State of the Blog (2011-2012)

Yes, folks it's time again for the annual year-in-review here on HTWT. I'll link to last year's post so that when I come back here next year I can follow the digital trail of breadcrumbs into my own past. Without fear of reversal, I can say that this past year was truly an exceptional one on just about every level. Right now things are really looking up for the future and I hope that my current streak continues.

Tempted by the Fates (WW110)

 

Dr. Catherine Neish stands atop one of the Kelso Dunes in the Mohave Dessert, California. Check out her website to learn more about her publications, activities and to view a slideshow of Catherine in front of things geologic.

We come now to our tenth episode. For those of you who think in astronomical terms, that means that we have increased our repertoire by an order of magnitude since our first presentation! For our tenth, we introduce a new interviewer to the mix - Marianne Mader. Her choice of interview subject is one whom I know well. My office mate for nearly four years at the University of Arizona and Titan expert, Dr. Catherine Neish of APL at Johns Hopkins. Those regular readers of this blog will know that nearly two years ago, I interviewed Dr. Neish for our sister program "York Universe." Luckily for us, she has always had time to speak to us and to you about the goings on out at Titan and close to home with our Moon.

In that respect, Dr. Neish is somewhat unique, someone who works across the solar system, but mainly on satellites instead of their primaries. However, Titan is large enough that it can be considered a world in its own right and in many ways is as interesting if not more so than some full-fledged planetary bodies. I've always been impressed by Dr. Neish's ability to make a lasting contribution no matter where she goes and you can include our analogue space missions here at Western University in that mix. Last summer, she was an integral member of Mission Control.

The ILSR Analogue Team relaxes at the Grad Club following the successful completion of week one of operations. Your humble narrator is located at the end of the table, clutching a green concoction. Catherine is at right (my left). Incidentally, WW Co-Host Raymond Francis can be seen at my right and Marianne Mader is second from the right.

As usual, my introduction can be found beneath the cut.

Hazardous Journey (WW105)

This week's guest, Melissa Battler, was our CAPCOM on the Barringer Lunar Analogue Mission (BLAM). As the main link to the astronauts in the field she fulfilled a vital role and one very much appreciated by myself as the Flight Director (FD).  You can see a photo taken from that mission above in which Melissa is wearing her trademark headset (top) and below at her station, situated right next to the FD.

Some might be tempted to wonder, why have a single person dedicated to speaking with the astronauts at all? Why can't the flight director or Mission Control as a whole just speak to the astronauts? Well there are a couple of reasons. First, it makes sense for there to be a single point of contact with the astronauts, someone with whom they can build up a rapport. That way, they always know information is coming to them through a single channel - this removes the potential for conflicting instructions. Secondly, mission control can be a bit of a crazy place, even with the FD directing traffic, and it takes a special skill set to be able to filter through all the information passing back and forth. A stellar short term memory and an ability to understand what directives are simply proposed and which have been decided is definitely a requirement. I stepped in when Melissa had to leave the room and I can tell you - her job was not an easy one!

There is another more subtle reason that the CAPCOM role exists, by having a person dedicated to communicating with the Astronauts, they gain an advocate at Mission Control. It is for that reason that CAPCOMs are typically current or former astronauts themselves. They can put themselves in the shoes of the astronauts who, in turn, know that the CAPCOM understands their plight. Melissa was an excellent candidate to fulfil that role precisely because she has had so much experience simulating Mars missions in the past. That exploration is part of what makes her interview with Alyssa Gilbert so memorable.

But you can't forget about the science either, and Melissa was kind enough to share with us - and with you - her expertise with extremophiles that live in the high arctic in complex chemical environments. I hope you enjoy the interview as much as I did. If you didn't have the chance to listen on Monday over at Astronomy.fm you can download a copy over at the Western Worlds webpage. And as always, my intro is under the cut.

Don’t mind the noise; we’re building a new Mission!

Welcome Back to the Moon! The view from the ILSR Field team in northern labrador. Read all about their adventures here!

