[meteorite-list] Government Shutdown Puts MAVEN Launch Preparations On Hold

[Michael Farmer]

Ahhhh the genius of the GOP.
Gonna cost the USA billions and billions all for a temper tantrum.

Michael Farmer
Sent from my iPhone

> On Oct 1, 2013, at 3:49 PM, Ron Baalke <baalke at zagami.jpl.nasa.gov> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> http://www.spaceflightnow.com/atlas/av038/131001shutdown/ 
> 
> Government shutdown puts MAVEN launch preps on hold
> BY STEPHEN CLARK
> SPACEFLIGHT NOW
> October 1, 2013
> 
> Without funding to pay for numerous programs and research, engineers began 
> shutting down work on a $671 million Mars science orbiter at the Kennedy 
> Space Center on Tuesday, halting critical preparations ahead of the mission's 
> narrow interplanetary launch window in November.
> 
> The launch window, which opens Nov. 18 and extends to Dec. 7, is restricted 
> by the locations of Earth and Mars. Launch opportunities to the red planet 
> only come once every 26 months.
> 
> The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, spacecraft was on 
> schedule to launch from Florida on Nov. 18 aboard a United Launch Alliance 
> Atlas 5 rocket. The launch will put MAVEN on a 10-month  journey to Mars, 
> with arrival in orbit at the red planet set for Sept. 22, 2014.
> 
> But the launch date could be in jeopardy if the federal government's partial 
> shutdown lasts more than a week. The shutdown began at midnight EDT Tuesday, 
> at the beginning of a new fiscal year, because Congress failed to agree 
> on a federal budget.
> 
> NASA will continue operating missions in flight, such as the International 
> Space Station, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Curiosity rover now 
> on Mars, but the space agency, acting on orders from the Office of Management 
> and Budget, halted development and testing of spacecraft still on Earth 
> awaiting launch.
> 
> "MAVEN has not been classed as exempt from the shutdown, so our plan is 
> to carry out an orderly shutdown," said Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN's principal 
> investigator from the University of Colorado at Boulder's Laboratory for 
> Atmospheric and Space Physics.
> 
> NASA and Lockheed Martin Corp., MAVEN's prime contractor, were preparing 
> the spacecraft inside a clean room at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
> 
> MAVEN carries a suite of instruments to study how gases escape from the 
> upper atmosphere of Mars, which could tell scientists how the red planet 
> evolved from a world hospitable for life to the barren planet of today.
> 
> "In an orderly shut down, the key thing is to ensure that all the hardware 
> is in a safe and known state so that we can pick it up again when we resume, 
> and that it is protected against environmental problems," Jakosky said.
> 
> Uneasy with MAVEN's launch schedule following the government shutdown, 
> officials said they are evaluating whether this fall's launch window could 
> be extended a few days into mid-December to buy more time. 
> 
> If MAVEN missed this year's launch window, the next chance to launch the 
> probe toward Mars would be in early 2016.
> 
> Engineers made good progress on MAVEN since the orbiter arrived at KSC 
> from its factory in Denver on Aug. 2, said Guy Beutelschies, Lockheed 
> Martin's MAVEN program manager, in an interview Friday.
> 
> Beutelschies said the MAVEN team was working with nine days of schedule 
> margin to meet the Nov. 18 launch date.
> 
> Technicians ensured all of MAVEN's systems still functioned after the 
> cross-country flight from Denver, installed the satellite's flight batteries, 
> put the spacecraft through mission simulations, tested its communications 
> with NASA's network of tracking antennas, and unfurled its solar panels 
> to check their deployment mechanisms, according to Beutelschies.
> 
> The next steps were to finish up testing of MAVEN's propulsion system 
> and put the cubical spacecraft on a spin table to check its mass properties.
> 
> MAVEN's load of toxic hydrazine propellant was scheduled to be pumped 
> into the orbiter's propellant tank in late October, and Lockheed Martin 
> was planning to hand over the spacecraft to United Launch Alliance on 
> Nov. 1 for attachment to the Atlas 5 rocket's payload adapter and encapsulation 
> inside the launcher's four-meter-diameter payload fairing.
> 
> "The team, absolutely across the board, institutions and individuals alike, 
> is totally committed to doing whatever it takes to launch on time," Jakosky 
> said Monday. "We're prepared to schedule double shifts and work seven 
> days if necessary, ensuring, of course, that we do things safely and technically 
> correctly. We'll have to wait and see what the feds do over the next one 
> to several days."
> 
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