11/4/2023 0 Comments Nasa meaning in science“ planetary is under financial pressure because we’ve snowplowed all the problems forward,” Zurbuchen says. Such delays often stretch for years, incurring additional costs and further exacerbating budgetary woes all the while. “But then we had a hard time catching up.” NASA had to shift more resources to MSR and Clipper, leaving a mission to a metal-rich asteroid known as Psyche understaffed and ultimately causing it to miss its launch window. “That’s because we did make those choices,” Zurbuchen says. Luckily, those efforts helped ensure Perseverance’s successful launch, landing and subsequent surface operations on Mars. When the launch date for the Perseverance rover was fast approaching, for example, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) channeled more resources into that mission-leaving MSR and Clipper depleted. Whether in terms of dollars or person-hours, such shuffling can amount to “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” as a recent audit critiqued. The space agency’s personnel are a factor, too, because scientists and engineers can be pulled away from smaller or more nascent projects to help support larger ones that are considered more urgent. NASA’s finite budget is not the only fundamental resource that can be destabilized by missions that have grown too big to fail. “But the size of these corrections and the trends-they worry me.” “We’ve never done anything like this, so there will be surprises,” says Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s SMD from 2016 to 2022. Yet MSR has not even reached formal confirmation yet-a milestone at which NASA codifies a mission’s technical details, cost and schedule baselines-meaning it is, in principle, still on the drawing board. Now, per Nelson’s congressional testimony, it needs another $250 million to stay on track. Its allotment from NASA’s annual budget has increased from $263 million to $653 million in fiscal year 2022 and then to $822 million in fiscal year 2023. Managing and mitigating MSR’s enormous technical risks is a key driver of the project’s skyrocketing cost. “Every one of those steps will be expensive and cannot fail-or the whole daisy chain falls apart, and you don’t get your samples back.” “It all has to work in a daisy chain,” Stern says. None of these feats have been done before, and the margin for error is razor-thin. These include fetching the samples, launching them off the surface of Mars, rendezvousing in orbit around Mars with a homeward-bound transport and safely delivering the precious specimens back to Earth in a new fashion that does not risk contamination. Now NASA and its international partners are solidifying plans for MSR’s next steps. Already, NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover is collecting samples around its landing site and dropping them in sealed, sterilized tubes for future retrieval. Those missions are not going to be easy, particularly MSR, which many experts equate to multiple flagship missions in one. But the two largest missions on the horizon-so-called flagships-are MSR, a daring effort to deliver Martian rocks to Earth, and Europa Clipper, a spacecraft eponymously named for the icy, ocean-harboring Jovian moon it will survey for signs of habitability. NASA currently operates planetary science missions across the solar system- orbiting the moon, piloting rovers and a robotic helicopter on Mars, rendezvousing spacecraft with asteroids, studying the atmosphere of Jupiter and even traversing the edges of interstellar space, to cite just a few. “But there’s a point at which it becomes overly ambitious to the extent that it’s brittle. “We have a very ambitious planetary program,” says Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, who served as associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) from 2007 to 2008. Seeing this all-too-familiar situation unfolding yet again, some space scientists are raising the alarm in hopes of somehow shoring up vulnerable missions against the coming storm. Already MSR’s “too big to fail” status is impacting other NASA projects, and rumors are flying that more severe effects still lie in store. That’s disturbing news, given the decades-long trend of NASA’s top-priority missions ballooning in cost and wreaking havoc elsewhere in the space agency’s science budget. Last month NASA administrator Bill Nelson testified to Congress that the space agency’s Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission urgently needs a quarter-billion-dollar infusion of extra cash-and that even more budget busting may be on the horizon. NASA’s planetary science program is in trouble.
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