It's the end of August and the change of seasons is in the air. Labour day is almost here, the US Open starts up tomorrow, and it's time for us to wrap up the ILSR Analogue programme with one more field deployment. As part of the famed "Anablog" I contributed a column which I've copied below. The original can be found here. For more information as it happens, keep up with the blog!

What’s changing as we move from SLAM to KRASH.

The end of the Sudbury Lunar Analogue Mission (SLAM) was, in a way, just the beginning. Almost immediately, our thoughts turned from the hectic two-hour cycle of Mission Control to think about how we would manage actual live astronauts in the field in addition to our robotic rover. Could we use the experience gained in June to our advantage? What could stay the same? What would need to change?

This weekend marks the culmination of that summer of planning. The team is now in the field and operations go LIVE on Monday, August 29 for the Kamestastin Research Analogue Site for Human exploration, better known in these parts as KRASH. KRASH brings us back to the Moon by heading up to Northern Labrador. There we will simulate two different missions. The first scenario will play out near the rim of Kamestastin Crater as two Astronauts, Anna Chanou and Raymond Francis, imagine themselves to be visiting a site that has been well-characterized by a precursor landed rover, as simulated in August of last year.

Landsat Image of Kamistastin (Mistastin) Crater. The golden area in the upper right has been dubbed the "Rim Site" whereas the lower left is "Disco (Discovery) Hill."

The Sudbury Lunar Analogue Mission Wraps Up

The ROC-6 Rover plays tourist after a successful mission exploring the Sudbury Impact Structure. The rover is shown in front of the Giant Nickel in this photo from the Mission's Anablog.

I'm on the train back to Toronto from Mission Control for SLAM (the Sudbury Lunar Analogue Mission) and I have to say: it has been a stressful, yet rewarding, couple of weeks. In some ways I am reminded of how I felt following last year's DPS conference (as I expressed in a New Year's Eve Post). Certainly, I now feel more a part of the CPSX community than I did before. But what it really feels like is Phoenix Redux. Sure, it was only two weeks - with no Mars Time issues - but all the intensity was there. Now that it's over, I am a tad bit sad, but at the same time, I am proud of what we accomplished.

Each according to his gifts: Analogues, A Canadian Contribution

This beautiful image taken by U of T's Tim Barfoot shows the ROC-6 Rover that will be used to simulate a Lunar Rover this summer as part of an Analogue Mission. It is shown here at one of the CSA's 10 Analogue Sites: Lake Orbiter, Devon Island.

How can Canada best contribute to Planetary Science and the development of Space Missions? Should we launch our own superior spacecraft? Develop our own cadre of scintilating supporting scientists? Engineer the finest quality instruments? Well, we do currently do all of these things. But while we do posess high quality in each domain and make valuable contributions to missions, it is unlikely that we will become the largest source of either.

However, there is one domain in which we have a distinct advantage. Ours is a large country with many different environments. These provide excellent places to check-out landed spacecraft equipment and develop techniques to command them. If this testing is done in what we call a "flight-like" manner (that is to say that we force upon ourselves the constraints which would exist were the mission actually occuring on another planet) then we have a special name for the exercise: an Analog Mission.

Such a Mission should have all the necessary simulated pieces in place to mirror an actual mission. These include a realistic instrument platform (i.e. a lander, rover or other spacecraft simulator), realistic instrumentation, realistic communications and a remote mission operations team which works on a schedule that is itself suitably "flight-like."

Space & Politics in Canada: Fallout from the 41st General Election

I, like many others, watched a generational sea-change in the politics of Canada last night. As Maclean's Magazine's Colby Cosh aptly put it this morning "Four Parties enter, Two Parties leave." The leftmost of the mainstream parties, the NDP saw huge gains in an "orange wave," bringing them up to official opposition status with 102 seats in the house of commons, more than double their previous high of 43. Meanwhile, the Liberal party - above 50% in popular vote and dynastically described as Canada's "Natural Governing Party" just ten short years ago - fell to third place for the first time in 144 years. But for those of us involved with space the real story is that after a 5-year test drive of conservative minority governments, the electorate has handed over the keys of the country to the Conservatives with a majority likely to last at least until 2015.

