NASA’s Science Mission Directorate will hold a Budget Town Hall meeting with Associate Administrator for Science Nicky Fox and her leadership team on Wednesday from 1:00 – 2:00 pm EDT. Participants are invited to submit their questions below and/or vote up questions already posted.
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Keith’s note: I guess its nice that NASA’s Astrobiology program officially emails info about job openings – in Norway. It might be a little more appropriate to start sending out info on job openings – in the U.S. – for all the people being laid off at NASA JPL and NASA Goddard. Meanwhile at the official NASA Astrobiology website the top story is about a undergraduate fellowship with a due date of 2 February 2024 – almost 2 weeks ago. Why bother being accurate. Just sayin’
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Keith’s note: A story is now widely circulating within the planetary science community that NASA SMD has asked for cost estimates to put the New Horizons spacecraft into hibernation. This would halt all Kuiper Belt science – which is an especially baffling thing for NASA to do since a Decadal Survey supported the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt in the first place. A fully functional, billion dollar mission is to be turned off for lack of a few million dollars – with no plan if or when to turn it back on. Space leaders have protested but that was answered with silence from NASA. In June you may recall that I posted “There May Be A Second Kuiper Belt And New Horizons Is Headed There“ that noted “In a meeting today of the NASA New Horizons Science Team a presentation strongly suggests that our solar system actually has a second Kuiper Belt.” Papers are in work but now NASA SMD wants to shut the spacecraft off before it can build on these findings or make any other discoveries. As I noted in “Hijacking New Horizons“ SMD wanted to get rid of the current New Horizons team and convert the mission into a heliophysics mission instead. Now, apparently, that idea has evaporated and, lacking a plan as to what to do next, shutting New Horizons off and disbanding its team is the only option Nicky Fox and her team can come up with. All for a few million dollars. What a waste of money. I hope GAO, OIG, and OGC are looking into this. I have to think that OSTP and NAC would find this to be problematical as well.
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Keith’s note: NASA SMD sent out a message today about the SMD Town Hall meeting that was to be held from 1:00 – 2:00 pm EDT today. Among the participation options was live streaming via https://www.youtube.com/@NASAScience/streams. One small problem: the Town Hall live stream never appeared. I sent several notes to senior NASA SMD and PAO as the event was beginning – but got no response back – and the YouTube livestream was never fixed. Not everyone in the real world uses WebEx, NASA. FYI here are the charts. Oh yes: the last thing mentioned today was news that the new SMD website https://beta.science.nasa.gov is now online and has “everything that we could dream that it could be”. Alas the Youtube live stream that NASA was supposed to offer today never happened. Oh well. Update: the NASA AV squad fixed their youtubery device and now you can see the “live stream” of today’s SMD Town Hall through the time travel magic of the interwebs below.
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Keith’s note: Recently I posted an item “There May Be A Second Kuiper Belt And New Horizons Is Headed There“ that noted “In a meeting today of the NASA New Horizons Science Team a presentation strongly suggests that our solar system actually has a second Kuiper Belt.” I then posted “Hijacking New Horizons” which noted that New Horizons will be visiting the region where there seems to be another Kuiper Belt in a few years. Alas, the ability to continue to conduct a planetary mission to explore these regions of our solar system is not in SMD’s plans. They want to change it into a heliophysics mission and get rid of the current New Horizons team. The following was released by Planetary Exploration News yesterday: “The following statement by the undersigned concerns the extended New Horizons mission:” More below.
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Keith’s note: Last week I posted some fascinating news – our solar system may actually have a second Kuiper Belt. The news originated from a New Horizons Science Team meeting. While that finding is rather tentative and is based on ground-based observations, the person making the presentation was a mission co-investigator. Now, instead of simply heading out into interstellar space, New Horizons is going to be heading toward a possible second Kuiper Belt in the late 2020s/early 2030’s time frame. Who knows – perhaps there will be a possible flyby target. But wait: just as this big planetary science news is emerging the NASA Science Mission Directorate wants to turn this planetary science mission – the only one that can visit this region of space in the coming decades – into a heliophysics mission instead. Go figure. So how did we get here? (More below)
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Keith’s note: NASA just posted this press release “Hubble Unexpectedly Finds Double Quasar in Distant Universe“ which says “The results will be published in the April 5 journal Nature.” and points to this article behind a paywall which you can read/rent for $39.95 – unless you have already paid for access to this taxpayer-funded research (funded by NASA, NSF, NRAO, STSCI etc.) So if you want to see your tax dollars at work – and you do not subscribe to $200/year journals – then this PAO summary is all you get. Yet you can find the preprint of that paper online here – for free: “A close quasar pair in a disk–disk galaxy merger at z = 2.17“ and it is accessible anywhere on Earth – even on the ISS. It has been online since 22 September 2022. I have repeatedly told NASA SMD PAO (just a few weeks ago in fact) where and how to find these preprints – many of which come out the night before or the evening after a formal release. Some preprints are online and approved for publication well before then. The entire NASA-funded research community knows this since they are the ones who submit them to the preprint servers and want their research to be seen ASAP. But NASA Public Affairs seems to have a chronic lazy streak running through it wherein the least amount of effort expended is often more than enough to keep the taxpayers happy. (See my 22 March 2023 post “NASA PAO Does The Bare Minimum (Again) To Announce Another Discovery“) Update: Wednesday evening someone from PAO got around to checking to see if the link went to an open access article and then fixed it so that it does. Why they do not do this before publishing things – thus making people think that they have to pay – is baffling.
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Keith’s note: According to Astrobiology Spinoff: NASA Funded Research Used Tardigrade Proteins To Make A Human Health Breakthrough “University of Wyoming researchers’ study of how microscopic creatures called tardigrades survive extreme conditions has led to a major breakthrough that could eventually make life-saving treatments available to people where refrigeration isn’t possible.” NASA funded this research. And there is an important “spinoff”. And you will never hear about it from NASA Public Affairs because they either do not know how to tell the story and/or do not care to take the time to bring together disparate parts of the agency to make a coherent story. More below.
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According to NASA PAO: “Fox began her NASA career in 2018 leading the Heliophysics Division, overseeing the agency’s efforts to study the Sun and how its constant solar wind affects Earth and other planets. Prior to that, she worked at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, where she was the chief scientist for heliophysics and the project scientist for NASA’s Parker Solar Probe.” More
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