NASA’s 

DISCOVERY

PROGRAM

The First Twenty Years of 

Competitive Planetary 

Exploration

Susan M. Niebur

WITH David W. Brown, Editor
NASA’s

DISCOVERY

PROGRAM

NASA’s

DISCOVERY

PROGRAM

The First Twenty Years of Competitive

Planetary Exploration

By Susan M. Niebur with

David W. Brown (editor)

Foreword by Michael J. Neufeld and

Afterword by Curt Niebur

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Office of Communications

NASA History Division

Washington, DC 20546

NASA SP-2023-4238
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Niebur, Susan M., 1973-2012, author. | Brown, David W., editor. | United States. NASA 

History Division, issuing body. 

Title: NASA’s Discovery Program: the first twenty years of competitive planetary exploration / 

by Susan M. Niebur with David W. Brown (ed.). 

Other titles: First twenty years of competitive planetary exploration | NASA SP (Series); 

2023-4238. 

Description: Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Office of 

Communications, NASA History Division, 2023. | 

Series: NASA SP; 2023-4238 | In scope of the U.S. Government Publishing Office Cataloging 

and Indexing Program (C&I); Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) distribution status 

to be determined upon publication. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Started in the early 1990s to provide opportunities for small, relatively simple planetary 

science missions, NASA’s Discovery Program has funded a series of focused and innovative 

missions to investigate the planets and small bodies of our solar system. This book draws on 

interviews with program managers, engineers, and scientists and takes an in-depth look at the 

management techniques they used to design creative and cost-effective spacecraft that continue to yield valuable scientific data”— Provided by publisher. 

Identifiers: LCCN 2023003999 (print) | LCCN 2023004000 (ebook) | ISBN 9781626830769 

(paperback) | ISBN 9781626830776 (ebook) 

Subjects: LCSH: Discovery Program (U.S.) | Planets. | Planetary Scientists—United States. | 

Astronomy—Observations. | Outer space—Exploration. 

Classification: LCC QB500.262.N54 2023 (print) | LCC QB500.262 (ebook) | DDC 919.904-

-dc23/eng/20230623 | SUDOC NAS 1.21:4238

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023003999

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023004000
v

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS....................................................................vii

FOREWORD

The Discovery Program, 1989–2022, 

by Michael J. Neufeld .........................................................................ix 

CHAPTER 1

Discovery Begins ...................................................................................1

CHAPTER 2

Big Dreams........................................................................................... 47

CHAPTER 3

Harsh Landings ....................................................................................91

CHAPTER 4

Applying Lessons Learned..............................................................141

CHAPTER 5

Breaking the Bank .............................................................................171

CHAPTER 6

Renewed Commitment: Dawn ......................................................197

TABLE OF

Contents
NASA′s Discovery Program

vi

CHAPTER 7

Renewed Commitment: Kepler................................................... 249

CHAPTER 8

Lessons Learned from the Evolution of the Program.......... 293

CHAPTER 9

Insights from Discovery................................................................. 355

AFTERWORD

by Curt Niebur....................................................................................381

APPENDIX A

Acronym List ..................................................................................... 383

APPENDIX B

Further Reading............................................................................... 393

THE NASA HISTORY SERIES.....................................................397

INDEX....................................................................................................411
vii

This history manuscript took an unusual path, and as such, special thanks are due 

to a number of people. First, of course, to the late Susan Niebur, who did the initial research and writing before her untimely passing. Before Susan, thanks go to 

Harley Thronson, Ming-Ying Wei, and Jens Feeley, who conceptualized, funded, and 

implemented the original call for and selection of history of space and Earth science proposals. Next to David Brown, who did yeoman’s work editing Susan’s rough 

draft and notes into a more complete form. Thank you also to Michael Neufeld for 

his careful review and for writing an excellent foreword that contextualizes NASA’s 

Discovery Program, brings the story up to date, and explains his and the other contributors’ roles. Last but certainly not least, thank you to Curt Niebur for providing 

an eloquent afterword.

Special thanks go to Tom Wagner, former Discovery Program Scientist, who 

expressed interest in having Susan’s unfinished manuscript completed and published 

and provided strong support along the way. In the NASA History Division, James 

Anderson, Steve Garber, and Michele Ostovar worked hard to get the manuscript 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NASA′s Discovery Program

viii

ready for production. Intern Maddy Pollack carefully consolidated footnotes where 

it was warranted. She and interns Olivia Reste, Travis Frederick, and Joshua Schmidt 

assisted in the review and compiled the images reproduced in this book.

Many thanks to the outstanding production team in the NASA Headquarters 

Communications Support Services Center (CSSC). Lisa Jirousek skillfully copyedited the manuscript, and Andrew Cooke performed careful quality assurance. Michael Chinn and Ronna Goldman skillfully laid out the elegant book 

design. Kristin Harley expertly prepared the index. Tun Hla, Vee Talbert, and 

Bill Keeter professionally managed the whole process. Thank you all for your 

skill, professionalism, and collegial attitudes in bringing this book to fruition.

Brian Odom

NASA Chief Historian
ix

The Discovery Program is the most important NASA robotic planetary spacecraft 

program you have never heard of—unless you are a space agency insider. Initiated in 

1989 and legislated into existence in 1993, Discovery has funded a series of relatively 

small, focused, and innovative missions to the planets and small bodies of the solar 

system. Notable ones include Mars Pathfinder, which landed a miniature rover on 

Mars in 1997; NEAR Shoemaker, which orbited and landed on 433 Eros in 2000–

2001; Deep Impact, which hit Comet Tempel 1 in 2005; MESSENGER, which orbited 

Mercury between 2011 and 2015; and the Kepler space telescope, which discovered 

thousands of exoplanets. If the public has heard of anything, it is the missions, not the 

program from which they sprang.

The Origins of the Discovery Program

At the end of the 1980s, there was growing discomfort in the science community 

with the planetary exploration program of the National Aeronautics and Space 

Administration (NASA). Almost the whole planetary budget went to a handful 

of large, expensive missions, which had been significantly delayed by the national 

FOREWORD

The Discovery Program,

1989–2022

By Michael J. Neufeld
NASA′s Discovery Program

x

policy of using only the Space Shuttle as a launch vehicle. An attempt to create a 

lower-cost Planetary Observer spacecraft series produced only one mission, Mars 

Observer, which significantly overran its budget, in part because it had to be redesigned for an expendable booster after the Challenger Shuttle accident of January 

1986.1 Opportunities for small, relatively simple missions were absent.

A new attempt to create a low-cost planetary program came primarily from two 

would-be reformers: Stamatios “Tom” Krimigis and Wesley T. Huntress. Krimigis was a 

prominent scientist in space physics/heliophysics at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics 

Laboratory (APL) and the head of APL’s Space Department from 1991 to 2004. Wes 

Huntress had been a distinguished cosmochemist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), 

a NASA planetary exploration center run by the California Institute of Technology. 

He became head of the Solar System Exploration Division at NASA Headquarters in 

1990 and Associate Administrator for Space Science in 1993. Both were dissatisfied 

with the status quo in planetary exploration; both wanted competitive selections of 

mission proposals for smaller, less expensive spacecraft led by scientists as Principal 

Investigators (PIs). Both thought JPL’s stranglehold on planetary projects, a product 

of NASA’s attempt to streamline during the lean budget years of the 1970s and early 

1980s, made it complacent and expensive. Huntress wanted to give JPL competition, 

and Krimigis was only too happy to supply it.

I have told the story of the origins of the Discovery Program elsewhere,2 as does 

Susan Niebur at greater length in this book, so I will only summarize the key points 

here. In fall 1993, Congress authorized for Discovery a $132 million budget—double 

what NASA had asked for. Over the preceding two years, the agency had awarded 

the planned first mission, NEAR, to APL. But it was then displaced to second when 

the idea for an innovative, JPL-built Mars Pathfinder lander and mini-rover became 

popular at NASA Headquarters, notably with the new Administrator as of April 1992, 

Daniel Goldin. Thanks to the intervention of Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, 

where APL was situated, both spacecraft were in the budget.

These two assigned missions would be followed by open competitions with projects 

proposed by PIs as part of a standing budget line. That model, as Krimigis had advo1 On Mars Observer, see Erik M. Conway, Exploration and Engineering: The Jet Propulsion 

Laboratory and the Quest for Mars (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2015), chaps. 1 and 3.

2 Michael J. Neufeld, “Transforming Solar System Exploration: The Origins of the Discovery 

Program, 1989–1993,” Space Policy 30 (2014), 5–12. For participant accounts of the early years, 

see Stamatios M. Krimigis and Joseph Veverka, “Foreword: Genesis of Discovery,” Journal of the 

Astronautical Sciences 43 (Oct.–Dec. 1995), 345–47, and Robert W. Farquhar, Fifty Years on the 

Space Frontier: Halo Orbits, Comets, Asteroids and More (Denver: Outskirts Press, 2010), 137–

42. For an overview of the program up to 2016, see Michael J. Neufeld, “The Discovery Program: 

Competition, Innovation, and Risk in Planetary Exploration,” in NASA Spaceflight: A History of 

Innovation, edited by Roger D. Launius and Howard McCurdy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 

2017), 267–90.
Foreword

xi

cated from the outset and Huntress pushed through, was based on NASA’s Explorer 

Program. It had been launching heliophysics and astronomy satellites since the late 

1950s. But Principal Investigators in Explorer were only responsible for the science 

and the scientific instruments, not the spacecraft engineering and overall leadership. 

Discovery would put scientist PIs at universities and other institutions in charge of 

leading the project, supported by a Project Manager (PM) focused on engineering, 

budget, and schedule.3

For the Solar System Exploration Division, this was a radical departure from the 

traditional model, where NASA HQ assigned a mission to JPL, after a laborious process 

of obtaining a budgetary line for a “new start” from the current presidential administration and Congress. With a “level of effort” program, there would be money in the 

federal budget every year to fund a steady stream of Discovery missions—the initial 

objective was a launch every 18 to 24 months—without having to seek permission for 

each project individually. (Congress formally approved that permanent line in 1995.) 

The PI would lead a “science investigation” to put the science at the forefront of the 

proposal and the project, inverting the traditional JPL approach, which was dominated 

by engineering considerations coming out of an era when it was a challenge just to get 

the spacecraft safely to the Moon or a planet.

There was one more important context for Discovery’s emergence: it became the 

poster child for Dan Goldin’s campaign to shake up NASA and institute a “faster, better, cheaper” (FBC) approach to robotic spacecraft development.4

 The perception of 

the space agency as bureaucratic, failure-prone, and expensive had risen quickly in 

the early 1990s, notably because of the flawed mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope. 

In early 1992, President George H. W. Bush replaced Administrator Richard Truly, an 

astronaut, with Goldin, who had worked as an executive at the mostly military aerospace contractor TRW. The fast, risk-taking methods of the Strategic Defense Initiative, 

created to fulfill President Ronald Reagan’s vision of a defense against ballistic mis3 Niebur, Susan M., “Principal investigators and project managers: Insights from Discovery,” Space 

Policy 28 (2012),174–84. See also her “Principal Investigators and mission leadership,” Space 

Policy 25 (2009), 181–86, and “Women and mission leadership,” Space Policy 25 (2009), 257–63.

4 Stephanie A. Roy, “The origin of the smaller, faster, cheaper approach in NASA’s solar system 

exploration program,” Space Policy 14 (1998), 153–71; Howard E. McCurdy, Faster, Better, 

Cheaper: Low-Cost Innovation in the U.S. Space Program (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University 

Press, 2001), and “Learning from History: Low-cost Project Innovation in the U.S. National 

Aeronautics and Space Administration,” International Journal of Project Management 31 

(2013), 705–11; Amy Page Kaminski, “Faster, Better, Cheaper: A Sociotechnical Perspective on 

Programmatic Choice, Success, and Failure in NASA’s Solar System Exploration Program,” in 

Exploring the Solar System: The History and Science of Planetary Exploration, edited by Roger 

D. Launius (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 77–101; and Jason W. Callahan, “Funding 

Planetary Science: History and Political Economy,” in 50 Years of Planetary Exploration: 

Historical Perspectives, edited by Linda Billings (Washington, DC: NASA, 2021), NASA SP-2021-

4705, 35–88, 64–70 referenced here.
NASA′s Discovery Program

xii

siles, were the model for a reform. Soon after arriving, Wes Huntress introduced Dan 

Goldin to Discovery, which neatly fit the Administrator’s rhetoric about instituting 

FBC methods at NASA. Because of his reputation as a reformer, Goldin survived the 

transition to the Bill Clinton administration in 1993. Thus, for most of the nineties, 

his “faster, better, cheaper” methods would dominate the development of space science 

spacecraft. But FBC came to a sudden end in 1999, when two Mars spacecraft not part 

of Discovery failed upon reaching the Red Planet. The media and the political class 

heaped criticism on the agency, and Goldin became risk-averse.

Discovery’s Rise, Crisis, and Renewal

Back in December 1992, NASA held its first workshop at San Juan Capistrano, 

California, to solicit mission ideas for Discovery. No fewer than 73 proposals were 

accepted from potential PIs, indicating that there was lively support in academia, the 

agency, and industry for the concept of competed small planetary missions. In early 

1993, Huntress chose 11 to be funded for further development. A year later, NASA 

released the first Announcement of Opportunity (AO), leading to the selection of the 

first competed mission, Lunar Prospector, in February 1995, plus an ensuing competition among three proposals. The winner was Stardust, a spacecraft to retrieve 

a sample of particles from a comet’s tail. Two more selections were made each in 

1997, 1999, and 2001 (see “Discovery Missions” table). NEAR launched first, in early 

1996, and flew by asteroid Mathilde before heading to a rendezvous with Eros; Mars 

Pathfinder made a spectacular landing on Independence Day, 1997, and deployed the 

mini-rover Sojourner. NEAR suffered an inflight crisis and missed Eros in 1999 but 

successfully orbited in 2000 and made a landing in 2001, something not originally 

planned. Thus, despite the political crisis of confidence that the 1999 Mars failures 

created, as well as Goldin’s retreat from FBC rhetoric and methods, Discovery looked 

to be a great success. It adhered to the early goals of frequent competitive selections 

and launches of PI-led projects supported by a variety of centers.

The crisis of Discovery came after 2002, when one spacecraft, CONTOUR, blew 

up as it was leaving Earth orbit, followed by several projects getting into trouble with 

cost and schedule. In its original conception, missions were to come under a cost 

cap ($150 million in 1992 dollars, without the launch vehicle) and be terminated if 

they ran significantly over budget or behind schedule. As Goldin framed it, inflight 

failures were to be expected in a “faster, better, cheaper” framework. The political 

and public reaction to the 1999 Mars failures showed how difficult that was. NASA 

and the Administrator were harshly criticized and ridiculed for incompetence and 

wasting the taxpayers’ money. Studies of those failures revealed weak management 
Foreword

xiii

controls, technical compromises, and inadequate testing coming out of very lean 

budgets. Afterward, NASA imposed more stringent project management reviews and 

paperwork, which inevitably increased cost.

Discovery Missions

Name Selection Launch PI/Institution Lead 

Center

Spacecraft 

Manufacturer Target

Mars Pathfinder 1992 1996 none/JPL 

(M. Golombek, PS) JPL JPL Mars

NEAR 1992 1996 none/APL 

(A. Cheng, PS) APL APL Mathilde, Eros 

Lunar Prospector 1995 1998 A. Binder/Lunar 

Research Institute ARC LM Sunnyvale Moon

Stardust 1995 1999 D. Brownlee/

U. Washington JPL LM Denver Comet Wild 2

Genesis 1997 2001 D. Burnett/Caltech JPL LM Denver

solar 

wind/

Earth-Sun 

L1

CONTOUR 1997 2002 J. Veverka/Cornell APL APL 2 comets 

(failed)

MESSENGER 1999 2004 S. Solomon/CIW APL APL Mercury

Deep Impact 1999 2005 M. A’Hearn/

U. Maryland JPL Ball Aerospace Comet 

Tempel 1

Dawn 2001 2007 C. Russell/UCLA JPL Orbital 

Sciences

Vesta, 

Ceres

Kepler 2001 2009 W. Borucki/ARC JPL/

ARC Ball Aerospace extrasolar 

planets

GRAIL 2007 2011 M. Zuber/MIT JPL LM Denver Moon

InSight 2012 2018 W. B. Banerdt/JPL JPL LM Denver Mars

Lucy 2017 2021 H. Levison/SwRI  GSFC LM Denver

Jupiter’s 

Trojan

asteroids

Psyche 2017 2023 L. Elkins-Tanton/

ASU JPL JPL Psyche

DAVINCI 2021 2029? J. Garvin/GSFC GSFC

LM Denver/

GSFC

Venus

VERITAS 2021 2031? S. Smrekar/JPL JPL LM Denver Venus
NASA′s Discovery Program

xiv

Terminating mission projects in the development phase, another expectation in 

Discovery’s design and Goldin’s rhetoric, was also much easier said than done. The 

sunk cost of tens of millions of dollars expended and hardware already built was difficult to discard, especially when a team was promising that X additional dollars would 

fix the problems. Deep Impact went through termination review twice and survived 

both. MESSENGER blew through the cost cap, and its launch was delayed by months, 

in part out of what the PI and APL thought was an excess of caution, but a formal 

termination review was never called. The Kepler telescope had major overruns and 

delays, due to factors including the extreme technical challenge of detecting Earthsize planets around other stars and NASA mandating the shift to full-cost accounting. 

Yet it was repeatedly extended. Finally, Dawn actually was cancelled in 2006 and then 

uncancelled a few months later. All four would go on to be groundbreaking missions.5

What emerged from the Mars failures of 1999 and Discovery’s troubles of 2002–2005 

was essentially version 2.0, in which missions could no longer be relatively cheap or 

risky. The cost cap was repeatedly raised such that, as of 2023, it is effectively more than 

double the original $150 million in 1992 dollars. The greatly increased emphasis on 

program reviews and documentation made development longer and more expensive. 

Realism also set in about the ambition of many of the proposals. After NEAR and Lunar 

Prospector, which were significantly under the cap, every proposal to 2001 was right 

up to it. The competitive process favored maximizing the science, which led to overly 

optimistic estimates of the cost of increasingly sophisticated instrumentation. That was 

a significant factor in the overruns and delays of the early 2000s. Combined with cuts 

in Space Science’s overall budget, that meant that there was insufficient money in the 

budget of Solar System Exploration (after 2004, the Planetary Science Division of the 

Science Mission Directorate) to open new competitions, as already-chosen ones had 

to be funded years longer than originally budgeted. The resulting dearth in selections 

is visible in the preceding table. NASA chose only two new spacecraft proposals in 

the sixteen years between 2001 and 2017.6

One partial substitute was the awarding of “Missions of Opportunity,” a budget 

line initiated in 1998. These cheaper proposals (originally capped at $35 million) were 

for instruments on other, usually foreign, spacecraft or for the creative reuse of NASA 

ones. See the table on the following page for a complete list. Notable is how the main 

spacecraft busses of both Deep Impact and Stardust were employed for new science 

after they fulfilled their original missions of dropping off a comet impactor and a 

sample return capsule, respectively.

5 For a more thorough account of these years, see Neufeld, “The Discovery Program,” 276–80. 

The tables in this foreword are updated versions of the tables in that article. 

6 Ibid., 280–83; Callahan, “Funding Planetary Science,” 70–74.
Foreword

xv

Program management was also reorganized during the crisis years, in part due 

to Goldin’s forced downsizing of NASA Headquarters. Contract administration and 

fulfillment were put into a separate Discovery office, first briefly at JPL, then at Marshall 

Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. That office soon added New Frontiers, a 

new competitive program for “medium-sized” planetary missions, beginning in 2003 

with the New Horizons project to send a spacecraft to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt.7 And 

in response to the new competition presented by APL, and later by Goddard Space 

Flight Center, Director Charles Elachi reorganized the Jet Propulsion Laboratory so 

that it could support multiple proposals. JPL often found Principal Investigators from 

within, or from the ranks of allied scientists in academia, reversing the early Discovery 

expectation that PIs would be academics who would ally with a center to advance their 

own idea. JPL’s success in that endeavor is visible in the “Discovery Missions” table: 

almost all winning proposals after 2001 are from there.

Discovery Missions of Opportunity

Name Selection Launch PI/Institution Lead 

Center Spacecraft Target

Aspera-3 

(instrument) 1998 2003 D. Winningham/SwRI SwRI Mars Express (ESA) Mars

NetLander 

instruments 2001 cancelled W. B. Banerdt/JPL JPL NetLander (France) Mars

M3

(instrument) 2005 2008 C. Pieters/Brown U. JPL Chandrayaan-1 (India) Moon

EPOXI 2007 2005 M. A’Hearn/U. 

Maryland JPL/Ball Deep Impact bus

extrasolar 

planets/Comet 

Hartley 2

Stardust NExT 2007 1999 J. Veverka/

Cornell JPL Stardust bus CometTempel 1

Strofio 

(instrument) 2009 2018 S. Livi/SwRI SwRI BepiColombo (ESA) Mercury

MEGANE 

(instrument) 2017 2024? D. J. Lawrence/APL APL MMX (Japan)

Martian moons 

Phobos and 

Deimos

7 Michael J. Neufeld, “First Mission to Pluto: Policy, Politics, Science and Technology in the 

Origins of New Horizons, 1989–2003,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 44 (2014), 234–

276, abridged and updated as “The Difficult Birth of NASA’s Pluto Mission,” Physics Today 69, 

no. 4 (April 2016), 40–47.
NASA′s Discovery Program

xvi

The creation of the New Frontiers mission line shows that, although the Discovery 

Program was no longer particularly fast or cheap, it was very successful in producing 

innovative and original proposals that maximized science return for focused planetary 

science projects. That success has continued. Beginning in 2017, Discovery was also 

able to restore the selection of two proposals at a time, if not at the every-other-year 

pace of the early years. A new mission line may be needed for cheap and risky missions, 

such as the CubeSats that have been launched to Mars and the Moon recently, but, 

without a doubt, Discovery has been a groundbreaking program that has revolutionized the NASA planetary program and gives every indication that it will be around 

for decades to come.

About This Book and Its Author

Dr. Susan M. Niebur was the Discovery Program Scientist at NASA Headquarters 

from 2002 to 2006. A PhD physicist who had written a dissertation on galactic cosmic rays, she had looked for a job at the space agency out of pure enthusiasm for it. 

She won a Presidential Management Internship there in 2001 and moved on to the 

Discovery position only one year later. As a young woman, she already stood out in a 

place dominated by aging, predominantly male civil servants. She had come with her 

husband, Curt Niebur, who came to Headquarters shortly after her and is still today 

a leading administrator in the Planetary Science Division. But when they began to 

have children, she found the work arrangements too inflexible. She quit and formed 

her own consulting company, as well as taking a leading role in encouraging young 

women who were planetary scientists, and early-career scientists generally, to organize and change the discipline. She founded the Women in Planetary Science website 

and the annual women’s breakfast at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference 

in Houston. Both continue to promote career advancement and networking today.8

In 2007, Susan Niebur won a NASA grant to write a history of the Discovery 

Program, the origin of this book. She also published several articles from her research 

and personal knowledge of the subject, focusing particularly on the role of the PI. Very 

unfortunately, she never finished the book manuscript, as she tragically died at age 

38 in early 2012 after a five-year struggle with cancer. That story is told by this book’s 

editor, David W. Brown, in his engrossing work on the origin of a mission to explore 

Jupiter’s moon Europa. (Curt Niebur is one of his central characters.) Later that year, 

8 David W. Brown, The Mission (New York: Custom House, 2021), 103–07; “Susan Niebur 

(1973–2012), Astrophysicist,” https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/people/1700/susan-niebur-1973-2012/; 

Women in Planetary Science website, https://womeninplanetaryscience.wordpress.com/; Division 

for Planetary Sciences, American Astronomical Society, “2012 Prize Recipients,” Susan Niebur 

citation, https://dps.aas.org/prizes/2012. All websites accessed 7 Sept. 2022. For her articles on PIs 

and Discovery, see n. 3. For a full list of her publications, see https://susanniebur.wordpress.com/

publication-list/, accessed 9 Sept. 2022. 
Foreword

xvii

the American Astronomical Society posthumously awarded Susan Niebur the Harold 

Masursky Award for “outstanding service to planetary science and exploration.” Asteroid 

113394 Niebur was later named in her honor.9

She left behind a partially completed Discovery manuscript and a rich collection of 

materials and oral histories covering the first two decades of the program, up to about 

2011. To complete this book, NASA hired David Brown to edit the chapters that were 

essentially finished—approximately the first sixty percent of the manuscript—and 

to complete the rest from a collection of drafts, notes, copied news articles, and oral 

history excerpts. It was a monumental task, but to the best of his ability, David has 

tried to write in her voice and finish the book the way she would have wanted to. It 

is by far the most comprehensive history yet written of Discovery’s early years. It is 

a fitting tribute to a charismatic, energetic, and influential young scientist, someone 

who unfortunately did not live long enough to see her children grow up or hold this 

book in her hand.

9 Brown, The Mission, 183–85, 226–28, 334–36. For Susan Niebur’s blog of her family and illness, 

see https://toddlerplanet.wordpress.com/, accessed 7 Sept. 2022.

1

Prompted in part by the grounding of the Space Shuttle fleet due to fuel leaks, along 

with embarrassing revelations of a Hubble Space Telescope that was defective on 

launch, the George H. W. Bush administration requested in July 1990 that an independent group evaluate the long-term goals of the National Aeronautics and Space 

Administration (NASA). Five months later, the Advisory Committee on the Future of 

the United States Space Program released its much-anticipated report, declaring space 

science to be NASA’s highest priority, above even the Space Shuttle, space station, and 

a return to the Moon.1 The report came on the heels of a difficult decade for the field 

of planetary science, which had seen only a few large projects replace the robust series 

of Mariner, Pioneer, and Voyager spacecraft that had characterized American robotic 

space exploration since the 1960s. To correct for the dearth of mission launches and 

1 Report of the Advisory Committee on the Future of the U.S. Space Program. (1990). U.S. 

Government Printing Office.

CHAPTER 1

Discovery Begins
NASA′s Discovery Program

2

to fully address the newly prioritized science objectives of NASA, the agency’s management and the planetary science community sought a new approach to the robotic 

exploration of the solar system.

LAUNCHING A MISSION LINE

Two of NASA’s existing, high-priority planetary science missions had been previously 

delayed in the 1980s, in part by issues related to the Space Shuttle. The first of these 

projects was the Galileo mission to Jupiter, first selected in 1977. The billion-dollar 

“large strategic science mission” (colloquially known as a “flagship”) was set for a 1984 

Space Shuttle launch with a Centaur upper stage pushing it toward the outer planets. 

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), an agency research and development center 

in Pasadena, California, delivered the spacecraft to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center 

in December 1985 as payload for the Space Shuttle. Before launch, however, tragedy 

struck with the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger in January 1986. This grounded the 

Jupiter orbiter for years while NASA struggled to return to flight. NASA implemented 

additional safety regulations, which rendered the Centaur upper stage—fueled with 

liquid hydrogen—far too dangerous for flight aboard the Shuttle. Engineers determined 

that a solid-fueled inertial upper stage, however, would be permissible, though it would 

supply much less thrust to the spacecraft.

