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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."
Thank you.
Software piracy is victimless theft.
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.
> 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!
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