Trump's OMB Does Not Know Who Operates DSCOVR
OMB Budget Blueprint Excerpt for NASA
“Provides $1.8 billion for a focused, balanced Earth science portfolio that supports the priorities of the science and applications communities, a savings of $102 million from the 2017 annualized CR level. The Budget terminates four Earth science missions (PACE, OCO-3, DSCOVR Earth-viewing instruments, and CLARREO Pathfinder) and reduces funding for Earth science research grants.”
Keith’s note: I asked NASA PAO “Which “Earth-viewing instruments” on DSCOVR are affected by the White House Budget Blueprint? How much does it cost NASA to operate these “Earth-viewing instruments” on DSCOVR on an annual basis? Who operates these “Earth-viewing instruments” on DSCOVR? NASA? A university? A contractor? A combination thereof?”
NASA PAO replied: “NASA provided two Earth-observing instruments on the DSCOVR spacecraft: the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology Advanced Radiometer (NISTAR). NASA funded the refurbishment and recalibration of these two instruments and is now supporting the analysis of their data. The operation of all instruments on DSCOVR is part of NOAA’s responsibility as mission lead. The NASA DSCOVR budget is for EPIC and NISTAR data analysis/processing. In last year’s federal budget request, NASA sought $1.7 million for this activity in FY17, $1.2 million in FY18, and $1.2 million in FY19. (See pg ES-35: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/fy_2017_budget_estimates.pdf).”
So NASA does not actually operate instruments on DSCOVR – NOAA does – but OMB wants NASA to “terminate” them anyway. And the money saved annually for NASA data analysis? $1.7 million. The cost for a single trip to Mar-a-Lago? $3 million. Priceless.
A good observation. Trump is not cutting NASA as sharply as several other agencies, but his cuts are aimed at a singular political purpose; eliminating accurate scientific observation of the Earth’s climate. Ignorance is bliss.
Actually the attempts to cut funding by Republicans against DSCOVR goes to when it was known as Triana (AKA Goresat). I am not sure why folks are surprised when it’s mission was started for political purposes. The Smithsonian has a great article on it.
http://www.airspacemag.com/…
“For DSCOVR is none other than the reincarnation of the lost satellite program Triana, better known as Goresat. It was born one night in February 1998, when then vice president Al Gore bolted out of bed with a vision of providing “a clearer view of our world,” as he would describe it a few weeks later when he announced the idea during a speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He challenged NASA to send a satellite to the L1 Lagrange Point, a spot one million miles from Earth in the direction of the sun, where the two bodies’ gravitational pulls are in equilibrium. Once there, Triana would create a digital age version of Apollo 17’s iconic “blue marble” photograph by beaming back a continuous real-time view of Earth’s sunlit side. This sight would, Gore hoped, heighten consciousness of the planet’s environmental fragility, and encourage contemplation of how global warming could gravely affect it. For the mission’s name, Gore chose to pay homage to Rodrigo de Triana,
the sailor who first spotted North America from one of Columbus’ ships.”
When your goal is political then you should expect politics to be involved.
It is also well to remember its main mission, which is not impacted.
“NOAA, for its part, says the climate observatory is nothing special. It’s just the cheapest way it found to replace a satellite known as ACE, the Advanced Composition Explorer, which has been studying weather on the sun since 1997.”
The instruments studying the Sun are not impacted.
I wasn’t surprised. I was curious if the cut involved the entire mission or just the two Earth-observing instruments (professional interest, since L1 solar wind, not Sun, observations are pretty central to analyzing data from other spacecraft.) Also, I’m amused that someone couldn’t figure out which agency operated DSCOVR. Or didn’t care enough to check. But not surprised.
Someone could probably do a Kickstarter for the $1.2 million projected cost in FY2018. Maybe some cloud computing company could even just donate the resources. Just sayin’ …
I’m busy.
Hmmm…
If the State of California took over the instruments as “Abandoned Federal Property” they could run these.
Heck all the flying climate Birds UCLA could run for pocket change
Berkeley would be a better choice. They are already set up to operate Earth-orbiting spacecraft. I don’t think UCLA has every done that. But the spacecraft isn’t abandoned property (the administration just wants a couple instruments turned off), and you can’t just pick them up by offering to pay.
NASA has to agree to provide all the necessary software, command dictionaries, etc., and provide the antenna time for communications. NOAA has to agree to keep the instruments on and the spacecraft pointed at Earth (precisely, for imaging, not roughly, which they already have to do for communications.) That’s not too likely if their boss is saying “no.”
This isn’t about saving the money, it’s about shutting down the satellite instruments to ensure that the data is not collected or analyzed, which might lead to continued publications about climate change.
This may seem confusing to scientists but it makes perfect sense to those who sincerely believe that climate research is a tool created by liberals who are intent on taking down the free enterprise system and implementing a soviet-style centrally planned economy. This is what those who hold the conservative world view truly believe. Environmentalists are referred to as “Watermelons”, because they are green on the outside but red on the inside.