Galileo engineers went to work replacing the planned direct trajectory with a more 

complicated route that sent the spacecraft around Venus and Earth, using the gravity 

of each as a slingshot “assist.” Galileo launched finally on 18 October 1989, on Space 

Shuttle Atlantis, using the integrated upper stage and three gravity assists to boost it 

toward the outer planets. Scientists, some of whom had been involved since the project’s 

inception, awaited its December 1995 arrival at the Jupiter system.2

Meanwhile, NASA’s Magellan radar mapper mission to Venus, also scheduled for 

launch on a Space Shuttle, was postponed in the post-Challenger standdown of 1986 

through 1989. With the date of Shuttle flight resumption uncertain, the Magellan team 

worked toward its original May 1988 launch window, with a backup date of October 

1989. Once Shuttle flights resumed, however, Galileo took precedence, and the Magellan 

team had to rework their planned trajectory to compensate for the reduced lift available 

at launch. Moreover, the delayed date of arrival invalidated the meticulously planned 

Venus mapping campaign. Engineers would now have to compensate for different 

relative positions of the spacecraft, Earth, and the Sun.

On 4 May 1989, NASA launched Magellan and its integrated upper stage on Space 

Shuttle Atlantis. After both stages of the integrated upper stage fired as planned, Magellan 

2 Dick, S. (2007). Why We Explore: Mission to Jupiter. Retrieved 1 August 2011 from http://www.

nasa.gov/exploration/whyweexplore/Why_We_26.html.
Chapter 1: Discovery Begins

3

continued its journey, entering orbit around Venus on 10 August 1990, and executed 

a very successful mission. Magellan ended with a dramatic plunge into the Venusian 

atmosphere on 11 October 1994.

A Graying Organization

NASA might have attempted more missions, but an earlier effort to start a less-expensive, 

medium-class mission line called Planetary Observer had failed. The first in the series, 

Mars Observer, went so far over budget and schedule that the agency deemed future 

such missions unviable. Mars Observer suffered from what some in the planetary 

science community call the “last bus out” syndrome, in which researchers continue 

to add scientific instruments to the spacecraft in hopes of not missing the last trip to 

a planet for many years. This resulted in what detractors called “Christmas treeing” 

the mission, with instruments hung like ornaments on the spacecraft.

The continual expansion of the mission’s scope, coupled with requisite engineering changes, caused Mars Observer to overrun its budget long before its completion. 

Then the spacecraft arrived at Mars and promptly vanished, never to be heard from 

again, possibly having exploded, crashed into the planet, missed Mars entirely, or some 

combination of the three. After the total developmental and operational failures of 

Mars Observer, the Planetary Observer line thus ended ignominiously.

Meanwhile, the flagship-class Cassini mission to Saturn, along with its twin, the 

Comet Rendezvous Asteroid Flyby (CRAF), both remained in the NASA budget 

approved by Congress for a New Start in 1989.3 Due to budget restraints and dollars diverted by Congress to the burgeoning space station program, CRAF would be 

soon canceled.4

The 1980s were a quiet, vexing decade for planetary scientists and spacecraft engineers.5

 “JPL is a bit of a graying organization,” commented Lew Allen, director of the 

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in 1988.6 “With the ten-year period in which no spacecraft 

have been launched, I’m concerned that the skills are not honed” to the extent that 

they must be to ensure the success of future missions.

3 Committee on Planetary and Lunar Exploration. (1985). Assessment of Planned Scientific Content 

of the CRAF Mission. Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences; Weissman, P., and Marcia 

Neugebauer. (1991). The Comet Rendezvous Asteroid Flyby Mission: A Status Report. Asteroids, 

Comets, Meteors 1991, 629–632.

4 Broad, W. J. (1991, 8 June). “House Vote Sets Stage for Conflict Between Two Allies in Space 

Program.” New York Times, A7.

5 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 September). Personal interview with T. Krimigis. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

6 Spotts, P. (1988, 6 January). “JPL’s Allen Says US Must Soon Get Its Own Launchers off the Pads.” 

Christian Science Monitor. https://www.csmonitor.com/1988/0106/ajpl.html.
NASA′s Discovery Program

4

Allen advocated less-expensive new missions that would include the miniaturization 

of technologies “to permit important scientific experiments to be done on very small 

vehicles,” as well as the Lunar Observer—previous frontrunner as the next mission in 

the doomed Planetary Observer class—to circle the Moon’s poles in search of water.7

Small groups of scientists pushed NASA to find ways to explore the solar system 

in cost-effective, imaginative ways, but even low-cost, high-reward modifications of 

current missions, such as adding asteroid flybys to Galileo’s trajectory or shifting the 

trajectory of the third International Sun–Earth Explorer (ISEE) to rendezvous with 

Halley’s Comet, were met with resistance at the agency.8 As NASA continued to cope 

with the devastating loss of Challenger, management chose to reduce risk significantly 

whenever possible on current and future missions.

This risk aversion, coupled with limited financial resources, left little room for NASA 

to even consider new missions, let alone large ones in the mold of Galileo, Magellan, or 

Mars Observer. Some planetary scientists supplemented their own dwindling mission 

resources by turning to studies of Earth, where funding opportunities were more certain 

because of higher launch cadences due to lower spacecraft cost and complexity, as well 

as reliable military dollars. Solar system exploration would continue, but glacially, one 

large institutional mission at a time. Scientists seeking new planetary missions were 

frustrated by the pace of plans for giant flagships and with NASA’s faltering plans for 

the development and launch of smaller, focused missions.

One Zero Too Many

In the summer of 1989, scientists hand-picked by NASA management met for a series 

of workshops to define the future of planetary exploration in the next decade. The Small 

Mission Program Group, chaired by Robert Brown of the Space Telescope Science 

Institute, was tasked with identifying the next planetary science investigations that NASA 

should attempt using mission concepts smaller than flagships. At the second meeting 

of the Committee on Strategic Planning, held at the University of New Hampshire 

between 26 June and 30 June 1989, members of the planetary science community 

and NASA expected the group to return details supporting the Lunar Observer as the 

agency’s top priority for flight. It soon became clear, however, that this committee was 

7 Ibid.

8 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 September). Personal interview with J. Veverka. Located in the “CONTOUR” 

file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, 

DC; Farquhar, R. (2011). Fifty Years on the Space Frontier: Halo Orbits, Comets, Asteroids, and 

More. Denver: Outskirts Press.
Chapter 1: Discovery Begins

5

not going to rubber-stamp the “easy” choice. Several committee members felt strongly 

that other celestial bodies should take priority and refused to endorse the spacecraft. 

The committee, in other words, rebelled.9

MARS PATHFINDER

During one session, Tom Krimigis, then-head of the Space Physics and Instrumentation 

Group at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), introduced 

an idea for Principal Investigator (PI)–led, low-cost, high-tempo planetary missions 

that he and several colleagues had advocated elsewhere. This intrigued the Committee 

on Strategic Planning, and when the subpanels gathered at a plenary session chaired 

by Joseph Veverka of Cornell University, Brown raised the idea of the new mission 

line. Scientists present did not believe it could be done, however, as NASA had just 

recently attempted an unsuccessful line of low-cost missions that aimed to provide 

frequent access to space. Mars Observer, the pilot project for Planetary Observers, 

demonstrated the weakness of the model.10

Krimigis was undeterred by the widespread skepticism. Citing the PI-led missions 

recently proposed and executed through the Explorer Program, a midsize mission line 

whose history dated back to the very first days of NASA, when Explorer 1 was launched 

in January 1958, he explained that a different paradigm could produce drastically different results from what had been revealed by Mars Observer. Some members of the 

panel were intrigued, though Don Hunten of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at 

the University of Arizona, as well as other scientists who were more familiar with the 

earlier failures, challenged Krimigis to brief the strategic planning committee on the 

ways Explorer succeeded where Planetary Observer failed—and to give a presentation the next morning. This was the pre-PowerPoint era of viewgraphs, a time when 

presentations took hours to create, with painstaking effort.

NASA schedules are demanding, and that week was no exception. Just a few days 

earlier, Krimigis had reported to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) on the 

results of a Phase A study—that is, the study of a baseline mission concept—of a space 

physics project called the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE), led by a single PI, 

Ed Stone of the California Institute of Technology. ACE was competing for a slot in 

the Explorer Program. The fate of the ACE proposal was then unknown, but because 

9 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 September). Personal interview with J. Veverka. Located in the “CONTOUR” 

file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

10 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 September). Personal interview with T. Krimigis. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.
NASA′s Discovery Program

6

Krimigis had just given that GSFC briefing, he had something almost as valuable as 

an endorsement: viewgraphs explaining the Explorer concept.

Krimigis presented the viewgraphs at the plenary meeting, introducing the planetary community to the low-cost, rapid-turnaround program that the solar and space 

physics community had built with Explorer.11 He demonstrated a new leadership 

model that put science at the top of the organization chart, with a single PI in charge 

of the mission and co-investigators in charge of each instrument carried by the spacecraft. This structure, a topsy-turvy way of mission development from an engineering 

perspective, had been shown to work on the Active Magnetospheric Particle Tracer 

Explorers (AMPTE), a recent Explorer mission on which Krimigis was PI. (AMPTE 

was a scientific success as well, operating with a small science team for five years.)12

The presentation intrigued committee members and representatives from NASA 

Headquarters. Veverka publicly challenged Krimigis on the cost for this self-contained 

mission when propulsion, nine instruments, and the full range of subsystems were 

included, saying that a project of that scope would likely cost $400 million. Krimigis 

responded, “Well, you know, you’re close, except you have one zero too many.”13 The 

ACE spacecraft was estimated to cost $40–45 million, plus $30 million for its instruments—an estimate supported by the fact that the same team had just delivered AMPTE 

on cost and schedule.14

Geoffrey Briggs, director of the Solar System Exploration Division at NASA 

Headquarters, was intrigued. In true NASA fashion, he appointed a science working 

group to study the low-cost mission approach, asking Brown to chair the working 

group as he had the original panel. The working group met about six months later in 

late 1989, and again in May 1990, to study potential mission concepts. (They did not, 

however, define program parameters.)15 The panel had one notable recommendation: 

the new program should be called Discovery.

Briggs also took a direct approach to the concept, asking Krimigis to lead a fastpaced, NASA-funded study at the Applied Physics Laboratory for a mission that would 

fit into this new type of planetary program.

As word spread, community support for the new initiative began building. It was 

not without difficulty, however. While the working group commissioned by Briggs 

11 Krimigis, S.  M., and Joseph Veverka. (1995, October–December). “Foreword: Genesis of 

Discovery.” The Journal of the Astronautical Sciences, 43(4), 345–347.

12 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 September). Personal interview with T. Krimigis. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Krimigis, S.  M. and Joseph Veverka. (1995, October–December). “Foreword: Genesis of 

Discovery.” The Journal of the Astronautical Sciences, 43(4), 345–347.
Chapter 1: Discovery Begins

7

discussed possibilities, Lew Allen, director of JPL, spoke publicly about his lab’s internal 

small spacecraft studies, remarking: “It’s been a disappointment to me that I have not 

been able to generate much enthusiasm for small spacecraft.”16 Proud of JPL’s contributions to NASA’s planetary exploration efforts to date, he continued: “We have done 

a reconnaissance of the solar system that has done most of the simple measurements 

that can be made with small, inexpensive instruments.”17 The trouble, he explained, 

was that planetary scientists wanted to take difficult measurements that required new, 

more sophisticated instrumentation that would in turn demand additional money to 

develop, miniaturize, and harden for the extreme environments of space. It would be 

a challenge to bring the entire community to consensus that a novel programmatic 

approach—frequent, low-cost missions each designed to perform smaller experiments 

on specific phenomena, as opposed to larger, well-instrumented spacecraft designed 

to get big, holistic science—could ultimately return all the complex measurements 

and breakthrough science they desired.

A Little Garage with a Car

Meanwhile, back at NASA Headquarters, Briggs began other studies that would lay 

the groundwork for future Mars missions. What Briggs really wanted was a way to get 

back to the surface of Mars while simultaneously breaking the mindset of sending one 

giant mission once a decade, adding instrument after instrument, dollar after dollar, 

up to the maximum capacity of the spacecraft and its launch rocket. How could NASA 

return to the surface of Mars without falling into the same trap that had ensnared 

Mars Observer? Joe Boyce, then the Mars Program Scientist at NASA Headquarters, 

recalled that Briggs was convinced that you could get back to Mars on the cheap, but 

the science instrumentation that spacecraft carried would have to be limited to only 

the most essential and inexpensive experiments.

In 1990, Briggs commissioned NASA’s Ames Research Center to develop a low-cost 

Mars mission concept. Previously, scientists had devised a latticework of Mars exploration initiatives and research built around a sample return concept, but NASA budgets 

had rendered sample return impossible. Ames Research Center began work on what 

would eventually be called the Mars Environmental SURvey (MESUR)—a mission 

concept that would see a network of small landers alight on the Martian surface, each 

focused on some specific science (e.g., atmospheric science, geology, geochemistry) 

and thus meet Briggs’s request for a light science payload per mission.18

16 Allen, L. (1990, June). “Face to Face with Lew Allen.” Aerospace America, 28(6), 10–11.

17 Ibid.

18 Conway, E. M. (2015). Exploration and Engineering: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Quest 

for Mars. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 41.
NASA′s Discovery Program

8

Briggs also called his good friend Gene Giberson, of the advanced planning office 

at JPL, and shared the challenge. Giberson, who was also the assistant lab director 

for flight projects, was captivated by the idea and offered to examine the capabilities 

of various types of small launch vehicles. He wanted to see if it would be possible to 

return to Mars without paying for a large, expensive rocket to carry a smaller spacecraft 

and its instruments and fuel. Giberson would have his team conduct this and other 

engineering studies.

There was a catch: at JPL, any mission to Mars was expected to meet certain standards 

and to be done in certain ways. A Mars landing was expected to follow the meticulous 

and successful engineering standards set by Viking, the lab’s previous Mars surface 

mission. Viking was a mammoth pair of life-detection landers that each reached the 

Martian surface by continuously firing rockets to slow descent. If too many people 

knew about Giberson’s “radical” study, word would likely reach unfriendly members of 

management, and the project would soon be killed—even though he was an assistant 

lab director. To avert this, Boyce recalled Giberson assigning only two employees to 

work on the problem. “We’ll do this on the quiet,” Boyce remembered Giberson saying, “not asking for any money to support the studies, because a line of funding would 

raise suspicion and the project would risk cancellation.”19

Boyce recalled something else from his conversations with Briggs during this brainstorming phase: “I thought Geoff was crazy.... He said, ‘I want this package to land on 

the surface, and I want it to have a little garage with a car.’”20 Years later, when Mars 

Pathfinder landed softly on the surface of Mars, the first Discovery mission would 

commence with the gentle opening of the lander’s petals and, later, a little rover called 

Sojourner rolling out of its garage. It was the first wheeled vehicle on Mars.

By the time Briggs left NASA Headquarters to work at Ames, he had conscripted 

JPL Advanced Planning to work on the Mars study as well. Meanwhile, APL was 

working on a small mission study, and the science working group was developing the 

concept of a new small mission line.

At NASA Headquarters, agency brass hired Wesley Huntress as the Division Director 

responsible for robotic exploration of the solar system. Huntress sought to establish a 

program for low-cost planetary missions that would return data from the solar system 

continuously, rather than in fits and starts, as had theretofore bedeviled the agency 

because it had only one or two projects per decade.

“The only way to do that,” he said, “was to have a larger number of smaller, less 

expensive missions, so that you could launch more frequently and have spacecraft 

19 Niebur, S. (2009, 22 March). Personal interview with J. Boyce. Located in “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

20 Ibid.
Chapter 1: Discovery Begins

9

operating at planets as continuously as possible.”21 Culturally—and despite Director 

Lew Allen’s desire to build small missions at JPL—it was not a popular idea overall at 

JPL, said Huntress, who had spent much of his career there as an employee. Big, billiondollar missions laden with instruments guaranteed consistent, long-term “business” 

for the lab. If JPL didn’t win every small mission contract, business would see gaps. 

“The way that they fed their people was to have them all working on these big missions, 

and they had no concept how to break them up and work them on smaller missions.”22

Outside of Huntress’s new division, there were examples across the country of 

low-cost missions in various stages of development. One was Clementine, an effort 

by the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) to test space-based sensors 

useful for a national missile defense shield. They would do this by mapping the Moon. 

Huntress remembered: “I instantly ran over to the Pentagon and talked to this young 

guy, named Mike Griffin, and I said[,] ‘How can we do this together?’”23 The mission was 

soon jointly supported by SDIO (which sponsored the spacecraft design, manufacture, 

and integration), the Navy Research Laboratory (which handled mission execution), 

the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (which did 

instrument design and manufacture), and NASA (in charge of the science team and 

navigation). The mission would become a success.24

Huntress’s conceptual low-cost planetary mission program, meanwhile, was mired 

in bureaucracy. Huntress disbanded the committee led by Robert Brown and restructured it, putting experienced hands in space exploration in charge of the science and 

engineering aspects, saying, “I didn’t want contemplation; I wanted action. So, I restructured that committee and gave it to Veverka [of Cornell University].... He would go 

right to the throat and so would Jim Martin [former program manager of the Viking 

program].”25 The science team, led by Veverka, was challenged to think differently: to 

define a focused science mission in an environment where the community at the time 

treated every spacecraft as the last bus out of town. Huntress worked closely with the 

committee to keep them focused and reminded them to work with Martin’s engineering group to see what could be done.

21 Wright, R. (2003, 9 January). Personal interview with W. Huntress. Located in “Wes 

Huntress” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

22 Ibid.

23 Niebur, S. (2009, 13 March). Personal interview with W. Huntress. Located in “Wes Huntress” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

24 Ibid.

25 Wright, R. (2003, 9 January). Personal interview with W. Huntress. Located in “Wes 

Huntress” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.
NASA′s Discovery Program

10

Meanwhile, Martin led a team charged with defining Discovery cost and management; providing an independent assessment of the feasibility of the program; and 

figuring out, essentially, how to do low-cost NASA-led planetary missions. According 

to Huntress, he chose Martin, whom he described as “a fabulous person, gruff, tough 

and smart as hell,” because Martin had been a program manager on Viking and had 

built one of the most challenging planetary missions in NASA’s history. His experience 

would keep optimism in check.26 Huntress wanted a diverse and highly experienced 

engineering team, calling upon project managers (PMs) and engineers from the APL, 

Goddard Space Flight Center, JPL, and Ames Research Center. This team visited government labs, aerospace contractors, and NASA centers, and the members were willing 

to talk with anyone who had experience on lower-cost projects or studies.

Then Huntress issued a challenge to APL and JPL: to develop simultaneous, competitive studies on a low-cost asteroid mission. Huntress chose the small-bodies target 

because of the relative ease and low general cost of such missions.27

“The Next Phase Is an Exploration Phase”

As the two laboratories vied for the first directed mission in a nascent Discovery 

Program, members of the planetary science community began to weigh in on potential 

science priorities. In April, the news of a new low-cost mission line had surfaced in the 

media, with a Planetary Science Division wish list of Lunar Observer, a Mars lander 

network, a Neptune orbiter, a Pluto flyby, a mission to an asteroid, a Mercury orbiter, and 

a Venus probe. Huntress told SpaceNews, “We’ve finished the reconnaissance phase of 

every planet in the solar system except Pluto.... The next phase is an exploration phase, 

conducting global surveys [of the planets] with orbiters and atmospheric probes and 

in-depth studies using landers and sample return spacecraft.”28 Meanwhile, scientists 

like Michael Belton of Belton Space Exploration Initiatives, LLC, and Alan Delamere 

of Delamere Space Sciences—both private firms that conducted planetary science 

research outside the auspices of academia—were taking the case for the Discovery 

Program to the larger community, presenting papers on specific low-cost missions 

26 Niebur, S. (2009, 13 March). Personal interview with W. Huntress. Located in “Wes Huntress” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

27 Wright, R. (2003, 9 January). Personal interview with W. Huntress. Located in “Wes 

Huntress” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

28 David, L. (1991, 15–21 April). “Scientists Urge Unmanned Planetary Probes.” SpaceNews. 6.
Chapter 1: Discovery Begins

11

at the Asteroids, Comets, and Meteors meeting at the Lunar and Planetary Institute 

in Houston, as well as the workshop on Micro-Spacecraft for Planetary Exploration, 

hosted by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, on 23 September 1991.29

NEAR

The challenge set by Huntress for APL and JPL, specifically, was to fly a mission to an 

asteroid for $150 million or less (excluding the costs of the launch vehicle and mission operations). In May 1991, the JPL and APL teams met at a hotel in Pasadena, 

California, to present their concepts of a low-cost mission to a near-Earth asteroid. 

Scientists who were present remember it as “a shoot-out.”30

At the meeting, scientist Ed Stone, who four months earlier had become the new 

director of JPL, welcomed both teams, as well as NASA Headquarters personnel, to 

the lab’s hometown. Then the JPL team began their presentation.

“You People Think We Are Stupid, Don’t You?”

According to Richard Vorder Bruegge, a planetary scientist formerly of Brown University 

and then a contractor at NASA Headquarters, “It couldn’t have been more than 30 

minutes after Ed Stone said we’re going to do this for $150 million” that JPL team 

leadership said, essentially, “We don’t believe that the first mission can be done for less 

than $300 million, but if you give us enough money, by the time we get to the third 

mission we’ll get it to $150 million.”

JPL’s approach was to accept that flying a planetary mission for $150 million was 

not possible as a starting point. Instead, JPL opted for an incremental approach: start 

with a spacecraft bus with essentially no science instruments, fly it, and see if it survives. Then do it again, but this time put a camera on it and see if you could stabilize 

the spacecraft well enough to take pictures. Then do it a third time and add another 

science instrument, perhaps a spectrometer, and try to orbit an asteroid. While lowrisk, this strategy would take 10 years and cost $450 million.

Huntress wasn’t the only stunned audience member. “I remember Jim Martin getting red in the face,” said Tom Krimigis of APL. He recalled Martin saying: “You people 

think we are stupid, don’t you?”31

29 Belton, M., and Alan Delamere. (1991). “Low-Cost Missions to Explore the Diversity of NearEarth Objects.” Asteroids, Comets, Meteors 1991; ibid.

30 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 January). Personal interview with S. Keddie, M. Saunders, and R. Vorder 

Bruegge. Located in “Discovery Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History 

Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

31 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 September). Personal interview with T. Krimigis. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.
NASA′s Discovery Program

12

Then the APL team presented their strategy. Tom Coughlin, the study manager at 

APL, briefed NASA Headquarters on their competing mission concept, a single flight 

estimated to cost $112 million. The mission was similar to one that they had been 

briefing for a decade and was perfectly in line with Huntress’s request. Bob Farquhar 

was in charge of mission design, and Krimigis had tapped Andy Cheng, an earlycareer scientist, for the position of project scientist, with Rob Gold as the instrument 

manager. The proposal had heritage with other recent APL projects such as AMPTE, 

which was done for $30 million.32 APL had proposed a mission at half the price of 

JPL’s first mission and accomplished the objectives without requiring additional flights.

“When I got the results, boy it was clear who knew how to build low-cost missions: APL. I mean, there was just no doubt,” Huntress said.33 APL would eventually 

be awarded the mission, which would be called the Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous.

Meanwhile, Huntress wished to make headway on the Mars lander network sought 

by the planetary science community, which was being studied internally at JPL and 

Ames Research Center (a competition that had become something of a friction point 

between the two labs). He favored JPL to lead the mission but knew that the lab needed 

competition if its culture were to change to meet the demands of Discovery. “I had 

decided to stop the rivalry between Ames and JPL. I gave MESUR to JPL,” he said, 

explaining that he wanted a long-term program to explore Mars, and that “no other 

place is going to run that except JPL.” MESUR, he said, “was going to be their entrée 

into low-cost missions, this Mars MESUR thing.”

Huntress pressed Ed Stone, director of JPL, to place Tony Spear, a project manager at JPL, in charge of the newly minted JPL MESUR project. Describing Spear as 

“a maverick in the JPL system,” Huntress said: “I trusted Tony was the guy to be able 

to upset the JPL apple cart, because I watched him on [Venus mapper] Magellan.”34

Turf wars at NASA Headquarters jeopardized Huntress’s plans, however. As part 

of an agency-wide reorganization to support NASA’s human spaceflight ambitions, 

the lunar science program had been transferred from his Office of Space Science to 

a separate Office of Exploration. Huntress feared that Mars might be next.35 “So I 

decided to marry MESUR into Discovery and have it be one of the first missions in 

Discovery.” Huntress had secondary motivations to make MESUR part of Discovery: 

32 Niebur, S. (2009, 27 August). Personal interview with T. Krimigis. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

33 Wright, R. (2003, 9 January). Personal interview with W. Huntress. Located in “Wes 

Huntress” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

34 Ibid.

35 Conway, E. M. (2015). Exploration and Engineering: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Quest 

for Mars. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 47.
Chapter 1: Discovery Begins

13

the challenge. “Landing on Mars is pretty damn hard, and I don’t know if anybody 

can do it like NASA JPL.”36

“NASA Is Determined to Constrain Discovery Program Costs”

Now NASA had its first two Discovery missions, but it still lacked a program with 

which to manage them. The agency convened a Discovery Cost and Management 

Team of Advisers to develop a program structure; policies for organization, staffing, 

and meetings; and guiding principles to ensure that the program could effectively 

administer small science missions. It was hardly glamorous work—the stuff of a true 

bureaucracy—but it was necessary to ensure that there would be a third Discovery 

mission, and then a fourth, and so on.37

In July 1991, that team issued a report outlining the intended parameters for the 

implementation of the program. The report concluded that Discovery could be successful, given one important limitation: “NASA is determined to constrain Discovery 

Program costs, through the annual and project run-out, to predetermined funding 

levels.”38 Other key recommendations from the group included the following:

• All projects proposed for implementation as part of the Discovery Program 

shall be constrained to a total cost of $150 million in Fiscal Year 1992 dollars.

• All projects shall launch within three years of a project’s start.

• Spacecraft instrument payloads must have demonstrated feasibility and maturity, or else they should not be selected, or the mission should be deferred.

GRAND VISIONS

To organize and represent the perspective of the scientific community, the Discovery 

Science Working Group discussed similar implementation issues but was unable to come 

to consensus. A letter from working group leader Veverka to Huntress on 11 September 

1991, discussed options considered by the group. They observed that while an informal 

set of working groups might be the most efficient way forward, it might be better to 

establish rigid, structured procedures, which could open the field to more potential 

36 Niebur, S. (2009, 13 March). Personal interview with W. Huntress. Located in “Wes Huntress” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

37 Logsdon, J. M. (1995, January). Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History of the 

U.S. Civil Space Program (Vol. 5). Washington, DC: NASA History Division. 467.

