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.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
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.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
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.