[X] My Assistant

[ElkGroveDan]

This was brought up in the MER forums but I figured it might be useful here where discussion of strategy and planning for missions goes on.

Having visited a DSN station this year I have a new found interest in the amazing mission these sites are tasked with. Unfortunately like everything in these belt-tightening days the DSN is underfunded for what it is they need to accomplish. That said a friend pointed out to me that there is a simple formula to calculate the DSN costs for a mission:

Missions calculate DSN costs using this formula: 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 FY09).
AW = aperture weighting:
= 0.80 for 34m High-Speed Beam Waveguide (HSB) stations.
= 1.00 for all other 34m stations (i.e., 34m BWG and 34m HEF).
= 4.00 for 70m stations.
FC = number of station contacts, (contacts per calendar week).

Online tools available:
DSN Aperture Fee Tool - Excel file 706k
DSN Services Catalogue - PDF 675k

The DSN is so critical to nearly everything we discuss here. Everyone should take the time to learn more about it, and if possible try to schedule a visit or tour. The people who work there are the unsung heroes of the headline grabbing feats that NASA and JPL accomplish.
http://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/

[dvandorn]

When I said "attack" I meant to aggressively investigate why the costs are so high, as in "we need to attack this problem and get it solved, people." (That is a perfectly acceptable use of the word, and not intended to imply violence or disrespect against the institution being discussed.) Is it intrinsically extremely expensive to operate these radio receivers? I grant you, they have to separate out extremely faint signals from background noise that fairly swamps them. But does the equipment needed to do so cost exorbitant amounts? Or does it require millions and millions of dollars a year in maintenance? These are the questions that were on my mind.

One thing that was on my mind, as well, is that the way supply-and-demand economics works, you can charge pretty much what you want to charge if you have no competition, and for the most part the DSN has no real competition. I guess I'm just wondering, in this age when electronics are so incredibly advanced over what they were when the DSN was designed and built, are there cheaper ways to accomplish what the DSN accomplishes? Even granted the initial outlays that would be required, the fact that the DSN is so time-limited by so many demands on its time, it would be quite useful to have a second or even third set of receivers active at (roughly) every DSN location around the globe (or, as has been suggested, though I think the cost would be really outrageous, place a new DSN into LEO). If a new network can be built that can be operated much more cheaply, with the same quality of data return, as the current DSN, has anyone contemplated how to get this done? *Can* it be done?

Those were the questions that were on my mind.

I certainly didn't mean to offend anyone. I just have run across several cases where DSN costs have been discussed as being very high, tens of millions of US dollars a year to support a single planetary probe. Everyone talks about ways to lower costs so we can fly more missions, but they seem to concentrate on launch vehicles and ASRGs and such, when over the course of a long, multiply-extended mission, it would appear that DSN costs are one of the really high-ticket items in the budget. And the DSN is getting to the point where we can't fly many more missions at one time than we have going right now; we seem to always be looking at trade-offs from one mission to the next based on which mission gets the DSN time at any given day and hour. (I know we've lost some Cassini data due to DSN conflicts, that's been mentioned here before.)

IIRC, one of the main DSN dishes is offline now (repairs that will take a couple of years to complete), and it is making the juggling of requests that much more difficult. We're now in a position, it appears, that if we lost another dish in the DSN, we may have seriously degraded our ability to operate the missions currently in flight. I'd say that calls for an expansion of the capability. And if the many millions (perhaps billions) of dollars US spent in total for DSN time every year underfunds the network, then how in the world are we going to expand it?

These were my concerns. I sincerely apologize if I offended anyone, I certainly didn't mean to. I just wanted to point out some concerns over planning expanded planetary exploration when the DSN seems to be a bottleneck, both in terms of cost and in terms of capability.

Forgiven?

-the other Doug

[mcaplinger]

Forgiven?

To my way of thinking, you don't need forgiveness (frankly this forum would benefit from a little less uncritical adulation) but your idea that DSN costs are such a large fraction of total mission budgets is, so far as I can tell, wrong.

That said, DSN would benefit from some more modern infrastructure, and there could be some cost reductions after that initial investment (why do you think GSFC built their own system?) but I suspect the savings might be 2x, not 10x.

[dvandorn]

To my way of thinking, you don't need forgiveness (frankly this forum would benefit from a little less uncritical adulation) but your idea that DSN costs are such a large fraction of total mission budgets is, so far as I can tell, wrong.

Thanks, Mike. I was going off of some discussions on a couple of other forums I read and sometimes post to, which were quoting DSN costs as as much as $15 to $20 million per year (if not more) for pretty much every spacecraft that uses it, and from what I was seeing from the publicly-available cost formulae at the time, these guesstimates didn't seem out of line.

If I'm wrong, I'm certainly more than willing to admit it. In the beginning here, I was just responding to concerns expressed and opinions given over the cost of yearly extended ops for the MERs, and was trying to determine where all of about $20 million a year was being spent to keep the old girls going. Not that I feel it's money poorly spent, just that, with the world economy in deep recession, I'm afraid that our wonderful planetary exploration vehicles, including the MERs, could be cut back or cut off entirely unless we figure out some way to operate them more cheaply.

For example, I recall that there was a "groundswell" campaign to collect money to keep the Viking landers going when Congress threatened to cut off their funding, and that the money collected wasn't really enough to pay for the DSN time, much less data analysis and storage. And that was nearly 30 years ago. That certainly reinforced the idea that DSN costs were a majority of the continuing operating expenses.

If Doug's numbers are right, then it would seem that we're paying something like $16 million a year for the rather limited staffing and facilities required to operate the MERs. Apologies, but that doesn't sound realistic, either.

-the other Doug

[djellison]

If Doug's numbers are right, then it would seem that we're paying something like $16 million a year for the rather limited staffing and facilities required to operate the MERs. Apologies, but that doesn't sound realistic, either.

Take a trip to JPL. If you're lucky Scott or Paolo or someone can show you around. I've seen it, and Cornell as well. It's a lot of people, a lot LESS than it was, but still a lot of people, a lot of offices, a lot of stuff going on. Remember the rows of desks during the early MER ops, Steve and Justin with the images on two monitors - that whole room is still used, day in day out. There's multiple sequencing rooms, theres instrument teams, there's the ISIL. Multiple daily teleconfs between JPL, Cornell, and host institutions of other participating scientists and engineers. The not insignificant effort in PDS releases. Training, IT support, security, oh the damn security, PAO, the servers for the jpg's. Hell - they've spent more on sand, grit, dirt, clay etc than a small building firm.

If it were a business, I can very easily imagine an 8 digit annual turnover.

For comparison - Cassini's 2 years extension is $80m per year.