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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 think there are very few intelligent people who would argue with collecting data from Voyager 1 and 2 as long as they are still in operation. After all, these craft have (boldly?) gone where no manmade object has ever gone before. Out into deep space. Considering that it took 30 years for the darn things to get out there, do we really want to blow this opportunity over a mesely few million bucks? I mean, 30 years is some people's entire professional career!
That being said, I think this is an area where scientists tend to underestimate the value of manned space travel. You'll notice that as long as manned space travel exists, it generates excitement in the general population. And as it advances, young people dream of one day visiting the stars themselves. Remove manned space travel, and the funding to ALL space ventures will be cut. Joe Smith really has no idea of the significance of the Voyager program. To him it's just a piece of junk that the Klingons will blast out of space in a few centuries. But give him dreams of visiting the moon, Mars, or other interesting places, and he'll happily support funding for all forms of space travel.
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Do not look into the sun with your remaining $4.2 million.
liqbase
Okay, so NASA spends $15 billion of our money each year, and the Pentagon spends another $20 billion on satellites and rockets. It costs a billion to launch a shuttle, and there used to be four launches a year, before they started losing things so often. They even canceled development of the X-33, and sold it for scrap metal, after spending 912 million dollars on it.
But we can't afford to spend a measly $4 million to maintain three projects that are still returning useful, interesting data, and haven't disappeared behind Mars or killed anyone?
I guess they have PHBs at NASA too! Maybe it's just about PR...making things look good to the average guy on the street, who thinks going to Mars is way cooler.
(I have to admit, the headline "Interstellar Pioneers Facing Termination" made me wonder the Aliens had finally taked over ISS...)
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.
Doesn't our government spend that much money like, every tenth of a second? Geeze, Congress should be able to find that much money in the seat cushions of their couch.
We must continue to monitor V_y_ger's progress so that we aren't taken by suprise when he returns.
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Will the money saved enable NASA to save the Hubble Space Telescope?
If not, then what is NASA planning to study after everything shuts down? I mean the shuttles arent flying, Hubble's about to be scrapped...
Hey here's an idea, let's fake another landing on another solar system body!
We could use the money we save on scrapping these to help develop Iraq's space program! But seriously there are tons of other programs that the government should cut that are pretty absurd before they even think of scrapping a space program that is truly beneficial?
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While I'm not railing against the war, and I believe we should be spending whatever money is necessary to protect the troops, I find it interesting that it's science that gets shoved aside...
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The money needed to pay for that additional season of enterprise would pay to keep these running for quite a while.
So... THIS is how one of the Voyager spacecraft becomes a super-powerful entity and we have no clue whats going on when it comes back to kill us all.
If only we had kept monitoring the transmissions from the Voyager spacecraft, we'd be able to tell when it starts its homicidal rampage.
... and in the DRM, bind them.
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.
.. it's so expensive?
$4.2 million dollars to analyse incoming data? You could employ 80 PhD astrophysicists for a year for that much. Surely there's not so much information coming back as to require that much computer time?
I'm not trolling, I'd just love to know.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
There's no one as short sighted as a bureaucrat. I should know: I am one, and I work with them every day. We regularly do foolish things, to achieve short term, counter-productive goals.
See what I've been reading.
I mean, the V'grs havae a 28 year headstart. building a Human Resources probe fast enough to catch up with them may be cost-prohibitive. It might be cheaper just to keep 'em both on the books and write them off at tax time.
- Despite popular opinion, I am not perfect.
I'd suspect funding the Voyager probes would be a better (and maybe more ironic, given ST:TMP) use of their money than more episodes of that television show.
Imagine that: buying science instead of fiction.
This is insane. Sure some money will be saved, but nearly 30 years of funds will have been wasted. Do the math.
Thats what I was thinking. Why shut it down when you could give it to someone else? I'm sure there is another country, company, or group who would be willing to take control of these space craft and gather data if NASA is now bored with the operation.
I think it's sort of indicative of our priorities that we spend $160 billion+ on a fanastic romp in the middle east and barely feel the need to justify the expense and yet we have trouble coughing up $4 mill a year when it comes to funding a scientific expedition which has the potential for giving us greater insight into our place in the universe. its times like these that i wish i had the option of controlling what my taxes funded.
I can't imagine a worse idea in the space program than terminating these missions to save a half-drop in the bucket of the overall budget.
I've read a fair amount of discussion of how they're approaching the heliopause (the point at which the solar winds begin to be overpowered by interstellar winds) and, as JPL will say, "The thickness of the heliosheath is uncertain and could be tens of AU thick taking several years to traverse."
