NASA Spitzer coolant loss: Future of Warm mission

Faced with a budget crunch, NASA is likely to shutter its Spitzer space telescope, an infrared space observatory, the fourth and final of NASA's Great Observatories.

The decision may help the US space agency to pump in the saved money to fund the functioning of Hubble, Kepler, Chandra and other orbiting observatories, the US space agency said in a statement.

NASA took stock of its fleet of orbiting astrophysics telescopes and decided which to save and which to shutter based on the findings of an independent review panel and turned down the Spitzer space telescope’s request for an extension.

“To me it is really sad that this country can not find just a few million bucks more to throw into this to keep these things active and running as they should be,” senior review panel chair Ben R. Oppenheimer, an astronomer at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, was quoted as saying.

However, for many, the end of road for Spitzer do not appear as abrupt as they could see it coming.

Spitzer was launched in 2003 as a multipurpose observatory targeted at the low-energy infrared wavelengths of light blocked by earth’s atmosphere.

Spitzer finished its prime mission in 2009 when it exhausted its supply of liquid helium coolant used to chill the instruments.

The loss of the coolant left two of Spitzer’s three instruments unusable, but two of the four wavelength bands on its main camera continued to operate as the Spitzer Warm Mission, Nature reported.

“Right now it can take images in a couple wavebands at tremendous sensitivity, but compared to what it used to do, its capabilities are far reduced,” Oppenheimer said.

“The committee felt that instead of chopping off a bunch of money from other missions, if we end that one large mission we can save everything else,” he explained.

This infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows the Helix nebula, a cosmic starlet often photographed by amateur astronomers for its vivid colors and eerie resemblance to a giant eye.

The Helix nebula, located about 700 light-years away in the constellation Aquarius, belongs to a class of objects called planetary nebulae.

Discovered in the 18th century, these colourful astronomical beauties were named for their resemblance to gas-giant planets like Jupiter.

Read more about the future of a warmer Spitzer and its role in providing new scientific discovery in the stark coldness of space. 

Planetary Scientists Protest: NASA Budget Cuts Proposed for 2014 'Disastrous'

Supporters of planetary science are rallying against NASA's proposed 2014 budget, which they say unfairly guts funding for solar system research and exploration.

The Obama administration unveiled the budget plan April 10, requesting $17.7 billion for NASA — $50 million less than the agency got in 2012.

The budget must be approved by Congress before it becomes official. Under the budget proposal, planetary science would receive $1.217 billion in 2014.

Discounting the $50 million earmarked for producing plutonium-238, which fuels deep space vehicles (this used to be paid for by the Department of Energy), and $20 million for asteroid detection in service of a future manned asteroid mission, this represents a $268 million cut from planetary science funding levels approved by Congress for 2013, advocates said.

Carl Sagan

"The Planetary Society has deep concerns about the continued effort to defund planetary science in NASA's 2014 budget proposal," wrote officials from the society, which was founded by astronomer Carl Sagan to promote solar-system exploration, in testimony submitted to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology April 24.

"Without immediate investment in technology and mission development — not possible under the FY14 proposal — the United States will go 'radio dark' in almost all regions of the solar system by the end of the decade."


In this still from a NASA video, a robotic spacecraft's capture bag swallows an asteroid in order to return it to Earth. 

NASA plans to retrieve an asteroid and park it near the moon by 2025, possibly even by 2021, so astronauts can explore it.

CREDIT: NASA

The proposed budget would include $105 million in funds to support an asteroid-capture mission and other asteroid studies, but eliminate Europa Clipper, a planned robotic mission to Jupiter's intriguing moon Europa, which harbours an ocean buried beneath its icy surface that may support microbial life, and current missions, such as NASA's Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn and the Messenger orbiter around Mercury, may come to premature ends.

Bill Nye

Bill Nye, chief executive officer of the Planetary Society, called the budget "shortsighted and disastrous" in a letter urging supporters to write their Congressional representatives in support of planetary science.

The organization aims to send 25,000 messages to Capitol Hill by April 28.

A group of lawmakers also joined in the campaign, penning a letter to NASA administrator Charles Bolden on April 19 asking that he and the Obama administration rethink their 2013 NASA budget, which is still unfinalised.

