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The Planetary Society Blog
By Emily Lakdawalla
LPSC: Monday afternoon and "NASA night"
Mar. 14, 2006 | 12:46 PST | 20:46 UTC
After the Stardust sessions in the morning, I went out for a fine Indian lunch with several people and had a nice long conversation with Olivier Barnouin-Jha, who is best known as an impact experiment person but who has spent the past year or so working on the LIDAR team on Hayabusa in Japan. I know Olivier from graduate school -- he had already graduated and left Brown by the time I got there, but I met him through other Brown students at conferences like this, and I have always looked forward to talking with him because he is so good at explaining what he's working on (and also because he's just a nice guy).
Olivier talked about how Hayabusa was really a mission driven by engineering -- that is, it was intended more as a test of technology than a science mission. But he said the engineers learned that they needed analysis by scientists to help them to understand exactly where they were with respect to Itokawa. (Unlike giant planets and even medium-sized asteroids, tiny Itokawa has such an insignificant gravitational field that it's very difficult for navigators to be able to predict the spacecraft's position and course near it with any accuracy.) Olivier, who is working with the Mercury Laser Altimeter team on MESSENGER, went over there to try to understand what the Hayabusa LIDAR data could tell the mission controllers about where Hayabusa actually was. With regard to Itokawa science, Olivier was pretty excited about what he saw as the inescapable conclusion that Itokawa truly is an unconsolidated rubble pile, made of rocks only very loosely clumped with a porosity somewhere in the neighborhood of 60%. We talked about more stuff but there is a full morning's session coming up on Hayabusa on Friday, which will cover all of these science results in more detail and with pictures, so I think I will wait until then to talk more about it. Olivier mentioned that some of the pictures that Hayabusa returned have resolutions as high as mere centimeters per pixel. I can't wait to see those.
The next item on my agenda yesterday was NASA night. This is a one-hour meeting that happens every year at LPSC, where some folks from NASA Headquarters present the future plans of NASA to the audience. I was not looking forward to it this year, because I anticipated that it would be ugly due to the terrible cuts to science present in NASA's fiscal year 2007 budget. But of course I had to go to see what the NASA folks would say, and how the scientists would react. The room was absolutely packed with several hundred scientists as the presentation began.
Mary Cleave, the Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, was the main presenter, and there were also contributions by Andy Dantzler, who is the director of the planetary science division. I knew as soon as Cleave began speaking that it would indeed be ugly. She had chosen to present NASA's future as being bright and rosy. Perhaps there are great things in NASA's future, but I think she would have done better to acknowledge up front the fact that there are many fewer great things to look forward to than the folks in the room had been expecting.
Of course, it is worth acknowledging that NASA has indeed had a fantastic year. Continued success of the rovers and Cassini, Deep Impact, Voyager traversing the heliopause, the successful launch of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and on and on. And they should toot their own horns about that. But all the successes of the past couple of years, which have kept us all very busy, may well yield to a period in space exploration that will be far less exciting, with few launches and few events.
After talking about the successes, Cleave talked about various reorganizations of NASA (they talk about reorganizing NASA at every NASA night, so I'm afraid I never pay any attention, because I figure it's not worth learning something that will be different next year). Then she got to the budget. Immediately her language became more hesitant. I tried to write down what she was saying as verbatim as I could, but it may not be perfect: "What we did in trying to build this budget, we had unexpected budget liens in the shuttle program. And those liens needed to be covered. So there was no money left in aeronautics, so we were the only ones left. So we are having reductions in our growth to cover liens in the shuttle program. Compared to other agencies on the discretionary budget side, we are still growing, so we are happy. So the total decrease to our budget is 3.1 billion dollars from the FY06 budget runout."
In conversations afterward with other folks from NASA Headquarters, I heard that Cleave and Dantzler and others fought tooth and nail for science at NASA, and the budget situation was the best that they could do. I guess that politics forced Cleave to say "we are happy" about this budget, but there was a noticeable undercurrent of grumbling at that remark of hers. The mood in the room was rapidly declining.
I could go on with details, but the bottom line is that Cleave and Dantzler attempted to tell the scientists in the room that they should be happy about the 2007 budget, and the scientists were not in any mood to hear that message. They are angry about the cuts to missions like the Europa mission and Dawn, and to the research and analysis funding that is forcing them to cut postdocs and graduate students, and they wanted to hear Cleave and Dantzler, their advocates in Washington, acknowledge that it is a bad time for science. But during the question and answer session Cleave responded to one vituperatively angry scientist by saying "I don't know why you're so angry." It was kind of a bad scene.
What were people angry about? The people who were most angry were angry about the cancellation of specific programs, like Dawn, Europa, and the endlessly put-off Mars Sample Return, and they were angry about having to turn away students that they had already brought on board.
Another class of angry people was Europeans. Gerhard Neukum, who is a very senior German scientist at DLR, stood up and chastised the NASA representatives for just canceling programs with European contributions without any consultation of the European partners, remarking that NASA is increasingly being seen as an unreliable partner by Europe. His views were echoed by two other speakers from Europe.
Scientists were also angry that the budget did not seem to reflect the priorities set by the science community. The priority argument was primarily cited by the advocates of the Europa mission. Bob Pappalardo would not sit down until he got Cleave to acknowledge that Europa is the consensus highest priority of the planetary science community.
It was ugly enough that some scientists clearly felt that balance was necessary -- not to defend NASA, but to try to do something more than rant. One scientist stood up and said that he thought that one reason people may be so angry is that NASA failed to involve the science community in the incredibly painful decisions necessary this year in the budget process, and Dantzler acknowledged that and suggested some ways that communication may improve.
There's been a lot of hallway discussion surrounding the NASA night discussion and the budget situation in general. This is the largest Lunar and Planetary Science Conference ever. The amount of work being done in planetary science is increasing continuously, and the public is growing more aware of what's going on. The public is also increasingly aware that it's the robotic missions, not the manned program, which is producing the headlines. That's not intended to be a manned-versus-unmanned argument, just an acknowledgment of the fact that this year, it's the unmanned program that's producing the good news and the exciting results. There is a whole generation of new Mars scientists that is growing up with the incredible activity of six operational spacecraft at Mars. And with this budget, what do those people have to look forward to? It's a very scary future for scientists to look forward to. Sure, some years will be better than others; I think that most scientists would acknowledge that. But the scientists are looking at going from feast to famine in just a few short years; they're anticipating a drought, and are beginning to look around them and wonder who will survive. The senior scientists will probably all survive, but outer planets people may have to give up on their field, and without sufficient funding for students, everybody's research productivity will dwindle.
My job at NASA night was to step up to the microphone and say that The Planetary Society is trying to do something to make this future less bleak, by asking our members and supporters to make it known to Congress that they want to stop the drastic cuts to science. I called on the scientists to be involved just as we've already called on members. I said my piece and sat down, and Cleave asked "What was the question?" I guess I cheated in the question-and-answer session -- I had no question, but hopefully we have some piece of an answer for those angry scientists.
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