Presently the JPL Dawn people are working as if Dawn was not cancelled because … they never received an official Dawn cancellation letter from NASA HQ. The cancellation did not follow normal protocal, in addition, which is to have a ‘hearing’ where the team can hear the cancellation reasons and have an opportunity to respond. They had _no_ opportunity to respond, in fact, which is especially egregarious given that the words in the media for the cancellation gives reasons that are inaccurate or not representative of the real issues.

Last Tuesday the JPL director met with the NASA head, Dr. Griffin about the Dawn mission, and Griffin agreed to hold a meeting where the team can make their case. The meeting (at the moment unscheduled — but in the next few weeks) will be chaired by two people who have extensive robotic mission experience, so we expect/hope the outcome will be fair. The meeting should be quite technical and hopefully will address the points that the Independent Assessment Team made, which everyone feels was quite fair too. In fact all of the issues in the AIT report that could be a ‘problem’ for the mission have been addressed and are solved. Technically the mission is in very good shape.

The later brings up another point, which is that missions in any stage of development are a series of engineering exercises to be solved. Unfortunately Dawn is now being scrutinzed by people who have little mission experience, so that any engineering discussion of a routine problem is being magnified and blown out of proportion as a ‘big problem’. Sometimes the team doesn’t even hear about those issues until they read a press report, so how can one possibly correct such sideswiping? At this point there are so many inaccuracies about the Dawn mission that the team strongly feels that they must be given a chance. So we hope that the outcome will be well. Today, the Dawn team is quite optimistic, in fact, that the Dawn mission will survive this mess and go forward.

Tomorrow we have a Dawn Payload telecon at our normally scheduled time, but I’m sure it will not be a discussion about sizes of nuts and bolts on the spacecraft but rather more information from the payload project to the engineers about the cancellation.

Personally, I think one good idea to finish the mission is to seek private funding from a Paul Allen equivalent, to find a rich and crazy space enthusiast who has 40 million dollars to invest in a vision about our solar system formation and two asteroids, but I’m not sure if the space science community is ready for that.. Anyone know if the Google heads are space freaks…?

And why didn’t Mary Cleave simply send Dawn to the Moon? Then it would have satisfied NASA’s new Moon and Mars agenda, she could say that bin Laden has terrorist training camps there to justify it, so then NASA could qualify for war dollars, and then the US government could say they are making the Home Planet better and safer for all.

(yes, the last paragraph was a joke.. )

http://space.com/news/060303_dawn_cancelled.html

From which I’ll quote aparagraph if I may .. :

“When word came last year of the stand down, Dawn’s principal investigator, Christopher Russell of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) told SPACE.com that the mission could tolerate a later launch date – without any science impact. He remained hopeful that NASA would allow the mission to proceed to launch. “I am having a difficult time processing and accepting the cancellation,” said Lucy McFadden of the Department of Astronomy at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland and a Dawn team member. “With the success of the Discovery Program’s Deep Impact and Stardust missions, and the recent and exciting scientific results from the Hubble Space Telescope on Ceres…we were poised to emerge into the asteroid frontier with the Dawn spacecraft,” McFadden told SPACE.com. McFadden said that scientists can better understand asteroids as true protoplanets, “if we could only send the spacecraft there.” Furthermore, there are equally intriguing clues to the intricacy of Vesta, a very different asteroid that was also on Dawn’s trajectory, she explained. “There are hundreds of people in this country and in Europe who have worked on the [Dawn] project for four years and had committed another decade to it…and now we are dropped,” McFadden said. “What can I say? It makes me cry.”

- Via Space.com item as linked above

Nothing about it on the JPL, NASAor Dawnhome pages as yet -they’re certainly not trumpeting the news.

I’ve now read in the Sykes letter linked to here that – get this – they broke the news to the Dawn projects head, Dr Russell at his mothers funeral. And as noted by the BA himself after Mary Cleave had testified before the Science Comittee w/o mentioning it there Do these people have any shred of compassion and honour? I doubt it.

I just hope it can somehow be revived – wonder if they could give all they’ve built to the ESA and get Europe to take over?

For those who might want to check the Dawn mission website is here :

http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/

No comments there on its cancellation yet but may be updated …