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Interstellar Pioneers Facing Termination
marcel-jan.nl writes "There are plans to terminate the interstellar missions Voyager 1 and 2 and the solar mission Ulysses in October to save money. The Voyagers alone need $4.2 million a year for daily operation and data analysis. Scientist say this cut is "an extremely foolish thing to do": the Voyagers are approaching the edge of the Solar System and Ulysses is observing the Sun coming to the end of a 22-year magnetic cycle."
I don't know for certain, but I'm guessing that a large portion of the costs may involve the maintenance and renting of the necessary transciever equipment. There may even be costs associated with renting the Deep Space Network for relaying Voyager transmissions when the Earth is on the far side of the Sun.
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Thank you.
Software piracy is victimless theft.
There's a lot more to keeping a mission running than employing a bunch of people to analyze the data. The "daily operation" is extremely expensive. One of the major costs is DSN (Deep Space Network) connection, over which the data is downlinked from the satellite -- that costs a lot of money. Plus you operations staff to monitor the satellite, people to maintain the operations computers... there's a lot of work goes into it.
Aside: PhD Astrophysicists earn *much* more than $52,500! Where I work, that's what BSc Astrophysicists get! Also, cost-per-person is typically four-times their salary (or so my boss keeps saying...) So I make it 13 or 14 PhD Astrophysicists to run the $4.2m mission.
That is, of course, unless a light-bulb needs changing...
It's not $4.2million to analyze data ... it's that much to run "the mission". The mission includes the cost of salaries/benefits/overhead for secretaries, support staff, technicians, and scientists, graduate students, costs for hardware, maintainance contracts, portions of other programs of which the mission is a "client" (like the Deep Space Radio network telescopes, for instance, or computing services). And there's a ton of other costs that will nickle and dime you to death. The actual data analysis is probably done by a graduate student who's getting paid next to nothing :-)
... closer to $50k. Then, you figure 2 to 3 times take home for benefits and overhead, and you get 30-40 per year, if you're lucky
And you couldn't possibly support 80 PhD astrophysicists on that amount of money. You could support MAYBE 40 postdocs, early in their caeers. And no, they don't take home $100k per year
I don't know the details of Voyager itself, but just keeping a program running does have some significant costs. Deep Space Network time isn't cheap; you have pure operating costs for that, paying engineers to run it (and the operations people are really *wonderful* on the whole, they do a lot of work, solve a lot of problems, and with very little fanfare), an appropriate fraction of upkeep/maintenance for it, etc. Then there's the grants for data analysis, keeping a few grad students fed while they work plus covering appropriate travel expenses, equipment, etc. And then all this is happening in a bureaucracy--add overhead. It adds up.
Folks, I need to make this very, very clear: Research science is no longer a priority at NASA. It's all going to the manned program. We're trying to refocus where we can, support the effort with good science, but the only way we're going to continue to expand our understanding of the space environment as a whole is if you--all of you--get on the phone and convince your congressfolk that pure research is worth funding through NASA. Otherwise things are going to come to a pretty serious halt and space scientists are going to start leaving the US.
What everyone is hoping is that it will try and find some of the boundaries between our solar system (well our sun really) and the rest of this galaxy.
Ciao
Voyager 1 is further out than Pioneer 10 (by some 7 AUs): http://www.heavens-above.com/solar-escape.asp
When I saw the figure I thought 4.2 million is quite cheap.
You are assuming 80 astrophysicists would make $52k annually. This is a very naive assumption because it entirely ignores administrative overhead that must always be included with salaries.
A rough rule of thumb is that a person costs about 2x their salary, to pay for utilities, housekeeping, human resources, etc. So a $50k salaried employee will cost roughly $100k. That would leave only 40 astrophysicists in your example.
Secondly, communication with Voyager occurs through the Deep Space Network, which has a slew of technicians and scientists that operate it. Voyager might spend about half to 3/4 of its budget paying for time on the Deep Space Network, even though they probably only communicate with Voyager a few hours (or tens of hours) annually. I believe most of Voyagers instruments are turned off because the RTG is winding down. IIRC, the bulk of the science down w/ Voyager now is tracking it's slowdown through the heliopause, by carefully monitoring the Doppler shift of its transmissions.
So $4.2 million will run out quite quickly. And I would guess they'd have maybe 10 scientists working on it nowadays, not 40. And these ten might only be part time too. But the bulk of it's expenditures would probably be on the Deep Space Network.
> Remember the probe that was lost because they forgot
> to convert from metric to imperial? Thats several
> million dollars down the drain. Did anyone get
> fired?
You need to understand that it was NOT NASA WHO FU^&%ED UP. The mistake was made at Lockheed-Martin, not NASA. Lockheed was contracted to provide functioning, tested hardware and software to NASA, and it failed. You can bet that someone DID get fired.
That being said, I agree with the need to cut beaureaucractic waste and administrative overhead at NASA...but it won't happen. The best we can hope for, realistically, is for better leadership at the top. I say let's put an astronomer or an astronaut in charge.
And regarding your point about SpaceShip One: yes, it was an amazing feat. Yes, they did a great job, and will continue to do great things, as will many of the other private sector ventures. But let's remember that what they did was successfully place a person into a BALLISTIC path in space, for a couple minutes, WELL BELOW low earth orbit, FORTY+ YEARS AFTER it was done by governments. Personally, I'm saving my really enthusiastic clapping for when they put someone up there...and KEEP them up there.
No gods, no demons, and no masters. Secular Humanism!
