Shifting NASA's Mars Strategy
NASA rethinks approach to Mars exploration, Nature
“This broadening context prompted Watzin to propose the new way of operating Mars missions. “I’m not trying to fix something that’s broken,” he said. “I’m trying to open the door to a larger level of collaboration and participation than we have today, looking to the fact that we’re going to have a larger pool of stakeholders involved in our missions.” Under the new, facility-based approach, scientists would propose investigations using one or more instruments on a future spacecraft. NASA would award observing time to specific proposals, much as telescope allocation committees parcel out time on their mountaintops. This would be different than the current approach where instruments are proposed, built and operated by individual teams of scientists.”
Would this plan eliminate the embargo system?
Probably not. Hubble Space Telescope observations, for example, have a proprietary period on the data, and that seems to be analogous to this plan. On the other hand, when people propose for observing time on HST, they can select how long that proprietary period will be, from waiving it completely up to a maximum of (I think) nine months. Proposers are also encouraged to keep it short (i.e. there is a strong hint this will help your proposal get selected.)
So the main change is that several investigators may be sharing time on one instrument. But who will design and build the instruments, and who will control them in operation?
Perhaps the folks at NASA are looking down a very long road thinking that owning the devices and the spacecraft widens a future, shrinking portfolio?
It’s hard to say, since the description is fairly vague. It could be a very large change from the way some missions operate.
The current practice, in many cases, if for each instrument have a team of scientists who are responsible for development, operations and science. Things tend to be managed through the instrument PIs. In some cases, a scientist on one instrument team may not have any official path to suggesting observations by or access to the data from another instrument (prior to public release.) Most missions aren’t managed in such an extreme way, and the rules are almost always relaxed in an extended missions. I’m just trying to give you an idea of the extreme case.
For a facility or a telescope like HST, the instruments are either developed in house (e.g. at a NASA center) or by competitively-selected instrument teams. Part of the teams’ reward is some guaranteed observing time. But, beyond that, the teams are no longer involved. Part of the job is writing up some very detailed documentation on the instrument, how it works, the nuts and bolts of operating it and how to analyze the data.
Some institution handles operations of all the instruments (Space Telescope Science Institute at JHU, in the case of Hubble.) Anyone, including people from international partner nations, can propose for and get time. There is no direction or control of this from the original instrument teams or even the operating institute’s director (other than broad policy, such as “if X% of the proposals are for extrasolar planets, then X% of the allocated time should also be for extrasolar planets” or “Once HST is gone, there won’t be any good, UV telescopes around, so we should give UV observations a priority.”)