Bob Richards' PSERF, March 25, 2011

Bob Richards, a "Space Dragon" who wants to expand the reach of the human race... 

and make a profit doing so!

In his talk last Friday, Bob Richards, a silicon valley space entrepreneur referred to the folks that blog about him. By virtue of this entry in my PSERF handbook, I suppose that now includes me. I cannot admit that I know the man well*, but he is an interesting fellow and his heart seems to be in the right place. For this special speaker, we met in a special location; not in the Biological and Geological Sciences Building, but over in the Ivey school of business. This was an appropriate choice, as Bob's expertise is in the area of space business. His primary goal these days? Expanding the economic sphere of the Earth from Geosynchronous orbit out by a factor of ten to encompass the Moon.

The presentation was free-flowing and Bob stayed afterwards to chat with several of us at the University's Graduate Club. While he spoke without slides, his talk was not unusual fare for PSERF which has attracted interesting speakers of all types, from experts on Space Weaponry through discussions of early cartography and the "inside baseball" story of science-driven space missions. Largely, I'm getting the impression that PSERF exists mainly to expand our concept of what we can do with these planetary science degrees of ours. In that vein, Bob had a great deal to offer us by describing in detail his experience with the emerging field of private space exploration.

Conversations at the LPSC: Dr. Michael Bland

Dr. Michael Bland surveys the landscape
in this photograph taken in 2006 in Death Valley, CA by Catherine Neish.

Tonight we move a little bit away from the Decadal survey on Astronomy.fm 's Live from York U. While the topic still comes up in reference to EJSM/JEO I focused on speaking with Dr. Michael Bland about his work studying the icy satellites of Jupiter and Saturn. Mike is a tectonics expert who looks at the geophysics and geomorphology of surface features to glean information about the interiors of these satellites. His specialty is the Jovian moon Ganymede, the largest of all satellites in our solar system and really a world in its own right with a diameter almost 400km larger than that of Mercury. Ganymede may not be the first body you think of when tectonic features come to mind. Certainly, the cracks formed on the surface by internal stresses are less dramatic than they are on Europa and less explosive than on Enceladus. But the terrain is more varied and perhaps less understood on this world.

Back to Bushnell

When I was 8 or 9 years old, I remember having an interest in astronomy and so my parents bought me a department store telescope, one christmas. While it wasn't one of the dreaded Tasco 'scopes, it was only a slight improvement: a Bushnell. It was refractor a couple of feet long with a two-inch plastic lens, two 0.85" eyepieces (15mm and 5mm) with astonishingly small apertures, a couple of plastic barlows and a star diagonal. To its credit, it did have a rudimentary viewfinder and extendable wooden legs for the altitude-azimuth platform. Unfortunately, aside from the Moon, I wasn't really able to see much of anything, despite many nights of attempts. I do remember one very bright star which I used to look at and watch how it would shimmer and change colour while close to the horizon (Based on the year and the view from my window, Stellarium suggests that this was Sirius). Given my inability to get much out of the thing, I pretty much abandoned it and let it sit idle in my room waiting for the night or two a year when my curiosity would grab at me and I would haul it out again.

2011 PSURF #1: Dr. Phil Stooke

Giovanni Schiaparelli's map of Mars showing the imaginary canals (image from wikipedia)

Maps, Maps, Everywhere! That was the theme at this year's inaugural PSERF meeting at UWO given by Phil Stooke. By the way, PSERF stands for Planetary Science & Exploration Research Forum, and truth be told, I'm writing that down here not only for your benefit, but also so I can refer back later and remember what it stands for. To say that the discussions are eclectic is a bit of an understatement. This was my third meeting and so far we've had a presentation on Space Weapons, a report by CPSX's own Bhairavi Shankar on an impact cratering short course, and now a discussion of early terrestrial cartography.