38 Martin, J. S. (1991, 10 July). Report of the Discovery Program Cost and Management Team.
NASA′s Discovery Program

14

investigators. No matter what, said Veverka, NASA Headquarters should continue to 

work the specifics of the program and not be distracted by any calls for re-proving the 

case, which had been made by the Brown Committee the previous year.39

The Woods Hole Space Science and Applications Advisory Committee (SSAAC) 

Workshop met in the summer of 1991. Established under the aegis of the NASA 

Advisory Council, its purpose was to help establish agency goals and priorities and 

resolve scientific and programmatic conflicts at the subdiscipline level for major NASA 

initiatives. In a 16 September letter, Huntress summarized the challenge of Discovery 

and its integration into space science by noting that the challenge was to devise a plan 

for the Nation’s robotic space efforts for that decade, balancing different goals and 

financial constraints. Specifically, he wanted to develop small planetary missions that 

would enable better access to space. The SSAAC accepted Discovery as a level-of-effort 

program with those goals.

This Woods Hole meeting situated the Discovery program in a position corresponding to an FY 1996 New Start, a dedicated, long-term line of funding in the NASA 

budget. Congressional interest in the Mars Pathfinder and NEAR missions helped with 

this accelerated New Start for Discovery.

Meanwhile, the Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Applications 

of the National Research Council’s Committee on Planetary and Lunar Exploration 

(COMPLEX) endorsed the idea of the fledgling Discovery Program in a report released 

in 1991, with several caveats, including this: “the mission and program structure should 

be such that no single element absorbs the program resources for more than two years,” 

and that a large investment in engineering design must not be required for missions. 

Moreover, data should be delivered “in a timely manner,” with “adequate funding for 

data analysis and related theoretical modeling.” The report explained that such rules 

encapsulated the best aspects of the Explorer mission line and NASA policies for 

Earth probes.40

“It’s Not Just Your Program; It’s the Public’s Program”

Background work was also happening on the political level. Key personnel at the 

Applied Physics Laboratory briefed Senator Barbara Mikulski, who represented the 

Maryland-based organization in Congress, about this exciting new program of small, 

low-cost planetary spacecraft that could be built with significant participation from 

39 Veverka, J. (1991, 11 September). Letter to Wes Huntress. Susan Niebur’s personal collection.

40 National Research Council. (1991). Assessment of Solar System Exploration Programs 1991. 

Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. 30–31. https://doi.org/10.17226/12323.
Chapter 1: Discovery Begins

15

the academic and research communities.41 This work bore fruit for Discovery, though 

the broader space program was not so fortunate. On 11 July 1991, Senator Mikulski 

spurred the Senate Committee on Appropriations, of which she was a member, to 

send a bill called HR 2519 to the main floor of the chamber. This was the Fiscal Year 

1992 appropriations bill written by members of the subcommittee through which 

NASA was then funded. Amendments were introduced as well, alongside Senate 

Report No. 102-107.

The Senate report contained a litany of committee recommendations, including 

specific additions and subtractions to particular missions—though mostly subtractions, 

in keeping with a new fiscal climate caused by spending caps in the federal government established in an earlier, 1990 budget agreement. The report recommended 

the removal of $112.3 million from the Comet Rendezvous Asteroid Flyby (CRAF)/

Cassini budget, effectively canceling CRAF, Cassini’s twin intended to probe a comet. 

Moreover, the report recommended, 

$1M from planetary research and analysis, taken as a general reduction. The Committee 

has been supportive of comprehensive planetary missions proposed by NASA in the past. 

However, with fiscal issues in mind, NASA is directed to consider science missions using 

small low-cost planetary spacecraft to complement its larger missions. In particular, the 

Committee directs NASA to prepare, with input from the scientific community, a plan to 

stimulate and develop small planetary or other space science projects, emphasizing those 

which could be accomplished by the academic or research communities. The plan should be 

submitted by February 1, 1992.42

The Discovery Program’s legislative origin was thus tinged by and entwined with 

the unfortunate cancellation of the large CRAF mission, all in the context of a tight 

budget climate. According to Huntress, then director of the Solar System Exploration 

Division, this devastated the Office of Space Science and Applications (OSSA), which 

managed the NASA science portfolio. He explained, “[T]he plan we came up with...was 

no longer realistic.... We had to cancel CRAF.” In addition, the office had to restructure 

the planned Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility (AXAF) into two missions (one 

of which, ultimately, was canceled). Huntress already had JPL Mars, APL asteroid, 

41 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 September). Personal interview with J. Veverka. Located in the “CONTOUR” 

file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, 

DC. See also Niebur, S. (2009, 13 March). Personal interview with W. Huntress. Located in “Wes 

Huntress” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC. See also Niebur, S. (2009, 24 September). Personal interview with T. Krimigis. 

Located in the “Discovery Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History 

Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

42 Congressional Research Service. (1991, 11 July). Senate Appropriations Committee Report: S. 

107, 102nd Congress. pp. 130–140.
NASA′s Discovery Program

16

and programmatic studies in progress, suggesting that NASA could do such missions 

and meeting this new congressional mandate for something that sounded exactly 

like Discovery.43

On 26 September 1991, Huntress requested that the National Research Council’s 

COMPLEX review the 1991 Solar System Exploration Division Strategic Plan created 

by yet another NASA committee during this time. The review was completed that 

fall, with an endorsement of Discovery from Larry Esposito, COMPLEX chair, and 

the committee.

The Discovery Science Working Group, led by Veverka, issued a report in October 

1991 endorsing the concept as well, capping missions at $150 million or less. The report 

recommended a rendezvous with asteroid 1943 Anteros as its first mission. This was 

the target for which APL had been planning.44

By the end of 1991, the groundwork had been established for the Discovery Program, 

built on three main principles: 1) frequent access to space; 2) best possible science; 

and, 3) as Huntress put it, an “element of public interest, because they’re paying the 

bill.” He understood that this might be at odds with what scientists wanted but sought 

to remind them that the program “has to be exciting to the people who are writing the 

checks. It’s not just your program; it’s the public’s program.”45

They Liked Mars, and They Liked Low-Cost

Federal agency budgets are not spur-of-the-moment inventions but are carefully 

planned and negotiated with the White House Office of Management and Budget 

(OMB) years in advance. In fact, part of the motivation for the establishment of the 

Discovery Program was to avoid the annual churn of congressional approval; a single 

line item for the program would be more stable and predictable and would not require 

the massive amounts of work required for a New Start.

But before that could happen and missions could be proposed, selected, and developed routinely without individual approval by Congress, Discovery itself was on the 

table as a New Start. The program was introduced as a concept in the Fiscal Year 1993 

NASA budget request as one that would “examine the feasibility of using small (i.e., 

Delta [expendable rocket] class) spacecraft with high technological inheritance and 

43 Niebur, S. (2009, 13 March). Personal interview with W. Huntress. Located in “Wes Huntress” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

44 Discovery Science Working Group. (1991, October). Discovery: Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous 

(NEAR) Report. 2. This is from the executive summary. Joseph Veverka chaired the group.

45 Wright, R. (2003, 9 January). Personal interview with W. Huntress. Located in “Wes 

Huntress” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.
Chapter 1: Discovery Begins

17

limited science payloads of two or three instruments in an effort to develop low-cost, 

scientifically viable missions with short development schedules.”46

The following year, the NASA budget introduced Discovery by name, explaining 

that it “would be constrained by highly focused science (few instruments), strict cost 

caps, short development times and use of the smallest launch vehicles capable of 

escape trajectories.” The Fiscal Year 1994 budget reflected the planned phasing of the 

Discovery missions: Mars Pathfinder first and NEAR second.47

THE CENTERPIECE OF NASA FOR THE 1990s

In April 1992, NASA presented the “Small Planetary Mission Plan: Report to Congress,” 

as requested the previous July.48 This document, drafted by Huntress, noted that “the 

current budgetary environment challenges NASA’s ability to sustain a program of 

high science value and opportunity. As part of an overall approach to maintaining the 

vitality and progress of the science community, NASA is emphasizing the introduction 

of small projects in its near-term plans.... [T]wo years ago, small planetary missions 

were just beginning to be discussed by the scientific community. Today, they are the 

centerpiece of NASA’s new programs for the 1990s.”49

The plan—which also discussed a “staged program to ascertain the prevalence 

and character of other planetary systems and to construct a definitive picture of the 

formation of stars and their planets”50 (dubbed TOPS, or Toward Other Planetary 

Systems)—emphasized general principles such as focused scientific objectives; mission designs requiring little or no new technology development; fixed cost ceilings and 

schedules, with reasonable contingencies; and the ability to sustain the scientific community by increasing the number of opportunities for direct investigator involvement.

The small missions would be completed in just three years from project start to 

launch. Each mission would be cost-capped at $150 million, with an annual total program cost cap of $85 million. Notably, these constraints would cause problems in the later 

years of the Discovery Program, as mission after mission exceeded its annual forecasted 

costs, suffered technical delays, and threatened the very future of the program. These 

46 NASA. (1992). NASA Budget Estimates, Fiscal Year 1993. https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/

assets/pdfs/FY1993-Budget-Estimates-Volume-1.pdf.

47 NASA. (1993). NASA Budget Estimates, Fiscal Year 1994, https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/

assets/pdfs/FY1994-Budget-Estimates-Volume-1.pdf.

48 NASA. “Small Planetary Mission Plan: Report to Congress.” April 1992. Reprinted in Logsdon 

volume V, pages 460–468.

49 Niebur, S. (2009, 13 March). Personal interview with W. Huntress. Located in “Wes Huntress” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

50 Solar System Exploration Division. “TOPS: Toward Other Planetary Systems,” https://web.

archive.org/web/20210414164816/http://web.gps.caltech.edu/classes/ge133/reading/TOPS.pdf.
NASA′s Discovery Program

18

problems would not manifest for a decade, but the seeds were planted in this report to 

Congress, which touted benefits of the Discovery Program, including “rapid response 

to emerging scientific opportunities, participation in cooperative ventures with other 

agencies, the timeline is more in line with graduate degree programs and academic 

resources, increased breadth of activity in the solar system exploration program, and 

enhanced timeliness for new information return on important scientific questions.”51

The author of the “Small Planetary Mission Plan: Report to Congress” stated pointedly that Discovery-class missions would not have the robust safeguards found in 

previous NASA spacecraft, explaining that “lower costs may imply the acceptance of a 

modest increase in the level of risk.” (This would change after the consecutive failures 

of the Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander in 1999.)

A commitment to cost containment was equally prominent.52

“His Eyes Got Real Big”

On 1 April 1992, Dan Goldin, who was formerly an engineer for NASA’s Lewis Research 

Center and then the vice president and general manager of contractor TRW Space 

and Technology Group in Redondo Beach, California, was confirmed as the ninth 

Administrator of NASA. Goldin subsequently promoted Huntress to the position 

of Associate Administrator for Space Science the following year, and the Discovery 

Program was well on its way, awaiting only congressional action to give it a New Start.53

Sometime during the first four months of Goldin’s tenure, he and Huntress were 

discussing planetary science missions, when, Huntress said, Goldin “started talking 

about Battlestar Galacticas and trading them in for low-cost planetary missions.” 

The Administrator instructed Huntress to establish a line of low-cost planetary science missions.

“I said, ‘well wait a minute[,] Dan, there is already one on the table. It’s called 

Discovery. It is in your 1994 budget,’” Huntress recalls saying. “And his eyes got big. 

[Goldin] said, ‘What? Really? Tell me more about it.’ Something clicked in his mind, 

and his eyes got real big when he saw that it was already on the table.”54

51 Logsdon, J. M. (1995, January). Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History of the 

U.S. Civil Space Program (Vol. 5). Washington, DC: NASA History Division. 460–468.

52 Ibid.

53 Wright, R. (2003, 9 January). Personal interview with W. Huntress. Located in “Wes 

Huntress” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

54 Niebur, S. (2009, 13 March). Personal interview with W. Huntress. Located in “Wes Huntress” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
Chapter 1: Discovery Begins

19

On 15 August 1992, this informal introduction was made formal when Huntress 

presented the Discovery mission concept to Goldin.55 Most items on the list of potential Discovery missions would actually launch over the next decade. These included 

MESUR Pathfinder (which became Mars Pathfinder); NEAR; multiple asteroid and 

comet flyby missions (realized as CONTOUR and Dawn); an Earth-orbiting telescope 

(which would fly as Kepler); a Mars aeronomy orbiter (later manifesting as MAVEN, 

or Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission, in the Mars Scout program); 

Lunar scout missions (the first of which was the Lunar Prospector orbiter); and comet 

reconnaissance missions to include a sample return (which would be Deep Impact 

and then Stardust).

Vested in a Single Individual: The PI

Huntress likewise formally introduced the new small mission program to the planetary science community through a Discovery Mission Workshop planned for 17–20 

November 1992.56 The Discovery Program constraints were outlined as focused scientific objectives; small payloads of only two or three instruments; the aforementioned 

$150 million cost cap with $85 million in program funding each year; a development time of three years or less; and launch vehicles in the small Delta class, or even 

smaller. Missions would be solicited by NASA Headquarters through “Announcements 

of Opportunity” (AOs)—formal requests for organizations to submit proposals that 

align with a set of scientific goals and technical and financial limitations.

The purpose of the workshop was to identify and evaluate promising mission 

concepts. At the time, the Solar System Exploration Division announced that it would 

fund three to six mission concept studies in 1993. (The number was later increased 

to 10, and after a request for reconsideration, 11 were finally selected.) Workshop 

participation would consist of all who submitted a one-page letter of intent by 2 July 

1992; designated reviewers; and observers. Valid letters of intent would include the 

scientific objectives of a prospective mission and a brief description of the proposer’s 

approach to technical implementation—a significant request for the time.

Carl Pilcher, advanced studies branch chief of the Solar System Exploration Division, 

believed strongly in the mandate to keep the missions focused, and he envisioned that 

if the program worked as intended, the scientific community would get a continuous 

flow of data from the multiple missions and students would also get to work on a 

mission from start to finish during their academic careers.57

55 Huntress, W. (1992, 15 August). “Discovery: A Program of Small Planetary Flight Missions.” 

Unpublished slides, presented to Daniel Goldin. Susan Niebur’s personal collection.

56 Huntress, W. (1992, 5 June). Dear colleague letter to mission concept proposers.

57 NASA Headquarters. (1992, 15 June). “Little Guys Make Big Science in Discovery Program.” 

NASA HQ Bulletin.
NASA′s Discovery Program

20

By July, 89 letters of intent had been received from would-be Principal Investigators—

so many more than expected that an extra day had to be added to the workshop. NASA 

Headquarters sent the 1992 Small Planetary Mission Plan to each proposer, along with 

additional information such as cost cap, development time, and launch vehicle limits.58

The accompanying letter included a clear vision for the role of a PI: “Overall responsibility for mission success must be vested in a single individual, in most cases the PI.” 

This endorsement was a change from the “top-down” model of mission development, 

in which the NASA Science Mission Directorate directed exploration targets and science to agency centers, which in turn might solicit PI-led instruments from other 

organizations in government, industry, and academia. Principal Investigator mission 

models, rather, would be “bottom up,” in which a single scientist (the PI) would take 

point in building mission teams and proposals in competition with others, for consideration by NASA Headquarters.59 The agency released the names and concept titles of 

all proposers, encouraging teams to combine resources and ideas, as merging teams 

might strengthen the concepts for consideration and lessen the evaluating workload. 

Proposers were told to prepare ten-, then fifteen-page concept descriptions to discuss 

scientific, technical, and programmatic aspects of their missions and demonstrate that 

their missions could fit credibly within the program guidelines. Thirty-five copies of 

each report were due on 9 September 1992.

This Is What NASA Ought to Be

In September, NASA received 70 detailed, 15-page mission concepts. The list was 

distributed to all proposers on 29 September 1992, with instructions for attendees.60

The meeting was open, except for panel deliberations at the end of the week, which 

were closed. In contrast to later practice, the workshop would offer “no provisions for 

protection of proprietary material. Participants must assume that all information sent 

to or presented at the workshop will be generally available.”61

During September and October, the concepts were reviewed by scientists across 

the country for science merit. Reviewers sent reviews by mail; science members of 

Discovery workshop evaluation panels were charged with “integrating these written 

reviews with their own assessments.”62

The draft evaluation criteria were widely distributed on 21 October 1992, in a letter 

from Geoffrey Briggs, then the Scientific Director of the Center for Mars Exploration at 

58 Pilcher, C. (1992, 15 July). Dear Colleague letter to proposers. Susan Niebur’s personal collection.

59 Bolles, D. (2022, 9 May). “Mission Models—Strategic and PI-Led.” Retrieved 9 May 2022 from 

https://science.nasa.gov/about-us/science-strategy/mission-models-strategic-and-pi-led.

60 Nash, D. (1992, September 29). Letter from Discovery Program Workshop Organizer. Susan 

Niebur’s personal collection.

61 Ibid.

62 Ibid.
Chapter 1: Discovery Begins

21

Ames, along with the names of the evaluation panel members and their subpanel assignments. This practice of openly identifying the evaluation panel would be short-lived.

The Advanced Studies Branch of the NASA Solar System Exploration Division held 

the Discovery Program Mission Concept Workshop from 15 to 20 November 1992 

at the San Juan Capistrano Research Institute in California. More than 200 scientists, 

engineers, and project managers attended.63 Nearly 100 PIs were invited to present 

their mission concepts. Each presenter was allotted 10 minutes for presentation and 

10 minutes to answer questions. The concepts were grouped into themes such as 

Atmospheres; Dust, Fields, and Plasma; Small Bodies; and Solid Bodies. Within each 

theme, the missions were grouped by target (e.g., Mercury, Venus, Mars, comets, and 

asteroids). After three days of oral presentations by the proposers, the panels began to 

discuss the merits of each proposal. At this first evaluation, co-investigators were not 

excluded from the evaluation of competing mission concepts, and the panel members 

were publicly identified. The organizing committee was identified in widely distributed 

letters as Carl Pilcher of NASA Headquarters; Doug Nash of the San Juan Capistrano 

Research Institute; Briggs of NASA’s Ames Research Center; Jurgen Rahe of NASA 

Headquarters; Richard Vorder Bruegge of SAIC; and Pat Dasch, also of SAIC.64

NASA Administrator Goldin made a last-minute surprise visit to the workshop. He 

challenged the evaluation panel and those assembled to be ambitious.65 The next day, he 

sang Discovery’s praises as he addressed a regular meeting of the Space Studies Board.

You know, I just went to this Discovery meeting. It was the most wonderful experience 

I had. I think it’s the world’s best kept secret.... They have 78 presentations of programs 

under $150 million. Some programs are $50 to $60 million that take three years that do 

everything you ever dreamed about doing. I didn’t know that this existed. I knew that there 

was a Discovery Program, but I didn’t find out about this until last week. There were a 

couple of hundred people down here in San Juan Capistrano and they said the first mission 

may get funded by 1998.... This is what the civil space program ought to be: a diversity of 

opinion; people that are bold, not afraid to take risks; a launch a month instead of a launch 

a decade; graduate students and professors building things; organizations that have the 

best idea and power to do things instead of the bureaucracy coming in and suffocating new 

ideas.... This is the most wonderful thing that ever happened to the space program. Here 

we can have a launch a month and with a launch a month, you could go to the cutting 

63 Vorder Bruegge, R. W. (1993, 21–23 September). “The Discovery Program: A New Approach to 

Planetary Exploration.” AIAA Space Programs and Technologies Conference and Exhibit 93-4090. 

Huntsville: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

64 NASA. (1992, 15–21 November). Evaluation Panel Handbook: General Information. San Juan 

Capistrano: San Juan Capistrano Research Institute.

65 Ibid., 39.
NASA′s Discovery Program

22

edge, and you could lose three or four spacecraft a year. It would be okay because you 

keep launching.66

The results of the San Juan Capistrano meeting were communicated to the scientific community via an open letter to the 246 attendees.67 Twenty-two concepts were 

judged to have exceptional or high science merit and low or medium risk, including 

precursors for Deep Impact, CONTOUR, Dawn, Kepler, Genesis, and six missions 

to explore Venus.

Mission concepts included observatories, space station payloads, flyby spacecraft, 

orbiters, atmospheric probes, airplanes, rough landers, and sample return spacecraft, 

with targets throughout the solar system and even including extrasolar planets (the 

first of which had only just been discovered, with its announcement earlier that year, 

on 9 January 1992). The spacecraft would draw their power from combinations of 

radioisotope thermoelectric generators, solar panels, and batteries.

Management structures were not generally streamlined, mature, or well-defined 

with respect to the roles of the PI and project manager. The review panels noted the 

layers of management and observed: “The management guidelines for the program 

recommended in July 1991 by the Discovery Program Cost and Management Team 

do not appear to have received wide circulation among the community.”68

There were other general problems with power supplies, including radioisotope 

thermoelectric generators, whose costs, at $15 million to $50 million each, exceeded 

that which was available in the Discovery Program; launch vehicles that could not 

reach outer solar system objects; reliance on international partners that increased 

implementation risk; and requirements for technology development resources. The 

Concept Study Review portion of the NASA Discovery Program Workshop Summary 

concluded, “NASA should not begin another brave new program unless and until it 

has the resources to provide each project with adequate definition.”69

The decision to distribute the report, including assessment matrixes that reported 

science value and risk ratings, opened the doors for feedback beyond what proposers had seen before or since. That December alone, at least 15 participants, including PIs and others, sent letters to NASA Headquarters or to Doug Nash at San Juan 

Capistrano Research Institute disputing their evaluations.70 Eleven asked specifically 

66 Goldin, D. (1992, 18 November). Remarks at the 108th Space Studies Board Meeting, Irvine, CA. 

[transcript].

67 Nash, D. (1992, 18 December). NASA Discovery Program Workshop Summary Report. 3–12.

68 Briggs, G. (1992, 18 December). Report on the Discovery Mission Concept Workshop Held at 

the San Juan Capistrano Research Institute, 16 to 20 November 1992. Submitted to the Science 

Mission Directorate with a cover letter from Doug Nash.

69 Nash, D. (1992, 18 December). NASA Discovery Program Workshop Summary Report. 3–12.

70 Letters in Susan Niebur’s personal collection.
Chapter 1: Discovery Begins

23

for a response from the evaluation panel.71 While highly complimentary of the program 

and its process, proposers also cited concerns such as the consequences of disagreements among technical panels, concerns over NASA’s decision-making when choosing 

cheaper or more expensive missions within the cost cap, issues concerning the time 

allotted between announcement and review date, frustration with the limited number 

of pages allowed for concept proposal in light of the detail expected by the panel, and 

the concern that the large number and diversity of the concepts in a given panel made 

it difficult for a small number of scientists to be well-versed in all topics. In addition, 

at least one proposer noted the high ratings on his review and took the opportunity 

to ask for study money. Another letter, from a colleague of a PI who objected to the 

premise that high-risk concepts should not be first on the list to be funded for study, 

took his complaints up the chain to NASA Administrator Goldin, who responded, 

“I am assured that they [the Solar System Exploration Division] are not ruling out 

concepts simply because they were judged to be of high risk by the workshop panel. 

To the contrary, they recognize that high-risk concepts may, in some cases, be those 

that could most benefit from additional study.”72

NASA originally planned to select three to six mission concepts for study. 

Overwhelmed by the response, the agency increased the number to ten. After the 

proposers received their evaluations, several objected to their scores and ratings. Don 

Burnett, proposer of the Solar Wind Sample Return mission, was among those asking 

for reconsideration of the review of his mission concept. The NASA Headquarters 

program official on the receiving end of that request agreed to stretch the promised 

funding to 11 rather than 10, funding Burnett’s study.73 After the initial announcement, 

3 additional studies (led by Veverka, Bill Boynton of the University of Arizona, and 

David Paige of the University of California, Los Angeles) were also funded, bringing 

the total to 14.74

High-Quality Science for a Reasonable Cost

The 14 selections represented the participation of a large part of the planetary science 

community. The concepts were led by PIs from 11 institutions total, viz., six universities, two NASA centers, the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, the United 

71 Nash, D. (1992, 22 December). Letter to Discovery Workshop Evaluation Panel. Susan Niebur’s 

personal collection.

72 Goldin, D. (n.d.) Undated letter to Laureano Cangahuala at JPL. Cangahuala’s letter was dated 31 

December 1992.

73 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with D. Burnett. Located in “Genesis” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC; 

NASA, (1993, 11 February). “NASA Selects 11 Discovery Mission Concepts for Study.” NASA 

Press Release 93-027.

74 Saunders, M., and M. Kicza. (1994). “Discovery Program Overview.” AIAA Space Programs and 

Technologies Conference, 27–29 September 1994.
NASA′s Discovery Program

24

States Geological Survey, and the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI); with management proposed at four management centers, viz., APL, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight 

Center, JPL, and NASA’s Ames Research Center; and a variety of industrial partners, 

viz., Boeing, TRW, Hughes, Lockheed Martin, and Ball.75

Selected Mission Concept Studies

Mission Concept PI PI Institution Management

Mercury Polar Flyby Paul Spudis LPI JPL

Hermes Global Orbiter Robert Nelson JPL JPL

Venus Multiprobe Mission Richard Goody Harvard JPL

Venus Composition Probe Larry Esposito U Colorado, Boulder ARC

Cometary Coma Chemical 

Composition Glenn Carle ARC JPL

Mars Upper Atmosphere 

Dynamics, Energetics, and 

Evolution Mission

Timothy Killeen U Michigan, Ann Arbor GSFC

Comet Nucleus Tour Joseph Veverka Cornell University APL

Small Missions to 

Asteroids and Comets Michael Belton National Optical Astronomy Observatories JPL

Near Earth Asteroid 

Returned Sample Eugene Shoemaker USGS, Flagstaff APL/GSFC

Earth Orbital Ultraviolet 

Jovian Observer Paul Feldman Johns Hopkins 

University GSFC

Solar Wind Sample Return Don Burnett California Institute of 

Technology JPL

Mainbelt Asteroid 

Rendezvous Explorer Joseph Veverka Cornell JPL

Comet Nucleus Penetrator William Boynton U Arizona, Tucson JPL

Mars Polar Pathfinder David Paige UCLA JPL

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory refocused efforts on these “faster, better, cheaper” 

missions in part due to the new Discovery initiative and in part due to the 1993 budget 

75 Ibid.
Chapter 1: Discovery Begins

25

freeze and outlook for flat growth over the next few years. In the new budget climate, 

said JPL Director Ed Stone, the lab must ensure that “the projects and programs we 

develop are doable, they’re affordable, they’re supportable, and they’re interesting.”76

Assistant Director Charles Elachi agreed, saying that upcoming missions would be 

“done on a short time frame and at a low cost.” Elachi was known at the time for taking 

Discovery proposals under his wing. As Don Burnett, Genesis PI, later recalled, “He 

met with everyone.”77 On 24 March 1993, Elachi would even set up an office at JPL to 

support PIs for these new missions.78

Science management at Johns Hopkins University’s APL, meanwhile, articulated 

eight principles essential for the management of small cost-capped missions shortly 

after the launch of NEAR.79 All but one were compatible with the Discovery Program 

paradigm; the last, wherein a single agency manager interfaces with the development 

teams, was a simplification of the Discovery reporting structure: Program Manager, 

Program Executive, Program Scientist.

