Lacking funds to build its spacecraft, the VERITAS project team goes to Iceland
Because NASA has cut almost all funding for the VERITAS mission to Venus in order to fund its overbudget, badly managed, and behind schedule Mars Sample Return mission, the VERITAS science team, held over with only a tiny holding budget for the next seven years, has taken a geology trip to Iceland to study the volcanoes there.
Early last month, one such field campaign took the mission’s science team to a barren and rocky region in Iceland. There, they studied rocks and surfaces near an active volcano named Askja. Such volcanic areas are being used as analogs of Venus to understand the different types of eruptions that may occur on its surface, and to test out various technologies and techniques to prepare for the VERITAS (or Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography and Spectroscopy) mission, which is not expected to launch sooner than 2031.
The article at the link focuses on this research, but the real story is this quote:
The VERITAS science team — which is being supported by a shoestring budget of $1.5 million until 2028, after NASA pulled the mission’s funding earlier this year and disbanded its entire engineering wing — collected samples of young rocks and recent lava flows near the Askja volcano that will be analyzed in a lab, according to a NASA statement.
The reason the budget was pulled was to scrap together any funds available from within NASA’s planetary program for that Mars Sample Return Mission, which is doing to the planetary program what the Webb Space Telescope did to NASA’s astronomy program: killing it. As long as NASA and Congress remain committed to that sample return mission, do not expect many new planetary missions to other planets to fly. Its budget has already quadrupled, and its launch is already expected to be delayed. Worse, the mission’s basic design remains tentative, with many major components nothing more than cool graphics on powerpoint presentations, despite having spent gigantic amounts already.
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Because NASA has cut almost all funding for the VERITAS mission to Venus in order to fund its overbudget, badly managed, and behind schedule Mars Sample Return mission, the VERITAS science team, held over with only a tiny holding budget for the next seven years, has taken a geology trip to Iceland to study the volcanoes there.
Early last month, one such field campaign took the mission’s science team to a barren and rocky region in Iceland. There, they studied rocks and surfaces near an active volcano named Askja. Such volcanic areas are being used as analogs of Venus to understand the different types of eruptions that may occur on its surface, and to test out various technologies and techniques to prepare for the VERITAS (or Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography and Spectroscopy) mission, which is not expected to launch sooner than 2031.
The article at the link focuses on this research, but the real story is this quote:
The VERITAS science team — which is being supported by a shoestring budget of $1.5 million until 2028, after NASA pulled the mission’s funding earlier this year and disbanded its entire engineering wing — collected samples of young rocks and recent lava flows near the Askja volcano that will be analyzed in a lab, according to a NASA statement.
The reason the budget was pulled was to scrap together any funds available from within NASA’s planetary program for that Mars Sample Return Mission, which is doing to the planetary program what the Webb Space Telescope did to NASA’s astronomy program: killing it. As long as NASA and Congress remain committed to that sample return mission, do not expect many new planetary missions to other planets to fly. Its budget has already quadrupled, and its launch is already expected to be delayed. Worse, the mission’s basic design remains tentative, with many major components nothing more than cool graphics on powerpoint presentations, despite having spent gigantic amounts already.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
They should say they are Ukrainian. The government will give them billions.
It has to be observed that the problems that scuttled VERITAS go even deeper than Mars Sample Return’s crowding-out effect; NASA’s investigation last year revealed how badly overstretched (and, it seems, mismanaged) JPL has become as it has taken on more and more missions in its portfolio, and JPL struggles ever more to recruit and retain top engineering talent against a growing commercial space sector. The Covid lockdowns made it all worse, of course; but it looks like VERITAS was going to struggle even in a world where MSR got cancelled.
Good things are still happening at JPL, but one wonders if NASA would not be better off if its science portfolio were more evenly distributed to its other centers. Or, for that matter, if Mars Sample Return were taken off the front burner of the stove for a long, hard look at other ways of getting samples back from Mars.
A 2017 horror movie called Life is about a retrieved soil sample from Mars containing an unstopable alien monster. Verrrry scary!
Richard M wrote: “Good things are still happening at JPL, but one wonders if NASA would not be better off if its science portfolio were more evenly distributed to its other centers.”
JPL seems to be the best run of the centers. I would keep the planetary missions there.
I am disappointed but not surprised that the sample return mission is a disaster. Planning for this overall mission was poorly thought out. It was a nice idea, but they decided to plan only for the sample collection and then at some future time figure out how to bring them back to Earth. I wonder if that future time will ever come, because they haven’t yet done a good job of figuring it out.
The right way to do a mission is to plan the whole thing before starting. Instead they planned only half the mission hoping that the second half would somehow work out. It was a half fast (say that three times fast) plan.
The idea of returning samples to Earth was that insitu analysis is limited in its scope, and the ability of various labs on Earth is extensive. However, instead of getting the higher quality analysis of the samples on Earth, we may never get any analysis of these samples at all.
Starship crews will simply have a scavenger hunt for the samples in 10 years.
“Good things are still happening at JPL, but one wonders if NASA would not be better off if its science portfolio were more evenly distributed to its other centers.”
The funny part is that JPL is not technically a NASA center; it’s owned and operated by Caltech. It’s just that NASA is pretty much its only customer.