Still for those of us interested in space exploration, maps provide a useful example. In its purest sense, exploration is about "filling in the gaps." Maps also give us a good way to examine the state of knowledge at any one time. For instance, if you look between the "Cantino Planisphere" (a world map from around 1500) and compare it to "The New and Correct Map of The World" from 1700 (you can find both in the slides linked to this article) you'll see how the age of maritime exploration managed to give us a better picture of our own planet.

Dr. Catherine Neish (Conversations at the DPS, profile 2)

A world of possibility: Dr Catherine Neish at Racetrack Playa in Death Valley, CA in 2006. Photograph by Diana Smith.

It was only recently, once I finished a dissertation on "habitability," that I finally admitted to myself that I am a bit of an Astrobiologist. Perhaps a bit of the reason I was so slow to come to that realization was that I tend to eschew the sorts of things that are in fashion and, especially a few years ago, nothing was more in fashion than Astrobiology. However, this week's Astronomy.fm interview subject, Dr. Catherine Neish, has always been an Astrobiologist and has said it loud and proud. Even during her undergrad at UBC, it was a topic of interest and led her to complete an REU at the famous Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico and to the presidency of their Astronomy club. Since that time, you could often see the SETI screen saver putting away, participating in a program to help process all the accumulated data, searching for signals from the sky.

When it comes to academics, she's no dilettante either. At the University of Arizona, Catherine held down a Julie Payette fellowship from the Canadian Government, the most prestigious fellowship on offer, and was a Galileo Circle Scholar. At the time, she specialized in laboratory experiments to simulate the prebiotic chemistry of Saturn's moon Titan (a tough task, to be sure!). Somehow, even with all of that she managed to participate in student government as the president of the U of A's graduate and professional student council. She also was the Principal Investigator of her Team-X class.

These days, she holds down a postdoctoral fellowship at NASA's Applied Physics Lab in Baltimore, MD, where she works on Lunar Science with the mini-RF team, a component of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Also, as a dual citizen, she straddles the line between the Canadian take on planetary science and that of the United States, able to move effortlessly from one to the other. As such, she offers a unique perspective on the space aspirations of both countries, which I enjoyed fleshing out during our conversation.

Catherine's Interview runs Monday, November 1st at 8PM EDT over on Astronomy.fm's "Live at York U" program. I'll be on-air to discuss further the topics from the interview, so if you'd like to ask a question, join us over at www.yorkobservatory.com. I'll happily answer any questions from the audience on the air!

DPS Notebook, Odds and Ends

Still emptying the DPS journal folks, one more to go after this one, but that one won't be about DPS per se, just general musings on the profession, conferences, etc. (something I wrote at 4AM on the plane home, so I've yet to decide whether to throw it up).

The first thing to mention is that I was lucky enough to get a total of six interviews with early career folks at the DPS and I feel they went rather well. After speaking with my colleagues at "Live at York U" over on Astronomy.fm, we have come to a decision regarding the schedule. Things kick off with a little introduction from me on October 18th, including some clips from talks by Ray Arvidson, Bob Pappalardo, Steve Squyres and Jim Green, then we get into the meat of things:

October 25th - Dr. Jason Barnes (Idaho)

November 1st - Dr. Catherine Neish (Johns Hopkins/NASA-APL)

November 8th - Dr. David Minton (SwRI/Purdue)

November 15th - Dr. Britany Schmidt (Texas)

November 22nd - Dr. David Choi (Arizona)

November 29th - Dr. Jonathan Fortney (Santa Cruz)

Note that all interviews will run over on Astronomy.fm at 8PM Eastern, 5PM Pacific. I believe that we will be shifting with the clocks when that happens, so for listeners in Arizona, note that time change. I am also happy to report that all the interviews will run in complete form, and have only been slightly cut. So look for 20-30 mins for the interviews.

