Scientists Finish Last-Ditch Plan to Save Infrared Spitzer Space Telescope, Space.com
“Spitzer likely can operate through 2018, Helou said. To get there, the project will have to trim its full-time staff, discontinue some engineering support services and cease efforts to make spacecraft operations more efficient, Helou said. There are about 45 full-timers on Spitzer now, including 27 at the Spitzer Science Center. The others are at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, which is run by Caltech, and Lockheed Martin Space Systems of Sunnyvale, California, which built the telescope.”
Shutdown for Spitzer and MaxWISE?, earlier post
Actually Ball Aerospace built the telescope. Lockheed Martin built the spacecraft and integrated the telescope. A great telescope. let’s keep using it.
Wanna save Spitzer? End the sequestration. Vote Democrat.
lol, Democrats were just as much to blame for sequestration.
Only in that they didn’t cave in. Do you really think that if Republicans get their way by cutting taxes further, there will be *more* money to spend on Spitzer?
well, neither side caved in to the other, so both sides can say that.
spending less and giving the public more money to spend in the economy directly seems like a better option than taxing the shit out of us and the government spending a shit ton more money, which was the Democratic plan.
Well, everyone certainly has their own political opinion. Of course, opinion isn’t fact.
“…taxing the shit out of us…” is an interesting exaggeration.
well, it’s certainly not literally true. i’m sure they would if they could figure out a way to do it… unless you want to count taxes used for sewage removal, waste treatment, etc.
So much for your credibility. You apparently insist on making juvenile political comments that lack critical thought. Sure, that scores points with your friends, and that makes you no better than the politicians you decry. Further it’s exactly your kind of words and your thinking that keeps Washington DC from righting and properly funding NASA and from getting anything done in general. Political point scoring and chest thumping is what is.
If that’s the extent to which you’re willing to actually think, there’s no point in discussing or interacting with you further.
um. YOU are the one that made the comment in the first place.
“”…taxing the shit out of us…” is an interesting exaggeration.”
who’s being juvenile? you’re the one that brought the toilet humor up hin the first place.
We already have the lowest taxes in the developed world, and our infrastructure is falling apart because of it. But go ahead and sprinkle some libertarian pixie dust on our problems and maybe they’ll magically be resolved without having to spend anything.
If you are concerned about infrastructure, then I recommend you call your local elected representatives and insist that they should spend it rebuilding roads and the electrical grid.
that’s what I do.
The government gets plenty of money, and for the most part i see it wasted and frittered away on nonsense.
i will trust the government with more of my money when they have shown they can spend it wisely.
Considering that the federal budget has increased by over a trillion dollars a year since 2005, the budget is not the problem, its allocation is.
100% agree with that statement.
Democrats are not to blame for sequestration at all. Republicans held the entire federal budget hostage to their rich masters so they wouldn’t have to pay a single dime in higher taxes, and sequestration was the result of their total lack of interest in this country’s survival let alone prosperity.
Democrats are the pro-space party; Republicans are only interested in the space where their heads and hearts should be, notwithstanding a minority who are legitimately on board.
yes, they are just as responsible. they refused to negotiate with Republicans.
Republicans modified what they wanted repeatedly and Democrats refused to even talk about it.
“my way or the highway” that kind of mentality is not acceptable.
Right, refusing to give in to terrorism = “refusing to negotiate.”
LOL nice attitude. thanks for being part of the problem. referring to the opposing political party as terrorists is exactly why this nation is split on party lines.
Hostage-takers usually are referred to as terrorists, especially when the Congressional majority they used to hold up the budget was due entirely to gerrymandering with the majority of American voters voting AGAINST their candidates.
They have zero public mandate to do anything they’re doing, but it has never stopped them from being criminals before, and it won’t stop them now.
you’re just describing politics as usual.
however, using phrases such as “hostage taking” and “terrorists” and “criminals” is just being divisive.
try using words like “compromise” and “working together” sometime.
Republicans have zero interest in compromise or in working together. They consider it their birthright to rule over Americans with or without our permission, and feel no moral restraint in their methods. They are not part of this country – just something feeding on it.
sure. just swallow what the left wing of the Democrat party says, hook, line, and sinker.
