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Astrobiology

Is Bad Science Better Than No Science? (Update)

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
September 13, 2018
Filed under
Is Bad Science Better Than No Science? (Update)

Could November elections scramble a controversial U.S. mission to a frozen moon?, Science
“Culberson’s lander has been somewhat controversial among scientists because it hasn’t gone through NASA’s traditional selection and vetting process. And today, researchers at an agency advisory meeting debated whether the congressional elections in November could bring a new lander-related headache: the defeat of Culberson, who is facing a tough re-election contest. If Culberson loses, NASA risks becoming “locked in” to an expensive and complicated project that lacks a key champion in Congress, one researcher worried.
“The science goals of the Europa lander do not follow from our current knowledge of Europa,” said Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. Although there is abundant ice for a lander to sample on Europa, he suggested, there is no concrete evidence of other ingredients necessary for life, such as carbon, nitrogen, biologically useful energy, or organic molecules. But given that the lander is already receiving money, he concluded in an about-face, scientists should support it. “A bad life detection mission is better than no life detection mission,” he said.”

Keith’s note: With regard to the frank commets by participants in the NASA Outer Planets Assessment Group meeting as presented in this Science article: the event was open and on the record and news media were listening in. Based on this article one can easily get the impression that the Europa Lander is viewed by some NASA scientists as having little value other than political – but its funded so – hey, lets run with it and take the money. The politicians who support this mission are viewed as disposable i.e. if one is not re-elected or the House flips and they lose their committee chairmanship, another politician can be found to support a given pet NASA/JPL/SwRI/etc. mission. This may be true in a cynical sense, but I feel silly having to remind a bunch of otherwise smart people that they are saying things in a not-so-smart context. The politicians are listening. What are they and their staff supposed to think when they hear this stuff? They stick their necks out to listen to the science community, support missions, get the money year after year, fight off enemies, and sign NASA’s praises and yet the ever-so-clever scientists at NASA sit in their little meetings and try to out-strategize the actual decision makers. People at NASA are never satisfied with good enough and can’t fight the urge to complain when their particular science thing is not the way they want it to be. This behavior never ends well for NASA.
A note of science clarification: Chris McKay is quoted as saying “A bad life detection mission is better than no life detection mission.” The Europa Lander is not a “life detection mission” any more than Europa Clipper is. Reading the Europa Lander Study 2016 Report it becomes immediately and abundantly clear that this mission is looking for biosignatures – not overt life detection. This may sound confusing but there is a big difference. Biosignatures are a range of measurements of substances and conditions known to be produced (most likely if not exclusively) by Earth life. But any one biosignature is not necessarily a solid indicator of life (past or present). Indeed, in many cases organic molecules associated with life (biosignatures) can also be formed naturally by chemical processes (abiotic) that do not involve life at all. But data taken from a series of biosignatures, repeatedly taken in various locations over time can be used to point to life’s increasing probability – or absence. Short of actually seeing a life form and directly measuring its chemistry detecting life on another world is not going to be a simple, one shot “detection” process. To understand the current NASA Astrobiology approach to searching for biosignatures please read the 2018 NASA-authored paper The Ladder of Life Detection
You can be assured that future meetings of NASA’s Outer Planets Assessment Group will have many more people listening in. NASA people need to learn when to speak their minds and when to sit down and shut up. This has nothing to do with transparency. It has everything to do with common sense.

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

11 responses to “Is Bad Science Better Than No Science? (Update)”

  1. George Purcell says:
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    Seems like a perfectly appropriate initial lander to me.

  2. rb1957 says:
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    I think “bad” is misspoken, and also maybe “life detection”. He’s right in that we know (believe?) there’s water ice there, but no evidence for the other chemicals required for life. So wouldn’t the first mission be to further investigate this “interesting” ice ? rather than to immediately leap to “detecting life” ?

    It could well be that this is how the mission direction developed … NASA wanted to further investigate Europa … “are the chemical ingredients for life there?” then someone thought this is way to passive and “intellectual” and changed it to “is life there ?” and so a reasonable exploration mission become the detection of life mission.

    Launching the mission to “detect life” based on what we “know” about Europa isn’t bad science; it’s bad planning/budgeting (since there’s little reason to expect success). For what I’ve read, I thought the likely site of life was the sub-surface ocean (if there is one). Then it’d be sensible IMHO to investigate the thickness of the surface ice, the material properties of the ice (what we need to know if we’re going to drill through it), the depth of the ice, the presence of subsurface liquid.

    • fcrary says:
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      No, a particular Congressman wanted a Europa lander and put it in NASA’s budget. Someone was either told or assumed he wanted life detection, so NASA did a study of a life detection mission. (This is where the whole political angle came in, since a Europa lander, let alone a life detection one, wasn’t even on the prioritized list recommended by the National Academies’ decadal survey.)

      The rewiew of the study said it would cost too much and that there was a real risk of ambiguous results regarding life. So they did another study, made some changes to reduce cost and cost risk, and changed the goal from life detection to biosignatures.

      During yesterday’s discussion, Dr. McKay was very specific: He did not say it was a bad mission. He said it was a bad _life_detection_ mission. He was very emphatic about that distinction. In fact, I don’t think many people in the room though it would be a bad mission. Whether it should jump to the front of the list (and put off, for example, a Uranus or Neptune mission by a decade), that’s something there wasn’t a consensus about. But the discussion did get sidetracked into politics, and priorities weren’t discussed much.

