Mercury Probe Delayed by Ten Weeks, and Two Years

Gogo Dodo writes "Spaceflight Now reports that NASA's MESSENGER probe launch has been delayed by 10 weeks. Unfortunately, this means MESSENGER will not arrive at Mercury until 2011, a two year delay."

Comments

An Understandable Shame

[Embedded Geek]

I think it's a shame they'll miss the better window, but giving more time to check out the on board diagnostics seems like a dang fine reason. I'd hate to see the thing get all the way to Mercury and then go dead. If the program mangers want this breathing space (and you can be sure they'd only consider this if they were getting a lot of warnings from within the ranks), they'd be fools not to take it. Still, the extra Venus flyby would have been nice (2 vs. 3).

I'm kinda concerned about the budget hit, though. Maintaining an engineering infrastructure on the ground for an additional two years, even one in "standby," is going to be costly. Sure, they can loan out personell to other projects during the interim, but you're going to see two more years of attrition and then retraining costs to catch up. A boom or bust in the tech cycle will simply agravate the situation (boom=more people leaving, bust=fewer new engineers to fill vacated slots).

The delay is probably acceptable, but let's hope the added budget doesn't hurt another probe.

Re:An Understandable Shame

[Ahotasu]

I bet the budget hit won't be significant --at least not due to engineering infrastructure. As an interplanetary mission (with some tricky orbital mechanics to boot), things have already been very thoroughly documented to mitigate the risk of losing knowledge about the system as time progresses. Engineering staff will (still) be busy in the first month or two following launch, then will move off onto other projects. Thus, a boom or a bust in the industry will have little to no effect on the engineering costs associated with this slip.

There's simply not enough work to keep the engineers busy while the bird flys to Mercury--automated data processing as well as monitoring by Operatins staff will take over the job of monitoring health and safety. If problems occur, then the engineers are brought back only long enough to deal with the problems. This has doubtlessly been the plan all along.

Where the cost really goes up, though, is in Mission Operations. Antenna time, operations staff, etc will eat some of the budget. I bet that's fairly trivial, though, compared to your scenario of a 'marching army'. I wonder how MESSENGER's doing in terms of budget reserves (these 'little' dollar signs NASA forces you to hedge)...

Re:Relativistic effects on the craft & orbit

[egomaniac]

To what extent do the mission planners have to account for this effect? Can they even know for sure until they see what happens as they pass by Mercury those three times before orbital insertion?

Of course they can. We know the speed of the Sun and planets relative to us, and we know all of their masses. That's everything you need to do full relativistic calculations.

And yes, these are astrophysicists we're talking about. Of course they take this into account.