The National Research Council (NRC) issued its report today on whether NASA should make a modest hardware contribution to Europe’s Euclid dark energy mission valued at about $20 million in exchange for one seat on Euclid’s 12-person science committee and early access to Euclid data.  The NRC endorsed NASA’s plan.

The report was requested by NASA and executed by the NRC on an expedited basis because the European Space Agency (ESA) needs an agreement to be signed through the U.S. State Department by the end of April if the United States wants to participate.  Consequently the committee was able to meet only once.   At that meeting, several committee members expressed concern about whether even a small contribution to Euclid would negatively affect plans for a U.S. dark energy mission.   The most recent NRC decadal survey for astronomy and astrophysics identified the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) as its highest priority large space mission, which has dark energy research as one of its three objectives.

Plans for building WFIRST are being delayed because of cost overruns on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).   The earliest WFIRST launch date now is about 2022 while Euclid is planned for launch in 2019.   By providing the hardware for the Euclid mission, U.S. scientists will get early access to Euclid’s data and one of 12 seats on the Euclid science team.  The agreement does not involve any exchange of funds between the United States and Europe.  NASA will pay for the hardware development and provide the hardware to ESA.  Exactly what hardware NASA will provide still must be negotiated, but ESA is particularly interested in U.S. near-infrared detectors.

The committee was careful to state that the contribution to Euclid “should be made in the context of a strong U.S. commitment to … WFIRST….”  and its “intent has been clear that this report does not alter … plans for implementation of the [decadal] survey’s priorities.”

The NRC committee that produced the 2010 decadal survey, New Worlds New Horizons, and recommended development of WFIRST was aware of ESA’s plans for Euclid, but ESA had not yet selected Euclid for development.  That occurred last fall.    By then, the depth of the cost overrun on JWST had crystallized and, coupled with the outlook for sharply constrained budgets for many years, NASA began looking for other ways to pursue dark energy research.   Dark energy is thought to comprise more than 70 percent of the universe.  It is called “dark” because scientists do not know what it is.   They know the universe is expanding at a rate faster than earlier theorized and coined the term dark energy to refer to the force or phenomenon that is fueling that expansion.

NASA earlier proposed a greater U.S. contribution to Euclid, but the U.S. astrophysics community was not supportive for fear it would drain resources from WFIRST or other U.S. space science priorities.   The $20 million proposal that NASA offered this time apparently was the right order of magnitude to win that support.  An internal NASA advisory subcommittee earlier had approved the idea as well.  The $20 million represents about 10 percent of the cost of Euclid’s instruments and is usually referred to as NASA having a “10 percent role in Euclid,” but it is not 10 percent of the cost of the project overall.

Correction:  An earlier verison of this posting misspelled Mr. Suffredini’s name as Sufferdini.

NASA International Space Station (ISS) program manager Mike Suffredini said today that although the launch of the next crew to the ISS will be delayed and other aspects of the schedule juggled, overall there will be virtually no impact on ISS operations.

The next crew was supposed to be launched to ISS on March 30.   Last week, however, their Soyuz descent capsule was badly damaged in a testing accident.  Russia has decided to use an entirely different Soyuz module rather than trying to replace just the descent part of it and is pulling up the next Soyuz that already is in manufacturing.   That will delay the launch until May 15.

Consequently, the ISS partners are making modest changes to the crew rotation schedule that will also impact when the next automated Russian cargo spacecraft, Progress, is launched.   ISS crews rotate on a roughly six month schedule, with three astronauts ferried to and from ISS on a single Soyuz spacecraft.  With a regular crew complement of six, that means four Soyuz spacecraft are docking with and undocking from the ISS every year.  Added to that are the automated cargo spacecraft — Russia’s Progress, which are launched between four and six times a year, plus Europe’s ATV and Japan’s HTV, each about once a year.   Thus, ISS is a traffic hub, with complicating factors such as sun angles dictating when certain launch and docking operations occur.

Suffredini played down the idea that the changes due to the Soyuz testing failure problem would have any long term impact on ISS operations and the scientific research the crews are conducting.   What affects scientific research is the number of crew aboard.   A hiccup last year because of a Russian launch failure (of a Progress cargo spacecraft in August) meant only three instead of six crew members were aboard for longer than expected, reducing scientific output.   Now that the six-person complement has been restored, astronauts are working hard to make up the difference so the goal of an average of 35 hours per week over the course of an “expedition” is maintained.   Right now, the astronauts are spending more than that on science to make up for the lost time last fall.

He also expressed confidence in the part of the Russian space program that produces the Soyuz and Progress spacecraft and their launch vehicles.   In response to a question from a reporter about other failures, such as the Phobos-Grunt Mars mission, Sufferdini said that was outside his area of expertise.   He stressed that he is confident of the Russian company, Energia, that manufactures the spacecraft for the ISS program and of its ability to investigate and remedy failures when they occur.