I'm planning on doing a little blurb about each of the subjects on the day their interview airs. But I will reveal this much now: in addition to planetary science we all share a connection to the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona. Some of us are still there (Choi) and most of us got our PhD's there (exception: Schmidt [UCLA]). In part I picked these people because I was familiar with them, even if I don't know them that well personally. But it is a testament to the program at LPL that I didn't have to look outside to find a wide range of expertise and planetary targets for study. We will be spanning the entire solar system both in time from its formation to the present day, and from the Earth, through the Asteroids, Jupiter, Europa, Saturn, Titan, the Ice Giants, the Kuiper belt and on to Extrasolar Planetary Systems.

Are you a Planetary Scientists and would like to be the subject of a future interview? Drop me a line in the comments! If you're located in the Greater Toronto Area or will be at next March's LPSC, we can arrange something taped, otherwise we can do a live interview. Either way we'd love to hear from you!

Other interesting tidbits (based on my #DPS2010 posts):

(1) Mars just keeps getting more warm and wet in the past - we've found exposures of the missing carbonates exposed by impact craters all over the place. The absence of carbonates was a major mystery for a long time. However, it seems that much in the same way that most of the water-altered minerals at Gusev were buried by later deposits, the carbonates are not absent, merely covered up! I was less impressed by the atmospheric modelling teams who used today's martian terrain and obliquity to describe the movement of volatiles 4 billion years in the past. While it's true that we don't know what that Mars would have looked like, it seems clear that Tharsis, at least, would not have existed. Since, in the current day, Tharsis is a major obstacle for a moving air mass and causes a great deal of atmospheric condensation through orographic cloud formation it should not be present in past models. Still, the authors did point out that it is difficult to support liquid on Mars with the faint young sun, even if you assume a very thick 5 Bar CO2 atmosphere.

(2) A consensus is emerging over lunar swirls - as someone who has done some geomorphology, I'm a sucker for an interestingly shaped surface feature. The lunar swirls have been a mystery for a long time since they were first seen in the 1960s. In an impressive series of talks in the lunar session, observations made by LRO placed brick after brick in the foundation that these are features in which variations frozen into mare lavas have been emphasized by differential space weathering. The anomalous magnetization of these features show that they deflect the solar wind. Thus, in addition to their differing magnetization they show differing albedos and a lack of solar-H implantation (so no hydrated water). However, Radar backscatter shows no difference in roughness, implying that the swirls are only skin deep (less than 15cm)!

(3) The disappearing exoplanets announcement - a great deal of excitement surrounded a talk called "Title Embargoed." After all, if we couldn't know the title ahead of time, it must have been a pretty big discovery! However, through the magic of delayed peer review, the presenters took to the stage only to announce that Nature would not permit them to speak about the work. Speculation as to what was to be reported was rampant, as were thoughts as to why the reviewers might be drawing out the process. In this highly competitive field, it could be that the reviewers are stalling until they can replicate the result. Or it could be that the discovery is itself uncertain and the authors are having difficulty satisfying the reviewers that their discovery is genuine, above the error bounds of their measurement. For an example, just take a look at the discovery (or not) of an earth-sized planet just this past week.

(4) Titan surface geology outpaces our wildest hopes - data from Radar and VIMS were presented in which wave height in the Titanian lakes was constrained both from specular glinting and backscatter. As well, the controversial proposition that the equatorial "coffee ground" sand dunes show interspersed liquid hydrocarbon seepage was debated.

(5) Faster computers make dynamical calculations better - some of the major problems in solar system formation are beginning to sort themselves out, in particular the long-standing puzzle of why Mars is so small. It seems that the solution may be that as the Giant Planets migrated inward then outward, they created a sharp edge to the disc of planetessimals which formed the inner planets. As well, the outward migration would have scattered a great deal of icy material in past the solar system's snow line, enhancing the amount of water delivered to the terrestrial planets. This is troubling from an astrobiological point of view, since to make this situation work you need two large gas giants which form early and in just the right places and then evolve until they hit a resonance with one another many millions of years down the road. How common is that type of formation? At the very least it adds another term to the drake equation.

