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Shutdown

Why Did JPL Shut Down Half Of A Website? (Update)

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
December 23, 2018
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https://media2.spaceref.com/news/2018/dsn.stats.jpg

Keith’s 9:30 am ET note: Apparently the NASA Deep Space Network Now website only operates with human intervention – NASA civil servant intervention, to be specific. If you visit the site now it is online but it does not show any activity on the DSN. There is a clock in the upper former that shows that it is updating. Obviously the DSN is still talking to spacecraft such as New Horizons during the government shutdown. But the software that talks to the DSN and makes the squiggly lines appear over the antenna icons can only operate while a civil servant is doing something. But wait: the DSN itself and the DSN Now website are run by JPL which is part of Caltech – not NASA. Why has JPL shut down the data feed to the DSN now website? Are they trying to make a point or is the set up so fragile that lack of a civil servant makes it break? I’d ask JPL PAO but they do not respond to media inquiries these days. But someone will post a snarky explanation on Twitter, I’m certain. Larger image.
Keith’s 12:22 pm update: It is working again – for now.

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

6 responses to “Why Did JPL Shut Down Half Of A Website? (Update)”

  1. fcrary says:
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    JPL seems to have straightened out the DSN web page, but I’m not surprised there was some confusion. For contractors, which JPL counts as, work on NASA projects during a government shutdown has to come out of the institution’s own money. With some effort and good accountants, they will get reimbursed. But some institutions may be hesitant to commit to that, or may not immediately tell their people to keep working. And JPL does have a firm policy of not accepting volunteer work. If they aren’t paying, they will not accept work. (So the idea of winning a lottery or inheriting a fortune, and then working for fun and without worrying about grant proposals won’t fly.) With all that, a day or two of confusion about who is allowed to do what isn’t shocking.

    • Chris Owen says:
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      We received an email stating business as usual.

      • fcrary says:
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        Which is sensible, and the same message I got from the university I work for. Keep working on your federal grants, and we’ll take care of the accounting. But there was about a one day delay from the shutdown to my getting that email. (Actually quite prompt, considering that was a Saturday…) So I’d call a day of “what am I allowed to do” about par for the course. The whole thing is dysfunctional, and it’s gotten to the point where I’m forced to call a day of confusion “normal”…

    • chrislcm says:
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      It’s a bit more complicated than that. JPL is forward funded with
      letters of authorization and credit, and so short shutdowns generally have minimal impact. Individual projects get authorized in advance on different schedules depending on the program office – if a project is low on funds and can’t get new funds those people have to work on something else or go on vacation. If a shutdown goes on for a long time and projects or the lab hit authorization limits it starts to become a problem. Caltech isn’t likely to dip into the endowment to cover NASA when there isn’t congressional authorization for the spending.

  2. jimlux says:
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    I suspect that the website is not a 24/7 kind of support obligation – the 23rd is Sunday, then followed by Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, both holidays for JPL. If something hiccups, I wouldn’t expect it to get fixed until Wednesday. The fact that it came back up on Sunday suggests that some other thing hiccuped, and it didn’t necessarily require manual intervention. There have been hiccups in its feed and operation in the past.
    Note that Keith found it down at 630AM PST on Sunday and it was working at 922AM PST.
    If you’re ambitious, you could go in and try and retrieve historical data from the gap period…The URL for 630AM PST on 12/23 is:
    https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/d
    the number is the unix seconds for the date/time, and seems to be ok, and a few spot checks during the succeeding few thousand seconds works too. So the XML data feed is ok.