On a separate but related issue, he also talked about the upcoming launch of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft to ISS.   The next test launch of Dragon and its Falcon 9 launch vehicle recently slipped from February 7 to March 20.  It will demonstrate the ability of Dragon to berth with ISS.   Dragon is designed to be used as a cargo spacecraft for ISS and NASA has Space Act Agreements with SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corp. to help them develop “commercial cargo” systems.  They were supposed to be operational by this year, as NASA’s contract with Russia to take cargo to the ISS runs out.  (Its contract to take crews to and from ISS is separate.)

Suffredini expressed no surprise that the SpaceX test launch slipped to March 20 and said that his personal belief is that it will slip to the first week in April while stressing that was not a firm statement, just his expectation based on years of experience.    Delaying until early April is not a problem in his view.    The key is to avoid a conflict with the next Progress launch and docking in mid-April.  He said that all the ISS partners, not only Russia, must agree to the SpaceX test berthing and they had just had a meeting in which they all said they were “comfortable” with the plan.

He added that because of the Russian cargo spacecraft failure last fall,  Russia owes NASA a certain amount of cargo capacity to the ISS.  If the U.S. commercial cargo efforts of SpaceX and Orbital are delayed, that should buy NASA some time into the early part of 2013.

The Russian media have been reporting today on their interpretation of the results of the investigation into the failure of the Phobos-Grunt (Phobos-soil) mission.   Itar-Tass, the official news service of the Russian government, says it was a computer problem, but was the real culprit cosmic rays or counterfeit computer chips?

Itar-Tass reported that the computer system did a double re-start, as explained yesterday on RussianSpaceWeb.com.  The Itar-Tass story says the double-restart caused the spacecraft to go into a standby mode and was caused by the “local influence of heavy charged particles” or because the computer chips “may have been counterfeit.”   Sticking to the charged-particle explanation,  Itar-Tass goes on to say that the institute that built the spacecraft, NPO Lavochkin, should have taken these particles — cosmic rays — into account in designing the system, and Lavochkin officials were “administratively punished” as a result.  Another Itar-Tass story blamed computer programmers.

Another important Russian media outlet, RIA Novosti, added  that counterfeit computer chips  “may have been imported” and were to blame.  But it goes on to say that the commission that investigated the failure “ruled out any ‘external or foreign influence”” as the reason for the failure.  Some Russian officials had blamed a U.S. radar in the Marshall Islands for inadvertently damaging the spacecraft as it flew overhead.

Russian space agency director Vladimir Popovkin is looking towards the future, not the past.  He told RIA Novosti that Russia might build a replacement for Phobos-Grunt if the European Space Agency decides not to include Russia in its upcoming Mars mission, ExoMars.

Russian space officials confirmed today that the next launch of a Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) will be delayed until the end of April or mid-May.   The delay is due to a testing failure of the Soyuz descent module last week.

Russian space agency (Roscosmos) director Vladimir Popovkin said the launch would be postponed until the end of April.  The mission, Soyuz TMA-04M, was supposed to be launched March 30.   Alexei Krasnov, the head of human spaceflight programs at Roscosmos, told RIA Novosti that the launch would be delayed 30-45 days, or possibly until mid-May, and the exact date would be established after consultation with NASA.

The ISS is a partnership among the United States, Russia, Japan, Canada and several European countries, with NASA and Roscosmos holding the key roles in ISS operations.

The three crew-members who will be launched on this mission are Russians Gennady Padalka and Sergei Revin and NASA’s Joseph Acaba.

According to RussianSpaceWeb.com, the Soyuz descent capsule was subjected to higher pressures than expected during a test last week and a weld ruptured making the capsule unusable.

The Russian commission investigating the failure of the Phobos-Grunt (Phobos-soil) Mars mission concluded that computer design error and insufficient testing were the reasons the probe never left Earth orbit, not interference from a U.S. radar according to Anatoly Zak at RussianSpaceWeb.com.  Zak summarizes the commission’s findings on his website today.   Russia’s news agency Itar-Tass reported over the weekend that the findings would  be presented to Russia’s space agency director yesterday and made public this week, but neither it nor other leading Russian media sources have published anything yet today.

Zak reports on his website that the “most probable cause … was a simultaneous robooting of two operational processors in the main computer….  The computers could crash as a result of errors in their software or as a result of some external reasons, such as electromagnetic incompatibility, industry sources said.  The mentioning of this last point … apparently became a basis for numerous reports in the Russian press blaming the failure on various improbable external reasons, such as foreign radars or solar flares.”

“Foreign radars” refers to assertions by some Russian officials that a U.S. radar based in the Marshall Islands inadvertently damaged Phobos-Grunt while it was being used to study asteroids and the orbiting spacecraft passed through the beam.  Yuri Koptev, former head of the Russian space agency who chaired the commission investigating the Phobos-Grunt failure, said that his group would conduct an experiment to prove or disprove the theory.

Zak reports that tests were conducted by NPO Lavochkin, which manufactured Phobos-Grunt, to determine if the computer could have been affected “by interference from the probe’s own power supply or from unlikely external sources, such as a narrow powerful beam of a ground radar.  During these tests, the computer withstood all simulations without any problems.”

Therefore, “[w]ith all external failure scenarios effectively debunked, the most probable cause of the failure was narrowed down to the lack of integrated testing” of the computer, Zak states.