Spitzer Space Telescope May Be Up For Grabs (Update)
NASA might turn over management of the Spitzer Space Telescope, one of the Great Observatories, to private operator. https://t.co/tCXmQyJHjf pic.twitter.com/p8aMdrzwgB
— Spaceflight Now (@SpaceflightNow) July 22, 2017
At @NASA, we continue to explore new ways to maximize science/$. Wonder whether there are interested parties, finding the next #TRAPPIST1 .. https://t.co/O0M1ez40Qa
— Thomas Zurbuchen (@Dr_ThomasZ) July 22, 2017
Keith’s 23 July note: It would seem that the precedents set by GALEX and ISEE-3 Reboot have found resonance at NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. I wonder how one might apply to take over Spitzer? Will there be a formal call for proposals, a NASA procurement notice, or some other formal mechanism to solicit ideas? If so, when? I sent a request to NASA. Stay tuned.
Keith’s 25 July update: According to NASA PAO: “NASA has successfully operated the Spitzer Space Telescope since 2003. Based on the most recent senior review, NASA plans to end its funding for the Spitzer mission with the commencement of operations of the James Webb Space Telescope in 2019. NASA is exploring options to continue operation of Spitzer beyond March 2019 using non-NASA funding sources, including private funding. NASA is open to discussions regarding a non-NASA funded extension of the Spitzer mission.”
Is there actually some private individual or group willing to pay to continue the operation of Spitzer?
Hertz, the head of NASA’s astrophysics division, was quoted as saying, “..I’ve heard there are people discussing this…” So I guess that’s a yes, or at least a maybe.
Sounds to me more like someone picking up the Political Winds of the Day.
One thing to remember is Spitzer’s primary mission ended a while ago when the helium coolant ran out. It’s on a lower payoff secondary mission now with reduced capabilities.
And capabilities which are decreasing with time. Spitzer is on a solar orbit which drifts away from the Earth at something like eight degrees per year. As the Earth-Sun-probe angle increases, operations get harder. The need to point solar panels at the Sun, radiators away from the Sun and the radio antenna at Earth have become conflicting requirements. Not completely conflicting, but enough so that performance is reduced, and that gets worse as time goes on.
Well, sort of. Spitzer has actually taken more data warm than it did when cryogenically cooled. A large fraction of what it does now are exoplanet observations. This idea was laughable pre-flight. Only during the warm mission were long enough blocks of time available to characterize the instrument fully enough, or to perform the observations themselves. So in fact the warm mission has been a huge bonanza, just for an entirely different type of science.
Was there not a pre-flight plan for using the instrument after it warmed? In a bit of searching I’m seeing nothing.
Asking because I wonder why the current performance and data haul is such a surprise.
Edit: I see the question was partially answered below.
As I mention above, the answer was explicitly no.
I would be shocked if there were no pre-launch plans for a warm mission. But I would also be surprised if there were any official plans. NASA’s way of designing and building spacecraft is heavily focused on the mission requirements and building something that will satisfy them. Adding things which are openly extraneous tends to get people in trouble during reviews. On the other hand, scientists do tend to have ideas in the back of their heads and sometimes build in capabilities that covertly will have some extended mission uses.
This raises a bunch of questions.
First, if it is handed over through a competitive selection, how do they deal with the advantage CalTech/JPL has? Transferring operations would be very expensive, compared to leaving them in place and simply charging the work to a different account. Would JPL be required to keep operating the spacecraft for whoever won the selection? Even if there was a competing CalTech/JPL proposal which lost? It isn’t clear if they could firewall operations from the their own proposal team, or make a reasonable selection without input from the operator people at JPL.
Second, who pays for the antenna time? According to typical practices, I don’t think that’s included in the $11 million/year budget the story mentions. Also, as far as I know, NASA doesn’t rent out DSN time. They might provide it as part of a private-public partnership, and I guess that’s how it would work. To the best of my knowledge, there is only one privately owned dish associated with the DSN, and you’d want to have all the NASA DSN protocols, since that’s what the spacecraft and operations people are set up for.
Realistically, there is no way to hand over operations, the existing science center and JPL operations team would still need to be funded to do the job. The scheduling and uplink segment are so complex that to recreate it would take 1-2 years of development and testing. Spitzer only has a few years past the current 2019 shutoff, so there wouldn’t be time to redevelop this stuff.