The end result will be that NASA will be free to study the other planets in and beyond the solar system, just not the one that we happen to live on…
That’s more than a bit unfair to “those who hold the conservative world view.” There are certainly many people who hold the views you describe. There are also many conservatives who do not, and actually let facts affect their opinions. Please don’t assume everyone who opposes, for example, lower taxes is automatically delusional about climate issues.
As far as studying other planets is concerned, I’m a bit worried about funding to study things like long-term climate evolution on Mars. That has implications for the sort of climate change studies the current administration doesn’t like. (On the other hand, if the work supported the “it’s not man-made” view, that might be different.)
Yes there are a few rational conservatives, and I actually agree with some of their positions. It just seems that there are fewer and fewer of them every day.
Shutting down a functioning satellite instrument because it might send back data that contradicts one’s view of how the world ought to be is not an intellectually honest thing to do, and claiming that it is being done to save taxpayers money is an insult to most people’s intelligence.
That’s not why the instrument is being abandoned: a fairer statement of the position might go something like “why spend money on useless data?”
My own view notwithstanding, there’s not much to be gained by misstating the position of one’s adversaries.
In the case of DSCOVR, I suspect the decision is intended to gore someone’s ox.
But in general, I don’t think this is exactly about data contradicting someone’s world view. Consider the background of the people involved. We’re talking about real estate development, marketing, lawyers, etc. Those are professions where the goal is to convince someone of something. Facts are, in a sense, only relevant as a tool to accomplishing that goal.
If you are selling land in Florida, you don’t mention hurricanes or the depth of the water table. If you are smarter than you are honest, then you’ll make that sort of information as hard for your customer to find as possible (to the extent that the law allows it.) Lawyers are actually trained to argue either side of a case, and are considered unprofessional if the don’t use the facts to benefit their client. That’s not using facts to discover what really happened, it’s using the facts as a tool to win a legal contest.
From that point of view, climate change is a political contest, and the administration wants to win that contest. From that point of view, why would they spend any money at all to give their opponents a weapon to use against them?
“Facts are, in a sense, only relevant as a tool to accomplishing that goal.”
Yes, it has been established that in Trump’s universe, “facts” are just another tool, and can be bent into any shape to accomplish a desired goal. As scientists and engineers it is our job to point out that fallacy to our fellow citizens.
If the future of Earth were as trivial as a Florida real estate deal, perhaps I could overlook such behavior. I have long held that the most important result of the Apollo program was the photo of Earth showing our one and only home planet all alone in the cosmos. My parent’s generation grew up thinking that the world was almost infinitely huge and that the oceans and atmosphere could absorb any amount of garbage that we wished to dump there in pursuit of economic profit. After the Apollo photo we came to understand that Earth is actually quite small and if we screw it up we have no other place to go. It is not a coincidence that the environmental movement started up a short time after that photo was taken.
The DSCOVR images provide a live daily reminder of those facts, and for those who are still living in the gilded age, it must be a terribly frightening thing indeed. Better to terminate the messenger than to have to deal with those real, pesky, scientific facts that can’t be bent. As Feynman said in his appendix to the Challenger investigation, “Nature cannot be fooled”.
I’ve been trying to figure this out, since instrument operations (or managing it) is one of the things I’ve done for a living. I can’t imagine operations and pipeline data analysis could cost anything close to $1.2 million for DISCOVR/EPIC and NISTAR. For the bare-bones minimum, the only tasks I can identify could be done by a few, smart undergraduates and perhaps one hour per week of supervision by a professor or research scientist. That wouldn’t cover things like a unique sequence (e.g. the EPIC movie of the Moon transiting the Earth), but I did say bare-bones minimum. Of course, students as operators would also imply education, so that could be a problem… The big cost would be porting all the appropriate software over to the new operator’s computers and getting it up and running.
Unfortunately, cost is not the issue. Flying those instruments in the first place was primarily a political, not a scientific, issue. Zeroing out their funding is apparently a political, not a financial issue. Transferring operations to someone else would require permission and cooperation from NOAA and NASA. If the White House is saying “off”, getting that permission and cooperation will be the obstacle.
The $1.2 million dollars is not for instrument operations or management (although I imagine that some small amount of funding is given to GSFC from NASA HQ for management type expenses). As stated elsewhere, instrument operations is done by NOAA (the earth science stuff is folded into the space weather stuff). Data processing is actually being done “gratis” by GSFC’s supercomputing facility (NCCS).
The $1.2 million (and the money for subsequent years) will be allocated to proposals selected from submissions later this year to take the data and use it for science research (eg, to determine ozone, monitor and track aerosols, study clouds, etc). At most, that’s enough to fund 5, maybe 6 different studies.
So the whole project is pretty lean and cost effective.
Let’s see… I didn’t mean to imply anything about management costs. I just mentioned my experience with managing instrument operations to say I had some idea what the actual work of instrument operations involves and how much it would cost.
For DSCVOR/EPIC, operations and data processing shouldn’t cost much. It’s a very straight-forward job, and I’m surprised it even takes one full-time employee to turn the crank on the pipeline data processing. Instrument operations by NOAA should be equally easy, assuming they are sticking to the usual 10-filter image once every two hours. As you said, a project like this can be very lean and cost-effective.