Senator Barbara Boxer

"We write to express opposition to any Fiscal Year 2013 NASA Operating Plan that disproportionately applies sequester and across-the-board cuts to the science budget," wrote Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) in a letter signed by Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Representative John Culberson (R-TX).

"While we fully understand that the funding levels enumerated in the bill and report are subject to change to reflect the across the board and sequester cuts, we expect that the balance among programs will remain consistent with the structure directed by Congress."

ESA budget cuts a major blow to CarbonSat - Earth climate science

CarbonSat Image Credit: Astrium

ESA’s funding shortfall is bad news for CarbonSat, a mission aiming to track atmospheric carbon dioxide.

For Europe’s space chiefs, the outcome of last week’s European Space Agency (ESA) budget negotiations was better than expected, given the continent’s economic troubles.

But for Volker Liebig, ESA’s head of Earth Observation programmes (EOP), there is a sting in the agreement.

The multi-year budget that member states approved — which falls some €2 billion (US$2.6 billion) short of ESA’s proposed spending of about €12 billion — could force him to postpone or cancel a mission aimed at pinning down the mysterious carbon sinks that are slowing the rise of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere.

Ahead of the budget negotiations in Naples, Italy, on 20–21 November, Liebig had hoped to secure around €1.25 billion for new research satellites.

With France, Italy and Spain contributing much less than expected, he received €1.9 billion for Earth-observation projects.

But €808 million has already been allocated for a new generation of weather-forecasting satellites, leaving him with little more than €1 billion for research missions.

“We have to discuss with scientists in the next few weeks what to do,” Liebig says. “But we will not be able to develop all the science satellites we wanted to.”

Most vulnerable, he says, is a planned €250-million climate-change mission scheduled for launch in about 2018.

One of the two contenders for the mission, CarbonSat, would map atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane at high-enough resolution to investigate a long-standing puzzle: why only about half of the CO₂ emitted by human activities remains in the atmosphere.

Scientists assume that the rest is absorbed largely by the oceans and plants, but ground-based monitoring stations are too few and far apart to pinpoint the sinks.

Satellites could fill in the gaps in the picture, but in April ESA lost contact with Envisat, the one satellite providing such data (see Nature 484, 423–424; 2012).

Neither Japan’s existing Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite nor NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2), scheduled for launch in 2014, will map greenhouse-gas concentrations in as much detail as CarbonSat, which would survey the whole globe with a resolution of 4 square kilometres.

“The information that it would collect is essential for developing, implementing, and monitoring greenhouse-gas-emission policies,” says atmospheric physicist David Crisp of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who is the science team leader of OCO-2. “A timely launch of this satellite should be among the highest priorities of ESA”.

CarbonSat’s competitor for ESA funding, FLEX, would also help to pin down carbon sinks, by measuring the faint fluorescence generated by plants during photosynthesis — a measure of how efficiently they absorb carbon.

“The last thing we want to do is to destroy the forests or whatever is absorbing almost half of the CO₂ that we are emitting,” says Crisp.

“Wouldn’t it be good to know where these processes are occurring?”

Budget Cuts Hit NOAA Aquarius Underwater Laboratory - YouTube

The future of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Aquarius Reef Base laboratory, the world's only undersea lab appears bleak owing to budget cuts from the Federal Government.

The NOAA was under orders to tighten up and the $3 million annual budget for Aquarius was eliminated, ABC News reported.

Though an Aquarius Foundation is trying to raise funds to maintain the lab, its efforts may not raise adequate funds to fund active work from the lab. Meanwhile, the lab's supporters are hoping a large donor will come forward amidst criticism that it is expensive to maintain.

Even when not in use, divers must ensure that its systems work properly every week in salt water.

Aquarius is the only undersea laboratory dedicated to marine science operating in the world.

Owned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and managed by the University of North Carolina at Wilmington (UNCW), Aquarius operates 4.5 kilometers offshore of Key Largo, Florida 20 meters beneath the surface.

Aquarius was originally conceived and funded by NOAA's National Undersea Research Program (NURP) in the mid 1980s.

The underwater laboratory was built by Victoria Machine Works in 1986-87. Initial deployment in the U.S. Virgin Islands before Hurricane Hugo struck in 1989, and devastated St. Croix.

Aquarius was retrieved from the seafloor in 1990 and was moved to North Carolina where it was refurbished and then redeployed in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary in 1993.