I don’t think the DSN will be the long pole in the tent. The Space Communications and Navigation program that manages the DSN at HQ has been pushing to be more progressive for about a decade. They are working to standardize protocols, publish standardized pricing etc. Scheduling is hard – for the DSN, all of the relevant principal investigators look at the criticality of the mission and the pass (i.e. coverage of an orbit insertion for a low-priority mission can be more important than a routine data dump for a higher priority mission). NASA also routinely uses SCaN assets as trading leverage for things they want. Including the DSN time for free or at a reduced cost could easily be part of the space act agreement written to accomplish the hand-off.
I’m really skeptical. As fcrary noted, in order to downlink Spitzer has to tilt way off the sun axis, enough that it starts running power-negative, which in turn cycles the batteries, something which it never did prior to a couple years ago. Eventually the sun starts to peek over the sunshield and heat the telescope assembly (Spitzer relies on passive cooling to keep the two short wavelength detectors running). Now, there are political issues involved with NASA continuing to run a spacecraft in a mode where it is likely to fail, and be unrecoverable. So a third-party operator could provide cover for that. But since Spitzer operations and scheduling are complex and the software not really recreatable, someone would basically need to fund the existing science center instrument team, scheduling team, and health and safety. So we’re talking $5-10M/yr. Then they would need to buy DSN time as well. So, impossible? No. But you would probably get a couple years useful lifetime at most, and you would need someone with deep pockets to fund it.
I’ve never been happy with the, as you put it, “political reasons” against NASA operating a spacecraft until it dies. In some cases, there are planetary protection issues, and I understand that. But something like Spitzer is on a solar orbit and the odds against hitting anything are astronomical. Is it just that it would be embarrassing to be in the drivers seat when a spacecraft dies?
No. The issue is that uncontrolled loss of the spacecraft results in an “L” in the column instead of a “W”. Controlled shutdown is a “W”. Spitzer is far enough away that it starts to develop significant telecom issues. In particular, recovery from safe is problematic due to reliance on the low-gain antenna.
I can sympathize with the idea of recovering from a safing on a low-gain antenna. But I’ve worked on Cassini for years. I think we only dropped to the low gain once, and that wasn’t really a safing, but it was painfully slow at a range of 10 AU.
But what you describe is exactly what I meant by “embarrassing to be in the drivers seat when a spacecraft dies.” You might call it winning and losing, but that’s just because someone has defined “winning” as “being in complete control to the very end.” That definition might live in the minds of spacecraft operators and managers, or it might be part of an institution’s official policies (would a failure review be required?)
But it isn’t necessarily correct and does preclude some useful work. I note that Spirit and the Viking landers were operated all the way though to unplanned failures. It might allow, in the case of Spitzer (or any number of other spacecraft), a final engineering experiment phase of the mission. Let’s answer the question, “How conservative were those flight rules, and could future missions be less conservative?” (I.e. determine hardware performance and durability by testing to failure.)
I suspect the most likely path would be a consortium that wanted to fund the existing infrastructure for a dedicated exoplanet or wide-field survey telescope. Remember, while the asset is national, the science center itself (which handles scheduling and all but the last legs of uplink) and it’s personnel are Caltech, a private entity, not NASA. They are subcontracted. For that matter, as an FFRDC the JPL component might be much easier to contract privately as well.
It would really be nice if all future spacecraft/satellites/rovers be required to design into their architectures, the capability to easily hand over the spacecraft to another non NASA entity (university, company, etc.) following completion of the government funded mission (normal/extended). This provided them a known working spacecraft, known capabilities, a learning platform and a continuation of what ever research mission that that spacecraft was designed to do. Why throw away a potentially useful asset? Who knows, Viking might still be operating today.
The point you have raised is the key one. Trying to privatize operations of a spacecraft that was never designed to be privatized is just the government deciding it can’t afford the normal care & feeding army and instead deciding, at the last minute, to try a partnership approach. Instead, you must design in the capability for low-cost operations… preferably by having a commercial/charity partner from the beginning. Calling Jon Morse and Boldly Go…
The problem is that this requirement actually incurs extra cost. Just documenting an existing system is expensive. In the case of Spitzer, which I am intimately familiar with, even designing in features to allow an extended mission was off the table pre-flight. We suspected that Spitzer’s short wavelength detectors could, in fact, operate without the cryogen, but the extra legwork to prepare for that was an extra cost, and outside the budget envelope. As a result there was a real scramble when the cryogen ran out and an extended mission phase was approved to actually get everything (like modifying flight software) ready.
