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NASA Wants Private Company To Take Over Spitzer Space Telescope (spacenews.com)
schwit1 writes: NASA has issued a request for proposals from private companies or organizations to take over the operation of the Spitzer Space Telescope after 2019. SpaceNews reports: "NASA's current plans call for operating Spitzer through March of 2019 to perform preparatory observations for the James Webb Space Telescope. That schedule was based on plans for a fall 2018 launch of JWST, which has since been delayed to the spring of 2019. Under that plan, NASA would close out the Spitzer mission by fiscal year 2020. That plan was intended to save NASA the cost of running Spitzer, which is currently $14 million a year. The spacecraft itself, though, remains in good condition and could operating well beyond NASA's current plan. 'The observatory and the IRAC instrument are in excellent health. We don't have really any issues with the hardware,' said Lisa Storrie-Lombardi, Spitzer project manager, in a presentation to the committee Oct. 18. IRAC is the Infrared Array Camera, an instrument that continues operations at its two shortest wavelengths long after the spacecraft exhausted the supply of liquid helium coolant. The spacecraft's only consumable is nitrogen gas used for the spacecraft's thrusters, and Storrie-Lombardi said the spacecraft still had half its supply of nitrogen 14 years after launch." The way a private organization could make money on this is to charge astronomers and research projects for observation time. This could work, since there is usually a greater demand for research time than available observatories.
...then the alleged Administration should put more money into research. China and most of the rest of the Asian countries understand research is the gateway to a better future. Hell, even the Arab countries get it. Africa gets it. Would someone please send a memo to la Presidenta Tweetie that research matters, but you do not get to dictate the results.
Thomas Friedman had a great op-ed in the NYT about the U.S. military in Niger. The entire Sahel is under threat from climate change. With their economic prospects dimming, the young men are easy targets for Daesh recruiters. The Knob's response is to send in the U.S. military. Even Mattis recognizes the futility of that policy and once commented that without a functioning State Dept and programs designed for economic development, the U.S. will have to spend much more on bullets. Too bad he's another eunuch in the court of someone who, in Friedman's article, is too dim to connect the dots.
The way a private organization could make money on this is to charge astronomers and research projects for observation time. This could work, since there is usually a greater demand for research time than available observatories.
How many of those astronomers and researchers are receiving funding from the US Govt? Paying the $14 million/year will likely be cheaper than privatizing it then paying for access. Of course, NASA might save money themselves and not care that the govt. is spending 2 dollars to save 1.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Just wondering, now that it's run out of its cryogenic coolant, are its infrared sensors in the optimal wavelength to "see" Dyson spheres? (I guess that means it's looking for objects at about 300K).
If so, that would be a really long-shot project to try using it on but if it has nothing else to do maybe some billionaire could fund it on a whim.
On the other hand, just how much nitrogen propellant is left? If the orbit could be adjusted so that it could focus just on the dark side of the earth (wasn't blinded by daylight), perhaps it could be used as the ultimate "night vision" device. The DOD or CIA might be very interested in having something that could see, with extreme sensitivity, stuff in the dark. Of course this might mean a BIG orbit change, going from L2(?) to some sort of sun-synchronous halo orbit around the earth. Still, if they're willing to go slow, maybe they could use the "interplanetary express" or whatever it's called to use the bare minimum of propellant by exploiting chaotic hills and valleys in gravitational fields.
Or maybe it could be used for brown dwarfs or wandering interstellar planets (big ones that would still be glowing in the infrared).
Or maybe it could be used, like the Hubble, for an extreme deep field survey to see the furthest objects in the universe. Since it has nothing else to do, it could be left to train on a single "spot" for thousands(?) of hours collecting one photon at a time. The extreme red-shifts it would collect would be from the very furthest objects at the dawn of cosmic time.
Maybe it could be used for making a "heat map" of the moons of Jupiter or Enceladeus and look for cracks in the ice. Or, for that matter, if it could be repositioned (again needs fuel) it could look for ice on our moon.
I wonder what a long period comet looks like in the deep infrared as it approaches the sun from a great distance. Might see some interesting plumes/ejecta.
sorry had a lot of coffee so just rambling. Probably a lot of these have already been tried
But then again, maybe not enough government money in it for him to bother with.
Maybe the can have a garage sale.
How about we take it over? We can crowd source the initial operating cost until we get up and running to charge for its use. How many slashdoters are in for this?
Things cost money. In Gov-speak, 14 million pays for about 30-40 people, from janitors and secretaries and IT up to engineers and instrument scientists, plus office/lab space and IT. Probably includes communications costs. Most definitely includes the overhead (~30% probably) of doing business the Government way. That's a slightly above average number for operating a satellite but you've got to remember that it's not a run-of-the-mill comm bird; it's a one-of-a-kind instrument. One-of-a-kind anything costs money because it requires one-of-a-kind people who know how to run it. Maybe you can trim a million or so, but if government's gonna run it, that's how much it'll cost.
Now if this thing were fully privatized and handed off to an organization without FAR strings attached to the way they have to do business, they might be able to keep the same people, pay them about as much, but save a good portion of that overhead.
>. A trivial thought experiment is the comparison between research and distribution of a vaccine which can eliminate a crippling and/or fatal disease entirely (similiar to the Polio vaccine) and research for a treatment that allows people to live with said disease. In the hypothetical case where both were known to be possible, private industry would quite obviously pick the latter, as it would have the best projected profit margin.
That's an interesting thought, but factually FAR more money has been made selling billions of doses of the vaccine, including boosters, than could ever be made selling treatment. The fact is, because vaccines sell $55 billion every year, Merck did invest over a billion dollars in vaccine R&D before bringing the meningitis and HPV vaccine to market.
You're simply wrong on the facts.
Have gnu, will travel.
If I had mod points, I'd give them all to you.
That's 2 of us so far, I guess that would be $7 million each.
Mayyyybe this would be OK if, and only if, the private company has to buy the telescope at full price and pay for any US government resources it uses to communicate with it. Otherwise it's another case of taxpayer-funded infrastructure being given/sold for pennies on the dollar to companies who then turn around and charge more for it that what it was costing taxpayers to maintain in the first place.
And if the $14 million/year that NASA is saving is less than what government-funded scientists (and NASA themselves) would have to pay the company for time on the telescope then it should most certainly not be handed over.