Realistic and Achievable

The Discovery Management Workshop, chartered by NASA Headquarters on 1 February 

1993, met to “consider management aspects of the Discovery Program, particularly 

the roles and relationships of the PI and his or her institution, any industrial partner, 

any NASA center involved, and NASA Headquarters.”80 Held 13–16 April 1993, the 

workshop was charged by NASA with focusing on practical applications: what their 

charter called the “hows,” rather than the philosophy, of management.

The workshop was asked to determine how Discovery might be realistically managed, how PIs would lead, how the periodic Announcements of Opportunity would be 

structured, how fast and how large a mission rate would be realistically achievable, and 

how contracts would be structured. NASA Headquarters invited two dozen experienced 

space program scientists, engineers, and managers to attend the three-day meeting.

Participants in the Discovery Management Workshop concluded in their final 

report: “It is unmistakably clear that everyone unanimously and enthusiastically supports the Discovery concept and its goals; the notion of accomplishing valuable solar 

76 Boyer, W. (1993, 22–28 February). “JPL Plans Smaller, Cheaper Missions.” SpaceNews. 16.

77 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with D. Burnett. Located in “Genesis” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

78 Elachi, C. (1993, 24 March). Letter to Glen Carle.

79 Krimigis, S. M., T. B. Coughlin, and G. E. Cameron. (2000). “Johns Hopkins APL Paradigm in 

SmallSat Management.” Acta Astronautica, 46(6), 187–197.

80 Carr, F. (1993, 25 May). Final Report on the Discovery Mission Concept Workshop Held at the San 

Juan Capistrano Research Institute, 16 to 20 November 1992.
NASA′s Discovery Program

26

system exploration science in a faster, better, cheaper mode is seen by the Workshop 

participants as not only exciting, but realistic and achievable as well.”81

Key findings included the following:

• The concept, goals and objectives of Discovery (NTE $150M, 3-year development) are terrific and achievable[.]

• Discovery should aim for one start and one launch per year, on-going[.]

• Headquarters should not attempt to manage the Program alone[.]

• A contract management and technical “oversight” office is needed.

• Most PI’s will not wish to be “Project Manager” of their mission[.]

• A few PI’s do not wish to team with a NASA Center[.]

• Most PI’s will favor roles as mission architect and science leader.

• Most Universities have neither the will nor the means to accept sole responsibility for an entire mission.

• Use of “new technology” is supported—within the Discovery boundary 

conditions.

• The traditional AO process can be improved (quicker and cheaper, just as 

effective)[.]

• Each bi-annual AO should select 3 missions for short Phase A’s, then downselect for Phase B, and go into development only after criteria are met and 

reviewed. 

• Be prepared to cancel any non-performing mission, in any Phase, A to C/D.

• Performing Criteria: good probability of valid science within cost & schedule 

commitments[.]

• Every mission needs a credible: management plan, cost, schedule, & reserves[.]

• Should have a fall back science floor (minimum acceptable objectives & capabilities)[.]

• An approved Project Plan for each mission is a must.82

The final report also noted the success of the Strategic Defense Initiative 

Organization, now the Missile Defense Agency, saying the “SDIO found it is possible 

to achieve launch times of 12–18 months from go-ahead and still follow all procurement regulations, FAR’s [Federal Acquisition Regulations],” and other restrictions.83

81 Ibid.

82 Ibid.

83 Ibid.
Chapter 1: Discovery Begins

27

The Time for Workshops Is Now Over

Approximately one month later, the executive committee of the April 1993 workshop 

wrote a letter to Huntress, now the Associate Administrator of the Office of Space Science 

(OSS) at NASA Headquarters.84 In that letter, Jim Martin, the former program manager 

of Viking and now spearheading a study of Discovery feasibility; Gene Giberson of 

JPL; and Frank Carr of NASA Headquarters—relying on “the 100 years of executive 

committee members’ experience with space program development”—provided their 

Recommendations for Discovery Policy and Implementation Guidelines. This was a 

surprising coda to a successful workshop report. Typically, when an ad hoc federal 

committee reports, the chair submits the report and is thanked for his or her service, 

and the committee is then dissolved. But in this case, Martin, Giberson, and Carr felt 

that some issues were unresolved. They took it upon themselves not only to publicize 

or emphasize the issues decided by the full workshop, but to have additional discussion 

and present what amounted to an additional white paper on the program.85

The first Discovery Management Workshop recommendations were revised, 

enhanced, and supplemented with new recommendations from the three, who wrote 

strong language declaring that “the time for workshops is now over, and that it is essential for OSS to take the high ground now in order to effectively compete for the scarce 

resources that might be available for starting new programs.” After the report, they 

noted, key issues remained, including the preferred modality for a PI leading this new 

kind of mission; the relative responsibilities of and for the project manager; funding 

approaches; and NASA Headquarters management mechanics and philosophy.86 They 

discussed three options for the implementation of the role of Principal Investigator. 

The first would be for the Principal Investigator to serve in a combined role of project 

scientist and project manager, taking all the responsibility.

The second would be for the Principal Investigator to serve as project scientist, a 

well-defined NASA role, and team with a NASA center for project management. In 

this second option, the Principal Investigator would formally delegate responsibility for 

several engineering tasks such as spacecraft, mission design, and ground data system 

to the project manager, who would then be accountable directly to NASA. “Under 

this option, the PI shall be responsible for the scientific success of the mission, and 

the NASA project manager shall be responsible for the successful implementation of 

the overall mission, including acquisition of science data.”

A third option would be the creation of the consortium model, where the PI would 

partner with a consortium of providers, including a project manager who “shall be 

84 Susan Niebur’s personal collection.

85 Martin, G., and F. Carr. (1993, 15 May). Letter to the community with a Dear Colleague letter 

from Bill Piotrowski. Susan Niebur’s personal collection.

86 Ibid.
NASA′s Discovery Program

28

responsible for the implementation of the overall mission, including acquisition of 

the science data.”87

Martin, Giberson, and Carr covered significant ground in this white paper, including 

the structure and function of the presumed Discovery Program Office and a detailed 

schedule for any potential Announcements of Opportunity. For the program itself to be 

agile as designed, the NASA Headquarters–driven Announcements of Opportunity and 

the surrounding process would have to be designed in a way consistent with the growing 

philosophies consistent with faster, better, cheaper. The overall process, from the start of 

preparations for the Announcement of Opportunity (AO) to the public announcement of 

mission selections, should take no more than 10 months, including a one-month reserve. 

The 10 months could be divided as follows:

1. The initial draft of the AO would take three months, after which a draft would 

be released for comment.

2. The comments would be adjudicated, and the final announcement would be 

released two months after the draft.

3. “Because of the draft release, one month should be sufficient for proposal 

preparation and submittal.”

4. The “AO evaluation cycle should not require more than three months, including all NASA approvals and selection announcements.”

5. The funding should start 60 days after announcement, with no funding gaps 

between phases.88

Later that year, NASA Headquarters management fleshed out requirements for 

the program, including an emphasis on technology transfer and education and public 

outreach efforts. At the request of Congress, NASA Headquarters management also 

added specific requirements for small and disadvantaged business subcontracting.89

The 1993 Discovery Program Implementation Plan soon followed, with four program 

goals clearly articulated:90

1. Retain U.S. scientific leadership in planetary science by assuring continuity 

in U.S. solar system exploration program (increasing mission flight rate and 

“launch schedule certainty”);

87 Ibid.

88 Ibid.

89 Saunders, M., and M. Kicza. (1994). Discovery Program Overview. AIAA Space Programs and 

Technologies Conference, 27–29 September 1994.

90 Solar System Exploration Division. (1993, 7 August). NASA Discovery Program Implementation 

Plan [viewgraphs]. Susan Niebur’s personal collection.
Chapter 1: Discovery Begins

29

2. Introduce new ways of doing business (industry, university involvement and 

responsibility, full and open team competition, mission life cycle duration 

consistent with undergraduate/graduate student involvement, streamline 

NASA management organization);

3. Emphasize use of new technologies in achieving mission objectives (identify 

and support development of technologies to enable/enhance Discovery, infuse 

new technologies into Discovery missions cost effectively with low risk, tech 

transfer); and

4. Keep the general public aware, involved, and excited about Discovery.

NASA Headquarters Discovery Program planners designed the goals to be achievable, quantifiable, and measurable, and they were intended to influence mission proposals.91 The planners did not and could not have foreseen, however, the way outside 

forces and events would change the way Discovery operated. As the program grew 

less risk-tolerant in later years, the emphasis on new technology first diminished and 

then became a liability.

By the time the Discovery goals were codified, they had changed yet again, emphasizing the quality of the scientific investigations that were perhaps assumed in the 1993 

version. Missions would now do the following:

• Perform high-quality scientific investigations that will maintain U.S. scientific leadership in planetary science and will assure continuity in the U.S. solar 

system exploration program.

• Pursue innovative ways of doing business, particularly as demanded by short 

development schedules, low costs, and competitively selected PI-led teams.

• Encourage the use of new technologies in achieving program objectives, 

particularly to achieve performance enhancements and cost reductions. The 

transfer of new technologies to broader communities is also encouraged.

• Enhance general public awareness of, and appreciation for, solar system exploration, and support the nation’s educational initiatives.

• Increase the participation of small and small disadvantaged businesses in high 

technology areas of Discovery missions.92

The Discovery Program Implementation Plan also established that the program 

manager should be an experienced manager from a private-sector aerospace company. 

Duties included being responsible and accountable for strategic planning, programmatic 

91 Ibid.

92 Saunders, M., and M. Kicza. (1994). Discovery Program Overview. AIAA Space Programs and 

Technologies Conference, 27–29 September 1994.
NASA′s Discovery Program

30

management and oversight, and achievement of Discovery Program goals and objectives. 

The program manager would prepare and issue the AO, perform the proposal review 

with the community, prepare a selection recommendation, and coordinate education 

and public outreach initiatives. Moreover, the program manager would oversee up to 

two NASA Headquarters civil servants and report directly to the Deputy Associate 

Administrator of the OSS.93

Acting Solar System Exploration Division Director Bill Piotrowski sent a “Dear 

Colleagues” letter to the community emphasizing the importance of community cohesion 

for the program to flourish. He wrote: “The ultimate success of the Discovery Program 

will depend to a substantial degree on the willingness of the individual members of 

the planetary community to unite behind each successive mission, even though one 

or the other of their two anchor missions may not be their personal favorite.”94

NEW START

NASA Headquarters gave the Discovery Program a formal budget request, or New 

Start, in the Fiscal Year 1994 budget, which President Bill Clinton signed into law on 

28 October 1993. Two candidate missions, Mars Pathfinder and NEAR, were thus 

slated officially for development.95

The goal of the Discovery Program would be to launch every year, with 

Announcements of Opportunity issued every 12 to 18 months, depending on the 

level of funding available. Huntress emphasized that in uncertain budget environments, proposers should not “propose to the cap” of $150 million, but rather, in order 

to maintain a mission cadence, hesitate to load spacecraft with science instruments 

whenever possible.96 In accordance with this guidance, Discovery Program management at NASA Headquarters encouraged the submission of proposals both at and 

under the cap in order to allow the selection of a balanced program. The first formal 

Announcement of Opportunity was issued on or around 2 July 1994. Proposers would 

have 60 days to respond.97

On 26 July 1994, NASA Headquarters released a Draft Program Management Plan 

for Discovery. Throughout the history of the Discovery Program, officials would con93 Ibid.

94 Piotrowski, B. (1993, 26 August). Letter to the planetary science community. Susan Niebur’s 

personal collection.

95 Congressional Research Service. (1993, 4 October). Congressional Record Bound Edition, vol. 

139, Part 16. 23343-23360. https://www.congress.gov/bound-congressional-record/1993/10/04/

house-section?q=%7B%22search%22%3A%5B%22%5C%22discovery+program%5C%22+1994%2

2%5D%7D&s=1&r=3.

96 Huntress, W. (1994, June 1). “Dear Colleagues” letter. Susan Niebur’s personal collection.

97 Ibid.
Chapter 1: Discovery Begins

31

tinue to work closely with the planetary science community at regular Lessons Learned 

Workshops, Preproposal Conferences (called “bidders’ conferences”), and science 

meetings, as well as through the various incarnations of the Solar System Exploration 

Subcommittee of NASA’s Office of Space Science during the 1990s and 2000s.

Selection: Mars Pathfinder

In 1993, NASA Headquarters selected Mars Pathfinder to become the first flight of 

the Discovery Program. Richard Cook of JPL served as mission manager, responsible for day-to-day operations of the lander and rover.98 Matthew Golombek of JPL 

was the project scientist, responsible for all decisions affecting mission science. Tony 

Spear of JPL was the project manager. NASA scheduled the mission for a 1996 launch 

with a Fiscal Year 1995 funding request of $77.5 million. The agency projected that 

Pathfinder would “land on Mars for less than 10 percent of the cost of landing there 

with Viking in 1976.”99

Joe Boyce, the Mars Program Scientist at NASA Headquarters, later credited 

Golombek with keeping the Jet Propulsion Laboratory from adding new science or 

engineering elements to the lander, overreaching and thus breaking the cost cap. Boyce 

and others at NASA Headquarters were never certain that JPL could pull off a Mars 

rover without going over budget and had initially been reticent to support it.

According to Boyce, Golombek took the initiative as project scientist to wheel and 

deal with colleagues and international partners to get as much as possible for as little 

as possible. Components of the Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer were provided 

by the Max Planck Institute in Germany, for example, in return for access to the data 

sent to Earth from Mars.

Meanwhile, the project manager, Spear, was a famously hard driver of his team. 

“You can’t burn people out, but he did expect one hundred percent of your effort, all 

the time, and there’s a type of person that likes that,” said Boyce.100

The Solar System Exploration Subcommittee endorsed Mars Pathfinder one year 

earlier, in December 1992. The planetary science community initially had issues with 

the mission. According to Huntress, “The scientists really had trouble with it because 

it was a tech demo. Why are we spending our money to do a tech demo? And that’s 

98 NASA. (1997, July). Mars Pathfinder Landing Press Kit.

99 NASA. (1995). “NASA’s Discovery Program: Solar System Exploration for the Next Millennium” 

[foldout]. In folder 17070, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

100 Niebur, S. (2009, 22 March). Personal interview with J. Boyce. Located in “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.
NASA′s Discovery Program

32

always been the problem, in the agency: getting money to get technologies to the right 

TRL [technology readiness level].”101

NASA added experiments to the mission. “Originally it was just supposed to be a 

camera to show that it actually had succeeded in landing,” said Huntress. Investigations 

built by university scientists would join the payload, as long as they could remain 

within cost and mass constraints.102

Mars Pathfinder investigations included studying the form and structure of the 

Martian surface and its geology; examining the elemental composition and mineralogy 

of surface materials, including the magnetic properties of airborne dust; conducting a 

variety of atmospheric science investigations, examining the structure of the atmosphere, 

meteorology at the surface, and aerosols; studying soil mechanics and properties of 

surface materials; and investigating the rotational and orbital dynamics of the planet 

from two-way ranging and Doppler tracking of the lander as Mars rotated.103 Mars 

Pathfinder ultimately carried several useful scientific instruments that enabled nine 

experimental investigations.

The Imager for Mars Pathfinder (IMP) was a stereo imager with color filters in each 

of its two camera channels, providing panoramic images and multispectral images with 

as many as 13 spectral bands.104 IMP was mounted such that it could look out at the 

rocks, determining their composition, and up at the sky, investigating the atmosphere 

as it blocked the view of the Sun during the day or the Martian moon Phobos at night.

Years later, after the mission’s success, one such observation of the predawn sky 

showed thin, bluish clouds, which the scientists thought to represent water ice forming 

on micrometer particles in the local atmospheric haze.105 IMP found a “complex surface 

of ridges and troughs covered by rocks that have been transported and modified by 

fluvial, aeolian, and impact processes. Analyses of the spectral signatures in the scene 

revealed three types of rock and four classes of soil.”106 IMP could also image windsocks 

that were spread out at various heights along a one-meter mast, to assess wind speed 

and direction: a clever way of measuring wind characteristics with a camera, and the 

first vertical wind profile measured on Mars. Other properties of the local area could 

be observed through equally wily tricks, such as a set of magnets with differing field 

101 Niebur, S. (2009, 13 March). Personal interview with W. Huntress. Located in “Wes Huntress” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

102 Ibid.

103 Golombek, M. P., and A. J. Spear. (1997, July). Mars Pathfinder Science investigations and objectives. 45th Congress of the International Astronautical Federation, 9–14 October 1994. See also: 

NASA. (1997, July). Mars Pathfinder Landing Press Kit.

104 NASA. (1997, July). Mars Pathfinder Landing Press Kit.

105 Smith, P. H., et al. (1997, 5 December). Results from the Mars Pathfinder Camera. Science. 

278. 1758–1764.

106 Ibid.
Chapter 1: Discovery Begins

33

strengths attached to the lander. Periodic images would show the accumulation of 

dust on these magnets, indicating the composition of the dust blowing by; the imager 

determined that the dust did indeed include magnetic composite particles, with a mean 

size of one micron.107 IMP was developed by a team led by IMP Principal Investigator 

Peter Smith of the University of Arizona. (Smith would later use this experience to 

successfully propose and deliver the Mars Phoenix mission.)

The second instrument was the mobile Alpha Proton X-ray Spectrometer (APXS), 

used to determine the elements that make up the rocks and soil both near the lander 

and farther away—a scientific investigation made possible by the “little car” technology 

of the rover. The APXS was designed to measure the amounts of all elements present 

at greater than 0.1 percent of the soil sample, excluding hydrogen.

When placed in position by a robotic arm on the back of the rover, the instrument 

would bombard a five-centimeter circular area of rock or soil with charged particles 

released by the small pieces of radioactive curium-244. The particles that bounced 

back, along with any generated x-rays or photons, were counted to give the abundance 

of the elements in the sample. Their energies revealed which elements were present.108

Years later, among other things, APXS revealed that the soil samples were consistent 

with those examined by the Viking landers in the late 1970s, albeit with higher levels 

of aluminum and magnesium, and lower levels of iron, chlorine, and sulfur.109

Germany contributed the alpha and proton portions of the instrument. APXS was 

a heritage instrument derived from a type carried on the Russian Vega and Phobos 

missions and identical to the instrument that was to fly on the ill-fated Russian Mars 

’96 mission. The x-ray spectrometer portion of APXS was developed by a team at the 

University of Chicago. The Principal Investigator for the instrument was Dr. Rudolph 

Rieder of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany; co-investigators 

were Dr. Thanasis Economou of the University of Chicago and Dr. Henry Wanke of 

the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry.

The Atmospheric Structure Instrument/Meteorology Package (ASI/MET), officially 

an engineering subsystem, took advantage of the landing opportunity to acquire atmospheric data both during descent and on the surface of Mars. During the lander’s entry 

and descent, the ASI/MET measured the vertical density, pressure, and temperature 

of the Martian atmosphere, enabling scientists to later reconstruct a profile of the 

atmosphere below 160 kilometers. On the surface, the ASI/MET monitored these 

variables, which together make up surface meteorology and climate.

107 NASA. (1997, 4 November). “Mars Pathfinder Winds Down After Phenomenal Mission.” NASA 

News Release 97-255.

108 NASA. (1997, July). Mars Pathfinder Landing Press Kit.

109 Williams, D. (2004, 30 December). “Mars Pathfinder Preliminary Results.” https://nssdc.gsfc.

nasa.gov/planetary/marspath_results.html.
NASA′s Discovery Program

34

Scientists would eventually find that the “atmospheric structure and the weather 

record are similar to those observed by the Viking 1 lander at the same latitude, altitude, and season 21 years ago, but there are differences related to diurnal effects and 

the surface properties of the landing site.”110

ASI/MET was based on Viking lander instruments. Ames Research Center’s Alvin 

Seiff, still working in retirement under the auspices of the San Jose State University 

Foundation, led the instrument definition team, and Tim Schofield of JPL led the 

science team. This instrument package was built and implemented by JPL as a facility experiment.

Other investigations included a windsock investigation led by Robert Sullivan and 

Ron Greeley of Arizona State University; a materials adherence study led by Geoffrey 

Landis of NASA Lewis (now Glenn) Research Center; a magnetic properties investigation led by Jens Knudsen from the University of Copenhagen;111 and smaller investigations: one prompted by wheel abrasion, and another involving radio science that was 

enabled by the X-band communications with Earth.112

The Sojourner rover on Pathfinder, not much heavier than a bowling ball, was 

packed gently with blocks of aerogel, a lightweight thermal insulator that conserved 

both mass and power. This change protected the electronics and reduced the rover’s 

mass by more than 2.6 kilograms, 20 percent of the rover’s weight.113

Mars Pathfinder operated on Mars for 83 sols (4 July to 27 September 1997), nearly 

three times the projected mission lifetime of 30 days. The Sojourner rover operated 

for 12 times its design lifetime of seven days. The mission returned more than 16,000 

images from the lander, 550 images from the rover, and 15 chemical analyses of rocks.114

A Non–NASA Center Mission

Meanwhile, at the Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, Andy Cheng was 

named the Project Scientist of the NEAR mission, which would be the first NASA 

110 J. T. Schofield et al. (1997, 5 December). The Mars Pathfinder Atmospheric Structure 

Investigation/Meteorology (ASI/MET) Experiment. Science, 278(5344), 1752–1757.

111 S. F. Hviid et al. (1997, 5 December). “Magnetic Properties Experiments on the Mars Pathfinder 

Lander: Preliminary Results.” Science, 278(5344), 1768–1770.

112 W. M. Folkner et al. (1997, 5 December). “Interior Structure and Seasonal Mass Redistribution of 

Mars from Radio Tracking of Mars Pathfinder.” Science, 278(5344), 1749–1751.

113 Jet Propulsion Laboratory. (1995, 10 March). “See-Through, Smoky-Blue Aerogel Will Help 

Protect Mars Pathfinder Rover.” JPL Universe vol. 25, no. 5.

114 NASA. (1997, 4 November). “Mars Pathfinder Winds Down After Phenomenal Mission.” NASA 

News Release 97-255; NASA.
Chapter 1: Discovery Begins

35

planetary mission not conducted by a NASA center.115 Cheng later recalled first encountering the NEAR mission because of a science working group report that crossed his 

desk during his tenure on COMPLEX, a standing body founded in the early 1970s 

by the Space Studies Board of the National Academies. He recommended NEAR to 

NASA as a good example of a small, low-cost planetary mission, and something APL 

could certainly achieve. It would go on to become the second slated mission to launch 

under the nascent Discovery Program. When APL management asked Cheng to be 

project scientist, he was, at the time, a Galileo interdisciplinary scientist working on 

magnetospheres, and he had experience working with various disciplines and instruments on space missions.116

Tom Krimigis, head of the Space Physics and Instrumentation Group at APL, 

asked Bob Farquhar, an astrodynamicist and mission designer who had been named 

the NEAR flight director, to look at the range of possible launch dates for a mission 

to visit a near-Earth asteroid. Krimigis later recalled: “Initially, we had an asteroid 

that would have a launch, I think, in ’98 or thereabouts.... So, he looks at it, comes to 

me, and says: ‘You know, I got something. If we do an Earth flyby, we can go to Eros, 

and it would launch in February of ’96.’” Eros, he said, was a much more interesting 

asteroid than the original target, Anteros.117 APL went to NASA Headquarters with 

the finding, and NASA Headquarters approved Eros as the target.

Development of NEAR kicked off in December 1993. Its science payload included 

six scientific investigations. Joe Veverka was the PI of the Multispectral Imager (MSI), 

a camera with an eight-position filter wheel enabling images to be taken over the visible to near-infrared wavelengths (450 to 1,050 nanometers), and the Near-Infrared 

Spectrometer (NIS), measuring reflectance in the 800- to 2,700-nanometer range. These 

two instruments, along with the X-Ray/Gamma Ray Spectrometer (XRS-GRS) package 

built by Jack Trombka and his team at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, were used 

to determine the mineralogy of the rocks and dust on the surface of the asteroid. The 

magnetometer was built by Mario Acuna of Goddard and Chris Russell of UCLA. The 

NEAR Laser Rangefinder, built by a team led by Maria Zuber at Goddard, was used 

primarily for spacecraft navigation, but also as a laser altimeter at asteroid encounters, 

yielding the shape of the object. Don Yeomans at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory 

led the radio science and gravimetry investigations, with Alexander Konopoliv of JPL 

and Jean-Pierre Barriot of Centre National d’Études Spatiales. The mass and gravity 

115 Niebur, S. (2009, 31 July). Personal interview with A. Cheng. Located in “Discovery Program” 

file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, 

DC; Applied Physics Laboratory (1996, 9 April). “Applied Physics Laboratory Honors NEAR 

Team for Underbudget Development and Launch.”

116 Niebur, S. (2009, 31 July). Personal interview with A. Cheng. Located in “Discovery Program” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

117 Ibid.
NASA′s Discovery Program

36

variations determined using radio science could be combined with results from the 

multispectral imager and the laser rangefinder to estimate the density and internal 

structure of the asteroids 253 Mathilde and 433 Eros.

NEAR, said Andy Cheng, was not a PI-led mission. NASA, he recalled, had no 

website at the time. “It was NEAR that put up the first mission website...and the AO for 

participating scientists—that was the first one, also, that the call went out over the web. 

We had to do it for them because there was nobody at NASA who knew how.” NEAR 

also pioneered interfacing with the Planetary Data System, the online NASA archive 

of data collected by planetary missions. Every member of the NEAR science team, and 

all mission-associated scientists, would have access to all data from every instrument. 

Science team leaders from each of the investigations would coordinate and approve 

plans for data analysis and publication.118 “There was a lot of resistance,” explained 

Cheng. “This business of not allowing people to have proprietary data rights—see, 

that was an innovation.... A lot of people didn’t like it.”119

Data sharing was not the only new way of doing business on a planetary mission. As 

Mark Saunders, who was the program manager for the Discovery Program at NEAR’s 

launch, recalled: “They said they could do it for $125 million, total, and [NASA] 

Headquarters even went: ‘We don’t believe this.’ The science objectives didn’t change.”120

(This was before the establishment of “baseline” and “floor” science requirements.)

APL did not plan for cost contingencies during the development of NEAR. “If you 

identify contingency, everybody thinks it’s theirs, and then they go ahead and plan 

on spending it,” Krimigis later said.121 He explained: “In this place, we worked with 

agreements between the program office and the supervisors who did the technical 

work in their groups, and we kind of signed internal contracts where we would say, 

‘Okay, you are doing the C&DH [command and data handling] system. Here are the 

specifications. Tell me how much it would cost.’ The group supervisor would sign a 

contract with the program manager that it was going to cost[,] say, $2 million—with 

118 Cheng, A. F., et al. (1997, October). “Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous: Mission Overview.” 

Journal of Geophysical Research. 102(E10). pp. 23695–23708.