  3. fcrary says:
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    To be fair, Dr. McKay said that if _Congress_ funded a particular mission, _NASA_ had to do it. That’s the law, and he was pretty clear that NASA can’t legally ignore laws passed by Congress because they don’t follow a Decadal Survey or a National Academies report.

    He was also corrected about the “life detection” versus a search biosignatures and habitability. But the original SDT report did describe the Europa Lander as a “life detection” mission. An earlier presentation described how the SDT report was reviewed, and based on the review, a new study revised the concept. That’s when it changed to a biosignatures and habitability mission (without changing the payload, which says something about the viability of life detection.)

    Personally, I think the discussion got side-tracked by the people commenting on the politics. There was a little discussion on the science and technology, for example whether a designing lander should wait until we’ve seen the results from Europa Clipper. Although the panel members were very good at sticking to their allocated seven minutes for initial comments, once the microphone was opened up to the audience, some of them decided to talk for as long as they liked. It was pretty clear that Dr. Spilker (the moderator) was thinking of that when she tried (and failed) to steer the discussion towards technical and scientific issues.

    But one political point did get lost. I think Dr. McKay actually said “we” have to do what Congress says they are going to fund. In context, it was very clear he meant “NASA”. Since he’s a NASA employee (civil servant for decades, if memory serves), that’s an understandable mistake. But the scientific community (which is not the same as NASA) can and should tell Congress when they are making a mistake. OPAG discussing the Europa Lander in that context is perfectly appropriate, just as SBAG did with the Asteroid Redirect Mission. I wish that discussion yesterday had gone in that direction.

  4. Steven Rappolee says:
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    I asked the Panel During Q & A if the proposed Geophone could detect “bioacoustics”
    I believe the answer was its been brought and it would be up to instrument proposers to look into this
    Oliver the cat was a hit with many OPAG participents

    https://yellowdragonblog.co

    I also said Bioacustics from an alien world well how would we know it?
    also is it a biodetection or a biosignature?
    I would argue a positive finding would be a biodetection My comments came after Dr Bolten talked for about 10 minutes 🙂

    • fcrary says:
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      I remember that question. My take on the answer is that they had not specified sensitivity for the geophone. Bioacustics had been mentioned, but no requirements or sensitivities specified.

      In fact, at this stage, they haven’t even decided that there will be a geophone. They made a reasonable guess at what sort of instruments would make sense, so the engineers would have payload mass, power and data volume requirements to work with. But the actual payload, its requirements and all the details will depend on a competitive selection. That’s years away.

      • Steven Rappolee says:
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        Seems about right
        That day Niebur has said flagship instruments are competed in response to Ice Giant missions
        What do you make of Dr McKays “no” answer?

        • fcrary says:
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          I have to agree with McKay’s no’s about life finding on Europa. Maybe not emphatically, but he’s got a point. It’s a bit early to go looking for life before you know the right ingredients are there. In the case of Europa, I think he pointed out the lack of detected carbon and nitrogen, and the lack of energy in a biologically usable form.

          Carbon and nitrogen are _probably_ there. McKay said that, and in the discussion someone pointed out that they had been detected on other satellites of Jupiter. So it’s quite likely they are present in Europa’s ocean. He was making a point about the difference between measured facts and likely theories and expectations. Basing an entire $2.5 to $3 billion dollar mission on something you’re fairly sure is true is a bit much.

          For the energy source, someone pointed out that’s there’s clear evidence of an energy source within Europa. The geology makes that obvious. McKay specified that he was talking about energy in a usable form for biology. (I think he mentioned molecular hydrogen and carbon dioxide coexisting as an example.) That’s not the same thing as energy to melt ice.

          Another issue that came up was his application of the standards used for competed missions. That is, the TMC (Technical, Management and Cost) part of mission proposal evaluations. That tends to be a very hard-nosed evaluation of whether the proposal will work, and will work on budget and on schedule. As discussed at the workshop, flagship missions don’t actually go through that process. They do look at those issues, but as part of a broader science definition team and concept study report, and reviewed based on the concept as a whole.

          The TMC review is something done by people specifically told not to consider the science goals or the planned measurements, and only give an evaluation of the realism of the implementation.

          By the way, instruments on flagship (formally, large strategic or directed) missions are a mixed bag. They are usually competed, but not always. Sometimes there is something so important to the mission that they don’t want to have it left out. If no one submits a good proposal for it, that could be a problem. In that case, the instrument is classed as a “facility instrument”, developed as a spacecraft system (e.g. in the same way as the attitude control or telecommunications system), and a science team is selected separately from the hardware development.

  5. sunman42 says:
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    Don’t discount the power of Congressional champions for missions that would never have gotten into formulation, much less fragged for years in development. Gravity Probe-B comes to mind, and I don’t believe the champions in that case were even on any related committee or subcommittee.

  6. stonemoma says:
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    Life detection will make it a complicated mission due to planetary protection. The same difference as with ExoMars and MSL, 0,03 spores or 300 spores. Full sterilization is more complicated now compared to Viking era.

  7. CommanderBill3 says:
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    To send a multi-billion dollar probe to Europa without a lander would be an opportunity lost. Even if its sole goal was to inspire the people paying for such a mission, it is good enough.

    NASA’s extremely slow incrementalism is frustrating to all those that observe it. It seems the urgency of the 1960s and 70s have given way to scientific and engineering employment organization where extending programs for full careers is the primary aim.

    SpaceX gets almost groupie adoration from the public primarily because it does things quickly with continuous improvement and stretch goals with no limits.

    NASA can learn much from their methods.