Considering it'd take billions more dollars and waiting decades to get that piece of data from somewhere else, I'd call it a bargain. I'm sure I don't know the impact of that information, but if something as fundamental as how far our sun's influence really extends is unknown, it seems like it'd be at least somewhat important.
I'm surprised North Korea hasn't just hacked the Voyager crafts yet. It wouldn't take much programming skills (just a seriously powerful transmitter/receiver) to upload your own firmware into those suckers that locked out anyone else's signal.
Maybe they should just open source the sucker. Let the open source community run the science. Put the sucker on sourceforge and give us access to the transmitters everyone once in a while.
Someone you trust is one of us.
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?
If a spacecraft is about to leave the solar system, then surely we should at least leave it running for a couple of years in order to get some more data on the Pioneer anomaly - it would be a shame to pass up on the chance to study one of the few unexplained anomalies in elementary physics...
Thank you.
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By my calculations at $166 million a day to be in Iraq, the US government could save the Voyager's first year's $4.5 million by leaving Iraq 39 minutes early. That seems reasonable.
Those who can do. Those who can't sue.
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
The administration has been anti-science since the beginning and shows no signs of letting up.
That's why Bush was pushing for a Mars mission, right?
EXACTLY!!!
Remeber, the perfect is the enemy of the good. Cheap talk about a Mars mission that will never happen is cover to cut practical science today.
This is exactly the same as the cheap talk about a "hydrogen economy" which has been used to prevent progress on fuel economy today.
I disagree with the idea that without manned spaceflight, the entire space program is doomed. NASA's webservers (OK, JPL's) have consistently collapsed under the load of people checking the initial data returns from the unmanned probes. The Mars rovers, Galileo, Cassini-Huygens have all been huge successes. I think you underestimate the people's willingness to pay for good science, as well as their ability to understand what makes good science.
There will always be those who cling to the absurd notion that humanity will spread to the other bodies in our solar system. There will also be those who denounce spending a penny on "frivolous" ventures like space probes as long as Just One Child Goes Hungry here on Earth. I'm a fan of spending money wisely. We could be littering the entire solar system with probes if we'd stop spending people up to film themselves drinking spheres of Tang or working hard raising spiders in microgravity in the experiment submitted by Mrs. Wachowski's third-grade class in Salina, KS. Bang for buck.
Sadly, the current administration policy is to strip the entire space program of money to pay for the absurd Moon-Mars Initiative. Fortunately, the current administration has only 3 years, 10 months, and 10 days remaining. If we're lucky NASA will survive that period with no significant losses beyond Hubble (which is a doozy of a loss).
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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.
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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?
Half of our budget goes to Medicare and Social Security. How much of that money do you think is wasted due to government bureacracy?
Now, how much of the budget goes to the (albeit stupid) programs you mentioned?
Yet no spending cuts* can make it through Congress, because both sides are weighed down by lobbyists who will paint any cuts* in the most drastic light possible to sway public opinion. Everyone wants to cut spending, but not on THEIR projects, which means nothing gets cut.
* Note: 'cuts' are a misnomer. No spending is ever actually cut by Congress. When they use this word, what they really mean is they are just SLOWING the GROWTH in spending on a particular program. Most programs have built in "raises" each year in spending. That way, Congress can say, "Instead of giving your program 2% more money this year, we're only giving it 1% more -- we're cutting spending!"
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
If they terminate funding and someone doesn't find a way to sneak commands to the spacecraft on the sly, contact will be lost, the Voyagers will go into their command reset "safe modes" and we may never regain contact with them.
This is shameful. They don't cost much to run but they give us valuable data on the Sun's influence and how it influences the interstellar medium. The data helps refine models on solar wind dynamics, wind influence and strength over distance, particle interactions with the interstellar medium and ultimate tell us where our neighborhood ends and interstellar space begins.
To the layman, yes, go for it. But these spacecraft are the only two vehicles this far out. It would take a decade or more to get a new spacecraft out there and if they cut funding to these, what makes you think they'll spend the billions of dollars and time needed to design a new spacecraft to explore the same region. Probably not in my lifetime.
I'm a big fan of the VIM. I stand in awe of the foresight and talent of the engineers who built the spacecraft and the fact they remain operational after decades in space. The communications needs aren't that much and it is incredible that these faint whispers can be heard from so far away.
