Space & Cosmos The Final Frontier’s Financial Limits By KENNETH CHANGJAN. 20, 2014 A decade after swinging into orbit around Saturn, NASA’s venerable Cassini spacecraft is still working, well beyond the four years of science the space agency had hoped to get. But the spacecraft is running low on maneuvering fuel, and its managers want to end with a scientific bang — an ambitious agenda that includes 22 orbits through a gap between the planet and its innermost ring before sending the craft on a death plunge into Saturn in 2017. For several months, however, scientists have worried that NASA, financially squeezed like the rest of the federal government, could terminate the mission sooner. This spring, agency officials, as they do every two years, will conduct a review of the spacecraft that have outlived their original missions. For the 2015 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1, NASA faces particularly tough choices. The Mars rover Curiosity, which will cost $67.6 million this year to operate, will complete its two-year primary mission in June, so money for continued roving will come out of funds dedicated to “extended missions.” For this year, that amount is $140 million, which includes $58.2 million for Cassini. Other extended missions include the Messenger spacecraft at Mercury, the Mars rover Opportunity and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. “This will be a very interesting competition,” James Green, director of the agency’s planetary science division, told a NASA advisory council subcommittee last fall. “We have two very expensive flagship missions, Cassini and Curiosity, which are expensive to operate even in an extended mission phase, along with a lot of our other missions, which are doing tremendous science at a lower cost. So this particular competition we’ll have to do very carefully.” No one expects NASA to turn off Curiosity, which will not even arrive at its primary science destination until later this year, raising concerns that Cassini may be on the chopping block. All that Linda J. Spilker, its project scientist, would say was, “I’m hopeful everything will work out.” More recently, Dr. Green told scientists that the perception of Cassini versus Curiosity was inaccurate and that officials could instead scale back the cost and scope of the extended missions. NASA could also juggle other money to pay for both Cassini and Curiosity, but that could have consequences like delaying future missions. “That is all part of the process,” Dr. Green said in an interview. “I’m asking the scientists not to freak out, not to worry about things they can’t control.” The Obama administration, which proposed deep cuts in the planetary sciences budget the past two years, could also ask for more money for 2015. “The administration remains committed to operating the pathbreaking Cassini and Curiosity missions as long as they keep passing these rigorous reviews,” said Phillip Larson, a White House space policy adviser. “If we keep one going, that doesn’t mean we have to cancel the other.” The administration’s budget request is likely to be disclosed in late February or early March. While Cassini has been studying Saturn and its moons for nearly 10 years, the final orbits would provide new science. The close passes, just above Saturn’s cloud tops at 76,000 miles per hour, would not only offer spectacular views, but measure the structure of Saturn’s gravitational and magnetic fields just as NASA’s $1.1 billion Juno mission is to do at Jupiter. That data would answer seemingly simple questions like how fast Saturn is rotating. So far, scientists have seen only the movements of the uppermost clouds, not what is below. “There’s just a whole new mission almost, waiting for us in the last year of the mission,” said Candice Hansen-Koharcheck, a senior scientist at the Planetary Sciences Institute in Tucson, who directs NASA’s outer-planets assessment group. Next year, Cassini is to make three close flybys of the small moon Enceladus, which is somehow shooting jets of water into space, raising the possibility of liquid water beneath the surface. Throwing away Cassini now, Dr. Hansen-Koharcheck said, “would just be, I think, a tragic, shortsighted, penny-wise, pound-foolish decision.” Compressing Cassini’s work into fewer years might save money, but Dr. Spilker and Earl Maize, the project manager, said it would not be easy. “Something very big would have to give,” Dr. Spilker said. Except for a dip last year caused by the automatic spending cuts known as sequestration, NASA’s science research budget has remained relatively steady the last few years, at about $5 billion. But to absorb cost overruns in the development of the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble, the Obama administration proposed cuts to the planetary sciences program. Even though Congress has restored some of the money, financing has been far below what was envisioned just a few years ago. While the current missions send back a bounty of data and discoveries — “the amount of science coming out is phenomenal,” said John M. Grunsfeld, NASA’s associate administrator for science — the future looks hazier, with fewer missions scheduled. A top priority of planetary scientists is to get a closer look at Europa, one of Jupiter’s large moons, which has a large ocean beneath its icy crust, making it one of the most promising places where life could be discovered within the solar system. Putting a spacecraft in orbit around Europa would cost nearly $5 billion, but scientists and engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., have figured out a way to accomplish many of the same objectives with a $2 billion spacecraft that simply flies past Europa multiple times. “I’d say it does 80 percent of the science at half the cost,” said Robert T. Pappalardo, the pre-project scientist. Even that may be too expensive. SpacePolicyOnline reported last month that Charles F. Bolden Jr., NASA’s administrator, told the advisory council that it had to stop thinking about so-called flagship missions with price tags over $1 billion. “The budget doesn’t support that,” he said. A few days later, Mr. Bolden said in a statement that the agency remained committed to future flagship missions, but added, “We are dedicated to pursuing the most cost-effective ways to accomplish this goal.” Congress is pushing NASA in that direction. It allocated $1.345 billion to planetary sciences in the spending bill it passed last week — $127 million more than the administration had requested — and directed NASA to spend $80 million of it on preliminary design work for the Europa mission. Dr. Heidi B. Hammel, head of planetary science at the American Astronomical Society, noted that the field has seen worse days. In 1981, the NASA administrator, James Beggs, offered up the entire planetary science program for sacrifice in response to demands for deep budget cuts by the Reagan administration. “We’re not as bad as we were then,” Dr. Hammel said. “I’m hoping we flatten out. I don’t see a downward trend into the ground.” In the ensuing negotiations between Mr. Beggs and White House budget officials, the program was saved, although no new missions were launched until 1989. Scientists came up with a list of four priorities. The fourth, to study Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, turned into Cassini. A version of this article appears in print on January 21, 2014, on page D6 of the New York edition with the headline: The Final Frontier’s Financial Limits. Order Reprints|Todays Paper|Subscribe
Posted on: Tue, 21 Jan 2014 04:24:20 +0000