119 Niebur, S. (2009, 31 July). Personal interview with A. Cheng. Located in “Discovery Program” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

120 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 January). Personal interview with S. Keddie, M. Saunders, and R. Vorder 

Bruegge. Located in “Discovery Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History 

Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

121 Niebur, S. (2009, 27 August). Personal interview with T. Krimigis. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.
Chapter 1: Discovery Begins

37

details, mind you, and people and resources and everything, it was all there. We would 

sum things up.”122

NASA Headquarters sent evaluators from SAIC, an independent systems engineering review firm, to check on the program’s progress and cost several times throughout 

development. Six or eight months after the start of the program, SAIC estimated the total 

cost-to-complete to be “at least two and a half times” the Applied Physics Laboratory’s 

estimate, said Krimigis. Several months later, SAIC returned and found that the overrun 

was going to be much less, but still 50 percent higher than APL’s estimate. No changes 

were made to the contract, and no additional NASA Headquarters–level reviews were 

held, other than the standard gateway and launch readiness reviews. APL continued 

working to keep Betsy Beyer, the NEAR program manager at NASA Headquarters, 

informed and involved throughout the process.

By not identifying contingency within the program, APL kept to its budget without 

requesting additional resources. Krimigis possessed deep knowledge of his people 

and leveraged that to deliver the mission on time and on budget. (A year after NASA 

selected the NEAR mission, Krimigis was surprised to learn that NASA Headquarters 

had indeed held project reserve on NEAR and had not told the project about it.)

The mission went through a plethora of development reviews before launch. The 

technical and cost review was held 1–3 December 1993, whereupon technical experts 

reviewed the planned spacecraft hardware, performance, and reliability projections, as 

well as mission operations plans and its cost realism. The Preliminary Design Review 

occurred on 25–26 April 1994, to evaluate the completeness and consistency of the 

spacecraft’s initial design before engineers might begin the detailed design of the hardware. The Critical Design Review of the integrated spacecraft, to verify whether its 

design was mature enough to enter final design and fabrication, happened on 29–30 

November 1994. The investigation readiness reviews of science instruments fell on 

1 December 1994. The mission entered integration and testing on 4 June 1995.123

“After That, We Couldn’t Do Anything Wrong”

NEAR launched on 17 February 1996. It was the Platonic ideal of a faster, better, cheaper 

mission. The Discovery Program required a development time of less than 36 months; 

NEAR left Earth in 26 months. The cost-to-launch-plus-30-days requirement—that is, 

the total expenditures on the mission up to one month after liftoff—was $150 million 

122 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 September). Personal interview with T. Krimigis. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

123 NASA. (2012, 14 August). “NASA Space Flight Program and Project Management Requirements.” 

NPR 7120.5E.
NASA′s Discovery Program

38

or less. APL estimated that the mission would cost $112 million. Instead, it came in 

at approximately $108.4 million, meaning it cost less than one-third of the cost of the 

least expensive previous planetary mission.124

On 15 April 1996, two months after the launch of NEAR, from Cape Canaveral, 

Florida, the lab held a celebration. Representatives presented NASA Administrator 

Dan Goldin and Senator Barbara Mikulski, who represented the Maryland-based 

lab in Congress, with an oversized, ceremonial check for $3.6 million. It was the first 

mission in NASA history to give money back to NASA Headquarters. “After that, we 

couldn’t do anything wrong,” said Krimigis.125

“One of the Most Successful Flybys of All Time”

As an example of the rich science that can be done even by the small Discovery missions, consider NEAR’s flyby of the asteroid Mathilde, which had been planned as a 

target of opportunity along its trajectory. On its way to Eros, NEAR passed Mathilde 

and took pictures, just as a tourist might do out the window of a train. Mathilde was 

unexplored territory: a black, carbon-rich rock, believed to be the most primitive 

material left in the asteroid belt.126 To conserve power needed at Eros, the team turned 

on only one of the six instruments on the spacecraft, the multispectral imager. Even 

so, “the Mathilde encounter was one of the most successful flybys of all time,” said 

Robert Farquhar, NEAR’s flight director. “We got images that were far better than we 

thought possible, especially since the spacecraft was not designed for a fast flyby.”127

Mission operations at Eros were not perfect. When Mark Holdridge was hired as 

NEAR mission operations manager at APL in 1997, he sought to expand the operations group to avert burnout and wanted greater testing—and more responsible testing 

methodologies—for what he felt were “sloppily performed” midcourse maneuvers.128

APL had never flown a deep space mission; the team was literally making it up as 

they went along. Holdridge insisted on regular spacecraft performance assessments 

and wanted closer ties between the mission and Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Software 

124 NASA. (1995). “NASA’s Discovery Program: Solar System Exploration for the Next Millennium” 

[foldout]; Applied Physics Laboratory (1996, 9 April). “Applied Physics Laboratory Honors NEAR 

Team for Underbudget Development and Launch.” http://web.archive.org/web/20200713071051/

https://www.jhuapl.edu/PressRelease/960409; Krimigis, T. (2020, 4 November). “Exploring 

Asteroid EROS: The Better, Faster, Cheaper Paradigm” [slides].

125 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 September). Personal interview with T. Krimigis. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

126 Applied Physics Laboratory. (1997, 19 June). “NEAR Fast Approaching Asteroid 253 Mathilde” 

[news release].

127 NASA. (1997, 30 June). “Asteroid Mathilde Reveals Her Dark Past” [news release].

128 McCurdy, H. (2005). Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight: The NEAR Shoemaker mission. 41. 

https://history.nasa.gov/monograph36.pdf.
Chapter 1: Discovery Begins

39

limits on the spacecraft lateral acceleration, coupled with missing code necessary for 

burn-abort routines, caused NEAR to miss its encounter with Eros. The mission team 

would work tirelessly to stabilize the spacecraft and plan another attempt to encounter 

the asteroid.

“What saved the mission was our resilient mission design,” said Farquhar. “We had 

worked out contingency plans ahead of time and had plenty of margin. If it wasn’t 

for that we wouldn’t have recovered.”129 The mission did recover, taking another orbit 

around the Sun before a second Eros encounter.130

Ultimately, NEAR did indeed end the mission with a victory, and the agile little 

Discovery mission proved itself, the concept of Discovery, and the faster, better, cheaper 

paradigm. NEAR did eventually acquire clear photos of Eros.131

CONCEPT THROUGH DATA ACQUISITION

Mark Saunders first joined NASA as a logistics manager for Space Station Freedom in 

1989. After working at NASA Headquarters and in the Space Station Program Office in 

Reston, Virginia, he was experienced in both the technical acquisition process and the 

knowledge of what it really took to get programs moving forward in Congress. When 

the Reston office closed, a result of the reformulation and management restructuring 

of the space station program under the Clinton administration, Goddard and NASA 

Headquarters created jobs to retain top talent. The Science Mission Directorate hired 

Saunders to become the first Discovery Program Manager.

The AO strategy had been well-defined by 1994. A contractor, Richard Vorder 

Bruegge, wrote the first draft of the AO Evaluation Plan. He explained: “Wes [Huntress] 

was sort of the brains behind it, and Al [Diaz, the Deputy Associate Administrator] 

was sort of overseeing the mechanics, making sure that certain things happened.”132

The scope of this AO would be significantly different from other federal requests 

for proposals. Instead of soliciting a spacecraft bus and instruments—a hardware 

acquisition, in other words—this AO solicited a full science mission from concept 

129 Worth, H. (1999, 29 January). “NEAR Team Recovers Mission After Faulty Engine Burn” 

[news release].

130 Asker, J. R. (1999, 4 January). “Missed Asteroid Rendezvous Cues Probe of Low-Cost Missions.” 

Aviation Week & Space Technology.

131 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 September). Personal interview with T. Krimigis. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC; McCurdy, H. (2005). Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight: The NEAR 

Shoemaker Mission. https://history.nasa.gov/monograph36.pdf; Russell, C. T. (1997). The NearEarth Asteroid Rendezvous Mission. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

132 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 January). Personal interview with S. Keddie, M. Saunders, and R. Vorder 

Bruegge. Located in “Discovery Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History 

Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
NASA′s Discovery Program

40

development through data acquisition. This strategy, the AO noted, would require 

“a careful tradeoff between science and cost incurred to produce missions with the 

highest possible science per unit cost.”133

In March, a draft AO was released to the community for comment. The AO began 

its route to concurrence through the many offices at NASA Headquarters in May. 

After changes by officials up to and including the Administrator, NASA Headquarters 

released AO 94-OSS-03 on 4 August with proposals due on 21 October 1994.

Twenty days later, Discovery program officers held the first Discovery Preproposal 

Conference. They explained the parameters of the AO to more than 300 attendees 

present.134 A technology fair was held concurrently, with 36 exhibitors, including 

many with experience in the planetary program as well as low-cost Explorer missions. 

Exhibitors spanned the range of potential partners, with seven NASA centers, the 

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Ball Aerospace, the Southwest Research Institute, Boeing, 

Martin Marietta, Hughes, Orbital Sciences, McDonnell Douglas, TRW, Honeywell, 

Spectrum Astro, and others sending representatives and working the room to position themselves as trustworthy, knowledgeable, and reliable partners for the Principal 

Investigator’s mission concepts.

The AO solicited proposals for focused scientific investigations that could be completed using small planetary missions. It required missions to adhere to proposed cost, 

schedule, and technical specifications, with no additional infusions of cash from NASA. 

It limited the development phase, Phase C/D, to $150 million and required completion in 36 months or less. Operations (Phase E) were limited to $35 million, but time 

was not capped. NASA would launch the selected mission on a Delta-class or smaller 

expendable launch vehicle before 31 August 2001. Small radioactive power sources 

(such as heaters) were acceptable in designs, but larger radioisotope thermoelectric 

generators were not.

Any samples returned would belong to the NASA Johnson Space Center Office of 

the Curator (now called the Astromaterials Acquisition and Curation Office), with 

the science team allocated up to 25 percent of the mass of materials brought back to 

Earth. Unlike the samples, though, NASA granted teams no proprietary data rights, 

and the teams would deliver said data to the Planetary Data System (PDS) in the 

shortest time possible. NASA reserved the right to add guest investigators to the team.

There was freedom in the management and technical requirements; the AO allowed 

each team to follow its own processes, procedures, and methods as consistent with overall NASA policies such as NPG 7120.5, the agency’s “Program and Project Management 

133 NASA. (1994, August). Announcement of Opportunity.

134 Saunders, M., and M. Kicza. (1994). Discovery Program Overview. AIAA Space Programs and 

Technologies Conference, 27–29 September 1994.
Chapter 1: Discovery Begins

41

Processes and Requirements.”135 NASA encouraged innovation when improvements in 

cost, schedule, or technical performance could be demonstrated. Requirements in the 

management area included a detailed Work Breakdown Structure, a well-defined management approach, a named project manager, and sufficient attention to the approach 

for management of risk. The proposal would also have to include technology infusion, technology transfer, educational activities, public information programs, and a 

commitment to meeting NASA’s goals for small businesses and small disadvantaged 

businesses. Though the AO teemed with requirements, it left big decisions, such as 

management structure, management approach, and contracting up to the proposing 

team. Over 30 teams submitted notices of intent to propose, with 28 submitting full 

proposals by the October deadline.

Huntress signed the AO Evaluation Plan on the same day. The plan recognized that

[t]he evaluation process and procedures used here are different from those used in the 

traditional evaluation of investigations proposed in response to AOs released by NASA’s 

SSED. These differences stem from the fact that Discovery Program success will not only 

be measured in terms of scientific and technical achievements, but will also be measured 

by the accomplishment of those achievements within agreed-upon cost and schedule (i.e., 

management) constraints. Thus, in this Discovery Mission AO evaluation process, the 

overall merits of a proposal from a cost and management perspective will be considered on 

a par with the overall merits from a scientific and technical standpoint.136

The Discovery Program Manager, Mark Saunders, would be assisted by the Discovery 

Program Engineer, Mary Kaye Olsen, and the Discovery Program Scientist, Henry 

Brinton, together forming the first Discovery Program Office.

“We Were Trying to Do Things Differently”

With the proposal evaluation plan in hand, 72 reviewers (scientists and engineers from 

across industry and military aerospace, as well as eight NASA members) prepared for 

a week of reviews at the Lunar and Planetary Institute. “We were trying to do things 

differently,” Saunders recalled. “If I get just NASA people doing these reviews, I’m going 

to get the same stuff. If they think this is a bit risky and we’re trying something new, 

they’ll trash it. None of the innovation will come.”137 According to Susan Keddie, a 

135 NASA. (2012, August 14). “NASA Space Flight Program and Project Management Requirements.” 

NPR 7120.5E.

136 Announcement of Opportunity Evaluation plan. Susan Niebur’s personal collection.

137 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 January). Personal interview with S. Keddie, M. Saunders, and R. Vorder 

Bruegge. Located in “Discovery Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History 

Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
NASA′s Discovery Program

42

reviewer and scientist at SAIC, “We would meet in the morning to review a proposal, 

and then the afternoon and night we would read the next one, which we would review 

it the next day.”138

The first three days would include subpanel discussions, integrating individual 

comments and developing general consensuses. The subpanels would reach consensus 

on adjectival ratings and rank the mission proposals. The last two days would be spent 

in plenary to assure that all proposals were treated equally. Review criteria involved 

cost and science return (the two weighted approximately equally), as well as project 

management and technical approaches. The goal was to get the best science per dollar. 

The panels also scored tech transfer, education, public outreach, and small business 

participation, including by small businesses owned by socially and economically disadvantaged individuals.

A Space Science Steering Committee would review the evaluation, studying the 

processes used by the panel and their conclusions, and then discuss any programmatic 

issues that needed to be considered. After the Steering Committee concluded its work, 

the Source Selection official would review the results of the evaluation panel and the 

steering committee and make a selection.

The Discovery office received 28 proposals from a combination of 36 universities, 

37 aerospace companies and small businesses, 12 national labs and federally funded 

research and development centers, 12 foreign institutions, and 10 nonprofit research 

institutes and observatories to study a wide range of solar system objects—comets, 

asteroids, Mercury, Venus, Mars, the Moon, Earth—and to look at Jupiter’s Io torus, 

the solar wind, and planets around other stars.

Scientifically First-Rate Space Exploration Using Small, 

Advanced Spacecraft

NASA Headquarters revealed the Announcement of Opportunity results at a press 

conference on 28 February 1995.139 One proposal, called Lunar Prospector, was selected 

for flight. Three other proposals were selected for a partially funded nine-month concept study:

• Stardust, which would collect dust from the coma of a comet

• Venus Multiprobe mission, which would drop 16 probes into the Venusian 

atmosphere

• Suess-Urey, a solar wind mission

138 Ibid.

139 Huntress, W. (1994, 21 October). Announcement of Opportunity Evaluation Plan; Niebur, S. 

(2009, 13 March). Personal interview with W. Huntress. Located in “Wes Huntress” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
Chapter 1: Discovery Begins

43

Stardust, led by Don Brownlee of the University of Washington with contractor 

partner Martin Marietta, came in at a cost of $208 million. Venus Multiprobe, led by 

Richard Goody of Harvard University with contractor partner Hughes Communications 

and Space Company, would cost $202 million; Suess-Urey was estimated to cost $214 

million, and its Principal Investigator was Don Burnett of the California Institute of 

Technology, with Martin Marietta Astronautics as its partner.

All three were between 61 and 66 percent of the allowed cost cap. All three were 

proposed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.140 This was not surprising, as the lab had 

submitted over a dozen proposals.141

At a press conference, Dan Goldin, Administrator of NASA, said: “I am absolutely 

thrilled with the potential of these missions, and with the universally high quality of 

the 28 proposals submitted to us.... The university and aerospace industry communities 

should be proud of their efforts, which represent a model of how to pursue scientifically first-rate space exploration using small, advanced spacecraft.”142

We’ve Turned the Old Way of Doing Business Upside Down

NEAR, the first Discovery mission, launched on 17 February 1996. Mars Pathfinder, 

the second Discovery mission, was launched on a clear night exactly as planned, at 

1:58 a.m., 4 December 1996. The Pathfinder rover was named by 12-year-old Valerie 

Ambroise as part of a national grade-school essay contest. She suggested that it be 

called Sojourner, after Sojourner Truth, who made it her mission to “travel up and 

down the land.”143

In the end, the Applied Physics Laboratory delivered NEAR for one-third of the 

cost of the previously least-expensive mission in the history of planetary exploration. 

Mars Pathfinder, meanwhile, placed a lander on the surface of Mars for a small fraction 

of the cost of the last time NASA so landed, in 1976—and included a rover, another 

first for Mars. The mission schedules were equally aggressive: each took less than three 

years from the start of development to launch. The Discovery Program was on track 

to launch, on average, one mission every 18 months or so, a much higher flight rate 

than planetary exploration had ever before achieved.144

The next Discovery mission was going to the Moon.

140 Ainsworth, D. (1995, February). “Three JPL Discovery Concepts Selected for Possible 

Development.” JPL Universe, 25(5).

141 Niebur, S. (2009, 22 March). Personal interview with G. Vane. Located in “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

142 “Three JPL Discovery Missions Selected for Possible Development,” press release #9515, 28 

February 1995, https://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/95/release_1995_9515.html.

143 “Heroines and History Well Represented in Worldwide Competition to Name Rover.” (1996, 

December 13). JPL Universe, 26(25).

144 NASA Office of Space Science. (1995, July). “NASA’s Discovery Program: Solar System 

Exploration for the Next Millennium.”
NASA′s Discovery Program

44

Figure 1-1: NEAR spacecraft 

The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft undergoing preflight preparation in the 

Spacecraft Assembly Encapsulation Facility-2 (SAEF-2) at Kennedy Space Center (KSC). (Image credit: 

NASA, image no. 9701593)
Chapter 1: Discovery Begins

45

Figure 1-2: NEAR image of Eros

Mosaic of asteroid Eros’s Northern Hemisphere, photographed by the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous 

mission. (Image credit: NASA/JPL/JHUAPL, image no. PIA02923)
NASA′s Discovery Program

46

Figure 1-3: Mars Pathfinder and Sojourner 

The Sojourner rover and undeployed ramps aboard the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft, photographed by 

the Imager for Mars Pathfinder (IMP). (Image credit: NASA/JPL, image no. PIA00621)
47

LUNAR PROSPECTOR: LEVERAGING 

PRIOR INVESTMENT

The first Discovery Program Announcement Opportunity, released in 1994, outlined 

detailed expectations for candidate missions based on principles set forth in the earlier 

Discovery Program Handbook.1 Selection of missions was to be through a two-step 

proposal process with two separate review panels to rate the missions on scientific 

merit, relevance, and cost effectiveness, as well as technical, management, cost, and 

outreach qualifications. The community responded with dozens of high-quality proposals.2

 After thorough review of the initial proposals, on 28 February 1995, NASA 

Headquarters selected the $59 million Lunar Prospector for implementation. It was 

the first time that such a decision was made through a competitive AO, and it was the 

third mission of the Discovery Program, after Mars Pathfinder and NEAR.

1 NASA. (1992). Discovery Program Handbook. Washington DC: NASA.

2 NASA. (N.d.). “NASA Discovery Program.” Downloaded from http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/

mission/sd-dscvr.htm on 30 May 2011.

CHAPTER 2

Big Dreams
NASA′s Discovery Program

48

Discovery Program missions would, and continue to, adhere to a general NASA 

project life cycle. During the “concept study” phase, called “Step 1,” a prospective 

mission is said to be in “pre-Phase A.” Upon a successful review, the study is “down 

selected”—chosen from competing mission concepts—and enters Phase A. Here, its 

overall approach and the technology to achieve it are enhanced and refined. The resultant “Step 2” study is again reviewed and, if selected, enters Phase B. At this point, 

its preliminary design and the necessary technology are completed. Further reviews 

and, ultimately, a nod from NASA bring the project to Phase C, during which time the 

final design of the spacecraft and instruments is settled upon and the fabrication of 

components and subsystems begins. Again, a successful review sends the project into 

the next stage of its life: Phase D, at which point the spacecraft is assembled, integrated 

with its science payload, tested, and launched into space. The operations phase of the 

mission is called Phase E, and once the mission is complete, it enters Phase F, when 

it is closed out.

Wes Huntress credited Lunar Prospector’s success to concept studies of the project 

having been completed in advance of the competition. “They didn’t need a Phase A,” 

he said. “They were ready for flight.”3

Although Lunar Prospector was the only Discovery mission to be selected based on 

its initial proposal alone, the mission was straightforward, with high-heritage instruments, clearly defined goals, a high probability of staying within its proposed low 

budget—and it appeared relatively straightforward to accomplish. The team had proposed a simple, challenging question: “Is there or is there not water at the South Pole?”4

Amazingly Fair and Amazingly Good

Alan Binder, the Principal Investigator of Lunar Prospector, has thoroughly documented 

all phases of the mission in his book, Lunar Prospector: Against All Odds.

5

 For his mission, Binder selected a very small team of co-investigators.6

 The project manager was 

Tom Dougherty at Lockheed Martin Missiles & Space in Sunnyvale, California. Joe 

Boyce served as the Lunar Prospector Program Scientist at NASA Headquarters. The 

mission would be designed in 22 months, at a cost of $63 million.7 Lunar Prospector 

would be launched on a Lockheed Martin Athena 2 expendable launch vehicle.

3 Niebur, S. (2009, 13 March). Personal interview with W. Huntress. Located in “Wes Huntress” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

4 “Lunar Prospector Poised for Monday Launch.” (1998, 4 January). CNN.

5 Binder, A. (2005). Against All Odds. Tucson: Ken Press. 213.

6 Binder, A. (1998, 4 September). “Lunar Prospector: Overview.” Science 281(5382). 1475–1476.

7 Ibid.
Chapter 2: Big Dreams

49

In his book, Binder wrote about his debrief with Mark Saunders, the Discovery 

Program Manager, after selection.8 Binder encapsulated the science per dollar argument with a cogent anecdote about the briefing: “We received a good on science. I 

asked Mark how we could have done better, and he replied, ‘The only way you could 

have done better on science was to have more of it, but that would have raised your 

cost.’ We had received an excellent on cost, so to get an excellent on science by doing 

more of it would have meant that we would have only gotten a good or very good on 

the cost—so that would have been a wash.”9

NASA Headquarters assigned mission management to Ames Research Center, 

with Scott Hubbard in the role of mission manager. All held out high hopes that this 

little mission would answer a very big question about the amount of water at the 

moon’s South Pole.10 Hubbard explained that he and Binder had a common goal: 

“We wanted to show that for the cost of a typical Hollywood movie, you can explore 

interplanetary space....”11

The goal of the Lunar Prospector mission was to map the abundance of certain 

elements on the Moon’s surface and to search for water ice deposits at the poles. Water 

ice is important for human exploration initiatives. Its extraction has obvious applications for life support and rocket fuel, as hydrogen and oxygen are necessary elements 

for both.12 Moreover, the mission would map the Moon’s gravity and magnetic fields 

at a higher fidelity than any previous attempt.13

Not Another Clementine

There was concern in the planetary science community that data returned from Lunar 

Prospector would offer only an incremental increase in knowledge over another lunar 

mission, Clementine. The joint NASA–Defense Department spacecraft had launched 

almost exactly one year earlier, on 25 January 1994. A comparison of the two missions, however, demonstrated instead that Lunar Prospector would be complementary, 

not duplicative. Clementine had an imaging system, altimetry hardware, and gravity 

investigations. Lunar Prospector, on the other hand, employed six experiments:

• Gamma Ray Spectrometer (GRS)

• Alpha Particle Spectrometer (APS)

8 Binder, A. (2005). Against All Odds. Tucson: Ken Press. 213.

9 Ibid.

10 “Lunar Prospector Poised for Monday Launch.” (1998, 4 January). CNN.

11 Ibid.

12 Binder, A. (1998, 4 September). “Lunar Prospector: Overview.” Science, 281(5382). 1475–1476.

13 “Missions to the Moon, Sun, Venus, and a Comet Picked for Discovery.” (1995, 28 February). 

NASA News Release 95-19.
NASA′s Discovery Program

50

• Neutron Spectrometer (NS)

• Doppler Gravity Experiment (DGE)

• Electron Reflectometer (ER)

• Magnetometer (MAG)

The gamma ray spectrometer would map the Moon in radioactive elements (uranium, thorium, potassium) and those that emit gamma rays when hit by cosmic rays 

or particles in the solar wind (iron, titanium, oxygen, silicon, aluminum, magnesium, 

calcium). A map of the latter set of elements would provide information about the 

composition of the Moon, which was known to be composed of 98 percent of these 

elements, by mass. Such maps would show not just the bulk elemental composition 

of the Moon, but also its mineralogy: information on the types of rocks present on 

the global surface that could then be compared with the rocks returned by the Apollo 

missions in the 1960s and ’70s. Such measured elements were also key in determining the prevalence of “KREEP”—material rich in potassium (K), rare earth elements 

(REE), and phosphorus (P)—and, therefore, lunar evolution. KREEP may represent 

some of the last remaining melt after the lunar crust was formed. Together, these 

elements would help scientists understand how the Moon formed and the surface 

continued to change. The mission also emphasized the detection of resources needed 

for future construction on the Moon. Scott Hubbard was the Principal Investigator 

for this instrument.

The neutron spectrometer was built by Bill Feldman and his team at Los Alamos 

National Laboratory to map the global concentrations of hydrogen, iron, titanium, 

calcium, aluminum, and other elements on the surface. The team represented one of 

the premier gamma ray and neutron instrument providers for the United States, later 

providing instruments for, and serving as co-investigators on, the Discovery missions 

MESSENGER and Dawn.

Alan Binder was the PI for the alpha particle spectrometer, designed to detect the 

radioactive decay of radon and its daughter, polonium—possibly the result of lowlevel volcanic activity and the source of the tenuous lunar atmosphere. The mission’s 

emphasis on resources for future human exploration was promoted again here, as 

radon gas is released with other gases essential for life support.

The Doppler gravity experiment, led by Alexander Konopoliv from the Jet Propulsion 

Laboratory, would use the Doppler shift observed in the S-band tracking signal of the 

spacecraft at Earth to estimate the lunar gravity field of the near side of the Moon and 

the corresponding location and size of any mass anomalies from the surface, lithosphere, 

or internal structure of the Moon. The variance of the gravity field over the surface of 

the Moon would indicate particularly dense areas of the crust.
Chapter 2: Big Dreams

51

The electron reflectometer investigation measured the energy spectrum and direction of electrons in order to determine the location and strength of the lunar remnant 

paleomagnetic fields. It was led by Robert Lin of University of California, Berkeley.

The magnetometer was mounted on a 0.8-meter boom extending from the electron 

reflectometer, away from internal spacecraft magnetic fields, to measure the locations 

and strengths of regional (low-intensity) magnetic fields in the crust. Such magnetic 

anomalies could show how the magnetic fields formed and could be used with the 

gravity data to infer the size of the Moon’s core, thought to be composed of iron. Mario 

Acuna, from Goddard Space Flight Center, and Lon Hood, from the University of 

Arizona, were the co-principal investigators of the magnetometer.14 Altogether, the 

instruments weighed just 21.4 kilograms; the spacecraft mass was 223 kilograms, with 

no onboard computer.

These instruments would fly on a small (296 kilograms) drum-shaped (1.37 meters 

in diameter, 1.28 meters in height) spacecraft bus built by Lockheed Martin.15 Mission 

refinements, development, integration, and testing were all completed in just 22 months, 

and the spacecraft was delivered to Cape Canaveral at the end of 1997.