Someone can't just pick up this mission from NASA. They would need a network similar to the DSN to communicate with the spacecraft and the technology is so old that it is improbable that someone else could learn how to communicate and interact with the spacecraft in time. Likely the only hardware and software on earth that can understand the Voyagers exists at NASA and if shutdown or disposed of, this knowledge would be lost forever.
If someone were to pay my living expenses, I would happily work to help keep the VIM running. There is grandeur in hearing the whispers of ourselves from so far away and we should listen until they can't talk to us anymore.
Cut some other program to help fund it. I can think of several.
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.
Sadly, the current administration policy is to strip the entire space program of money to pay for the absurd Moon-Mars Initiative. Fortunately, the current administration has only 3 years, 10 months, and 10 days remaining. If we're lucky NASA will survive that period with no significant losses beyond Hubble (which is a doozy of a loss).
You people make no sense. The last president to do ANYTHING about improving the space program was Reagan. He spent money trying to undo the boneheaded space choices made by every president and congress after Kennedy. Once Reagan was gone, the status quo was again reasserted. I don't see ANY evidence that ANY valid choice in president would improve the space program.
If you want science done at NASA, it needs to be a re-election issue for congress critters. The president has some say, but at the end of the day it's congress who holds the keys to the purse. Making them see the light would be far more effective than complaining about the effectivness of the president's attempts to encourage the space program.
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It lets him claim to be interested in spaceflight while he kills off Voyager, the Shuttle, and Hubble. Bastard.
More nonsense. Did Bush call up O'Keefe and tell him to scrub the shuttle mission for Hubble? Nope. That was O'Keefe's call. Did the president call up O'Keefe and tell him to stop flying the shuttle? Nope, that was O'Keefe's call. The president actually asked what he could do to get manned flight back on track.
Now Voyager is facing cancellation from a desk jockey inside NASA and you think the president had something to do with this, how? The program is facing cancellation because some beaurocrats are worried about losing their jobs. The shuttle incident made things look very bad for NASA, and the inquery board's findings of "too much management" made them look worse. Managers inside NASA are trying to look like the "fiscally responsble" ones so that it's not their head on the chopping block.
Stop trying to make everything into a Democrat vs. Republican argument. It has no bearing on reality and only makes people here look stupid.
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I can't believe NASA has been pissing away our tax dollars on some unmanned satellites out in the boondocks of the soloar system. By killing the support for this program we will save enough money to launch one more shuttle flight (where the REAL science is done) in just 302 YEARS!
($4.2 million / 1.3 billion average shuttle flight cost.)
As I mentioned in a post yesterday, I love Microsoft because they "...will make the decision based on what is best for customers."
Let me add that I love NASA because they always base their budget priorities on how to get the most scientific knowledge for every dollar spent.
Oh, and they're immune to politics and mere PR crap.
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If they can scrounge up millions to try to keep Enterprise on the air, I'm sure funding ACTUAL REAL SCIENCE should be a more worthwhile cause.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
That's nothing. Divide it by the US population.
Just my two cents. (literally)
This news makes me very, very sad and I can feel your pain...
I was not born yet when the Pioneers/Voyagers were launched, but when I started to learn more and more about the world around me as a kid.. I became fascinated with space at a very young age.
I just cannot tell you how much both projects and their teams have inspired me throughout the years... and how much I wish I had been born earlier and been part of the whole those mission teams!
Those probes are IMHO still on the frontier of our knowledge and technological capabilities as humans.
Even though they're 'just' made with technologies from the 1960's and 1970's... I have an enormous amount of respect for the way those probes have been built, their ability and stability.. and their precision!.
IMHO, these missions are one of the 'wonders of the (tech.) world' and a beacon for what we should be doing as a race: explore the Universe!
(indeed, instead of all those pathetic wars on this planet)
Thank you and your collegues for everything!!
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.
Geeze, I can't believe I just read through this entire thread and haven't seen a single mention of what people (at least those who are US citizens) can actually do about this. Go here:
http://www.congress.org/
Type in your zip code. Look at the list of your elected officials. Call them or send them a paper letter (even better if you include a donation in it). I did it, and you can too. Believe it or not, congresspeople actually listen to their constituents.
That said, I hope in the future more and more science-related projects get handled by private groups, like the Planetary Society's Cosmos 1 launch of the first solar sail spacecraft next month. That way, instead of whining to congresscritters about using other people's money for projects we care about, we can just give the money ourselves. I'm sure the actual Voyager space program would be able to raise at least as much money as the Enterprise television show.
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