These Are Not The Telescopes NASA Was Looking For
NRO Gifts NASA Two Leftover Space Telescopes, SpacePolicyOnline
“The CAA’s response to the newswas rather muted. The reaction was surprisingly flat for a community that received a fairly valuable gift. At a media teleconference later in the day, NASA’s Michael Moore, deputy astrophysics division director,estimated thatabout $250 million in mission costs could be avoided by using one ofthe NRO telescopes. He added that the telescopes cost about $75,000-$100,000 to storeat the manfacturer’s (ITT Excelis) facilities in Rochester, NY. In response to a question atthe media teleconference, Hertz said he thought CAA members were “excited at the possibilities,” while Dressler acknowledged that some people “need to have a lot more time” to consider the situation. This is a “sharp right turn,” he added, compared to what was recommended in NWNH.”
‘Free’ spy telescopes come to NASA with a cost, Nature
“But on Tuesday, NASA was still keeping relatively quiet about the apparent windfall. “We’re not pushing this information like we normally do,” said Michael Moore, NASA’s acting deputy director for astrophysics.”
Keith’s note: OK. So the status quo seems to be grumpy, cautious, etc. about another means to accomplish THEIR expensive long term astronomy plan without any sudden “right turns”. Are there not other uses that this hardware could be put to – ones that have minimal involvement with these stuffy folks who are all set in their high-cost way of doing business? Every time I have tried to engage NASA’s representatives about out-of-the-box thinking about alternate ways to use these telescopes from NRO they quickly retreat into their shells saying “its too early to discuss this”. Well gee, they have had a chance to talk about this among themselves for a year and a half! If this behavior persists I am afraid that NASA will simply be spending the equivalent of someone’s college education every year storing the stuff in Rochester, New York. Remember Triana aka ‘Goresat’? Where is it now?
Its interesting how NASA’s human exploration programs all seek a “flexible path” as they structure their programs and missions, yet NASA’s space science programs seem to lack that capability – or any interest in emulating it.
Rather than “grumpy” as a status quo (where does that word come from anyway?), I think “cautious” is the correct assessment. Here NASA has been given some telescopes that, aside from very general optical prescription, NASA seems to know very little about. Is it any surprise that the astronomy community wants to be cautious about this “opportunity”? Sure, these telescopes may represent $250M of hardware investment, were NASA to build their own, but they could also represent a huge amount of money in reverse engineering if NASA doesn’t get a lot of insight about exactly what these things are.
Why does NASA have to know details about them? Because NASA has to assess long term resilience, as well as detailed performance in likely launch environments, thermal performance, and availability of critical spares before launch. Mere presumption that NRO must have known what they were doing is reckless. Basic engineering smarts knows that gift horses deserve to have their mouths looked at closely.
It is stunning that NASA would trot these telescopes out without being able to tell us any more about them, and call them an opportunity. I’ll bet NRO has a warehouse full of decade old non-standard computer systems that NASA should be able to put to good use as well, in a “flexible path” scenario. Anyone interested? I’m frankly astonished that Grunsfeld would do something like this. At the worst, this could be branded as NASA management leading on the science community.
Didn’t you read the bit in the Times article where Grunsfeld said that his first instinct was to ignore them as a distraction, but the study committee said one would be perfect for WFIRST? I don’t think it’s leading on the science community at all to say “we just got given this hardware, maybe it’s useful, but we’re not sure how best to use it and in any case there’s no money”. And that’s basically what has been said so far.
As for the lack of technical information – I completely agree about the need to look this particular gift horse very closely in the mouth. One hopes that they come with detailed documentation, and I’ve heard that is indeed the case, but I can understand various authorities wanting to keep it quiet and limit who gets access. “Declassified spy satellite” is gonna mean even worse ITAR headaches than usual.
FYI, Triana is renamed Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) and now belongs to NOAA. The NOAA budget request has money for a 2014 launch, but no launch vehicle has been Identifed yet.
And how long was it in a bag at GSFC? How many different incarnations has it had? How many times has hardware been put into it, taken out, etc? ANd what is the cost associated with this? And compared with its original mission, is there any similarity?