Now that you mention it, I just checked and there is a place-holder research and analysis program (ROSES-2017 program element A.24, “DSCOVR Science Team”.) They don’t list proposal deadlines or target funding levels, but this place-holder does mean NASA was planning to spend money on EPIC and NISTAR scientific work. Those programs are typically somewhere in the range of ~10 grants funded at the ~$100,000 per year level. I suspect this explains what most of the $1.2 million would have been for.
Yes, the $1.2 million is supposed to fund the continuation of the DSCOVR science team, selected from the submissions to the upcoming ROSES announcement (once the placeholder is replaced with something concrete). ROSES-funded grants are usually at least $150k to $200k; anything less would not be enough to find one full time person (but DSCOVR is run in such a lean fashion I wouldn’t be surprised to see some low budget submissions).
As I said, most operations are NOAA’s responsibility (and cost), and processing is done at GSFC’s supercomputing facility without charge.
Just a couple of minor corrections.
“Continuation” of science team funding isn’t quite correct, if the DSCOVR funding is similar to other, similar programs. At least in planetary science, the grants are for two to four years (typically three.) After that, the grant ends and there is no continuation. The previously-funded people can submit a new proposal, but it is exactly that: A new proposal which has to compete against other proposals, by people who were not previously funded. There isn’t supposed to be any bias in favor of proposals by previously-funded individuals (other than technical merits like past experience with the data.) I’d call that an opportunity to do new, related work, and not a option to continue previously-funded work.
Also, funding levels for NASA research and analysis grants (ROSES) vary from program element to element. The ~$100,000 per year I mentioned is low. That used to be true a few years ago. It has gone up with inflation, and I keep forgetting to account for that. But for the program elements I know about, $200,000 would be uncommonly high and $125,000 might be typical. You are correct to say that this isn’t enough to fund one full-time researcher. (And for people unfamiliar with the details, benefits and institutional overhead make the cost to NASA two or three times a person’s salary.) That is a bit absurd, and there have been suggestions about increasing the pre-grant funding levels. But that’s how it stands, at least for most planetary science grants. Earth science may be different. As I said, there are lots of differences within the NASA R&A program.
I did not mean to imply otherwise, sorry for the confusion. It is the continuation of the science team, not the continuation of the members of the science team; it is recompeted every 3 years, and no one is guaranteed to be funded for another 3 years and remain a science team member
It is very difficult to get one of these proposals below $150k; I’ve tried (I think I may have gotten down to $130k once). The problem is you have to be realistic. If you say you are going to do something and then price it too low the reviewer will grade it as unrealistic and, given the level of competition, you’ll be dead in the water.
Unfortunately, it seems to me that the funding levels for these things have not gone up but have decreased; at the same time NASA keeps trying to do as much with less.
And now Trump’s skinny budget has mentioned cutting even more funds for ROSES. Not good at all
I understand exactly what you mean about requesting realistic funding for a R&A proposal. Claiming you will do the proposed work for an unrealisticly low sum can kill a proposal. The various program elements list a total amount of money they expect to spend and the number of proposals they expect to fund. I tend to divide the one by the other, and propose work consistent with that funding level. For the program elements I propose to, and have been a reviewer on, that’s around $125k these days. That does limit how much a single proposal can accomplish. You seem to propose to different program elements, where the same math and logic make $200k proposals viable. As I said, there is a lot of variability within NASA’s R&A program. Some disciplines are more fortunate than others. I’d love $200k as a typical, annual budget, just as I would love a 30% rather than a 15% selection rate. But that isn’t true for planetary science. It’s nice to know it is for other disciplines, and I hope that doesn’t change. But for climate change research, I’m afraid that is a real possibility.
Thanks for checking that. I also suspect the operating costs are lower than the $1.2-$1.7 million NASA is paying for processing and data analysis. The instruments themselves make repeated, point-and-stare observations. I’d be surprised if it took more than one FTE (full time equivalent) to operate both of them. Even if they figure out which agency is responsible and add further cuts to NOAA, this isn’t about money.
Chiao’s statement includes the following:
“The Constellation program, frankly, had a lot of funding problems and some pretty serious technical problems. You know it probably was the right thing to do to cancel it.”
Do you agree or disagree? Would you agree that the same technical and cost problems exist for SLS/Orion?
The whole earth pictures are spectacular, but the the most critical instrument from my perspective is NISTAR, which provides solar reflected and Earth emitted thermal radiation across the entire sunlit disk of the Earth at high spacial and temporal resolution, most of the Earth’s total radiation budget. If the Earth is absorbing more heat than it is radiating, it is getting hotter regardless of what we see at small scale.
This goes beyond politics. I can see no rational or acceptable reason for ignoring this data. If anyone has such a reason, please let us know.
https://eosweb.larc.nasa.go…
I hope to see them too, and I’m 65. But for such travel to be sustainable we need technology that makes it possible at an affordable cost and customers who are willing to pay it. For a trip to the Moon that would have to be under $100M per seat, or $1-2M per seat to LEO. Round trip, of course.