[X] My Assistant

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Regarding the European instrument contributors who are grousing about Dawn's cancellation, all I can do is repeat what Superchicken would always tell his assistant Fred after the latter had gotten beaten to a pulp by the villain: "You knew the job was dangerous when you took it." Maybe they should direct a little of their wrath toward the "Dawn" team for seriously underestimating the mission's cost in the first place.

[mcaplinger]

Witness the accounts in recent stories that Fiona Harrison found out about the cancellation of her Explorer-class mission NuSTAR during the February 6 press conference...

I know Alex understands this, but let's be clear. NuSTAR was given additional phase A funding in 2005 with the understanding that a flight decision would be made in early 2006. That decision was made on schedule, in the negative. To say, therefore, that NuSTAR was "cancelled" is wildly inaccurate. Now, it would be interesting to know what the basis for that decision was: developmental risk, change in science emphasis, NASA-wide budget problems, or something else. But no one on NuSTAR should have had any expectation that they were flying for sure if they were just in Phase A.

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

I know Alex understands this, but let's be clear. NuSTAR was given additional phase A funding in 2005 with the understanding that a flight decision would be made in early 2006. That decision was made on schedule, in the negative. To say, therefore, that NuSTAR was "cancelled" is wildly inaccurate. Now, it would be interesting to know what the basis for that decision was: developmental risk, change in science emphasis, NASA-wide budget problems, or something else. But no one on NuSTAR should have had any expectation that they were flying for sure if they were just in Phase A.

In all honesty, Mike, I didn't realize the details. In fact, I was just referring to the recent accounts in Science and Nature relating the story (quoting, acutually) of how Harrison found out about NuSTAR's fate.

[mars loon]

--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Toma B @ Mar 3 2006, 07:53 PM) </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->
I find it difficult to believe that NASA will end space mission that is 98% finished...why anybody did not noticed it before...

This is awful!!!
[/quote]


Right on TOMA B !!!!!!

Just saw this a short while ago.

IT IS AN ABSOLUTELY STUPID DECISION to cancel DAWN.

despite what some have said, the cost overrun was less than other missions like Messeger. more later

now I am departing to do public outreach to support NASA and motivate kids to study science

made more difficult by nonsense like these bean counter budget cuts

ken

[Holder of the Tw...]

I haven't seen any of the cost breakdown information for Dawn. As for instruments provided by other countries, these are typically the result of barter agreements between NASA and the other countries' space agencies (i.e., on a no-exchange-of-funds basis).

So what's the deal now? I assume they'll be getting their equipment back, to use as best they can?

I find myself in rare agreement with Bruce here; I think it was a cheap shot accusation. I am fully sypathetic to Russell's loss, especially after having lost my own father over a year ago, but as others have noted, how is NASA responsible for the coincidental timing of notification of cancellation?

I stand corrected. I'll make a mental note of that website and author for future reference.

[David]

I don't know anything about the politics involved in this, so I won't comment on them. But the bottom line is that we are losing precious information we should be getting about a very important part of our solar system.

As far as encouraging or discouraging accurate budget estimates, I don't see why the team that is running the project should be making estimates of the cost. Obviously there is going to be strong pressure on the team to low-ball them. Why not have an independent analyst look at the initial plans and produce his own estimate for NASA? Why should NASA be dependent upon a figures created by the people who are most interested in getting the project approved?

As it is, even with the project cancelled, a bunch of people got paid over several years. If they'd come in with a more accurate (higher) estimate earlier, there would have been no project and no money. How can "no project/no money" be more of an incentive than "incomplete project/some money" (with the chance of maybe convincing someone to complete the project) ? There's never going to be an incentive to come forward with high-end figures, if those are primarily what NASA looks at in picking projects.

I'd rather that NASA simply pick the projects on the basis of the science, and commit before hand to providing whatever money is necessary to achieve the goals -- while keeping a close eye to see that the money is going to the science goals and not elsewhere. As it is, we have a haphazard series of projects with no real plan behind them, and no commitment to any of them, except the ones that are fortuitously succesful, and that only after the fact. It's a recipe for continued disasters.