The main reason DSCOVR/Triana has been on the shelf for so many years is a purely political one, not a budget or science-related one. Besides, DSCOVR/Triana always had a “space weather” component and, as such, it really has only one incarnation (apart from the name change). Fortunately, both NOAA and the Air Force are in such desperate need to replace the current solar instruments at the L1 point that they are willing to fund the space weather end (provided the Air Force finds money for the launch, something that’s not guaranteed). Unfortunately, the dismal NASA/NOAA budgets makes funding the earth science end still somewhat problematic, even though the instruments have been refurbished (for the minor sum of about $9 million) and are ready to go.
Details of DSCOVR’s history in storage and subsequent resurrection can be found at http://science.nasa.gov/med….
FWIW, Triana is on assisted breathing as DSCOVR. Not sure it’ll actually launch, but it’s something…
Caution is likely causing some of the apparent “grumpiness”, but certainly it isn’t the sole cause. No matter the case, I’d rather NASA not rush to decide how these telescopes will be used. They should take 6 months to a year to formulate a plan that will stand a chance of being funded. In that light, it might make sense to send one up with an intermediate mission. That intermediate mission could allow some good science to be done while NASA secures funding to launch the second to be used with the first as a space-based interferometry telescope for the visible and at least NIR and/or MWIR spectrums. It seems like these telescopes could be used to at least accomplish what WFIRST is designed to do according to latest decadal survey.
Respectfully, anyone suggesting building a space interferometer just because we have two mirrors doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Optical interferometry is _crazy hard_. After spending a ton of cash on SIM, JPL couldn’t come up with a feasible plan to do it – and that was just a pair of small apertures on a fixed connected baseline. The last astro decadal killed it off because there just wasn’t a believable budget path, and the science payoff was too little for most of the community.
Trying to make a free-flying interferometer with a pair of 2.4ms? Several billion bucks, almost certainly. And the hardware needed for that is completely and utterly the wrong direction for any of the WFIRST science. Interferometry is impressive – but it’s not what the science community wants these days.
BTW, Hilarious Headline! Love the Star Wars reference!
My impression is that the press conference got thrown together to get ahead of leaks that were already occurring. And frankly I think the whole thing is an attempt to keep WFIRST’s head above water. That mission has been sinking fast, but by pushing out a telescope you can jump-start the sunk costs and savings arguments.
Keith, you’re a bit hard here. Modern astronomy is on the bleeding edge. Science missions are really carefully designed to return science results. Anything that could be done by slapping a random camera on a random telescope and throwing it into orbit probably was already done a decade ago. Given how tight the science budget already is, being tossed an old telescope and being told “do something with this” really throws a wrench into years of planning. Now the existing hardware has to drive the requirements, rather than vice versa. And how long have these been sitting? Is it decades, as one probably suspects? What is required to re-qualify them? Do they have to be dismantled and retested at the component level? It would be really easy for this to be no savings at all. Sure, it would be nice to have some extra optical/uv telescopes, but at what cost?
Frankly, all this has done is add to an already incredibly chaotic situation within SMD vis-a-vis the ongoing JW issues.
Speaking of “flexible path,” I should also mention that a proposal was put forward, by NASA, to add the TSIS (Total Solar Irradiance Sensor) instrument to DSCOVR/Triana so that the critical long-term solar irradiance data record could be continued uninterrupted. The studies were performed that indicated that TSIS could be accommodated, and the original mission could still be performed. Not sure what happened to the proposal, but it does go to show that being flexible is not just the purview of the manned mission component of NASA.
Here’s what went wrong. The people who’d care most about these, weren’t contacted first.
There’s a long history of cobbling together scopes – at Berkeley many of the popular astronomy professors have lately built automated scopes out of discarded components and gotten massive research product out of them on the cheap.
This is why you go to those that don’t have budget first (assuming they have clearance enough to know what they are dealing with).
Those that already have budget, just see it as a way to become burdened with something that they cannot immediately use, and steals time/budget from them to even consider.