Well, if you could spend 5%more during development and get more science out of a privately-run extended operations period, that might be worth it for a Foundation to sponsor.
In a way, that might be possible. Several NASA programs (Discovery, New Frontiers and Explorer, I think) have provisions for proposals to include “enhancement” options. I think up-front, outside funding to enable a good, externally funded extended mission could fit in that way.
Can you expand a bit on this? Or point me in the right direction?
You ‘suspected’ that the detectors would work at a warmer temperature (albeit with shifted sensitivity no doubt). Wouldn’t the bracketed characteristics of the detectors be fully modeled before flight?
On the issue of the extended mission: with no pre-flight data on performance when Spitzer was no longer cooled, I suppose the extended proposal was based on data from the newly warmed instrument?
Was there no pre-flight contingency for how to use Spitzer after the cooling was no longer available? Put another way, how was the extended mission conceptualized before there was actual data on warmed performance? Or was it the case that extension simply wasn’t envisioned?
Spitzer in the warm mission relies on passive radiative cooling of the telescope and instrument package in order to reach the required detector temperatures. This cooling is a by-product of the thermal design used while the cryogen still existed. We knew pre-flight that the system would probably radiatively cool enough for the two shortest wavelength detectors to still function. However, the idea of an extended mission was not allowed to drive any mission requirement. Hence no work could be done more thoroughly modeling this, or testing the detector characteristics on the ground at non-cryogenic temperatures, or adding software features to allow this to work. All of that stuff costs money, and this was outside the cost envelope, because an extended mission is by definition not part of the funded mission. So most accurately the extended mission was a fantasy many people had before flight, but was to remain that way. When the cryogen actually lasted five years (twice the level 1 requirement) and the spacecraft and detectors were in surprisingly good shape, more money was approved for an extended mission component. That required changes to flight software, in-flight detector re-characterization, all sorts of stuff.
HQ hates extended missions. By definition they are an unplanned burden on the budget. Everyone builds their spacecraft too well, and they last too long, and soon supporting all these extended missions eats up the whole budget leaving nothing for future projects. So you have a political issue of balancing killing a functioning spacecraft vs. developing new ones.
“…the idea of an extended mission was not allowed to drive any mission requirement. Hence no work could be done more thoroughly modeling this… the extended mission was a fantasy many people had before flight, but was to remain that way.”
Are you seriously saying no one with this extended mission fantasy went into work over a weekend and did some unfunded modeling of passive cooling and instrument response at elevated temperatures? I understand your point, but I suspect some people had a better idea of the prospects than you suggest.
Then more people need to start using the KISS principle.
At least for planetary missions, NASA generally does operate spacecraft as long as they last (or nearly so; they often do controlled disposals before the things actually die.) At the moment, I think Juno and OSIRIS-REx are the only ones in their prime mission phase. All the rest, including all the Mars spacecraft, are in extended mission. Cassini’s prime mission, for example, ended in July, 2008. It’s only now being disposed of (September 15, 2017) because it’s essentially out of fuel and planetary protection requires a safe disposal. The last deliberate early termination was Magellan (although some of the more recent lunar missions might be debatable.)
As for handing off operations at the end of prime mission, I think the centers which originally operated the missions might want to keep them. They could point to the cost and complexity of handing off operations, and they do use extended missions for training. Typically new hires, but also students (interns.) And, in some cases, NASA missions are operated by non-NASA organizations (e.g. Kepler at CU/LASP or New Horizons at JHU/APL.)
Most likely candidate would be Planetary resources or other new startup interested in NEOs. If they could “pay by the drink” they could arrange some multi-day observations of some asteroids and perhaps get some spectra to give an indication what the composition is. Oooohhhh…… Platinum!
“NASA is open to discussions regarding a non-NASA funded extension of the Spitzer mission.”
Excellent. I like this idea. I’d like it even better if they did this on a regular basis; say a year of fully functional operation of the system – be it a satellite or a rover.
It is my opinion that NASA should not get bogged down in multi-year efforts when it’s resources could be better used elsewhere.