Belated report on NASA Night

Sorry for the wait, folks, but I've been slammed with work and such for the past few days and am only now getting to posting some of my conference notes! This one deals with the NASA night that was held during the conference. I'll also have at least one more posting and a wrap posting in a day or two (I hope!) which deals with the random collection of other notes I made. So without further ado, I give you NASA Night at the DPS!

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The NASA logo, affectionately called the Meatball by the community.

Tuesday night was the annual NASA night here at DPS. Basically, it's a town-hall style meeting in which NASA, through the planetary science director, updates the community on what has been happening over the last year, what issues are outstanding. After that they take a number of questions from the community. One of the real treats of last night was a half-hour session devoted to an update on the Planetary Science Decadal survey, given by the chair, Steve Squyres.

Squyres revealed that the first draft of the Decadal Survey has in fact been submitted to the NRC, just this past week. This draft will next undergo peer review and should be available for release by the end of February 2011 and will be presented formally in march at LPSC (The Lunar and Planetary Science Conference). Now while Squyres could not reveal the contents of the report at this stage, he was able to speak in broad strokes about what we should expect. First of all, this decadal survey had an additional constraint compared to previous decadal surveys. Not only was the committee tasked with identifying the best science to be done, but they were asked to determine the cost of doing that science and to use that cost estimate as a factor in ranking what should be done. The result may be less of a guideline, as previous decadal surveys have been, and more of a concrete and implementable plan.

To that end, the survey committee sought out a great deal of mission assessment (millions of dollars worth) and then had the numbers checked over independently by Aerospace Corporation. There are exceptions. First of all, the smallest missions, the Discovery-class, will not be ranked as these are meant to respond to opportunities and discoveries as the decade goes on. As well, the survey committee was asked to not interfere with the current New Frontiers selection process, and so the three surviving candidates - OSIRIS, SAGE and MoonRise - were not evaluated. It should be interesting to see what makes its way into the final report. You could certainly tell that Squyres was excited and wished he could just go ahead and spill the beans right then and there.

Following the decadal survey update, Jim Green, the planetary science director at NASA Headquarters described the highlights of the year past and the year yet to come. Two items stuck out in my mind. First, there is a real bonanza of activity taking place over the next 600 days or so, something that NASA is describing as the Year of the Solar System. Given its length, it's a Mars Year, as Green pointed out. It also has a website, http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/, and a new educational software package named “eyes on the solar system” which was demoed here at DPS and will go live at the end of the month. Over the course of this time, we've got the release of the decadal survey, the arrival of Messenger at Mercury, and the launch of three spacecraft over four months in 2011 (GRAIL [moon], Juno [jupiter] and MSL [mars]).

The second item is the difficulty that NASA is having in getting the Pu-238 that is required for NASA to run planetary missions beyond Mars. As we get further and further out in the solar system, the amount of solar flux available to power spacecraft gets less and less, so much so that by the time you get out to the orbit of Jupiter, where the flux is less than 4% of what it is at Earth, it is especially impractical for spacecraft to be solar powered, although Juno intends to try it.

Instead, spacecraft are powered by the radioactive decay of Pu-238. This material is packaged as alloy at far from weapons-grade concentrations in a series of aeroshells which are intended to survive a launch-pad accident. Meanwhile, the heat given off by the radioactive decay is harnessed as a power source, classically using a thermocouple run in reverse, to produce an RTG, or radioisotope thermoelectric generator.