The Evidence of Water Ice Is Quite Strong

Lunar Prospector launched at 9:28 p.m. EST on 6 January 1998, from Launch Complex 

46 at Cape Canaveral and reached the Moon just four days and nine hours later. The 

spacecraft began collecting data almost immediately. Binder was elated at the spacecraft’s 

performance and scientific data yield about the Moon. The Lunar Prospector team 

announced the presence of water ice at both poles, but Bill Feldman cautioned that 

although the evidence was strong, there likely was a low concentration of water at the 

poles. While results were qualified, spacecraft performance was not. “This spacecraft 

has performed beyond all reasonable expectations,” said Scott Hubbard at this initial 

press conference.16

Later analyses refined results and changed interpretations. “The data show clearly 

where the hydrogen is. It’s localized in spots near the poles, and it has to be buried 

about half a meter or so,” said Feldman a few months later. “In making our initial 

14 Binder, A. (1998, 4 September). “Lunar Prospector: Overview.” Science, 281(5382). 1475–1476.

15 Ibid.

16 National Aeronautics and Space Administration. (1998, 6 March). “Lunar Prospector Finds 

Evidence of Ice at Moon’s Poles.” ScienceDaily. Retrieved 5 August 2021 from http://www.

sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/03/980306043804.htm.
NASA′s Discovery Program

52

estimates, we assumed the water was spread over the footprint [area scanned by] the 

instrument. As we’ve gathered more data, we’ve found that it’s not spread out as we 

first assumed, but concentrated,” he said.17

Throughout the mission, Lunar Prospector continued to provide firsts, such as the 

first operational gravity map of the entire lunar surface. David Lawrence, a physicist 

on the neutron spectrometer team at Los Alamos National Laboratory, said: “Before 

Lunar Prospector, we only saw 20 percent of the moon. Now we’re mapping a whole 

other planet, and that’s really exciting.”18

After the completion of its one-year primary mission, Lunar Prospector executed 

a six-month extended mission.

End of Mission

At end of mission, with NASA’s full approval, the team crashed the spacecraft into 

the Moon. Just before 6 a.m. the morning of 31 July 1999, the spacecraft impacted a 

dark crater near the South Pole. The ejecta of such an impact, observed by the Hubble 

Space Telescope in Earth orbit and the McDonald Observatory in Texas, would reveal 

the characteristics of water ice if a large amount was present.19 David Goldstein of the 

University of Texas at Austin encouraged astronomers to request Director’s Discretionary 

Time on their telescopes to watch the impact as well.20 The probability of success before 

impact was estimated to be only 10 percent, but, as Guenter Riegler, then-director 

of the Research Program Management Division, Office of Space Science, at NASA 

Headquarters, said: “While the probability of success for such a bold undertaking is low, 

the potential science payoff is tremendous.”21 Unfortunately, no plume was observed.22

Papers continued to be published in myriad scientific journals, including Geophysical 

Research Letters, on the results from Lunar Prospector for several years. Exemplary of 

these were the results of the magnetometer investigation, which proved to be a small 

17 Connor, S. (1998, 3 September). “Scientists Find Billions.” The Independent. Downloaded from 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/scientists-find-billions-of-tons-of-ice-lying-under-themoons-poles-1195839.html.

18 Hoffman, I. (1999, 1 August). “Results of Moon-Probe Crash Examined.” Albuquerque Journal.

19 Phillips, T. (1999, 21 July). “Bracing for Impact.” NASA Science. Downloaded from https://

science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/1999/ast21jul99_1/.

20 Goldstein, D. B., et al. (1999 15 June). “Impacting Lunar Prospector in a Cold Trap to Detect 

Water Ice.” Geophys. Res. Lett, 26(12). 1653–1656.

21 NASA. (1999, June 2). “Lunar Prospector Set to Make Science Splash.” Press release 99-36AR.

22 NASA Space Science Data Center. (N.d.). “Lunar Prospector.” Downloaded from https://nssdc.

gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunarprosp.html on 3 May 2023.
Chapter 2: Big Dreams

53

instrument with big results. Scientists on the magnetometer team estimated a magnetic 

core roughly 680 kilometers ±180 kilometers in diameter—only 1 to 3 percent of the 

Moon’s mass—making it an order of magnitude smaller than Earth’s core-mass ratio.23

This unexpected result supported the “impact origin” of the Moon, a theory put 

forth by scientists William Hartmann and Donald Davis in 1975.24 In this theory, 

during the early days of the solar system, a Mars-size planetesimal hit the early Earth, 

knocking a good bit of its outer material into space.25

STARDUST

The 1994 Discovery Announcement of Opportunity in which Lunar Prospector was 

selected also resulted in a Phase A competition of three other missions, of which 

one would be selected nine months later.26 As the Discovery Program matured, the 

complexity of the selected missions increased. Leading these missions required PIs 

to manage ever-larger teams and find solutions to technical and scientific issues that 

fit within the strict cost cap of the Discovery class.

Esker K. “Ek” Davis, manager of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Planetary and Space 

Physics Missions Program Office, oversaw the submission of 15 JPL Discovery mission 

proposals in 1994 and was “the key person at JPL who established the foundation for 

our approach to the Discovery Program,” according to Charles Elachi, then-director of 

the lab’s Space and Earth Science Programs Directorate.27 Under Davis, three missions 

developed by JPL were selected by NASA Headquarters for Phase A competition in 

1995: Stardust, Suess-Urey, and Venus Multiprobe.28

The three mission teams performed ten-month concept studies to refine mission 

design, perform early trades, answer reviewer concerns about technology readiness, 

and demonstrate that each respective spacecraft was ready for flight. Despite the widely 

23 “Moon Has Small Core, Say LP Scientists.” (1999, 9 August). Space Daily. Downloaded from 

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/water-99l.html. See also Hood, L., et al. (1999, 1 August). 

“Initial Measurements of the Lunar Induced Magnetic Dipole Moment Using Lunar Prospector 

Magnetometer Data.” Geophysical Research Letters, 26(15). 2327–2330.

24 Hartmann, W. K., and Davis, D. R. (1975). “Satellite-Sized Planetesimals and Lunar Origin.” 

Icarus, 24(4), 504–515.

25 “Moon Has Small Core, Say LP Scientists. (1999, 9 August). Space Daily. Downloaded from 

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/water-99l.html.

26 NASA. (1995, 6 October). Discovery 4 Down Select Review Plan.

27 Whalen, M. (1995, 1 December). “Discovery Office Manager ‘Ek’ Davis Dies.” JPL Universe 25(24).

28 Ainsworth, D. (1995, 10 March). “Three JPL Discovery Concepts Selected for Possible 

Development.” JPL Universe, 25(5).
NASA′s Discovery Program

54

spread rumors of the imminent selection of Venus Multiprobe (due to its significantly 

lower cost and elegant design), when the results were announced on 11 November 

1995, the winner was Stardust.29

Wes Huntress, newly promoted to Associate Administrator of Space Science, as 

well as being a selecting official, told the teams and the media: “Stardust was rated 

highest in terms of scientific content and, when combined with its low cost and high 

probability of success, this translates into the best return on investment for the nation.” 

When asked how the decision between the missions was made, Huntress credited the 

“plan to communicate the purpose and results of this exciting mission to educators 

and the public” as a deciding factor.30 The irresistible potential for public engagement 

acting as the wind in its sails, NASA selected Stardust as the fourth Discovery mission, 

the agency’s first mission to a comet, and the first sample return mission since Apollo.

Keep It Simple

Selection of the Stardust mission concept broke new ground in the Discovery Program.31

The mission would be small, focused, and achievable, despite scientists and engineers 

attempting the improbable: sample return in a cost-capped mission environment. This 

meant, in addition to encountering a target, taking measurements, and returning the 

data to Earth, that at least part of the spacecraft would have to be returned to Earth 

safely, with the samples collected intact.

Don Brownlee, Stardust Principal Investigator and a professor at the University of 

Washington, had spent years studying interplanetary dust particles collected on rooftops, 

high-altitude balloon flights, flights of U2 and ER-2 airplanes, sounding rocket flights, 

the Apollo program’s precursor missions Gemini X and XII, Skylab, Russia’s Mir space 

station, and the International Space Station, among others. He mined the dust for the 

secrets that they held about the beginning of our solar system.32 These fluffy micronsized particles, which came to be known as Brownlee particles, were amalgamates of 

minerals with extraterrestrial isotopic ratios, which suggested that they had existed at 

29 Niebur, S. (2009, 25 March). Personal interview with D. Brownlee. Located in “Stardust” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

30 Ainsworth, D. (1995, 1 December). “Stardust Named Next Discovery Mission.” JPL Universe. 

25(24). See also NASA. (1995, 22 November). “Comet Sample Return Mission Picked as Next 

Discovery Flight.” NASA press release. Niebur, S. (2009, 13 March). Personal interview with 

W. Huntress. Located in “Wes Huntress” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History 

Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

31 Brownlee, D. E., et al. (2003), “Stardust: Comet and Interstellar Dust Sample Return Mission,” 

J. Geophys. Res., 108, 8111, doi:10.1029/2003JE002087, E10.

32 Doughton, S. (2006, 13 January). “Stardust Space Capsule to Touch Down Sunday.” The 

Seattle Times. Niebur,  S. (2009, 25 March). Personal interview with D. Brownlee. Located in 

“Stardust” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.
Chapter 2: Big Dreams

55

the formation of the solar system. Brownlee recognized their significance and made a 

career of studying them with custom-built mass spectrometers and other specialized 

laboratory instrumentation. Although there had been no previous missions to study 

interplanetary dust, Brownlee was invited to join lunar investigations as early as Apollo 

12 and continued as a lunar sample investigator after that. He was also a co-investigator 

on Giotto, the ESA mission to Comet Halley.

The Challenge of Sample Return

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory had studied comet missions as far back as 1959, but the 

concept became more pressing with the imminent return of an ancient visitor, Comet 

Halley, which would swing by Earth in 1986. Two of the key engineers working in the 

advanced projects division at JPL in 1981 were Ken Atkins, who led a development 

team whose spacecraft used ion rocket technology, and Lou Friedman, who led a 

team to use solar sail technology. The two had a good-natured rivalry, competing to 

demonstrate their engineering designs for a Halley’s Comet intercept mission. After 

a “shootout” where the two teams presented their competing ideas to an impartial 

technical review panel, the ion rocket technology came out on top.

Atkins’s team worked with the European Space Agency (ESA) on the mission, 

even improving the plan to include a probe that would be dropped at the comet 

before the spacecraft continued on to rendezvous with another comet, 10P/Tempel.33

Meanwhile, Geoff Briggs, who then led the Solar System Exploration Division at NASA 

Headquarters, called Brownlee and co-investigator Peter Tsou of JPL, asking if it would 

be possible to analyze samples recovered from the comet. The projected encounter 

speed—70 kilometers per second—and the additional challenge of Earth microbial 

contamination on the spacecraft precluded such an operation. Still, the notion inspired 

Robert Farquhar of APL, Brownlee, Tsou, and others on the team, and the quest for 

sample return from a comet’s coma thus began.34

The team was motivated by the premise that a simple sample return concept using 

minimal instrumentation could be contained in a cost box of $50 to $100 million—a 

very low price relative to pre-Discovery half-billion-dollar NASA missions that often 

invited radical descopes to cut costs. “We furiously started designing something called 

Halley–Earth Return (HER), which would go on the trajectory flying past Halley and 

33 Niebur, S. (2009, 12 August). Personal interview with P. Tsou. Located in “Stardust” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

34 Niebur, S. (2009, 25 March). Personal interview with D. Brownlee. Located in “Stardust” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, 

DC. See also Milstein,  M. (1999, February–March). “Bring Me the Tail of Wild-2.” Air & 

Space. 55-61.
NASA′s Discovery Program

56

then come back to Earth,” recalled Brownlee.35 The spacecraft carried only a sample 

collector and a camera—a step in the right direction, but the technology was insufficiently advanced to capture the material in a readily usable state. A key element of 

the proposed mission involved “capture cell technology,” which destroyed the captured particles, leaving only atoms behind for analysis. The resultant “atomized sample 

return,” as it was called, was simply not useful to mineralogists, however. Maintaining 

the integrity of minuscule particles of dust and understanding the composition of 

adjacent materials would be essential to their analysis; numbers of elemental atoms 

in that context would have been useless.

“The bulk composition isn’t that valuable to know,” reflected Brownlee in a 2009 

interview. “What may have sounded like a dramatic thing at the time was probably not 

a good thing to have done.”36 The interest in capturing cometary material and returning 

it to Earth intensified. The planetary community wanted sample return—something 

not achieved since the Apollo missions. Before development on a mission to Comet 

Halley could really begin, however, it was canceled on 30 September 1981, amid a 

weak economy; a smaller federal budget; and a consequent, broader culling of the 

planetary portfolio.37 “When they finally shot us down,” said Atkins, “the Europeans, 

nonplussed about that, started their own program called Giotto.”38

Tsou and colleagues at JPL worked 15 years on potential designs for “intact capture,” 

which would meet the objectives of mineralogists.39 They experimented with many 

kinds of foam to strike a delicate balance: sturdy enough to stop the particles released 

from the comet but soft enough for the materials to survive intact.

Giotto’s Comet Halley flyby was 70 kilometers per second, and “there are all kinds 

of reasons why you wouldn’t expect to be able to collect any captured intact particles.40

The work evolved over time. Tsou experimented with low-density targets, successfully 

35 Niebur, S. (2009, 25 March). Personal interview with D. Brownlee. Located in “Stardust” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

36 Ibid.

37 Westwick, Peter J. (2006), “Planetary Exploration in Extremis.” Engineering and Science, 

69(4). pp. 32–43.

38 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with K. Atkins. Located in “Genesis” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

39 Doughton, S. (2006, 13 January). “Stardust Space Capsule to Touch Down Sunday.” The 

Seattle Times.

40 Niebur, S. (2009, 12 August). Personal interview with P. Tsou. Located in “Stardust” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC; 

Niebur, S. (2009, 25 March). Personal interview with D. Brownlee. Located in “Stardust” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
Chapter 2: Big Dreams

57

demonstrating the first intact capture with a soft aluminum projectile and a piece of 

commercial Styrofoam in 1984.41 “I was dogged by the idea,” said Tsou, who continued 

to squeeze in experiments between funded JPL work. “You name the foam, I’ve used it.”42

Meanwhile, an international flotilla of spacecraft was set to intersect the orbit of 

Halley’s Comet, including the Russian Vega 1 and 2, the Japanese Sakigake and Suisei, 

and ESA’s Giotto. JPL continued to struggle with comet concepts and proposals. The 

lab and Goddard Space Flight Center proposed to the Planetary Observer Program 

in 1985 a joint project called the Comet Intercept Sample Return Mission: a coma 

sample return mission with intact capture in a Discoverer Capsule.43 JPL and ESA also 

proposed flying a spare Giotto spacecraft as Giotto II that same year. In 1988, JPL then 

targeted the small Explorer program, proposing an Earth-orbiting mission called the 

Cosmic Dust Intact Capture Explorer, which would capture interplanetary particles.44

In addition, Jet Propulsion Laboratory employees had joined with Japanese colleagues to study a low-cost flyby sample return. They proposed jointly to NASA and 

Japan’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science in 1992 a spacecraft called the 

Sample of Comet Coma Earth Return (SOCCER). There was also the Comet Nucleus 

Sample Return, yet another mission to emerge from the lab—this one a lander—and 

priced at $2 to $4 billion.45 It was not selected for flight. Nor was a coma flyby mission 

projected to come in at $800 million.46

A flagship-class mission called Comet Rendezvous and Asteroid Flyby Return—a 

twin to Cassini, the spacecraft set for the Saturnian system, and well into development—

was canceled by Congress in 1992. (Congress, notably, withheld the large program’s 

money at the exact same time the Senate gave NASA direction to plan a small planetary 

science program which would become Discovery.) In Europe, the sample return element 

of the Rosetta comet mission was dropped, and Japan’s SOCCER mission evolved into 

a spacecraft called Muses-C, then later Hayabusa, which was now an asteroid mission. 

In total, Peter Tsou recounts 12 comet-encounter mission concepts at JPL alone that 

had been rejected by the time of the first competitive Discovery AO in 1994.47

41 Tsou, P., D.  E. Brownlee, and A. L. Albee, “Experiments on Intact Capture of Hypervelocity 

Particles,” JGR 89 supl. C866–C867, 1984.

42 Milstein, M. (1999, February–March). “Bring Me the Tail of Wild-2.” Air & Space. 55–61.

43 Tsou, P., et al. (1983, March). “Sample Collection on Comet Flybys.” Lunar and Planetary Science 

XIV. 794–795.

44 Niebur, S. (2009, 25 March). Personal interview with D. Brownlee. Located in “Stardust” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

45 Niebur, S. (2009, 12 August). Personal interview with P. Tsou. Located in “Stardust” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

46 Vellinga, J. (2007, 6 February). “Bringing a Comet Home.” Project Management Challenge 2007.

47 Milstein, Michael, “Bring Me the Tail of Wild-2,” Air & Space, February/March 1999, 55–61; 

Peter Tsou interview; and Tsou, Peter, “Origins of the Stardust Mission,” Stardust newsletter, 

vol. 1, no. 4, December 2003, p. 1.
NASA′s Discovery Program

58

No U.S. team had ever been successful in launching a mission to a comet. The 

opportunity to propose missions for this new program enticed, but the mission would 

have to be low-cost, quickly developed, and adhere to a tightly focused science investigation. It would be a challenge, but new technology and advances in development 

methodology and cometary understanding made this audacious goal possible for the 

first time. In the years following the earlier, rejected proposals, four major new technological advances had been made across industry and academia that would enable a 

realistic mission that included both interstellar and cometary sample return paradigms: 

namely, the development of an intact particle capture technology called aerogel; a 

low-energy sample return trajectory that could match a comet’s velocity to just over 

6 kilometers per second using minimal fuel for velocity changes (thereby enabling 

the use of a smaller spacecraft that could be launched by a Discovery-friendly Boeing 

Delta II rocket); the identification of micron-sized interstellar grains currently entering the solar system with the neutral interstellar helium gas (as seen by dust detectors 

on Ulysses and Galileo); and dramatic improvements in analytical instrumentation 

for determining the isotopic, mineralogical, elemental, and chemical compositions of 

micron-sized grains or their components.48

While development on the nascent mission concept called Stardust had been targeted 

to return fresh interstellar grains, the plan was modified in 1994 to study and return 

both “fresh” interstellar grains recently injected into the interstellar medium and ancient 

interstellar grains and nebular condensates frozen in comets. The highly experienced 

Stardust team had flown instruments on other U.S. and international missions, and 

their plans employed flight spares from JPL’s stores wherever possible. The team drew 

on the rich heritage of cometary encounter and sample return mission concepts as 

they attempted a straightforward mission concept—“bring the comet home”—for a 

bargain-basement price. The team agreed on a singular primary science objective: 

collect 1,000 cometary particles greater than or equal to 15 microns in diameter and 

return them to Earth for laboratory analysis, with image collection and the capture 

of interstellar grains as secondary objectives. With these modifications and with so 

many years and so many studies of mission concepts, Stardust was selected by the 

Discovery Program on its first try.

48 Grün, E., Zook, H., Baguhl, M., et al. (1993). “Discovery of Jovian Dust Streams and Interstellar 

Grains by the Ulysses Spacecraft.” Nature, 362. 428–430. https://doi.org/10.1038/362428a0; 

Grün, E., et al. (1994). “Interstellar Dust in the Heliosphere.” Astron. Astrophys. 286. 915–924; 

Brownlee, D., et al. (1994, 21 October). “Stardust: Comet Coma Sample Return Plus Interstellar 

Dust Science and Technical Approach.” Downloaded from http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/science/

sci.html on 11 September 2010.
Chapter 2: Big Dreams

59

Proposal and Concept Study

In fact, the Stardust Step 1 proposal had been submitted late.49 It was a testament to its 

merits that Stardust was still selected for concept study, alongside Venus Multiprobe 

and Suess-Urey. However, the review panel challenged the team to address weaknesses 

in project management, mission operations, and science.50 Regarding management 

issues, to name one example, there were personnel disagreements between JPL and 

aerospace contractor Martin Marietta Associates—a problem that could prove disastrous for that project and others.

Ek Davis was the Discovery Program Manager at JPL who made the decision. 

Davis had previously managed the flagship planetary exploration missions Galileo 

and Voyager and overseen the development of all of JPL’s Step 1 proposals. He identified one of the proposal managers at JPL—Ken Atkins, who had been assigned to an 

asteroid sample return proposal called ASTER—as having performed particularly well, 

and he asked Atkins to step in as manager for the Stardust Step 2 proposal. His work 

on ASTER reflected his earlier work on Halley mission concepts HIM—the Halley 

Intercept Mission—and HER—the Halley–Earth Return.51

Atkins had extensive hardware delivery experience, which he credited as a major 

factor in his successful guidance of the Stardust proposal, but he was lacking one significant skill: “I didn’t know how to get a proposal ready to do this.” He later recounted, 

“I called Tony Spear up and I said, ‘I need help in proposal, in just getting this proposal 

together from a JPL standpoint.’ And he said, ‘Come see me.’ He had the proposal that 

he’d done for Pathfinder. He’d been through the gauntlet and been beaten around and 

it was a thing that [NASA] Headquarters liked.”52 Spear also offered Atkins the loan of 

a deputy who had successfully written the Pathfinder proposal, along with the technical writer and the mission planner. Overwhelmed with gratitude, Atkins asked Spear 

why he would offer to do all this for the Stardust project. “Well,” said Spear, “you’re 

the only one who asked.”53

49 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with K. Atkins. Located in “Genesis” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC. 

Stardust was selected for concept study, along with Venus MultiProbe and Suess-Urey. The team 

was challenged to address the identified weaknesses in project management, mission operations, 

and science.

50 Niebur, S. (2009, 4 September). Personal interview with T. Duxbury. Located in “Stardust” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

51 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with K. Atkins. Located in “Genesis” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

52 Ainsworth, D. (1995, 1 December). “Stardust Named Next Discovery Mission.” JPL 

Universe, 25(24).

53 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with K. Atkins. Located in “Genesis” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
NASA′s Discovery Program

60

Because they had worked so well together on the ASTER proposal, Atkins recruited 

Tom Duxbury, also of JPL, who had experience in optical onboard navigation, to handle 

mission operations and interactions with the science. Martin Marietta Aerospace, which 

would soon merge with the Lockheed Aircraft Company to form a division called 

Lockheed Martin Astronautics (LMA), had a strong program manager in Joe Vellinga, 

who led Stardust, Suess-Urey, and five other proposed concepts on the spacecraft side. 

“He is amazing,” Don Brownlee, PI of Stardust, recalled of Vellinga. “He always gets 

everything done.”54

While the Stardust team worked hard on the Concept Study Report, Atkins sought 

an edge that would put his proposal above the three JPL candidates. One rainy day, 

he attended a lunchtime seminar at the lab given by Bob Ballard, who had just discovered the Titanic on the bottom of the ocean floor using remote undersea robots. 

Ballard described his educational outreach program, JASON, named for the Greek 

figure and concerned with connecting students and satellite information about the 

ships’ search. Atkins was intrigued and pitched Brownlee the idea to partner with the 

JASON team for student outreach. Katherine Collins, Stardust’s outreach coordinator, put together a partnership with JASON as well as the Omniplex (now called the 

Science Museum of Oklahoma), a museum in Oklahoma City recommended by coinvestigator Benton Clark.55

The Stardust team did make another smart decision about their education and 

public outreach plan. When the team looked at existing JPL missions for guidance, they 

realized quickly that they could not afford to be as comprehensive as the wide-ranging 

student outreach plans of flagships like Galileo and Cassini. The team focused on middle 

school children in grades five through eight. They followed a template established by 

Pathfinder, bringing in experts to help develop the outreach plan with 10 educators 

per year. After the first 10 developed the education material and beta-tested it, they 

assisted in selecting a subsequent 10, whom they would also mentor.

They “had the greatest reach of any program that I know,” said Aimee Meyer, 

Stardust education and public outreach lead during flight. Atkins and the project team 

were very supportive of those outreach efforts. Meyer sat down separately with the 

science team and asked them to be open, to talk about their science with her so that 

the educational materials could reflect new discoveries. The science team responded 

with more information and requests of their own, such as web links back to their own 

54 Niebur, S. (2009, 25 March). Personal interview with D. Brownlee. Located in “Stardust” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

55 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with K. Atkins. Located in “Genesis” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
Chapter 2: Big Dreams

61

university sites. In the first year alone, 25 educators reached over 1 million people, 

adding formal and informal talks at schools, Rotary Clubs, malls, libraries—anywhere 

they could, because they had become so excited about “their” mission.56

Management Approach

To stay within the Discovery cost cap, Stardust management worked diligently to keep 

the science focused and to forestall any temptations to let it grow. They kept the mission design and operations simple and reused as much as possible. As the team later 

reported: “Inheriting parts, hardware, software, and designs is required to leverage dollars 

and get efficient in doing missions faster and better, while staying inside a constrained 

budget.”57 Like Mars Pathfinder and NEAR before them, this team also used several 

innovative management techniques during the mission’s design and implementation 

that can be summarized as follows:

• Adhering to a single, inspiring goal

• Designing to cost, employing only a strategic release of reserves

• Creating a flat management structure with communication between partners

• Resisting scope creep and strategically managing reserves

Joe Vellinga, the Stardust project manager, later explained that during development, he was often asked how to do “faster, better, cheaper,” and what was necessary 

to leave out of the program. Nothing, he said, was left out, but much was done in less 

depth than previous methods would have required. Testing and planning were often 

done to a “good enough”—rather than a fail-safe—standard. The mission revolved 

around a single primary objective: to collect 1,000 cometary particles of a size greater 

than 15 micrometers and return them to Earth in satisfactory condition for analysis.

Discovery Program manager Mark Saunders had convinced the team that any 

overrun—or any projected increase identified by the Earned Value Management system—would lead to termination. There would be no 15 percent overrun allowance as 

seen on other projects and codified in the NASA Procedures and Guidelines document 

7120.5A. A mission would have to manage its reserves and adjust in order to stay within 

the cost. Nevertheless, the team believed that it could be done and designed the mission 

to cost, prepared to make any compromises necessary to deliver the primary objective 

within the financial limits. They prioritized project science into primary, secondary, 

and tertiary science, and the engineering was planned accordingly. Primary science was 

56 Niebur, S. (2009, 2 September). Personal interview with A. Meyer. Located in “Stardust” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

57 Atkins, K. et al. (2000, 2–5 May).” Stardust: Implementing a New Manage-to-Budget Paradigm.” 

Proceedings of the Fourth IAA Conference on Low Cost Spacecraft.
NASA′s Discovery Program

62

nonnegotiable; other science was in the baseline but would be the first to be descoped 

if development threats made it necessary. Moreover, they would design the mission 

using as many existing capabilities as possible. For instance, they would buy existing 

components from other projects or industry rather than design them from scratch.58

In fact, Stardust was able to reuse quite a lot of systems, hardware, and experience 

from other missions. Where most JPL projects developed their own ground data systems, 

Stardust would reuse Mars Surveyor Operations Project (MSOP), the Mars Ground 

Data System from the late ’90s. This was a real change from the old JPL paradigm of 

“having many teams with chiefs, having a lot of levels,” Tom Duxbury, who handled 

Stardust mission operations, recalled, adding, “and they were not happy initially.”

