The Senate passed the appropriations bill funding the rest of the government through September 2012 as well as another bill increasing funds for disaster aid and recovery, but did not agree to a House plan to fund the disaster aid by reducing FY2012 funds for most government agencies including NASA and NOAA.

The latter measure, called a rescission, was contained in H. Con. Res. 94 and would have meant a 1.83 percent cut to funding for agencies like NASA and NOAA from the amounts already provided for FY2012.   By a vote of 43 – 56, the resolution did not reach the required 60 vote threshold to proceed to consideration.

Rescinding funds is a common method used by Congress to meet planned budget targets or achieve other budgetary goals and can be done at any time, but for now, NASA and NOAA appear to be saved from such a cut. 

Congress was expected to adjourn for the year on Friday, but the Senate votes took place on Saturday, and the House will return to work on Monday to resolve an outstanding item of business that needs to be resolved before the end of the year — whether to continue a payroll tax cut for the middle class.   House Republicans passed a measure to continue the payroll tax cut for two months, but tied it to forcing President Obama to make a decision within 60 days on a plan to build an oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf Coast.  The President is waiting for environmental studies before approving the proposal.

NASA has lost hundreds of samples of astromaterials including Moon rocks and meteorite samples and needs to improve its management of such materials that are loaned to researchers and institutions according to NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG).

In a report released today, the OIG found that over 500 astromaterials loaned out between 1970 and June 2010 were lost or stolen, “including 18 lunar samples reported lost by a researcher in 2010 and 218 lunar and meteorite samples stolen from a researcher at Johnson Space Center, but since recovered.”

Considering that NASA is planning more missions to collect samples from solar system bodies, the OIG called for more reliable controls and accountability at Johnson Space Center’s Astromaterials Acquisition and Curation Office.  That office manages 140,000 lunar samples, 18,000 meteorite samples, and approximately 5,000 solar wind, comet and cosmic dust samples according to the report.  NASA had about 26,000 of those samples on loan as of March 2011, but the OIG concluded that NASA’s “records were inaccurate, researchers could not account for all samples loaned to them, and researchers held samples for extended periods without performing research or returning the samples to NASA.”

The OIG recommended a number of procedures to be implemented to improve control of the materials.   In a December 7 memo published as an appendix to the report, Charles Gay, Acting Associate Administrator for Science Mission Directorate, concurred with all the recommendations. 

NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden told a Space Transportation Association (STA) audience today that NASA is not planning for a budget that would reflect deep cuts required by sequestration under the Budget Control Act (BCA) of 2011.

Responding to a questioner by saying that he is “optimistic,” Bolden said that he does not think Congress will allow the sequestration to go into effect.  “I, like the President, am very confident that the Congress…is going to find a way to solve the problem,” he asserted.

The BCA created the congressional “supercommittee” that was tasked with reducing the deficit by $1.2 trillion over 10 years.  If it failed, automatic reductions called a “sequester” of a similar magnitude would go into effect for all the government departments and agencies that are funded as part of the “discretionary” part of the government.   There also would be a modest cut to Medicare providers.

The supercommittee did fail, conceding just before Thanksgiving that its 12 members could not reach a compromise on how to reduce the deficit.   Republicans wants reductions solely through spending cuts; Democrats wanted a combination of spending cuts and revenue (tax) increases.

Exactly how much any particular agency would be cut in any given year is uncertain at this point since the calculations depend on a number of factors.  However, cuts on the order of 7-8 percent for non-defense discretionary agencies like NASA have been floated.   These would be cuts to projected funding levels through FY2021.

Bolden did, indeed, sound very optimistic about his agency’s achievements in 2011 and the outlook for the future.   Even though Congress reduced NASA’s $18.7 billion FY2012 budget request to $17.8 billion, he called it “pretty doggone close” considering today’s stringent budget environment.

Bolden cited launch of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) – Curiosity – as one of NASA’s major achievements in 2011.   He said that it was a precursor to sending people to Mars in the 2030s.  Curioisty is a rover than will land on Mars and roam across its surface to study whether Mars once could have been habitable.  The comment thus infers that NASA’s plan is to land people on Mars in the 2030s, although President Obama’s National Space Policy calls for putting people into orbit around Mars – not landing on the surface – in the 2030s.  Landing is much more difficult than orbiting and would require the development of systems that would increase the cost of the human spaceflight program.   In response to a question, Bolden clarified that it is his hope that both orbital and landing missions could be accomplished within the decade of the 2030s, but he stressed that specific plans have yet to be developed and they depend on technological advancements.