[Mariner9]

I think some people are missing a subtle point here. There seems to be an assumption that given the late date, and the physical completion state of the spacecraft, that (1) the project is almost complete and (2) just spend a known ammount of money and it will fly and everything work perfectly.

None of us have seen the technical review. We don't know what the actual state of the Dawn project was. Most of the positive comments seem to come from people on the project who want it to continue, biased witnesses to be sure.

I've been in the engineering and software field for 20 years, and I can tell you from painful experience that just because it's been built, or software code been completed, you are not necessarily close to completion.

If a given project was built poorly, designed poorly, or the software written badly.... well, the more you test, the more problems you uncover, and the more fixes you make and so on..... Ive seen it time and again in the software world, where the code was written hastily or with bad architecture, and no matter how much you try to fix it you only make it a bit better, you never make it good.

Perhaps there was no confidence at NASA HQ that Dawn could be reasonably recovered and flown sucessfully. In that case, the best use of everyone's time, and taxpayer money, is to stop throwing good money after bad.

It is by no means a stupid decision, in that case it is a very difficult but wise decision.

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

In all honesty, Mike, I didn't realize the details. In fact, I was just referring to the recent accounts in Science and Nature relating the story (quoting, acutually) of how Harrison found out about NuSTAR's fate.

For the sake of completeness, I tracked down the specific references that referred to NuSTAR being "cancelled." Maybe they should have interviewed Mike for a balanced quote And the quotes came from a Nature article and yesterday's story in the NYT:

Excerpt from Tony Reichhardt's article in the February 16, 2006, issue of Nature:

US space scientists rage over axed projects
Tony Reichhardt
Nature 439, 768-769 (2006).
doi:10.1038/439768a

[...]

"There is fury not just at the size of the cuts, but at how they were decided and announced to the science community. Heidi Hammel, a planetary researcher with the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, says that NASA's advisory council was not operating during much of last year and so 'there was absolutely no way to know how these decisions had been made. It's sort of like a black hole over there.'

"The lack of communication extended even to projects that were being axed. For example, the California Institute of Technology's Fiona Harrison had an Explorer mission that was about to enter its development phase after two years of work. But in what [Charles] Beichman [of the California Institute of Technology] calls an 'egregious breakdown of the process', she learned during the press conference that her NuSTAR X-ray astronomy satellite had actually been cancelled." [Emphasis added]

-------

Excerpt from Dennis Overbye's article ("Budget Cuts Back Much- Promoted NASA Missions") in the March 2, 2006, issue of The New York Times:

"Much of the concern among scientists is for the fate of smaller projects like the low-budget spacecraft called Explorers. Designed to provide relatively cheap and fast access to space, they are usually developed and managed by university groups. Dr. Lamb referred to them as 'the crown jewels in NASA's science program.'

"In recent years, one such mission, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, produced exquisite baby pictures of the Big Bang, while another, the Swift satellite, has helped solve a 30-year-old mystery, linking distant explosions called gamma-ray bursts to the formation of black holes.

"Explorers, Dr. Lamb said, are where graduate students and young professors get their first taste of space science. Until recently, about one mission was launched a year, but under the new plan, there will be none from 2009 to 2012. In a letter to Dr. Cleave last fall, 16 present and former Explorer scientists said, 'Such a lengthy suspension would be a devastating blow to the program and the science community.'

"One author of the letter, Fiona Harrison, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, said she first learned from a news conference that her own Explorer project, an X-ray satellite observatory called NuStar, was being cancelled after several years of development. Dr. Harrison said that she had been invited to reapply in 2008, but that in the meantime she had to tell her graduate student to find another thesis project. [Emphasis added]

"Dr. Harrison said she was thinking of leaving the country or perhaps even the field of astrophysics."

As far as encouraging or discouraging accurate budget estimates, I don't see why the team that is running the project should be making estimates of the cost.

[...]