Duxbury fought resistance to change by implementing an open-door policy, welcoming discussion from anyone on the project without going through supervisors. “By 

eliminating a level or two in the organization, there were so few people working on 

the project at JPL that it was very easy for me to work with each of them one-on-one 

if needed.”59 The camera was also a re-flown technology. The lens, filter, wheel, and 

shutter were Voyager spares, and the charge-coupled device was a spare from Cassini. 

Other components inherited their designs from Cassini and Mars Pathfinder but were 

built new.60 Lockheed Martin would operate the spacecraft. Even the Lockheed Martin 

Product Development Office was shared with Mars Surveyor ’98. The team soon initiated project-to-project communication, shared parts stores and procurements, shared 

staffing where possible, and shared JPL and Lockheed Martin facilities. The team 

designed the mission to be done within the resource envelope and emphasized this 

approach at the System Requirements Review, which they also treated as a Capability 

and Requirements Review (CRR)—the culmination of design-to-cost. Preparation 

for the CRR included an examination of possible existing capabilities for meeting 

the requirements, what modifications were required and what gaps remained, and 

what components needed to be developed for Stardust alone. This was essentially an 

58 Vellinga, J. (2007, 6 February). “Bringing a Comet Home.” Project Management Challenge 

2007. See also K. L. Atkins (2004). “How to Plan and Manage Reserves Effectively.” 2004 IEEE 

Aerospace Conference Proceedings (IEEE Cat. No.04TH8720), vol. 6. 3942–3955 doi:10.1109/

AERO.2004.1368212.

59 Niebur, S. (2009, 4 September). Personal interview with T. Duxbury. Located in “Stardust” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

60 Newburn, Ray, and Ken Williams, “Pictures from Space,” Stardust Newsletter, vol. 1. no. 4, 

December 2003.
Chapter 2: Big Dreams

63

inheritance review of each item, complete with risk assessment and detailed justification for reserve requirements on new or modified hardware; a reserve of 100 percent 

for new hardware required for the primary objective was not unusual for this project.61

An integrated schedule (and the budget change log) helped managers see when the 

major challenges to the mission were likely to occur and quantify their possible effects, 

driving the reserve required for that component and thus the overall level of reserves 

required at any given time in the mission. As major milestones were met, a percentage 

of the reserves could be released, as the soft lien that had been held against it was no 

longer necessary. Stardust in many ways redefined design-to-cost for a science-driven 

mission in a cost- and schedule-capped environment like the Discovery Program.

Tom Duxbury looked to Clementine’s “faster, better, cheaper” techniques for mission operations and science. He eliminated organizational boundaries where possible 

and slashed management positions to flatten the organization. “The Discovery philosophy was that we were a ‘team’ and not a group of contractors and subcontractors,” 

he later said. “I did not have a group of JPL system engineers on project staff looking 

over Lockheed Martin and MSOP shoulders. We had a simple mission and did not 

need to complicate the operations by having layer upon layer of organization.” The 

Stardust project office consisted of a part-time manager, a secretary, and a part-time 

accountant; the rest of the JPL team members remained in their respective Technical 

Divisions. This was a radical departure from the structure of most projects at JPL. “It 

was easy to determine the key positions that needed to be filled and those that could 

be reduced or eliminated,” said Duxbury.62

The mission plan was treated as a partnership in all ways, formalized with the 

Mission Definition and Requirements Agreement, a four-party agreement signed by 

NASA, Principal Investigator Brownlee, JPL, and Lockheed Martin.63 JPL provided only 

very limited oversight with Lockheed Martin. In return, Lockheed Martin opened all 

its activities to JPL and Brownlee, and the group made communication a priority. The 

team took full advantage of new telecommunication options, issuing team members 

pagers to be used for urgent questions; the person paged would simply dial in to a 

standing “meet me” telephone number and answer the question without the need to 

61 K. L. Atkins (2004). “How to Plan and Manage Reserves Effectively.” 2004 IEEE Aerospace 

Conference Proceedings (IEEE Cat. No.04TH8720), vol. 6. 3942–3955 doi:10.1109/

AERO.2004.1368212. Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with K. Atkins. Located 

in “Genesis” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

62 Niebur, S. (2009, 4 September). Personal interview with T. Duxbury. Located in “Stardust” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

63 “Stardust Mission Definition and Requirements Agreement, Rev 3.” (2000, June). Located in 

Stardust Project Library, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA.
NASA′s Discovery Program

64

get on a plane and view the work in person. The system allowed over 30 calls to be 

held concurrently. Moreover, regular telecons helped the partners get to know each 

other, which facilitated trust.

JPL agreed to use commercial off-the-shelf software to which Lockheed Martin 

was accustomed, including Microsoft Project, Microframe Program Manager, and 

FastTrack for top-level schedules, so that both could see various levels of detail of cost, 

schedule, and the like. E-mail became commonly used, and servers were replicated, 

mirroring each other every 30 minutes through the existing firewalls—a significant 

technical advance for the time. Teams worked together on a project-to-project level to 

identify parts stores and common procurements to save the project—rather than their 

institution—money. Management worked to integrate the team beyond the standard 

capabilities and provide an overarching sense of camaraderie. The team went so far as 

to note later: “The [communication] structure promotes team cohesiveness and open 

communications—there are no secrets across institution boundaries.” They added 

that this “new openness and partnership” enabled the electronic exchange of timely 

internal earned-value information heretofore unobtainable.64

The Stardust team became advocates of “virtual co-location” by arranging Monthly 

Management Reviews by web and telephone and urging other project managers to do the 

same.65 These frequent virtual meetings helped to reinforce the team dynamic, even as it 

was spread out between Pasadena (JPL), Denver (Lockheed Martin), Seattle (University 

of Washington, where the Principal Investigator was based), Chicago (University of 

Chicago, which was building the Dust Flux Monitor Instrument), Germany (Max 

Planck Institute, which was building the Cometary and Interstellar Dust Analyzer), 

and co-investigator institutions, with launch preparation in Florida and preliminary 

examination and sample distribution in Texas.

Earned Value Management was one of the last project areas to be filled. Bredt 

Martin joined the project as Manager of Business Operations and Information Systems 

in January 1996 after 10 years at JPL as an engineer working on spacecraft thermal 

environments, managing Hubble Space Telescope planning, and managing program 

control for the SeaWinds scatterometer project, among other things. When Martin asked 

to join the Stardust project, not only was he welcomed, but, as he had experience with 

64 Atkins K. L., et al. (2000, 2–5 May). “Stardust: Implementing a New Manage-to-Budget 

Paradigm.” Proceedings of the Fourth IAA Conference on Low Cost Spacecraft. Laurel: Johns 

Hopkins University.

65 Atkins, K. L., et al. (2000, 2–5 May). “Stardust: Implementing a New Manage-to-Budget 

Paradigm.” Proceedings of the Fourth IAA Conference on Low Cost Spacecraft. Laurel: Johns 

Hopkins University. See also Vellinga, J. (2007, 6 February). “Bringing a Comet Home.” Project 

Management Challenge 2007. See also Atkins, K. L. (2004). “How to Plan and Manage Reserves 

Effectively.” 2004 IEEE Aerospace Conference Proceedings (IEEE Cat. No.04TH8720), vol. 6. 

3942–3955 doi:10.1109/AERO.2004.1368212.
Chapter 2: Big Dreams

65

Earned Value Management using the same software as was used at Lockheed Martin, 

he was asked to lead business operations and implement an Earned Value Management 

system on Stardust. (JPL was not a regular user of Earned Value Management software, 

as it had not previously been required by NASA or other sponsors.)

Since NASA told the project team that financial, technical, and schedule performance 

were of equal weight, the team took an optimistic approach to scheduling, planning 

for the best case and managing additional work as needed within the constraints of 

Earned Value Management. Earned Value was determined each month at the subsystem level, using both definitive milestones and honest assessments of its status to 

provide an early-warning system of lagging progress so that action could be taken by 

the project long before the problem worsened. The Earned Value Management system 

was shown to be effective within a few months of the start of Phase C/D, when the personnel ramp-up and work performed at Lockheed failed to keep up with the aggressive 

baseline schedule. Because Earned Value Management alerted the team of Lockheed’s 

impending bottleneck, they were able to do a recovery replan early in the program. In 

another example, the team incorporated into the resource baseline a month of funded 

schedule margin before Assembly, Test, and Launch Operations; two months during 

Assembly, Test, and Launch Operations in Denver; and one month at the Cape. This 

funded schedule margin was viewed as a planned early release of schedule reserves—a 

resource that could be tapped as required. The team focused on early identification of 

problems, with workarounds; early release of reserves (this plan was identified by the 

team as a form of self-insurance); and risk reduction actions that could be developed 

quickly as necessary.66 Stardust credited the use of Earned Value Management, Total 

Quality Management, and Reengineering principles for keeping costs under control.67

Requirements Creep Camel

There was both an individual and a collective resistance to scope creep on Stardust. The 

mission’s unofficial mantra became: “Do not allow the ‘requirements creep camel’ to get 

his nose under the tent.” There were certainly opportunities for scope creep, such as the 

science team’s midcourse introduction of a mechanism to capture volatiles as well as 

particles. Because the process added unknown risks to the mission, the project rejected 

its inclusion. Other “nice to have” technologies included additional instrumentation for 

the new heatshield design, this time pushed by another NASA center, Ames, through 

66 Atkins, K. L., et al. (2000, 2–5 May). “Stardust: Implementing a New Manage-to-Budget 

Paradigm.” Proceedings of the Fourth IAA Conference on Low Cost Spacecraft. Laurel: Johns 

Hopkins University.

67 Atkins, K. L., et al. (2000, 2–5 May). “Stardust: Implementing a New Manage-to-Budget 

Paradigm.” Proceedings of the Fourth IAA Conference on Low Cost Spacecraft. Laurel: Johns 

Hopkins University; Vellinga, J. (2007, 6 February). “Bringing a Comet Home.” Project 

Management Challenge 2007.
NASA′s Discovery Program

66

NASA Headquarters, but the project held the line and did not incorporate the changes 

(even though it would have benefited heatshield analyses for future missions). Only 

one major improvement was accepted: the addition of variable-density aerogel, at no 

additional cost. To keep the cost fixed, the team quickly learned that the set mission 

requirements could under no circumstances change. “When cost is committed,” said 

Joe Vellinga of Lockheed Martin, “requirements are frozen.”68 The project committed 

to the Mission Definition and Requirements Agreement (MDRA) and pushed back 

on new mandates without appropriate levels of reserves attached, later emphasizing: 

“The use of original MDRA reserve to cover added scope not in the MDRA is never 

justifiable.”69 The mission’s commitment to not allowing requirements creep was challenged a number of times, but Ken Atkins of JPL held the line so diligently that at his 

retirement, Brownlee gifted him with a toy camel of his own.70

Stardust developed and followed a reserves management plan based on its designto-cost approach.71 The plan included reserves scheduled to be released at key points in 

the mission or to buy down risk. As the design matured, new capabilities were found 

and new requirements suggested, but the mission stood firm; new requirements were 

not allowed to find their way into the baseline mission.72 At Monthly Management 

Reviews, Atkins would present risk, reserves, and the price of “full-time equivalent” 

workers to combat a particular issue. Over the lifetime of the project, said Atkins, “I 

was able to release reserves to preemptively counter threats and risk. Looking for ways 

to attack risk before it attacked us, we spent about a million dollars on risk reduction 

before launch.”73 The mission would have no project-level overruns, with over a million dollars remaining in the budget at launch.

68 Vellinga, J. (2007, 6 February). “Bringing a Comet Home.” Project Management Challenge 

2007. See also Atkins, K. L. (2004). “How to Plan and Manage Reserves Effectively.” 2004 IEEE 

Aerospace Conference Proceedings (IEEE Cat. No.04TH8720), vol. 6. 3942–3955 doi:10.1109/

AERO.2004.1368212.

69 Atkins, K. L. (2004). “How to Plan and Manage Reserves Effectively.” 2004 IEEE Aerospace 

Conference Proceedings (IEEE Cat. No.04TH8720), vol. 6. 3942–3955 doi:10.1109/

AERO.2004.1368212.

70 Vellinga, J. (2007, 6 February). “Bringing a Comet Home.” Project Management Challenge 2007.

71 Atkins, K. L. (2004). “How to Plan and Manage Reserves Effectively.” 2004 IEEE Aerospace 

Conference Proceedings (IEEE Cat. No.04TH8720), vol. 6. 3942–3955 doi:10.1109/

AERO.2004.1368212.

72 Vellinga, J. (2007, 6 February). “Bringing a Comet Home.” Project Management Challenge 

2007. See also Atkins, K. L. (2004). “How to Plan and Manage Reserves Effectively.” 2004 IEEE 

Aerospace Conference Proceedings (IEEE Cat. No.04TH8720), vol. 6. 3942–3955 doi:10.1109/

AERO.2004.1368212.

73 Atkins, K. L. (2006, 1 April). “Stardust: The Rewards of Commitment, Care, and Communication.” 

ASK Magazine, 23. 14–17.
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67

Stardust was selected by NASA in November 1995 to be the agency’s next Discovery 

mission. Don Brownlee and co-investigator Ben Clark called Atkins with the news.74

“At first I couldn’t believe it,” Atkins said. “I thought we had been the dark horse in this 

competition for a long time, so when I heard, it was like winning the lottery.”75 Atkins 

was thrilled to join the Discovery Program as a project manager. That afternoon, he 

went to share the news with Ek Davis, the Discovery Program Manager, who was at 

home, cancer-stricken. Davis was very pleased to hear of Stardust’s selection, and the 

two sat and talked about the achievement. A local radio station called for comment, 

and Atkins did the interview from Davis’s house, with Davis there in his wheelchair. 

“I think I was about the last JPLer to talk to him because the next day, he was gone,” 

said Atkins.76 Davis died of cancer on 24 November 1995.77

The Mission

When Mark Saunders, the Discovery Program Manager, debriefed the proposing teams, 

Atkins recalled, “[I]t was totally equal in terms of the number of points except in one 

spot. The deciding factor in this was outreach and you won.”78 The outreach plan had 

been developed in line with everything else on the mission—simple, straightforward, 

and leveraging work previously developed on other projects. “It was kind of amazing 

to me that somehow all of a sudden we came out on top. We had never gotten very far 

before,” said Brownlee, the mission PI, recalling the many comet mission proposals 

in previous years.79

The fundamental breakthrough for this mission as a scientific investigation was 

its design. By bringing the samples home, the in situ analysis at the comet could be 

reduced to virtually zero. This eliminated instrument miniaturization costs and flight 

testing for an instrument payload, to include radiation, vibration, and environmental 

assessments to ensure its survival on top of a rocket. “The point of sample return is 

to flip the paradigm,” said Atkins. “If I can bring back a sample and hand it to you, 

there’s no limit to the science you can do.”80

74 Atkins, K. L. (2003, 1 October). “Mr. Stardust’s Wild Ride.” ASK Magazine, 14. 16–19.

75 Ainsworth, D. (1995, 1 December). “Stardust Named Next Discovery Mission.” JPL 

Universe, 25(24).

76 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with K. Atkins. Located in “Genesis” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

77 Whalen, M. 1995, 1 December. “Discovery Office Manager ‘Ek’ Davis Dies.” JPL Universe, 25(24).

78 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with K. Atkins. Located in “Genesis” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

79 Niebur, S. (2009, 25 March). Personal interview with D. Brownlee. Located in “Stardust” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

80 Milstein, M. (1999, February–March). “Bring Me the Tail of Wild-2.” Air & Space. 55–61.
NASA′s Discovery Program

68

The primary objective of the mission was to collect 1,000 cometary particles greater 

than 15 microns and return them to Earth in a condition satisfactory for analysis. The 

particles were expected to consist of a mixture of the ancient, pre-solar interstellar grains 

and nebular condensates that were frozen into comets at the far edges of the solar nebula 

during the formation of the solar system. Mission success hinged on that objective.

Secondary science objectives were to take 65 images of the comet’s nucleus within 

2,000 kilometers; to image the coma; to analyze particles in situ within the coma; 

and to collect and return 100 small, high-velocity, “new” interstellar particles from 

a stream of “fresh” interstellar grains discovered entering the solar system from the 

same direction as interstellar gas.81

Tertiary objectives—not critical but considered important by the team—were to 

measure certain aspects of the comet as the spacecraft flew through its coma. These 

aspects included the coma dust flux, particle size distribution, integrated dust fluence, 

large particle momentum, and dust flux profiles over the spacecraft’s path. Another 

tertiary objective was to collect coma volatiles and perform in situ compositional 

analyses of interplanetary dust particles, interstellar particles, and any other particle 

types encountered during the cometary flyby. To accomplish all this, the Stardust mission was outfitted with a sample collector, a mass spectrometer, a dust detector, and a 

shared engineering optical navigation camera.82

The choice of comet, like all comet missions, was limited by those traveling through 

the inner solar system at the projected time of encounter. This mission, however, also 

required the selection of a comet traveling slowly enough to allow Stardust to approach 

and eventually pass the comet, collecting samples as the speeds converged, limiting 

particle fragmentation. Comet 81P/Wild (also called Wild 2) was identified as an accessible target by JPL flight engineer Chen-Wan Yen.83 Discovered by Swiss astronomer 

Paul Wild in 1978, Wild 2 is a relatively fresh, four-kilometer-wide comet whose outer 

layers have been subjected to limited heating by the Sun.84 For centuries, it had been 

in a stable orbit with a perihelion of 4.9 astronomical units (AU) and an aphelion of 

25 AU. Then, in 1974, the comet passed near the giant planet Jupiter, which caused 

a reverse Jupiter gravity assist, knocking the comet into an orbit much closer to the 

81 Grün, E., et al. (1993). “Discovery of Jovian Dust Streams and Interstellar Grains by the Ulysses 

Spacecraft.” Nature 362(28–430).

82 Brownlee, D. E., et al. (2003), “Stardust: Comet and Interstellar Dust Sample Return Mission,” 

J. Geophys. Res., 108, 8111, doi:10.1029/2003JE002087, E10.

83 Milstein, M. (1999, February–March). “Bring Me the Tail of Wild-2.” Air & Space. 55–61.

84 Platt, J. (1997, 18 April). “Stardust Team Studies Wild 2, Hale-Bopp’s Cometary Cousin.” Downloaded from https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-stardust-team-studies-hale-bopps-cometary-cousin.
Chapter 2: Big Dreams

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Sun, with a perihelion of 1.58 AU and an aphelion of 5.2 AU.85 This interaction put a 

comet made of materials from the faraway Kuiper belt region of the solar nebula within 

reach of Earth’s scientists—without the decades-long journey that would ordinarily be 

required. It was the ultimate shortcut to sampling the outer solar system.

“Stardust could provide a new window into the distant past,” said Simon Green of 

the Open University’s Planetary and Space Science Research Institute.86 The conditions in the early solar nebula were both unknown and vital to understanding the 

formation conditions and subsequent evolution of planets such as Earth. Since the icy 

cometary particles would be unchanged by heating or other evolutionary processes 

over the 4.5-billion-year interval, they would reflect an accurate measurement of the 

outer solar system at formation. A major fraction of the dust particles incorporated 

in the comet, in fact, would be interstellar grains that predated even the solar nebula. 

“There’s nothing left on Earth’s surface that’s nearly as old as these bits of crystals and 

minerals,” said Carlton Allen, who worked with the mission as astromaterials curator 

at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.87

Staffing Up

Staffing the new mission was an unexpected challenge. In 1995, NASA Administrator 

Dan Goldin prepared to implement a Reduction in Force at NASA Headquarters. Many 

management positions were eliminated, and, separately, JPL employees working on 

various mission proposals had gone back to their day jobs. There was a renewed focus 

at the lab on employees working on projects instead of employees managing others, 

and lab leadership told Atkins, the Stardust project manager, that his mission could 

not have a Deputy Project Manager. This made traditional project management activities difficult, but Atkins agreed. He divided mission responsibilities into as few areas 

as possible: science, led by Brownlee, the Principal Investigator; flight system, led by 

Lockheed Martin; and mission design, operations, and navigation, led by Tom Duxbury.

Once that was complete, all that remained was to create the organization chart 

to justify the decision and to obtain the right people to lead these areas and the next 

level down. Among the personnel brought on board was Rick Grammier, who had 

been Atkins’s deputy in the electronics area. Management appointed Grammier as 

project engineer. For adjudicating issues where the Principal Investigator and project 

manager disagreed, Atkins created an oversight board chaired by the PI and reporting to the project manager; with Charles Elachi, director of the JPL Space and Earth 

85 Brownlee, D. E., et al. (2003), “Stardust: Comet and Interstellar Dust Sample Return Mission,” 

J. Geophys. Res., 108, 8111, doi:10.1029/2003JE002087, E10.

86 Briggs, H. (2006, 15 January). “Stardust Capsule Returns to Earth.” BBC News.

87 Irion, R. (2009, 25 November). “The Secrets Within Cosmic Dust: Dust Captured by a Spacecraft 

from a Comet’s Tail Holds Clues to the Origin of the Solar System.” Smithsonian.
NASA′s Discovery Program

70

Science Programs Directorate; Noel Hinners, the vice president of flight systems at 

Lockheed Martin Space Systems; and the NASA Discovery Project Manager. Atkins 

also set up an advisory board for real-time mentoring with experts like Tony Spear of 

Mars Pathfinder; Tom Gavin, the Cassini flight systems manager; Mike Sander, deputy 

director of JPL’s Space and Earth Science Programs Directorate; and Joe Savino, an 

electronics expert.88 Staffing up had to be accomplished quickly, since Phase A and B 

together were limited to 18 months.89

Mission Design

The most challenging aspects of the Stardust mission were expected to be the development of the aerogel collectors and the spacecraft’s survival in a challenging environment. 

For the first few months after launch, several instruments on the spacecraft would 

operate, but the sample collectors would remain closed. En route to Wild 2 and on 

the return, a sample collector would open to collect interstellar grains. An optional 

flyby of the asteroid Annefrank would allow testing of the in situ instrument payload 

and the encounter software. Shortly before the spacecraft flew past Wild 2, the aerogel 

collectors would open to collect particles of ancient cometary dust at a crawling relative speed of just 6.1 kilometers per second. The collectors would then close, and the 

spacecraft would continue its two-year journey back to Earth.

Aerogel—Stardust’s “secret weapon”—is extremely low-density silicon glass that 

is 99 percent empty space, with a density of less than 1 percent of that of typical glass. 

Some members of the team called it “frozen smoke.” According to Brownlee, the PI, 

“Aerogel is only a little bit denser than air. Sometimes we lay it on the lab table, and 

we can’t find it.”90

The astonishing substance was not invented for Stardust. The first scientific papers 

announcing the substance were published in 1931 and 1932 by Samuel Kistler, an 

instructor at the College of the Pacific. Having just begun his doctoral work in the 

summer of 1927, Kistler spent the academic year teaching undergraduate courses. He 

learned to work with wet gels from a professor there, J. W. McBain, and, with assistance 

from undergraduate Charles H. Learned, employed supercritical fluid drying to create 

the first aerogel.91 This new material was a silica aerogel: a substance that captured 

imaginations with its wispy appearance, extremely low density, and incredible strength. 

88 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with K. Atkins. Located in “Genesis” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

89 Ainsworth, D. (1996, 12 January). “JPL Adds New Discovery Mission to Its Agenda.” JPL 

Universe. 3.

90 David, L. (1996, July–August). “Dr. Brownlee’s Comet Catching Machine.” Final Frontier. 8–9.

91 Kistler, S. (1931). “Coherent Expanded Aerogels and Jellies.” Nature, 127(741). https://doi.

org/10.1038/127741a0. See also Kistler, S. S. (1932). “Coherent Expanded-Aerogels.” The Journal 

of Physical Chemistry, 36(1), 52–64. https://doi.org/10.1021/j150331a003.
Chapter 2: Big Dreams

71

Kistler licensed aerogel to Monsanto Corp. in the early 1940s. The company described 

it as a “light, friable, slightly opalescent solid containing as much as 95 percent air volume,” created by replacing the water in a special silica gel with alcohol and heating the 

material to 550 degrees F under a constant pressure, and then dropping the pressure to 

20 inches of mercury for 10 minutes. The process is called supercritical fluid drying.92

Aerogel was used for different coating and detector experiments in the years before 

Stardust. “There were several physics departments around the world that were actually 

making aerogel for these Cherenkov counters,” said Brownlee, “so the word of aerogel 

and its properties was sort of floating around the physics community at some level.”93

Tsou first encountered the material on a visit to Los Alamos, where he saw a small 

piece on a windowsill and was intrigued with its properties. In the mid- to late 1990s, 

Brownlee and Tsou came up with ways to fly aerogel in space on the Shuttle. Larger 

tests, using space station–attached payloads and European missions, soon “indicated 

you could collect particles at this kind of speed and have them survive intact. And 

that’s really the technology that made Stardust possible, finding low-density capsule 

materials,” said Brownlee.94

Aerogel proved the enabling technology for cometary sample return on this mission; over 1,000 particles larger than 15 microns were expected in the 1,000 square 

centimeters of ultra-fine mesostructure silica aerogel. Laboratory tests led the scientists 

to expect, among other things, hydrated silicates, noble gases, and organic material 

to be retained during the material’s approximate 6-kilometer-per-second encounter 

with the comet.95

The spacecraft was based on the Lockheed Martin SpaceProbe deep space bus, 

built with flat panels made of thin sheets of graphite over a lightweight aluminum 

“honeycomb” core. The spacecraft had a minimum of moving parts: one to deploy 

the sample tray assembly out of the sample return capsule and the NavCam scanning 

mirror for tracking the comet’s nucleus.96 Duxbury described the sample tray assem92 Kistler, S. (1943, February). Chemical and Metallurgical Engineering, February. 144.

93 Niebur, S. (2009, 25 March). Personal interview with D. Brownlee. Located in “Stardust” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

94 Ibid.

95 Tsou, P., Brownlee, D., Sandford, S., Hörz, F., & Zolensky, M. (2003). “Wild 2 and Interstellar 

Sample Collection and Earth Return.” Journal of Geophysical Research, 108. https://doi.

org/10.1029/2003JE002109.

