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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."
Once the probes are built and launched, and the bulk of the diagnosis and repair of early malfunctions is taken care of, the rest of the probe is cheap to operate by comparison. By contrast, how much does the U.S. spend on gasoline or diesel for military vehicles within the borders of the U.S.? How much does the U.S. spend to allow congressmen to use government-paid-for television studios to film whatever they decide?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
We apparently can't afford $4.2 million per year for discovering the origins of universe and having a presence beyond our solar system, but $1 million per year for studying wild shrimp is apparently a needed project.
I know that pointing out frivolous spending is the easy way to attack spending cuts for what one considers important, but this is just goofy.
I'm a big tall mofo.
This is insane. Sure some money will be saved, but nearly 30 years of funds will have been wasted. Do the math.
That money's needed for faith based initiatives, abstinence-only education and 'my-granpappy-ain't-no-monkey' stickers for textbooks. Question; can they save money by shutting down the analysis portion and just collecting raw data until more generous hands are on the budgetary purse strings?
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?)
I am Jonathan Vos Post, formerly Mission Planning Engineer on Voyager 2, for the the part of the mission called "VUIM": Voyager Uranus Interstellar Mission.
a cePu blications/210Ways.html
I worked for Charlie Kolhaase, Mission Planning Director, and Ed Stone, Chief Scientist.
So far as I'm concerned, NASA is telling me that I wasted my time (except for those nice screensavers of Miranda, which was a part of mission under my responsibility). Now they want to kill me, bury me, and desecrate my grave.
That's what this feels like, anyhow.
The interstellar part of the mision is extremely serious science, as others have said. We only have 4 interstellar probes right now, two Voyagers and two Pioneers.
Kill the still-working half of the fleet, and we're back to square one.
Who cares how the sun interacts with interstellar medium? Who cares if anomalous acceleration of the Voyagers tells us something about Dark Energy?
Let's go invade Iran, or shoot another Italian journalist, or detain a few hundred more people at Gitmo. Yeah, that's what our wonderful government wants to do with the money saved.
The gentleman from the Voyager Navigation team with whom I worked most closely still at JPL (promoted to management) -- I won't mention his name to spare him retribution from above -- correctly described himself as "The other interstellar navigator, besides Sulu."
My credentials on the subject are at
http://www.magicdragon.com/ComputerFutures/Sp
But no manned vehicle will ever get out to where the Voyagers and Pioneers are, so you're comparing apples and hand grenades. How does excitement about manned space travel translate into continued funding for the Voyagers?
Guess what? The Voyagers (and SIM, and TPF, and LISA, and Con-X, and JIMO, and Hubble) are all taking budget cuts even as I type this in order to pay for your manned space travel to the moon and Mars.
Congress allocates $16B to NASA and Bush says "Go to the Moon and Mars and pay for the Shuttle and the ISS."
Guess how the money gets allocated? PHBs or short-sighted bureaucrats aside, NASA is doing exactly what your elected president and congress are directing them to do, and it's the PHBs and bureaucrats who are scraping enough money from the bottom of the barrel to keep the science programs going.
Or not, as I go to deliver my last talk on a science program later this afternoon. See, the budget has been cut for the third time this fiscal year to pay for manned space flight.
That's why Bush was pushing for a Mars mission, right?
Yep. Bush will go for silly not-gonna-happen-and-no-point-if-it-did stuff rather than science any day.
NASA's internal beauracracy
Just as a data point, NASA is asking for $77 million next year just to fund changes to their financial reporting systems. Ie the noise in the flapping around the edges of the work of the people who couldn't find $4mil for Voyager would fund it for nearly 10 years.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
Even if the program is cancelled there may still be some data observerd. These guys still get occasional data from the Pioneer craft even though the missions ended in '96.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Now, how much of the budget goes to the (albeit stupid) programs you mentioned?
(speaking of faith based initiatives, abstinence only education, and "my granpappy-ain't-no-monkey" stickers for textbooks from the grand parent post)
Bush has said that last year the government distributed$2 billion in grants to faith based organizations for social welfare purposes. His budget for the upcoming year includes $206 million for abstinence education, an increase of $39 million over last year! And the monkey stickers, that's a state issue; but you can be sure that some states have spent quite a lot of money on stickers that suggest creationism and evolution stand on the same level of scientific footing.
The point is that while its true that the government spends most of its money on Medicare and Social Security, Bush is also blowing ALOT of money on socially conservative programs. The $39 million increase in abstinence education this year would have been more than enough to keep these clearly worthwhile science programs going at NASA had it received those dollars instead. But no, we're going to spend it on programs that have a clear history of producing and disseminating false, misleading, and distorted information about reproductive health. There's your Bush science right there, people.
Does anybody on this site actually know anything about space science?!
Yes. If your question is, does everyone here work with/at NASA and know all the facts, then no.
Does anybody have any idea what sort of science payload the Voyagers are carrying?
10 instruments supporting imaging, radio, magnetic, and spectral analysis. Some of the instruments have been deactivated to save power. Not great, but still the only thing we have that's 13 light hours out.
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.
If you can give me a probe that will overtake Voyager in 10 years, carry a more sophisticated science package, and be at least as durable and cost effective, then I say kill the Voyager program. If you are just hoping to get a bit more funding for a program that won't do anything near the same thing, then I say leave Voyager in operation.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
What we need here is a little out-of-the-box-thinking. Why not turn it into an all volunteer project? Here's our chance for one of the greatest open source hacks of all time. If we can create multiple operating systems and associated software with only ad-hoc means of funding, I think we can do the same with this project. Surely we could reverse engineer the transmission protocol which communicates with the spacecraft (even if the data is encrypted, its 1970's based encryption which we should be able to break). In fact what we are dealing with here is all 70's based technology. Moore's law to the rescue. But we'd also need a large antenna right? Well I have not done any signal-to-noise calculations, but what if we used 1,000+ smaller antenna distributed throughout the country? You know, like those large dishes from the analog satellite TV days. Okay, maybe the recievers would have to be sitting in a bath of liquid nitrogen. So what? It's cheaper than milk. And we might have to be syncronized in time and know the precise locations of each antenna. Hey, that's what the 'Net and GPS are for. There are a thousand other reasons why the pessimists might say this couldn't work, but pessimists never accomplish anything anyway, ignore them.
Having worked for NASA TWICE in my career, once in the late 80's and again in the late 90's NASA is ALWAYS underfunded. However, NASA wastes a LOT of that money they do get. They can't even determine if they get overcharged for a pencil. NASA is in dire need the kind of contract and expense reform the DOD had to do after the $2000 hammers were revealed. Also, scientists at NASA want missions to do EVERYTHING and they have zero concept of what it costs, then they continually polish things, underestimate timelines and then the projects take 3X as long as planned and eat the budget for the next 2 missions. It's not that NASA has bad ideas or bad scientist or bad engineers, it's bad managers mostly on the financial side. Along with a great case of not saying "NO" to new projects so that things like building maintenance can occur!! If everyone wants to continue to listen for Voyager (which is a very weak signal and hard to pick up out of background noise of the Universe) then they can start a private foundation to listen. After all, Bill Gates and others give many millions for things like AIDS research so I think they could give a few thousand for Space!