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 …

It’s also a bit unfair to blame NASA when the President and Congress give them a requirement to do something but not enough money to cover it. NASA is responsible for how they shuffle the deck, but the small deck is what was given to them.

Of course the President’s plan has always had a hole in it to my mind. End Shuttle by 2010 but not have a replacement vehicle in line till 2014? Hello, gap.

I think this mission may have become a victim of procrastination. Without a practical deadline for launch, the shortest delay was prone to being extended and spending beyond the program’s means could be rung up on a probe that hadn’t yet left the ground.

The Dawn project head (Chris Russell) has chosen to fight the decision, so I suspect you will hear more.

One other point in the costs mentioned should be the hundreds of thousands of euros spent. Since two of the three Dawn instruments were European, NASA has dug itself a messy hole with its international partners (German Aerospce Agency, Italian Space Agency).

I grew up in the smiling metropolis of Huntsville, Alabama, host to oodles of space-program stuff. Because the same city incorporates Redstone Arsenal on the military side and the Marshall Space Flight Center on the NASA side, it manages to get “trickle-down” benefits from both directions. Even if science gets shafted, the Chinese restaurants where engineers always have lunch can keep going, because the guys building missiles eat at the same buffets as the people designing Shuttle payload modules.

Not that the “trickle-down” system works perfectly, of course: a quick glance at the housing projects, etc., will indicate that. The graft at the top of the defense contractors operating in town is enough to turn a libertarian into a Marxist. During the civil rights movement, when other Alabama towns were making themselves famous — Selma, Montgomery, Birmingham — the Powers Which Be decided they needed to protect Huntsville’s juicy federal funding by protecting its image, so they paid off civil-rights leaders. How much will it cost us not to have a march in this town?

When people ask me where I come from, I always tell them I was born in a New Mexico border town but grew up in the Heart of Dixie, in the one city ever to have its cultural level raised by an infusion of ex-Nazis. I’m sure there are a great many people, in Germany and elsewhere, who would feel greatly uncomfortable naming a town’s convention hall the Wernher von Braun Civic Center. (“Vonce the rockets are up, who cares vere zey come down? Zat’s not my department, says Werhner von Braun…”) But it was the space program’s colonization of Huntsville which, more than anything else, made that town a pale blue dot in a red state. Sordid ironies. . . .

(You don’t see “Get the US out of the UN” billboards in Huntsville; you have to drive to Birmingham to see that.)

On a completely different topic, why do you suppose these colliding galaxies in Stephan’s Quintet are smiling?

The point is, NASA scientists/engineers/etc. try to work into the budget any problems, but they can’t possibly all be foreseen. And to be fair — and I’m not saying this is good practice — I’ll point out that a lot of private sector companies get away with worse.

“The cost for the entire mission (design, development, launch vehicle, instruments, spacecraft, launch, mission operations, and data analysis) must be less than $299 million. The development time from mission start to launch can be no more than 36 months.”

So, they already went 74 million dollars over budget and were asking for another 40 million dollars, and were already several *years* overdue.

Russell and Sykes would be facing jail time for fraud if they were in the private sector.

Must be really depressing to be a grad student or post-doc in the planetary sciences right now.