I'd rather that NASA simply pick the projects on the basis of the science, and commit before hand to providing whatever money is necessary to achieve the goals -- while keeping a close eye to see that the money is going to the science goals and not elsewhere...

I vote for David as the next NASA Administrator or SMD Associate Administrator! Or at least the person who is in charge of writing the AOs. Anyone like to second this motion?

I think some people are missing a subtle point here...

Very well stated, Mariner9. And I snipped the bulk of your post just to save space. I guess old USENET habits die hard.

[nprev]

Well, without pointing fingers of blame...dammit. Just dammit, is all.

The fact remains that this is an extremely important mission with major science objectives, and I think that a project replan or even a partial restart is essential. Hopefully, TPS and other space interest groups will rally to revive the objectives (if not the current incarnation) of Dawn!

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

NASAWatch/Spaceref has posted a "Letter from PSI Director Sykes to House Science Committee Chair Boehlert Regarding Cancellation of NASA's Dawn Mission."

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

As far as encouraging or discouraging accurate budget estimates, I don't see why the team that is running the project should be making estimates of the cost. Obviously there is going to be strong pressure on the team to low-ball them. Why not have an independent analyst look at the initial plans and produce his own estimate for NASA? Why should NASA be dependent upon a figure created by the people who are most interested in getting the project approved?

I'll certainly go with that -- but I've been under the impression that the Review Board, to a considerable extent, already was independently reviewing the proposers' cost estimates. Apparently they need to do a better job of it.

And -- as Robert Clements and I and others have said earlier -- the current standards for picking Discovery missions, in which science return is actually regarded as MORE important than cost-effectiveness, is the exact reverse of the standard that should apply, given the natural tendency of proposers to underestimate their costs and overestimate their science return. (Of course, all this assumes that NASA was honest in setting that rule in the first place, which it wasn't.)

[tedstryk]

Also, the politics of the mission can't be helping. Most of the payload is European, so there's no constituency there. And Orbital's lobbying position has always been unclear to me; they seem to spend more effort on bigger-ticket defense-related items. If JPL is making a big stink about the cancellation of Dawn, I haven't heard anything about it yet; it's probably small potatoes compared to MSL or even Juno.

I think that, as the dust settles, it may prove that, due to technical concerns, the higher-ups at JPL may be a bit relieved. Still, I think this is unfortunate. When I first heard about Dawn, I was very excited, particularly because it sounded much more like a big ticket mission than a discovery mission. So I guess reality as reared its ugly head.

[tedstryk]

This brings up that old question of whether Deep Impact or Stardust could be retargeted to Vesta or Ceres (Deep Impact in particular, since it has more fuel and better instrumentation for remote sensing). I realize it is a game of orbital mechanics, but it would be a really neat opportunity. And with its instruments, Deep Impact could do a good job studying either one (Considering the fact that in a close flyby, not hampered by avoiding comet dust, and with a larger target, MRI could get some good images, and HRI, despite its focus problem, would probably make some pretty recoverable image of things like high contrast terminator topography).

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

I don't see any way it could be made to work. Orbital mechanics aside, neither one has big enough solar panels to power its instruments properly for such a distant object. (You'll recall that they had to shut down all the instruments on NEAR except its camera for the Mathilde flyby.) It's better to fly craft specifically designed for the Main Belt for such missions (although they could be multiple-flyby missions as opposed to orbiters. We do, after all, need to look at a widespread representative sample of MB asteroids.)

[mcaplinger]

This brings up that old question of whether Deep Impact or Stardust could be retargeted to Vesta or Ceres (Deep Impact in particular, since it has more fuel and better instrumentation for remote sensing). I realize it is a game of orbital mechanics...

Deep Impact's aphelion is at about the orbit of Mars, so it's got no chance of getting to the main belt. Stardust's is at 2.7 AU and Ceres' orbit is from 2.55 to 2.99 AU, so it's a much better prospect; of course, the orbits are unlikely to be in phase to allow a close approach, and Stardust only has ~140 m/sec of delta-v left.

http://discovery.larc.nasa.gov/discovery/dpl.html has some information on these spacecraft.