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Thursday April 2, 2009
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Even as basketball fans gear up for a weekend of NCAA semifinal action, NASA's roster of 64 candidates for its "Greatest Mission of All Time" has been pared down to its own Final Four, and the remaining field is surprising, to say the least. Gone are heavyweights such as Apollo 11, the Hubble Space Telescope, Voyager I and II, Cassini, the Viking Mars landers as well as Spirit and Opportunity, still roving Mars after 5 years.
The remaining missions include LRO (the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter), SPB (that's Super Pressure Balloon, for the uninitiated), the New Horizons mission to Pluto, and SOHO (the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. The semifinals, for which the two-day voting period began today, pit New Horizons against SPB, which so far has been the Cinderella mission of this tourney, while the venerable SOHO faces LRO.
Mission Madness has strongly favored new missions over the old. Part of that may be the voting structure. People are allowed to vote as many times as they want, so missions with an active support staff and fan base may benefit from multiple submissions from their proponents. Many Web sites of candidate missions have notices encouraging people to vote for their "team."
To get to the semifinals, LRO staged a late rally in Round 4 to best Freedom 7, that first suborbital flight by Alan Shepard from back at the dawn of the Space Age. In Round 3, I was shocked that LRO, which will be tasked with scouting out landing sites for future Moon missions, defeated Apollo 11, the most famous Moon flight of all (which I'd been confident would at least win its Nebula Division to reach the semifinals, if not the whole magilla). To take the Galaxy Division, the venerable SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory), which has been monitoring the Sun since 1995, squeaked past the Viking I and II Mars landers. Over in Horizon, the New Horizons Pluto mission held off Expedition 16, the first International Space Station flight with a female commander, to advance to the semifinals. And in the Stellar Division, SPB, continued its unlikely push for glory by getting by Orion while once again racking up the highest vote total of any mission in the round, as it did in all the previous rounds as well.
As for what to expect in the final rounds, SPB has gone from being a dark horse to become the team to beat. I have a soft spot for its semifinal rival, New Horizons, which is new a third of its way to Pluto. Pluto was still a planet when the mission was launched, and it's questionable whether the mission would have gotten off the ground had the now-dwarf planet already been demoted. As for SPB, its popularity remains an enigma, as it lacks the cachet of more high-profile missions--it would seem to either have a small base of very active voters, or a large "stealth" fan base. (It's also possible that NASA itself is internally pushing its candidacy, perhaps to bring attention to this unsung aspect of its operations.) In early semifinal action, it's gotten off to a commanding 60-40% lead over New Horizons in early voting, already building up a lead of over 1,200 votes. My calls to NASA's balloon project headquarters to try to find out more about the mission have so far gone unanswered; should I receive a response, I'll post an update.
The other semifinal pits an ongoing mission with a long track record of success against a project that will help lay the groundwork for future lunar exploration. SOHO has monitored the Sun for more than a full 11-year sunspot cycle now, and is a survivor that's come back from two months-long operational lapses (the first was a loss of contact and control, the second a failure of all its gyroscopes), as well as an antenna problem whose makeshift solution requires that the spacecraft, which is in a "halo orbit" about a million miles sunward from Earth, be rotated 180 degrees every 2 to 3 months.
I am unofficially connected with the SOHO project, as a volunteer who scours its images for "sungrazing" comets. (SOHO has been dubbed the "greatest comet hunter in history," with more than 1,600 cometary fragments, most of which vaporize as they plunge toward the Sun, to its credit.) LRO, due to be launched as early as late May, will circle the Moon in a low polar orbit, scouting for water ice near the poles and taking detailed light and temperature maps to help determine future sites for mission landings as well as a Moon base. SOHO is off to a strong shot in this semifinal match, though there's plenty of room for LRO to catch up.
The finals will likely pit SPB against SOHO or LRO, putting SPB in range of pulling off an upset of monumental proportions. Whether any of the remaining candidates is really "Greatest Mission of All Time" is doubtful, but the contest has beena fun way for NASA to draw attention to its past glories, its road to the future, and a lot of missions, great and small, which might otherwise have escaped the public eye.
Posted By:
Tony Hoffman
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April 2, 2009 6:03 PM
I enjoyed reading this article. Thank you. And while I am also connected to SOHO (one of SOHO's instrument, MDI, is the basis of my existence), I think that SOHO really has been the most useful mission out of the four left. I love the SPB Team, don't get me wrong. But being able to predict Space Weather more accurately and further our and learning so much about our Sun - that's good stuff.
I am certainly ready to launch with SDO later this year and continue Solar Observations.