But the total amount of Pu-238 is limited, and it has been more than 30 years since Pu-238 was last produced by the United States. As such, the stock of material has been steadily diminishing, despite purchases from the russians, so that currently there is insufficient plutonium to power all the NASA missions that are on the books. This includes efforts to extend the lifetime of the current stock by utilizing more efficient heat utilization methods, such as sterling cycles (SRGs) which are much more efficient and thus require less plutonium. There have also been efforts to front-load the usage (since the stock naturally decays away and less is left on the shelf each day) by offering incentives in the recent Discovery AO to teams proposing SRG power sources. A large fraction of the 28 propsers reportedly took them up on the offer.

This is an issue of particular concern to the DPS, which has less of a Mars-component than other planetary science conferences, and the division membership has been writing letters to congress about the issue for several years. This year, there was a positive sign in that the approvals bills for NASA and the DOE (Department of Energy) both talked about the desire for DOE to restart Pu-238 production. NASA was even given approval to spend 15 million dollars on its share of this program.

However, the approval of administration budgets by congress is a complicated process with an approval and appropriational level. That is to say that NASA may be “approved” to carry out activities, but the money required to do them may not be “appropriated.” Sure enough, in the appropriations bill for the DOE, language on the restart of plutonium stated that since NASA was the only public user of Pu-238, it should have to shoulder the entire cost burden, some 90 million dollars all told. So unfortunately, it doesn't look like much is going to happen on this issue this year.

As a final note, an old classmate of mine at LPL, Terry Hurford, was announced as one of the new names at NASA HQ. He will be a program scientist in the OPR (Outer Planets Research) division of the NASA R&A Program, and largely takes over for Curt Neibur who becomes project scientist for EJSM.

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Following NASA night many of us took off for an important "AG" meeting. The AGs are Assessment Groups and many of the popular destinations in the solar system have one to help prioritize our exploration and science activities. For instance, I get a great deal of mail from MEPAG, the Mars Exploration Program Assessment Group. The AGs have their international counterparts too, the WGs. For Mars that would be IMEWG, the International Mars Exploration Working Group. However, the AG I was headed for was much more social in nature. The BWEAG, or Beer and Wine Exploration Assessment Group, was conceived and chaired by Andy Rivkin. It reminds us that conferences are not just a place to listen to talks, but to interact socially with your peers and discuss what you learned that day. Many a new collaboration has been formed at places like meetings of the BWEAG. To my knowledge, there is not yet an IBWWG, but just in case Andy comes up with one, you read it here first!

Reviewing the Reviewers – A Commentary on the Augustine Report

The much awaited report by the panel tasked by US President Obama to provide a Review of the U.S. Human Space Flight program will have to wait a few more weeks. However, a 12-page summary is already available (you can read it for yourself here: http://www.nasa.gov/offices/hsf/home/index.html). The reaction to the report seems mixed and spans the gamut from describing the options presented as too expansive, just right or too conservative. Some of this is described here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/science/space/16nasa.html?hpw or for a slightly more detailed version try http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0909/15augustine/.

There do appear to be a few things that are widely agreed on. The first is that no matter what we do, there will be a gap in the ability of the United States to transport personnel to orbit. Since the committee is assuming a baseline additional two year slip in the Ares-1 program, if it is selected, this gap would be of order seven years. Second, under the current budget, the time required to obtain sufficient heavy lift capability to return to the Moon stretches out a very long way into the future, and may not even be ultimately feasible. Thirdly, de-orbiting the ISS in 2016 potentially poses a significant risk to US international participation in future space endeavours.

However, the current baseline is achievable without these delays with a modest increase in NASA’s budget from the current $17.6 billion to around $21 billion. That level of increased funding would also permit other options for exploration as well. Whether that money is forthcoming is yet to be seen. The house committee on Science and Technology seems enthusiastic enough; however, NASA’s long term budget was cut earlier this year by the democrats and expected additional funding from the Bush administration for the original Constellation program in 2004 never arrived. So whether these moneys will be provided are anyone’s guess.