NASA’s contributions to understanding our own planet as well as planets around distant stars were on display at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in San Francisco today.

Among them was a finding that the horrific damage caused in Japan this year was the result of merging tsunamisobserved by chance when three earth observation satellites with radar altimeters happened to be in the right place at the right time to measure wave heights.  “It was a one in 10 million chance that we were able to observe this double wave with satellites” according to Y. Tony Song of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a federally funded research and development center operated for NASA by the California Institute of Technology.

The three satellites were the NASA/CNES Jason-1, NASA/ESA Jason-2, and ESA’s EnviSAT.  CNES is the French space agency; ESA is the European Space Agency.   All three have radar altimeters that measure sea level changes and each crossed the tsunami at different locations, enabling the findings.

The satellite data showed that at least two wave fronts merged into a single, double-wave.  “This wave was capable of travelling long distances without losing power” and “doubled in intensity over rugged ocean ridges, amplifying its destructive power at landfall,” according to NASA.

Completely separately, scientists now have confirmed the existence of a planet that is similar in size to Earth orbiting a distant star similar to our Sun and within a zone where they believe life could arise.   NASA’s Kepler space-based telescope is studying a comparatively small region of the sky hunting for planets around other stars.  It cannot directly observe such planets, but stares at the stars to notice changes in their brightness that could indicate an orbiting body passing in front — a planet.

Scientists describe a region around stars where it might be possible for life to arise called a “habitable zone.”   Kepler 22-b, as this planet is designated, is in the habitable zone of a star similar to ours that is 600 light years away.   It is one of 48 planet candidates in habitable zones of stars that Kepler is studying, down from the 54 reported earlier this year because scientists are now using a stricter definition of a habitable zone – sometimes referred to as the Goldilocks zone, where the temperature is not too hot and not too cold, but just right for life.    Planet “candidates” must be verified through observations using other ground- or space-based telescopes before they are confirmed as actually being planets.  Kepler 22-b is the first to be confirmed.

The House Science, Space and Technology Committee will hold a hearing on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) program next week.

The program, which has experienced significant cost growth and schedule delays, was saved from cancellation in the final version of NASA’s FY2012 appropriations bill.  The House Appropriations Committee wanted to terminate the program.   Its counterpart in the Senate, however, approved an increase in funding for FY2012 so the telescope can be launched in 2018 instead of years later.  The Senate Appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA is chaired by Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), an ardent supporter of NASA’s space and earth science programs, especially those managed at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, including JWST.

The projected lifecycle cost for the program is up to $8.8 billion.   The price has risen substantially over the years and an independent review just last year estimated the cost at $6.5 billion assuming launch in 2015 (a two-year slip).   To launch in 2015, however, substantial additional money would have had to have been spent on the program in FY2011 and FY2012, money that NASA did not have.   Thus, the launch date slipped even further, increasing the cost yet again.  The independent review, chaired by John Casani, blamed poor program management at NASA, not technical issues, as the reasons for the cost growth.  Northrop Grumman is the prime contractor.

JWST supporters have been waging a campaign to build support for the project which obviously has been successful so far.  Conferees on the appropriations bill adopted the Senate position, adding $156 million to the program’s budget for FY2012.   NASA says that an additional $1.067 billion will be needed for FY2013-2016 and other parts of NASA are worried that their budgets will be cut in order to pay for the JWST overruns.

The hearing is scheduled for December 6 at 10:00 am EST in 2318 Rayburn House Office Building.   Witnesses are:

• Mr. Rick Howard, Program Manager, James Webb Space Telescope, NASA
• Dr. Roger Blandford, Professor of Physics, Stanford University, and chair of the National Research Council”s recent Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics
• Dr. Garth Illingworth, Professor & Astronomer, UCO/Lick Observatory, University of California, Santa Cruz
• Mr. Jeffrey D. Grant, Sector Vice President & General Manager, Space Systems Division, Northrup Grumman Aerospace Systems

Editor’s Note:

I was privileged to be a guest on David Livingston’s The Space Show yesterday.  David has posted the audio and a short summary of the show on his website for anyone who is interested.

Marcia Smith