Maybe we could organize a user group that would take over? Like Keith did with ISEE? OTOH if SLS and Orion are cancelled there might be enough money to keep Spitzer going.
“OTOH if SLS and Orion are cancelled there might be enough money to keep Spitzer going.” Or we could just get the money from the tooth fairy. Better chance of that happening than SLS getting cancelled. It just got 300 million more reasons from the senate to continue.
Oh who cares? We have SLS! 🙂
I frankly can’t believe that it takes anywhere near 45 FTEs to operate Spitzer with only one instrument operational. With one US instrument still operational (as well as several European ones, for which their national funding agencies are responsible), and NASA responsible for operating the spacecraft, SOHO is operated with under 11 NASA and contractor FTEs, and that includes continual software development to keep ops hardware sustainable and secure. Used to be considerably more, but Goddard re-engineered in response to falling funding levels.
Let’s hope JPL can prove itself equally creative in responding to this engineering challenge, and keeps this great observatory in operation.
I’m not particularly familiar with SOHO, but I am with both Spitzer and HST. Both are general purpose community observatories. They execute hundreds of different astronomical programs per year, which vary substantially in purpose and design, all of which are proposed by the community (and hence are unknown prior to that year’s selection). This was always part of, and drives, their operational design. It requires a lot of FTEs to schedule – if nothing else, SOHO looks at a single target, wheres Spitzer looks everywhere on the sky, and also has to deal with the complexities of interlocking pointing constraints and program temporal constraints. More FTEs are required for technical support of the camera (which is now one of the most photometrically stable cameras of its kind ever built, and which due to continuous work far exceeds it’s original design). And a support team to handle observers and run the proposal selection process, and another that keeps the data pipelines humming. In the end it adds up. Factually, Spitzer is at far less than half it’s budget when all three instruments were operating, despite the fact that the instrument teams were only part of the whole operation. And it is a small fraction of other space (or airborne) observatories. It is expensive compared to survey-mode spacecraft, because the latter are single purpose and much, much simpler.
I realize that a service mode observatory will be more complicated to operate than one that points at the same target or does regular survey slews, but in 11 years, software should have been perfected to optimize scheduling while implementing all the constraints (HGA has to see an available TDRS, certain parts of the observatory can’t be within a certain angular distance of the Sun [or earth?] direction, &c.) — EUVE had such software twenty years ago.
SOHO’s mission ops now involves about one third the number of FTEs it did in the years immediately after launch, largely because it adopted COTS automation software. Experienced ops engineers wrote the rules the automation software implements, and the engineers, who now work 8 x 5, get text messages if constraints are violated. In an extended mission, you accept more risk to the observing program (e.g. time to drive in and fix an anomaly, time to restore from safe mode if more serious constraints are violated) than you would in a prime mission. Has Spitzer really examined that mode of operations?
And surely, after 11 years, the data processing pipeline should be stable. Why does it take more than a fraction of an FTE to monitor that (and the engineer could also be sent text messages outside of normal business hours if for some reason the data processing were required for planning the next day’s observations).
Lowering operating costs in an extended mission all comes down to accepting a higher level of risk to the science return, without endangering the spacecraft or instrumentation. The tradeoff is that 90% or 95% achievement of science plans is better than 0%.
Spitzer already did all that years ago when it trasitioned from the primary cryogenic mission to the extended non-cryogenic mission. It currently uses a small fraction of the FTEs it did after launch (and indeed is at a tiny staffing level compared to it’s sister missions that have been in the air much longer). It’s important to keep in mind that while it lost two of the three instruments, the total demand for the observatory actually increased as a result of new capabilities that were developed. Finally, you mentioned “fraction of an FTE”. There’s an important assumption in that statement. In the past there were enough birds in the air to shuffle people around and essentially hold them on retainer at fractional levels. That’s not the case anymore, because there are no projects to soak those people up. Staff reductions result in total loss of the knowledge base when those people leave NASA and the industry for good, taking anywhere from 10-40 years flight experience with them. NASA is now so streched so thin that it’s starting to tear.
No need to examine that mode of operations…Spitzer spacecraft ops has already been doing 8-5 ops with pagers for most of the mission. As a consequence of having a fixed antenna, the telescope spends most of its time out of contact doing science anyway, so there’s never been any reason to staff it 24/7.