out that extended mission ops are the cheapest portion of a planetary mission. The biggest costs are for the DSN time to get the data back to Earth. The remaining costs are mostly for the manpower -- the salaries and benefits of the teams working the missions. And in the case of the MERs, many of those are only working part-time on Oppy and Spirit, spending much of their time on MSL and other projects, as well. (Amortized costs of things like the computers used by the MER teams, the office space they take up, etc., are really pretty irrelevant, after all; it's not like they buy new equipment and rent new facilities for each mission extension. Those capital investments have long since been paid for and depreciated in the bookkeeping.)
Extended ops are the biggest "bang for the buck" you can get out of these things, and NASA has been pretty good about avoiding the penny-wise, pound-foolish approach of cutting $10 million from extended ops to try and make up a $400 million shortfall elsewhere. They're more likely to delay or cancel whole programs before they start racking up their major design and construction costs than they are to cut off assets already in place.
That said, there may be pressure to cut back on Spirit operations if she continues to be power-starved and barely mobile. I don't foresee a project shutdown for Spirit, but you have to admit, we're not getting a huge amount of science data from her recently. Then again, we're not spending nearly as much time (and therefore money) on her as we are on Oppy, either.
-the other Doug
I just went looking for a rate table of DSN fees, and found the following item in a .pdf file ( http://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/advmiss/docs/5_3-MOC_Services_SMEX_AO_2007.pdf ) that describes, among other things, the services and rates for the DSN. There was no actual rate chart; there was a formula for calculating what is called the Aperture Fee:
AF = RB [AW (0.9 + FC / 10)]
where:
AF = weighted Aperture Fee per hour of use.
RB = contact dependent hourly rate, adjusted annually ($1057/hr. for FY08).
AW = aperture weighting:
= 0.80 for 34-meter High-Speed Beam Waveguide (HSB) stations.
= 1.00 for all other 34-meter stations (i.e., 34 BWG and 34 HEF).
= 4.00 for 70-meter stations.
FC = number of station contacts, (contacts per calendar week).
The weighting factor seems to be a multiplier based on a function of aperture size (34m vs. 70m) and number of weekly contacts. An accompanying chart shows the weighting factor for a 70m dish used 28 times per week (i.e., 4 times per day), for example, is 15. The same dish used 14 times a week (twice a day) has a weighting multiplier of a little more than 9. The same numbers of weekly contacts using a 34m dish give you weighting mutiplier of 9 for 28 contacts and 2.5 for 14 contacts.
So, a probe that requires four comm passes a day using a 70m dish looks like it would cost something on the order of $15,865 per hour. That's 28 times $15,865 per week, times 52 per year. That would be $444,220 per month, and $23,990,440 per year. That's based on a reading of the chart, not by plugging numbers into the above formula.
A twice-a-day contact through a 70m dish, again based on the chart, would cost $9,500 or so per comm pass, times 14 passes per week ($133,000), for an annual cost of $6,916,000.
And that all assumes that you're only paying for a single hour of DSN time per pass. In actuality, with calibration times, you're likely going to have pay for a minimum of two hours' worth per pass, possibly more (*). So you might have to double those numbers.
However you slice it up between the various data sources coming through on a MODY or MRO comm pass, total DSN costs add up to millions of dollars a year. So I still think one of the biggest chunks (if not the biggest) of mission operations, extended or otherwise, is DSN time.
-the other Doug
* -- the assumption that each comm pass lasts *at least* an hour is built into the rate structure, I think. At least it says in there: "A station contact may be any length but is defined as the lesser of the spacecraft’s view period, the scheduled pass duration plus calibration times, or 8 hours. For a standard pass, a 45-minute set-up and a 15-minute tear-down time must be added to each scheduled pass to obtain the station contact time (other calibration times apply to Beacon Monitoring and Delta-DOR passes). Note that scheduled pass-lengths should be integer multiples of 1-hour." So even if your comm pass only lasts 12 minutes, it doesn't look like you get the benefit of a pro-rate... dvd
Oh, agreed. And obviously, according to the formula itself, the amount of time charged for each chargeable comm pass is a maximum of 8 hours per day ("the lesser of the spacecraft’s view period, the scheduled pass duration plus calibration times, or 8 hours"). MER DTE sessions would be liable for the full cost of such a comm pass, obviously, but that's a tiny fraction of the communications with the rovers. (It's hard from the information I found to tell how much of the calibration times are required for each Mars asset pass even though your dish is already pointed at Mars; I imagine some of that calibration time is necessary each time you shift from one asset to another, but again we don't have enough operational detail to tell for sure.)
The important information missing is the prorate of relay DSN costs that are passed on to the MERs. But you're absolutely right in this case -- you wouldn't be saving any of that money, since you'd be using pretty much the same amount of DSN time whether or not the MERs are reporting data through the relays. You'd have to cancel one or more of the orbiter DSN passes per day (or simply cancel the extended missions of MODY or MRO entirely) in order to save any money from the DSN side of things, and since that would, in effect, be canceling the extended missions of the orbiters *and* the rovers, I don't see that happening. That's too much loss of bang per buck saved. And I, for one, would be pretty durned uncomfortable with a decision to put one or both orbital assets into "cold storage" for several years just to save the DSN charges.
So, as you've noted, it's unlikely that NASA will cancel or curtail the extended missions of MER-A, MER-B, MODY or MRO to find the extra money needed for MSL. I think a delay of MAVEN is more likely, but it's hard to say. We really just need to see what the numbers come out like over the next several months; speculation at this point as to what might be cut or delayed isn't very useful, since we don't have enough information yet to make intelligent guesses.
-the other Doug
Maybe USMF members can all point their satellite TV dishes at Mars twice a day and form a collective DSN. Take distributed computing to the next level!!!
No, I didn't think this was physically possible, but wouldn't it be great if it were!
It's hard to fathom how expensive the DSN charges are - interesting analysis, oDoug. That's the tradeoff for putting lightweight/low wattage transmitters and receivers in the spacecraft. It never ceases to amaze me that we can still pick up Voyager signals from so far out in the Solar System, with only a 20-watt transmitter on the spacecraft.
Per "The Problem With Wikipedia" ( http://xkcd.com/214/ ) : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-noise_block_converter , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal-to-noise_ratio (I think?) , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_dish, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Telescope ...as they used to say in South Park, "I've learned something today". Not sure I'll be able to recall it tomorrow though
Suppose you are in your livingroom and want to hear the birds in the park 2mi away. It is a nice and quiet summer night big windows open, cup your hands near your ears. That's DSN.
Suppose you are in your livingroom and want to hear the same birds 2mi away. It is Thanksgiving, your grandma's hearing aid batteries are low and she is shouting at you. Your relatives try to explain to her she is shouting and start to shoult as well. The kettle in the kitchen is whistling, the door bell rings, the dog starts barking, your newborn triples start crying. That's your TV dish/LNB/reciver. The only reason your TV can receive the satellite signals is beacause the birds in the park are now using a 500KW rock concert PA system.
Paolo
Perfect example Paolo! (you crack me up).
Paolo, you just made my day...
2 years delay = 2 MSL´s?
I am sure they can scrounge together some engineering parts, copy the rest and book an extra place on a rocket by then...
Powered by Invision Power Board (http://www.invisionboard.com)
© Invision Power Services (http://www.invisionpower.com)