As for NASA EDGE - we love what they have done with this. Even though there was a lot of controversy with the voting and what missions advanced, it gave us all an opportunity to learn about other missions. It has given our EPO team a chance to visit an elementary school in Las Vegas tomorrow Friday and do an afternoon about SOHO, SDO, the Sun and Mission Madness!
April 2, 2009 9:25 PM
I love NASA Mission Madness as much as the next scientist, but I have to express some frustration at Little SDO HMI. We develop this awesome competition and all we get is angry e-mail. Little SDO HMI votes like crazy and gets a chance to visit a school in Las Vegas?!? How is that fair? Gearlog, you are missing the bigger story.
Seriously, great story.
The Co-Host,
NASA EDGE
P.S. No hard feelings Little SDO HMI. Be sure and tell those elementary school kids in Vegas to double down on Math and go all in with science. If they do, they may start for championship mission some day!
April 2, 2009 11:53 PM
Thanks a lot for dropping by, Little SDO HMI and NASA EDGE Co-Hose, and thanks for your great work. I would agree, SOHO has a tremendous track record and easily the most accomplished of the remaining missions. (Though I welcome the SDO folks to plead their case.)
By the way, speaking of mission choices, why no Galileo, Kepler, Apollo-Soyuz? Or even TPF (though that's still a ways off).
I'm looking forward to SDO joining the growing fleet of solar observatories.
Tony
April 3, 2009 7:43 AM
I'd meant to say "(Though I welcome the SPB folks to plead their case.)" Too many acronpyms, too little time.
--Tony
April 3, 2009 10:03 AM
Overnight voting revealed a surprising shift, as New Horizons surged ahead of SPB by over 2,000 votes. (Meanwhile, SOHO continues to outpace LRO, by some 1,200 votes.) Will this round mark the end of the flight of those intrepid balloonists? Stay tuned...
April 3, 2009 12:40 PM
I had a chance to speak to Debbie Fairbrother, chief tecnologist for NASA's balloon program, about the SPB project. Unlike NASA's workhorse zero-pressure high-altitude balloons, which vent gas (helium)during the daytime when heated to full inflation, and contract at night when the gas cools (sometimes causing the balloons to descend 10,000 feet or more at night), super pressure balloons are fully pressurized, insulating them from the vagaries of temperature, providing greater stability and the potential for much longer flights. A January test flight launched from Antarctica, in which the balloon maintained an altitude of 110,000 feet, stayed aloft for 54 days, compared with a few weeks for a zero pressure balloon. When development is complete, super pressure balloons will be able to carry payloads of several tons to the edge of space (above 99 percent of Earth's atmosphere) on missions of 100 days or more. NASA's current high-altitude balloons carry instruments such as telescopes and cosmic-ray detectors (and much more economically than an orbiting satellite mission); the payloads can be retrieved and reused once the flight is over. Earth scientists are also expressing interest in the use of super pressure balloons. They could also potentially be used in missions to other planets, where they would stay aloft in the planet's upper atmosphere. Pretty cool, eh?
April 4, 2009 12:53 AM
Mission Madness started with 64 "teams"--and now there are just two. Voting for the semifinals just concluded, and the final round (for which voting will be held Monday and Tuesday) will pit SOHO against SPB. SOHO traded leads with LRO several times before ekeing out a narrow victory (by 377 votes out of over 50,000 cast), while SPB overcame an early deficit to win handily over New Horizons (by more than 5,000 of the nearly 78,000 cast).
April 7, 2009 6:28 PM
Pluto still IS a planet. Just ask New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, who led a petition of hundreds of professional astronomers in rejecting the IAU demotion. Please do not blindly accept that demotion, done by only four percent of the IAU's members, most of whom are not planetary scientists, as fact, when it is not. It is one interpretation in an ongoing debate, and there are many scientists and lay people working to get the demotion overturned while others are ignoring it entirely.
April 8, 2009 11:36 AM
I should have phrased it "Pluto was still *officially* a planet...."--clearly, Pluto (planet or otherwise) itself hasn't changed because of the vote. I was speaking more to the possible effects of said demotion, had it occurred a few years earlier, on the mission's funding. (Of course, if the Illinois legislature can vote that Pluto is still a planet, the mission might even have gotten more support had Pluto been booted into the doghouse prior to liftoff.) The process of defining planethood, with the committee's recommendation and then the counter-definitions, was flawed. The subject of classification of solar-system bodies deserves a closer and more focused look, but in a broader context, particularly now that we're finding planetary systems around other stars. I know there was talk (I think spearheaded by Alan Stern) after the IAU's decision of convening a conference for this express purpose, and I would welcome that.