Does anybody on this site actually know anything about space science?! Does anybody have any idea what sort of science payload the Voyagers are carrying? Deep breath... Voyager 1 and 2 are in an area called the Interstellar Boundary. There is interesting stuff happening there. That's why NASA is funding the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) program to get some actual data on the phenomenae that are happening out there. The Voyager birds don't have the payload or the data rates to support any valuable science out there. Any far as solar science, there are at least a few spacecraft on orbit that are observing the sun in just about every spectrum of value. Voyager 1 and 2 were pretty well built and have nuclear powered EPS's. They have enough fuel for a very long time. How long should we support these missions which have such diminished value? That money can do a lot of good in the space science community. I know the mission I'm working on (also a deep space bird) could use that money for some extra QA and the like.
Let me point out to Bob Park's point of view on the way science is viewed by the current administration.
For those of you who don't know who Park is or have not read the excellent Voodoo Science, he is the president of the American Physical Society.
Murphy(c)
Gee, we would have missed out on Anomalous acceleration if we had pulled the plug the first time they wanted to. (Have they adequately explained that yet?)
One proposed explanation is here. I have no idea what the consensus opinion is.
BTW, it was Pioneer, not Voyager, that revealed the phenomenon.
Underwater research is in fact more difficult than space research -- you need a much stronger capsule to survive a deep trip than you do to survive a trip into space, at least if you just consider pressure. The difference between the atmospheric pressure inside a space capsule and outside is generally going to be 1 atmosphere -- basically 14.7 PSI or a little over a thousand grams per square centimeter.
According to the NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), the pressure increases at 1 atmosphere per 10 meters. If you go 4000 meters down, that's 400 atmospheres of pressure pushing inward on the outside skin of your submarine. One atmosphere is pushing outward on the inside skin of your sub. That submarine better have a strong skin, or the people inside it are going to end up looking like something you'd spread on toast.
The article I linked above has a great account of what happened during an unmanned test of some diving equipment at 3000 feet -- it's not often that you read a scientific article or story and see the sentence "If I had been in the way, I would have been decapitated."
Y|
Operating the Deep Space Network (DSN) costs about 257 million dollars per year.
NASA 'Science, Astronautics, and Exploration' Budget details
It would cost less money to build a working fusion reactor than it would take to send a 6-man team to mars for 6 months.
Since when was making physics work a matter of money? There has never been a Fusion plant that produces more power than it uses. Not a single watt, not a single Joule. While scientists have ideas on getting around this, Fusion is perpetually "20 years away". I don't see that changing until we're already in space. Why? Because then you can build fusion plants that don't need so much destructable shielding.
Here is the basic idea a fusion reactor produces 1,000,000X the energy per unit mass than a chemical rocket does
Err... right. One million times, you say? Assuming you're correct (which you're not), you still need to translate that into work. Most nuclear rockets are 2-10x more powerful than their chemical counterparts, not some mythical "one million times". Oh, and I did I mention that the 10x rocket uses fusion? Fusion BOMBS that is.
It's also vary vary safe to build and transport so you build one ship in orbit using one of these and you can basically get to turn on the ION drive and leave it that way for years thus getting 100's or thousands of to mars from orbit cheaply.
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Someone PLEASE stop the torture.
After all why build a ship that can go there once when you can build one that can make the trip twice a year every year for 20 years.
I agree. That's why nuclear, interplantary starships are the right idea. Of course, to build those we need funding. So far, only the going and down part has been funded. And very wasteful methods have been funded, at that.
Yes I wan to get off this rock but we need to be really to do that by first building cheep craft to get to orbit
Agreed. Got any ideas? I've got a few. The simplest is to build a scaled down Big Gemini, and pop it on top of an inexpensive rocket. At 50 mil per launch, it would be far more cost effective than the Shuttle. If we have a reason to send people up constantly, then economies of scale could conceivably lower that to ~10 mil per launch.
That's one idea that could be investigated, but hasn't been. The dirty little secret is that the space program was wound down after Apollo, and hasn't been truely focused since then.
and then build ships than can move us around the solar system cheaply.
Indeed. NERVA and Orion are well understood concepts in starship propulsion. Early craft could use these engines while experiments and research is done on more exotic methods such as Nuclear Salt Water and Daedalus drives.
Until that point going to mars is little more than a publicity stunt that teaches us little and is so costly we will not repeat it for 50 years.
Well, we could use the first reusable ship to go to Mars. After all, we DO have to build a ship. Why would we bother making it disposable? After all, this isn't a moon shot from the bottom of the gravity well.
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I agree with much of what you said, but NASA doesn't charge for the use of the Hubble Space Telescope. They PAY people to use it. People like me. I've had a few Hubble projects, and NASA has given me about $5k per HST orbit to make sure the data are analyzed and published in a timely manner. That analysis money is one of the reasons Hubble is so productive.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
Sadly that hasn't been true for a while.
That BBC News article was written way back in 2001. In 2002 NASA stopped receiving recognisable telemetry data and in February 2003 there was no signal at all from the spacecraft (there was only a very weak signal in the January 2003 session).
See the Pioneer 10 home page for the details.
Chris
There are plans to terminate the interstellar missions Voyager 1 and 2 and the solar mission Ulysses in October to save money.
A minor point, by Ulysses isn't actually a NASA mission, it's operated jointly by ESA and NASA, and ESA actually built the spacecraft. I'm not sure the USA actually has any right to terminate it, although it almost certainly does rely on the DSN for some, if not all, communications, so this could be seriously curtailed.
At a minimum this would piss off ESA big times, and historically NASA/USA behaviour in regards to this mission hasn't exactly been brilliant. There were meant to be two spacecraft in the original mission, one built by ESA, the other by NASA, but the US one got scrapped and ESA got left with only half the mission.
NASA has remained involved, since it was launched with the Shuttle, and they provided the RTG, and the DSN, but sometimes it really seems like they are taking the mick. :(
Actually it is rocket science...