• PROJECTS
• THE PLANETARY REPORT
• PLANETARY RADIO
• WEBLOG
  • Archive
  • Future Space Events of Note
  • Special Coverage
  • Video Archives
• SOCIETY UPDATES

browse projects: Apophis Mission Design Competition Asteroid Impact Mapping System Catalog of Exoplanets Drive a Mars Rover Extrasolar Planets Transit Search International Lunar Decade LIFE Experiment: Phobos Mars Climate Sounder Team Website Messages from Earth Observing Earth Pioneer Anomaly Planetary Microphones S.O.S: Save Our Science! SETI Optical Telescope SETI Radio Searches SETI@home Shoemaker NEO Grants Solar Sailing Space Advocacy Space Information Stardust@home Target Earth Visions of Mars

browse space topics: 2001 Mars Odyssey Asteroids and Comets Cassini-Huygens Chandra X-Ray Observatory Chandrayaan-1 Chang'e 1 Compare the Planets Dawn Deep Impact Earth Extrasolar Planets Genesis Hayabusa (MUSES-C) Hubble Space Telescope Jupiter Kaguya (SELENE) Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) Mars Mars Exploration Rovers Mars Express Mars Global Surveyor Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mercury MESSENGER Moon Near Earth Objects Neptune New Horizons New Horizons Digital Time Capsule Past Missions Phoenix Planetary Analogs Planetary Exploration Timelines Planetfest 2008 Pluto and Charon Pluto Top Ten Postcards from Venus Private Missions Rosetta Saturn Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence SMART-1 SOHO Space Imaging Spitzer Space Telescope Stardust Trans-Neptunian Objects Ulysses Uranus Venus Venus Express Voyager Weekly Planetary Radio Trivia Contest

The Planetary Society Weblog

By Emily Lakdawalla

A conversation with Mark Sykes, Dawn Co-Investigator

Weblog Archive

Because so many of you have expressed interest in Dawn, I thought it would be a good idea to find out more about its troubles over the last several months, culminating in its outright cancellation yesterday, immediately following a House Science Committee Hearing on the NASA FY 2007 budget. So I talked to Mark Sykes, who is the director of the Planetary Science Institute and a co-investigator on Dawn.

I tend not to pay much attention to missions that aren't flying yet so all I really knew about Dawn to this point was that it was a Discovery mission (one of the lower-cost NASA missions) with a planned launch in May 2006 that would visit Vesta in 2011 and Ceres in 2014, and that it had been ordered to "stand down" in October. I told him I was sorry about the cancellation, and he said, "Yeah, well, but basically I've been hearing nothing but negative things out of [NASA] headquarters about this mission for years, and so when they did the stand down thing it seemed clear to me that there was a desire to cancel the mission."

Mark continued, "Here we were eight months out from launch, and they not only stood us down for three months but they forced a reduction in personnel at JPL and Orbital Sciences Corporation by more than two thirds." Orbital is the chief contractor building Dawn. Why the stand down? "They were really angry about cost overruns, tens of millions of dollars." The original budget was $373 million, and the mission had requested another 40. "And then they had some technical issues that they brought up about a xenon tank that wasn't behaving properly at twice the pressure it was supposed to operate at, and about some electronics associated with the ion propulsion. So they brought in an independent assessment team during the stand-down period to review this stuff. The conclusion of the independent assessment team, which was delivered to Headquarters on January 27, was that it 'does not see any reason that the DAWN Project cannot be achieved within the identified cost and schedule changes proposed.' In other words, there's no technical barriers to the project going forward.

"Part of the problem with cost is that there's a substantial part of the overrun that's caused by NASA headquarters itself. Their stand-down and reduction in force means that to get back up and running again, there's a significant fee. Plus, it delayed launch by 14 months. That adds tens of millions of dollars right there. You can't complain too much when you're the cause of part of the problem. We were canceled once before, on Christmas Eve 2003, and the reason was because, at the time, Deep Impact and MESSENGER were having severe cost overruns. And so Headquarters decided that the problem was that they didn't require sufficient cost reserves to cover that. So they changed the cost reserves requirements, and applied it retroactively to all the Discovery missions, which was Deep Impact, MESSENGER, and Dawn. We were in the middle of Phase B at the time." (Here's some information on what the different phases of mission development entail.) "They retroactively applied this to us, increasing our cost, but they didn't give us any money to cover it. They gave money to Deep Impact and MESSENGER but they didn't give us any money. And so as a consequence, we had to say, 'Okay, our plan was to go to Vesta and Ceres, now we're just going to go to Vesta.' Because to meet this new requirement we had to cut somewhere. And so they canceled us for de-scoping Ceres. But then we were able to bring Dawn back from the dead through Orbital Sciences giving up their fee, and some intervention by Congress, and NASA gave us some funds to restore Ceres."

Where is Dawn now? It's at Orbital Sciences Corporation, with 98% of its hardware delivered, including all thre of its science instruments, which, Mark says in a letter he is drafting to send to the House Science Committee, "represent another substantial European investment in a US solar system exploration mission. Germany is providing a double framing camera and Italy is providing a mapping spectrometer. The third instrument is a gamma-ray/neutron spectrometer provided by Los Alamos National
Labs. Needless to say, the Europeans are furious with the USA at this peremptory action by NASA." Most of the hardware has been integrated onto the spacecraft.

We had a lot of conversation about the context in which this cancellation happened, which was immediately after the House Science Committe hearing. (Not only that, but Mark said that the Principal Investigator, Chris Russell of UCLA, was notified of the cancellation while attending his mother's funeral. That's even worse timing than the Christmas Eve date of the first cancellation, but in all fairness I don't think that NASA headquarters can be blamed for it.) Mark sees the cancellation of Dawn as typifying the fact that the NASA budget "has its priorities upside down," valuing high-dollar, expensive missions over all else.

Instead, Mark said, he agreed with the point of view espoused yesterday by Planetary Society President Wes Huntress in his testimony to the House Science Committee. When budget pressures force cutbacks, Mark said, the priorities should be: 1) keeping the basic research and analysis programs healthy, so you can preserve the human capability to perform the research that is, after all, the goal of science missions; 2) funding basic technology development, to develop the technologies that will enable future missions to proceed when the money is there to pay for them; 3) fund smaller, competed missions like Discovery-class spacecraft, which are developed quickly and flown frequently and so can maintain the momentum even in the absence of larger missions; 4) fund medium-sized missions like New Horizons and Mars Reconniassance Orbiter; and finally 5) fund 'flagship' missions like Viking, Galileo, Cassini, or the Europa explorer. When the budgets get tight, Wes said and Mark agreed, delaying or cutting the most expensive missions will have the least long-term impact on the human and technological infrastructure that is necessary to support our exploration of our solar system when budget allows.

Wes Huntress's testimony is very much worth reading. He concludes,

The bottom line is that the future of our Nation's solar system exploration enterprise has been mortgaged. The momentum of current mission development will carry it for about two years, and then the bottom begins to fall. We must sustain the science and technology that will afford us a new future when we get there two years from now....

The Administrator's budget message said about the Vision, "we will go as we can afford to pay." But the only way he can pay is by taking resources from the future of science and robotic exploration. If these annual reductions in NASA's budget continue, and if NASA continues to drain resources from science and technology, then America can retire as the leading nation in the scientific exploration of space, whether by robots or by humans.