Let's delve a little more deeply into the summary report itself. The meat of the report is table 4-1 which describes five different ways forward some with several sub options. The first is the program as-is, the second extends the life of the ISS out to 2020 and replaces flights to LEO with a commercial option. However, if that $3-4 billion is added, additional options become available. These can be used to increase the rapidity of the Ares program (Option 3) to put it back on track, extend the ISS life with a commercial options while doing the same (4A) or closing the gap in human space flight by recertifying the shuttle out to 2015 (4B). Additionally, and most excitingly, option 5 moves past the paradigm of heading first to the moon by considering various ways in which the current program and technology can be leveraged to expand NASA’s role beyond earth orbit and into free space.

While the job of the panel was simply to list alternatives on which the White House and Congress will ultimately decide – and Dr. Augustine refused to endorse any one option – I suspect that the committee’s heart belongs mainly to option 5. They talk about how it would be possible to achieve firsts in free space at a rate of about one per year, visiting lagrange points, earth crossing asteroids and the moons of Mars without the kind of funding increase that a full Mars mission would require. These are, in other words, the types of missions that inspire people to go into science and engineering and dream of being astronauts.

I think that this is the kind of program that I can get behind. The moon, while it might be interesting and worthy of more research is a place we’ve already been. Building a base there is a laudable goal, but can wait. Either way, it does seem clear that NASA’s future lies outside of Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Hence, the committee also highlights supporting a commercial presence in LEO for all options except the program of record.

Former Administrator Griffin has spoken out against this proposal by stating that the commercial space industry is still nascent and has a long way to go before it can provide safe, effective transport to LEO. He’s right – but not because of a lack of technology or ingenuity, but for lack of a bankable reason to develop that capability. Thus in the same way that the airline industry grew thanks to subsidies for air mail delivery, challenging private industry to take up the transport of crew to LEO and the ISS would spur forward the development of this capacity quickly.

Ultimately, this change could be the greatest benefit of a slightly redesigned program. By commercializing LEO, launch costs could be reduced and the space industry stimulated. This would pay dividends to any space travel initiatives, and holds out the possibility of eventual affordable commercial flights to LEO for ordinary citizens. Once individuals have had that experience, I doubt that support for further expansion into space will be hard to come by.

As I’ve said in the past, ultimately what it comes down to is a question of purpose for NASA. They can move progressively onward and upward, ceding the ground where they have sown the seeds of development to private industry. Or, they can fall back and get out of crewed spaceflight, concentrating their resources on cheaper robotic exploration. Or they can do nothing and continue the current trajectory of chipping slowly away at the agency until only enough funding remains to keep the engineers and scientists employed and the lights on in the NASA centers.

We can and should do better. So I’ll be watching the full report and the reaction to it closely. For as difficult as it might be to change horses in mid stream, it’s more dangerous still to risk all that the agency has built over the last fifty years in planning for the future. I think the Augustine panel understands that and I think there's a good case for optimism going forward at this point.

Who am I?

Let me introduce myself. My name is John Moores and I'm a Planetary Scientist currently working in Toronto, Canada. I graduated last fall with a doctorate from the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona where I studied under Peter Smith, Principal Investigator (or P.I. as we call him - watch out for plenty of acronyms on this blog) of the Phoenix Mission. Prior to my time at LPL, I completed a Bachellor's Degree in Engineering Science at the university of Toronto.

I've worked on a bunch of space missions (Phoenix, Huygens) and hope to work on a bunch more, with a little luck. Scientifically speaking, I seem to enjoy studying water particularly in its frozen form. I did my dissertation on different types of water on Mars and am really excited about studying comets, glaciers, clouds and icy satellites. Even ice on the moon, which hopefully we'll know more about soon once the results are in from LCROSS (which successfully launched today - congrats to them and the LRO spacecraft which shared the fairing).

If you "want to know more" (*) feel free to drop by my page over at www.lpl.arizona.edu/~jmoores.

Next post: Actual content (I promise)

(*) That line from "Starship Troopers" has to be useful for something, seared as it is in my brain. Those looking for (good) Heinlein, give "The Moon is a harsh mistress" a try. It even fits in with today's theme.