You go to the research consortium first, and to those dependant on Hubble observing time, say … how much is it worth to you … for 2x-3x the amount of time … for an always modern instrument. They’ll tell you in an eye blink. There’s your interest group.
From there you go to their grants and attempt to work out a way to multiply the effect of the grant. Now there’s real money behind things.
Then you talk to the congressional staffers on the committees, who see the advantage in budget negotiations, they introduce the idea to NASA as a part of an alternative in a down year budget.
In the end, STSCI writes a proposal that doesn’t scare NASA, and you get a more polite response from all involved.
Use them as ISRU testbeds for a telescope on the moon. Make them free for university students to get time on. Put one at a Lagrange point. Put another past the asteroid belt on full time NEO watch duty. Or put one in orbit around Saturn. Piggyback one on the JWST (just kidding). There’s a bunch of different and complementary ways these could be used. Who cares if they aren’t the latest and greatest, the fact that there are 2 of them with basically Hubble architecture means we know how they work and have the engineers available to quickstep these out into service. Sure the costs of any particular mission support might be larger than the cost of building one of these things but even so this is a gift to use not sit on our rears about. Do it!
Telescope on the moon: can’t be done for less than many billions, and is pointless in the optical. Free for university students: No such thing as free, and the NSF is struggling already to keep up funding for its existing system of ground based telescopes, almost all of which are larger than these. Or did you mean free for students in space? That’s even less likely to be magically free. Put one at a Lagrange point: that’s not a science plan, that’s an address. What’s the point? Orbit around Saturn: my God, are you kidding me? Cassini was $4B (well spent in my opinion), so sending this there would probably cost about that much, and would have zero additional science benefit over a telescope in GEO or L2. Each of these ideas is worse than the other.
The right thing to do with these is not some crazy idea that would take a ton of tech development, it’s to say, “how can we put an absolutely bare-bones focal plane array in place, attach this to a minimalist COTS spacecraft bus, and launch something approximately like WFIRST for the lowest possible cost.” That cost is still going to be painfully high, but unless everyone keeps their eye on the ball (cost and risk management), there’s no chance of anything real getting done.
Clearly I’m no astronomer and I defer to your expertise on mission planning, however I think we are on the same page, these need to be used, not mothballed.
stargazer2893,
I think your second paragraph is exactly what we need to see more of in this thread — suggestions about what can be done, and done beneficially, as opposed to what can’t be done. And clearly thinking outside the box is called for in situations like this, since the tried-and-true NASA methods would obviously lead nowhere.
When reading comments from those of us who are not in your field of expertise, please bear in mind that our misapplied enthusiasm has often been fed by prior reports and suggestions from other people, and things very often change in subsequent reports and posts. In this case (according to what I read), two telescopes turned out to be actually two mirror sets instead, and the original NASA response that I read said that they were being considered for dark energy research, which was, I think, a premature suggestion at best, even though it came from an official source.
Thanks for your better informed ideas and try to be patient with those of us who are often fueled more by enthusiasm than first hand knowledge.
Steve
Gary Hudson told a story in his Space Show interview about trying to purchase the leftover Multi-Purpose Logistics Modules from NASA, for spin-gravity research. I may be mangling the narrative here, and definitely embellishing it with some sarcasm, so go to TheSpaceShow to hear the real thing.
Apparently everything went swimmingly with the higher-level folks–no, we don’t need those, we’ll never use them, it would be great to repurpose them for research, what a clever notion. But as word got around, lower-level people nixed the whole idea, because someday, somehow, someone in NASA might find a use for the things. Or parts of the things. Or might need some scrap metal for the shed. Or something.
I also remember a proposal to use decommissioned Titan IIs for cheap space launch. They’re perfectly fine, they were paid for long ago, and they’re just sitting there gathering dust. Of course that didn’t work out either.
In two decades NASA has never found a use for the spare 2.4 meter Hubble mirror, currently on public display at the National Air and Space Museum. Two more mirrors from NRO will probably not be any more useful than the spare HST mirror has been.