96 Brownlee, D. E., et al. (2003), “Stardust: Comet and Interstellar Dust Sample Return Mission,” 

J. Geophys. Res., 108, 8111, doi:10.1029/2003JE002087, E10.
NASA′s Discovery Program

72

bly as having “shoulder and wrist joints,” both of which could bend for deployment 

with the appropriate surface aligned with the direction of incoming dust particles.97

Subsystems were fully redundant, except for the spacecraft battery.98

The spacecraft was protected by multilayer “Whipple shields” that functioned like 

the front bumpers on cars, stopping incoming particles from impacting the solar arrays 

and other sensitive elements of the main spacecraft. Cometary dust—the mission’s 

raison d’être—was also its greatest nemesis. Mission designers had to collect sufficient 

dust on the sample collectors for future analysis but also protect the spacecraft from 

the dust encountered. Because the cometary environment was not well known at all, 

the mission faced a tough challenge indeed.99

The science team was small, consisting only of the most critical personnel needed 

to design a sample return mission. They were cometary scientists who could design the 

collectors and set requirements for the sample return, but the bulk of actual analyzing 

scientists were added later.

The mission would be in development for three years and in flight for seven. “For a 

low-cost mission, you can’t really support a big science team,” said Brownlee. “We were 

focused on getting the sample back.... If we had a little more money, it would have been 

nice to have a bigger science team, because the encounter images we got were fantastic,” and the team could definitely have used more people to do image processing.100

Communication

In the early phases of spacecraft design, scientists and engineers of a new team must 

learn to communicate effectively with each other. This is especially important in costcapped missions like those in the Discovery Program, as misunderstandings may lead 

to problems that cost time and money to fix. For instance, as Mike Zolensky, thencurator of stratospheric dust at Johnson Space Center, explained, “There was a meeting 

where we’d talk about the design of the sample return capsule—the SRC. The guy who 

designed that, he’d be in there showing us the design for the SRC, and someone would 

make some offhand comment, saying, ‘Gee, what if we did this,’ and then we’d forget 

about it. The next meeting, when we came back, he’d have totally redesigned the SRC, 

97 “Stardust Reaches for Cosmic Dust.” (2002, 16 August). JPL Universe, 32(17).

98 Brownlee, D. E., et al. (2003), Stardust: Comet and interstellar dust sample return mission, 

J. Geophys. Res., 108, 8111, doi:10.1029/2003JE002087, E10.

99 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with E. Hirst. Located in “Genesis” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

100 Niebur, S. (2009, 25 March). Personal interview with D. Brownlee. Located in “Stardust” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
Chapter 2: Big Dreams

73

just because of this little comment that was just tossed out, this little discussion point, 

and he worked very hard to do that. That happened several times.”101 As soon as the 

spacecraft launched, the sample return capsule designer retired.102

The sample return capsule was derived from a prospective Mars sample return 

capsule designed by Martin Marietta Aerospace (which eventually became Lockheed 

Martin) in Littleton, Colorado.103 The capsule design had some unresolved stability 

issues, but engineers added tungsten weights to its front, changing the center of gravity 

and the spin rate to partially address the problem. Another modification made was 

the addition of a drag chute to forestall the capsule turning upside down on reentry.104

Because of the planetary science community’s extensive study of interstellar dust 

particles, as well as the history of cometary impacts on Earth, John Rummel, planetary 

protection officer, confidently declared that “comets are extremely unlikely places 

for life. Stardust will come back to us with a clean bill of health. Containment is not 

warranted.”105 The problem was the exact opposite: While a few grains of interstellar 

dust and a dash of cometary material posed no threat to Earth, Earth posed a threat 

to the sample. To mitigate this, the science team created a Contamination Control 

Plan prescribing the handling of the sample return capsule down to the sample grains 

themselves.106 The canister had to be decontaminated before launch so as to minimize 

the introduction of Earth particles to cometary material. The team was dedicated to 

returning a clean sample for scientific analysis—a goal that had not been attempted 

since Apollo. The team planned carefully for sample return, starting with a thorough 

examination of the Apollo records still at Johnson Space Center.107

101 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with M. Zolensky. Located in “Stardust” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

102 Miscommunications between scientists and engineers can result in suboptimal teaming, personal frustrations, and lost time. In a cost-capped program, lost time always incurs a concurrent 

financial cost—even if no actual changes are made. The story of the redesigned canister also 

reinforces another principle that would come to define good Discovery mission development: 

The resistance to scope creep. Every change costs money and time and should thus be resisted 

unless absolutely necessary.

103 Brownlee, D. E., et al. (2003), “Stardust: Comet and Interstellar Dust Sample Return Mission,” 

J. Geophys. Res., 108, 8111, doi:10.1029/2003JE002087, E10.

104 Niebur, S. (2009, 25 March). Personal interview with D. Brownlee. Located in “Stardust” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

105 Ballingrud, D. (1999, 14 January). “Next, NASA to Send Craft to Chase Comet.” St. 

Petersburg Times, 1A.

106 Zolensky M.E. and Girard T. (1997). “Stardust Spacecraft Program Contamination Control 

Plan.” JSC Publication 27954. 26.

107 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with M. Zolensky. Located in “Stardust” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
NASA′s Discovery Program

74

Instruments

The primary goal of the Stardust mission was to safely return collected cometary material. In-flight science was limited largely to images collected by the Optical Navigation 

Camera (NavCam); dust flux and size measurements taken by the Dust Flux Monitor 

Instrument; and in situ analyses of particle composition using the Cometary and 

Interstellar Dust Analyzer (CIDA) instrument.

NavCam was a modified version of a Voyager Wide Field and Planetary Camera and 

featured a 1024 × 1024 charge-coupled device detector built originally for the Cassini 

Imaging Science Subsystem with digital electronics modified from the Clementine 

spacecraft. The camera optics used a Voyager Wide Angle Optical Assembly with a 

200-millimeter focal length lens. The filter wheel and shutter were also Voyager spares. 

Stardust added a scan mirror mechanism to vary its available viewing angles (this 

design had heritage from Mars Pathfinder) and a new periscope to protect the scanning 

mirror in the coma’s dust particle storm. The images would have a resolution of 59.4 

microradians (mrad) per pixel—an order of magnitude better than Giotto’s images 

of Comet Halley. Co-investigator Ray Newburn of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was 

responsible for the imaging science from this camera.108

Any spacecraft flying so close to a comet would necessarily encounter a great deal 

of dust. To study this phenomenon, the spacecraft’s Dust Flux Monitor Subsystem 

included two quartz piezoelectric acoustic sensors, which were called, collectively, the 

Dual Acoustic Sensor System; as well as the dedicated Dust Flux Monitor Instrument, 

itself a copy of the High Rate Detector element of the Cosmic Dust Analyzer instrument 

used on Cassini. The sensor unit of the 1.7-kilogram Dust Flux Monitor Instrument—a 

highly sensitive instrument designed to detect particles as small as a few microns—was 

based on a special polarized plastic dust sensor developed in the laboratory of John 

Simpson in Chicago, and it was mounted on Stardust’s Whipple shield to measure 

oncoming particles. Because the instrument could measure the flux of interplanetary 

dust encountered throughout the mission, its data could be employed for multiple 

purposes: to protect the spacecraft from the high flux of particles in the coma, to 

understand spacecraft anomalies, to measure the impact rate and mass distribution 

of particles during the spacecraft’s encounter with the comet, and to provide context 

for the collected dust samples.109

Anthony Tuzzolino of the University of Chicago, the instrument lead, was no stranger 

to spaceflight, having contributed his expertise to 35 space missions, including the dust 

108 Newburn, R. L., Bhaskaran, S., Duxbury, T. C., Fraschetti, G., Radey, T., and Schwochert, M. 

(2003), “Stardust Imaging Camera.” J. Geophys. Res., 108, 8116, doi:10.1029/2003JE002081.

109 Tuzzolino, A. J., Economou, T. E., McKibben, R. B., Simpson, J. A., McDonnell, J. A. M., Burchell, 

M. J., Vaughan, B. A. M., Tsou, P., Hanner, M. S., Clark, B. C., & Brownlee, D. E. (2003). “Dust 

Flux Monitor Instrument for the Stardust mission to comet Wild 2.” Journal of Geophysical 

Research: Planets, 108(E10). https://doi.org/10.1029/2003JE002086.
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detectors on the two spacecraft Vega 1 and Vega 2, both bound for Halley’s Comet, and 

the High Rate Detector on Cassini. Despite this wealth of experience, Tuzzolino was 

frank in interviews, saying that he couldn’t predict the exact particle size distribution 

with precision. “I just don’t know. Every comet is different.”110

The second dust detector, CIDA, had strong heritage from the instruments that 

flew on Giotto, as well as PUMA 1 and 2 that flew on Vega 1 and 2 to Halley’s Comet. 

The CIDA instrument was a 100-square-centimeter silver target hooked up to a mass 

spectrometer capable of measuring particle mass. When a dust particle impacts the 

silver target, charged ions are produced that then travel down an instrument tube and 

bounce off a reflector for counting. Since heavier ions take longer to travel through 

the tube, the time of flight of each ion from the target to the detector can be used to 

calculate its mass and determine the elemental and chemical compositions of cometary 

or interstellar particles. CIDA measurements of in-flight impacts could be compared 

with the returned interstellar samples for context; in return, the returned samples 

would provide ground truth data for the instrument’s measurements. The instrument 

co-investigator was Jochen Kissel of the Max Planck Institut für Aeronomie.111

The team expected the dust detectors to return plenty of data, just as the sample 

return capsule would return plenty of particles. “We’ll have more than enough,” said 

Thanasis Economou, Stardust and Mars Pathfinder co-investigator from the University 

of Chicago.112 While the large number of particles would be a boon for scientists, it 

was a challenge for the engineers who had to design the spacecraft and its protective 

systems. The spacecraft would have to survive not only the thundering launch and 

coldness of space, but also the cometary hailstorm pelting the spacecraft at relative 

speeds many times that of rifle bullets. Later, the spacecraft would have to survive a 

faster reentry than any previous spacecraft. At 2.7 AU, the spacecraft solar cells would 

also have to operate farther from the Sun than any previous mission. At that distance, 

sunlight would be less, and thus available power diminished.113

The last Stardust investigation would involve no dedicated hardware but rather 

used existing engineering systems for scientific observations. The X-band transponder, originally developed for Cassini and used in the spacecraft telecommunications 

system, would also estimate the upper limits of the overall mass of the comet. The 

spacecraft gyro and accelerometer necessary for its attitude control subsystem could 

110 Knoppes, S. (2003, 31 December). “University of Chicago instruments to reach comet, Mars in 

same busy week.” University of Chicago news release.

111 Kissel, J., Glasmachers, A., Hoerner, H., & Henkel, H. (2001). “Cida-A Cometary and Interstellar 

Dust Analyzer for The Stardust Mission.” COSPAR Colloquia Series, 11, 370. https://doi.

org/10.1016/S0964-2749(01)80087-1.

112 Bridges, A. (2004, 6 January). “NASA spacecraft on way home to Earth with comet sample.” USA Today.

113 Vellinga, J. (2007, 6 February). “Bringing a Comet Home.” Project Management Challenge 2007.
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be used to estimate the magnitude of large particle impacts and the overall dust flux. 

John Anderson at JPL led these dynamic science investigations.114 All the in-flight science would be considered supporting measurements for the primary goal of sample 

collection and would give context to the returned cometary and interstellar particles.

Phase B

Shortly after selection, Ken Atkins, the Stardust project manager, realized that the $9.6 

million available in his first budget would be insufficient to kick-start the project, and 

he was soon proved correct. After selection, the team discovered that transponders—

necessary for spacecraft telemetry, command, and control—were needed earlier than 

planned. Atkins asked for additional funds to procure them as “long-lead items”: 

components that, though not required for assembly until Phase C, would need to 

be developed much earlier, in Phase B. This would provide time for production and 

integration into the telecom system. Atkins approached Don Brownlee, the Principal 

Investigator, but Brownlee held the line, knowing the tight constraints of the Discovery 

Program. Here, an overrun of one dollar could trigger cancellation. Thankfully, NEAR 

had recently reported an under-run, and that money was available for use by Stardust 

to prevent a later overrun in cost, schedule, or both.

In October 1996, all flight instruments and spacecraft subsystems passed the 

Preliminary Design Review held for Jet Propulsion Laboratory management, NASA 

Headquarters representatives, and an independent review board.115

As the spacecraft moved into its final design phase, the science team and other 

astronomers continued to make observations of Comet Wild 2 to better understand 

its brightness, as well as the size and quantity of the gas and dust particles, in order 

to prepare for data collection and spacecraft protection. Observations were done at 

Lowell Observatory, the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (University of Arizona), the 

W. M. Keck Observatory, and Palomar Observatory.116

The spacecraft design, including all flight instruments and spacecraft subsystems, 

passed the Critical Design Review in August 1997. “We’ve tried to use as much inherited, 

proven, and low-cost subsystem elements as possible. However, we needed to design 

some unique elements, such as the means for capturing comet dust and interstellar 

114 Brownlee, D. E., et al. (2003), “Stardust: Comet and interstellar dust sample return mission,” 

J. Geophys. Res., 108, 8111, doi:10.1029/2003JE002087, E10.

115 Platt, J. (1996, 1 November). “Stardust passes preliminary design review.” JPL Universe.

116 Platt, J. (1997, 18 April). “Stardust team studies Wild 2, Hale-Bopp’s cometary cousin.” JPL Universe. 

Downloaded from https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-stardust-team-studies-hale-boppscometary-cousin.
Chapter 2: Big Dreams

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particles,” said Atkins. Sixty million dollars had been spent by this time, with another 

$68 million planned for spending before launch. Thirty-seven million dollars would 

be needed for operations and the return to Earth.117

Stardust was approved to begin assembly and testing in early January 1998. In 

February, project engineers performed a successful drop test of the sample return capsule at the U.S. Army’s Dugway Proving Grounds at the Utah Test and Training Range 

near Salt Lake City. The sample return capsule was lifted 3,960 meters using a balloon, 

and then dropped, swinging gently beneath its parachute to make a soft landing.118

Delivery and Launch

Aerogel development was an unexpected challenge. It terrified the team to learn just 

how friable it was during shipping from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California 

to Lockheed Martin in Colorado. “Oh my God,” thought Brownlee, “if it did that just 

going from Pasadena to Denver, what’s it going to do on the mission?”119 Thankfully, it 

proved hardier when shipped to Cape Canaveral, which occurred on 11 November 1998.

Stardust launched on the second day of its twenty-day launch window, on 7 February 

1999. The spacecraft, mounted atop a Delta II rocket, carried with it the hopes and 

dreams of not only the mission team and NASA, but also the names of over a million 

individuals, etched onto two microchips. Most of the names had been collected online 

by way of the mission website, The Planetary Society, the National Space Society, and 

a website for the movie Deep Impact, a comet disaster flick. The launch carried the 

spacecraft to a holding orbit 115 miles above Earth. Thirty minutes later, the upperstage rocket ignited, freeing Stardust from its planet of origin. The launch was so 

accurate that the mission’s intended first course correction maneuver was judged to 

be unnecessary.120

From a hill as close as one could safely get to Pad 17A, Brownlee watched the 

launch with Aimee Meyer, the mission’s education and public outreach lead, and with 

a group of Stardust Educator Fellows. After a celebratory press conference, both he 

and project manager Atkins again drove to the launch site, Atkins recalled, “just to be 

sure that it’s gone, and be glad.”121

Several months after the successful launch, Atkins retired. Mission manager Tom 

Duxbury was promoted to project manager in August 2000. Duxbury had not intended 

to stay on the project after launch but was inspired by the loss in 1999 of two spacecraft 

117 Platt, J. (1997, 22 August). “Stardust spacecraft passes critical design review.” JPL Universe.

118 Murrill, M. B. (1999, July–August). “Stardust readies for Feb. launch.” JPL Universe. 4.

119 Niebur, S. (2009, 25 March). Personal interview with D. Brownlee. Located in “Stardust” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

120 Stardust status report, 8 May. (1999, 5 March). NASA/JPL news release.

121 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with K. Atkins. Located in “Genesis” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
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at Mars, which brought home the importance of development personnel remaining 

with their missions during the operations phase. (Duxbury agreed to stay with the 

stipulation that he would serve as project manager only half-time. He would spend 

the other half working on Mars science, an agreement that he promoted as perfectly 

in line with Discovery’s “faster, better, cheaper” philosophy.)122

Cruise Phase

It wasn’t smooth sailing for the spacecraft en route to Wild 2. Stardust went into safe 

mode 10 times during flight. Most notable, perhaps, was when a solar flare hit the 

spacecraft on 8 November 2000, confusing its star cameras and causing its onboard 

computer to reboot five times in six minutes, leaving the spacecraft in terminal safe 

mode.123 Each safe mode event required controllers to wait for the next opportunity 

to communicate with the spacecraft and restart normal operations.124

Later testing revealed that the launch had not been incident-free. Test images taken 

by the navigation camera (and necessary to image Comet Wild 2) appeared blurry, 

as if the pictures were taken through a dirty lens. The team theorized that spacecraft 

degassing—that is, the diffusion and desorbing of compounds from the spacecraft 

surface—could have caused contaminants to be deposited on the lens surface, creating 

a thin film. In an attempt to remedy this, the operations team heated the optical path 

of the camera several times to burn off the contamination. Subsequent pictures taken 

just before Earth flyby in January 2001 showed that the resolution had been restored to 

nearly normal; the camera was now able to detect dimmer stars than before the fix.125

Interstellar Dust Collection

The CIDA instrument had been powered on shortly after launch. As the spacecraft 

traveled outbound, particles would splatter on its target with increased relative velocity, maximizing measurements of the stream of interstellar particles and enabling the 

study of smaller and rarer varieties.126

122 Ibid.

123 Atkins, K. L. (2006, 1 April). “Stardust: The rewards of commitment, care, and communication.” 

ASK Magazine, 23. 14–17.

124 Atkins, K. L. (2006, 1 April). “Stardust: The rewards of commitment, care, and communication.” 

ASK Magazine, 23. 14–17. See also “Stardust spacecraft enters ‘safe’ mode; transmits first image 

from space.” (1999, 23 March). CNN; Niebur, S. (2009, 14 May). Personal interview with D. Jarrett 

and Kate Wolf. Located in “Discovery Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, 

History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

125 NASA. (2001, 11 January). “NASA can see clearly now—just before Earth flyby.” NASA 

News Release.

126 Brownlee, D. E., et al. (2003), “Stardust: Comet and interstellar dust sample return mission,” 

J. Geophys. Res., 108, 8111, doi:10.1029/2003JE002087, E10.
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On 18 January 2000, and again on the 20th and 22nd, the spacecraft fired its propulsion system in a three-part maneuver to put it on target for an Earth gravity assist.127

Several weeks later, with the spacecraft well on the inbound portion of its trajectory, 

scientists deemed the spacecraft as being parallel to a stream of interstellar particles 

passing through the solar system. Parallel vectors meant the impacts would be lessened, 

and on 22 February the team deployed the Stardust collector for its first interstellar 

dust collection period. Shortly after the collector’s petals were closed on 1 May, several 

Co-Is working on data from CIDA announced they had detected complex carbon molecules one hundred times the size of a water molecule. Their size led Jochen Kissel, a 

co-investigator on Stardust, to tell the press: “Only organic molecules can reach those 

sizes.” Don Brownlee, the Principal Investigator, urged caution when interpreting the 

in situ measurements but acknowledged that “if that is the composition of the interstellar particles, it’s very exciting.”

Organic molecules were intriguing to the mission scientists because contact with 

liquid water on the young Earth could have triggered the type of chemical reactions that 

are a prerequisite for the origin of life.128 Scientists external to the team took it a step 

further, theorizing that the molecules might not only be carbon molecules, but rather, 

fragments of bacteria. Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe of Cardiff University, studying the data with his brother Professor Dayal Wickramasinghe of Australian National 

University, told a Scottish newspaper, “The results show oxygen and nitrogen at roughly 

the 10 percent level. That is just about the fraction we find in the molecules of life.”129

Years before sample return, the Stardust samples were already intriguing researchers.

Stardust’s Earth flyby occurred on 15 January 2001. It passed early that morning 

approximately 5,950 kilometers above Earth, just southeast of the southern tip of 

Africa. This gave the spacecraft the energy boost necessary to speed its orbit from a 

two-year trip around the Sun to a one-and-a-half-year journey, taking it to Wild 2.130

As it flew, Stardust collected additional particles between 5 August and 9 December 

2002. This interstellar dust was produced by the current generation of stars, opening 

new lines of research, including the possible comparison of ancient and newer dust 

compositions, yielding new clues to galactic evolution.131 By the end of the year, Stardust 

had met and exceeded its goal of collecting interstellar particles for 150 days.132 “We 

127 “Stardust completes velocity maneuver.” (2000, 4 February). JPL Universe, 30(3). 1.

128 Whitehouse, D. (2000, 3 May). “Organic molecules found in ‘stardust.’” BBC News Online. 

Downloaded from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/734780.stm on May 15, 2009.

129 Euan, M. (2000, 4 May). “We’re all aliens; Scientists find evidence that life began in space.” 

Daily Record. 11.

130 “Stardust Earth flyby successful.” (2001, January). JPL Universe. 2.

131 “Stardust reaches for cosmic dust.” (2002, 16 August). JPL Universe, 32(17). 1.

132 Vellinga, J. (2007, 6 February). “Stardust: Bringing a Comet Home.” Project Management 

Challenge 2007.
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are getting the very best primitive samples that there are in the solar system. In my 

view, it’s even better than we would have had if we had landed on the comet,” said 

Brownlee about the interstellar particles.133 “We believe that some of the particles in 

the comet will, in fact, be older than the Sun.”134

Annefrank Flyby

Just before midnight on 1 November 2002, the Stardust spacecraft flew within 3,000 

kilometers of asteroid Annefrank. The team used this incidental flyby as an engineering test for the spacecraft subsystems, performing a “full dress rehearsal, with the 

cometary dust detector deployed, the spacecraft poised in its flyby attitude, and with 

all science instruments on,” described Brownlee.135 Though the navigation camera had 

trouble distinguishing faint objects from Annefrank due to similar levels of brightness, 

it ultimately succeeded, with 71 of the 106 images taken featuring the asteroid.136 The 

Dust Flux Monitor Instrument took data for 27 minutes, and Kissel was encouraged 

by the test of the interstellar dust analyzer. The spacecraft performed extremely well 

under these demanding circumstances. So the team was greatly encouraged in their 

planning for the Wild 2 encounter that would occur 14 months from then.

“We learned a lot that will improve our operations at Wild 2 based upon the lessons learned at Annefrank, but the bottom line is that if Annefrank had been Wild 2, 

we would have succeeded,” said Tom Duxbury, the mission manager. As a bonus, 

the Stardust team was surprised to discover that Annefrank was about twice the size 

(8 kilometers instead of 4 kilometers) estimated by remote observations, due to its 

dimmer surface.137

SRLIDAP and Progress Back at the Lab

At launch, there had been only four sample analysts on the science team and the plan 

for science analysis was still in development. Moreover, the team was divided as to the 

best way to proceed with sample analysis after Earth return and preliminary examination at the curation facility. More scientists were needed, but there was not widespread 

agreement as to the best use of their time. “There were huge fights for years in meetings,” said Mike Zolensky of Johnson Space Center, but at last they came up with a 

plan. “We invited the augmented science team at the last minute before recovery with 

a few people to enlarge it, then we also invited on anyone from the community who 

133 Groshong, K. (2005, 22 December). “Stardust ready for landing.” Pasadena Star News.

134 Potter, N. (2005, 22 December). “Comet mission set for return to Earth.” ABC News.

135 Webster, G. (2002, 8 November). “Stardust’s Annefrank flyby successful.” JPL Universe, 32(23). 1.

136 David, L. (2002, 4 November). “Scientist surprised: Stardust sees details of asteroid 

Annefrank.” Space.com.

137 Webster, G. (2002, 8 November). “Stardust’s Annefrank flyby successful.” JPL Universe, 32(23). 1.
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wanted to do analysis of the samples.” This approach worked. Scientists worldwide 

were eager to get their hands on the samples, and few required funding. With very 

little additional investment, “it grew from having a few people on the science team 

analyzing the samples to over 200 people analyzing the samples,” added Zolensky. 

“Having the whole community involved in the examination smoothed over the process 

of handling [the samples].”138

Preparing the clean room at Johnson Space Center also required quite a bit of work 

and planning, and the team did not initially allocate enough time or money to do so. 

The team thought they “could plan the lab, build it, and test it out, all in a couple of 

years. It’s more like five years.... We were rushing like crazy,” Zolensky recalled. The 

particles to be returned were submicron in size (less than 1/25,000 of an inch), and 

they would be overwhelmed easily by the grime in even a normal clean room. To put 

the amount of dust returned into perspective, Brownlee said, “There’s more comet dust 

collected in your backyard than we’re bringing home.” This is because of the regular 

influx of cometary material in the atmosphere falling to Earth. The problem is that it 

is mixed with tons of soil and nearly impossible to isolate. The advantage of sending 

a spacecraft to the comet is that the material would be pristine, unaltered, and kept 

frozen in the ices from the beginning of the solar system.139

Zolensky explained: “You might wonder what you can do with particles that are 

microscopic....” With the proper equipment, technique, and patience, “you can take 

a grain and slice it like you were slicing a loaf of bread into hundreds of slices.”140

Analysis would require new techniques. Scientists would have to determine which 

portions of a single grain were desired for various research purposes.141 Study of these 

tiny particles required new instruments, and NASA provided them, with millions of 

dollars spent through the Sample Return Laboratory Instruments and Data Analysis 

program (SRLIDAP) and the Planetary Major Equipment (PME) program. To ensure 

congruence with mission goals, SRLIDAP was run by Dave Lindstrom, Program Scientist 

of the sample return capsule, called Genesis, and PME was run by Susan Niebur, the 

Discovery Program Scientist.

Comet Wild 2

As Stardust approached the comet, no one knew exactly what to expect. The only 

previous close encounter of a comet was ESA’s mission Giotto, but Stardust would get 

138 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with M. Zolensky. Located in “Stardust” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

139 Williams, D. (2006, 13 January). “Stardust of yesterday.” CNN.com; Kridler, C. (2005, 22 

December). “Capsule to bring back dust for examination.” Florida Today.

140 Carreau, M. (2006, 7 January). “NASA craft’s payload may offer a big payoff.” Houston Chronicle.

141 “Dr. George Flynn Takes the Lead on NASA Stardust Project.” (2009, 18 August). SUNY 

Plattsburgh website.
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even closer. This level of uncertainty required dynamic decision-making, with dust 

models updated frequently as new data were collected. The models, in turn, were used 

to determine the optimum parameters for closest approach, and the spacecraft team 

would update spacecraft commands accordingly. Successful real-time changes required 

a joint effort between the navigation team, the scientists responsible for the camera, 

and the spacecraft team implementing decisions as new commands for the spacecraft. 

The team added staff for the encounter phase, trained them, and defended the flyby 

plans in a series of peer reviews and reviews with upper management. These sessions 

included presentations and careful discussion of identified risks and contingency plans.

On 13 November 2003—49 days before encounter—team members arrived at work 

to find that the optical navigation camera had successfully taken close-up images of 

Comet Wild 2 and delivered the images to Earth. “When I first looked at the picture, I 

didn’t believe it,” said Shyam Bhaskaran, the mission navigator. “We were not expecting 

to observe the comet for at least another two weeks. But there it was.”142 The team was 

exhilarated and relieved. “We weren’t sure how close we would have to get to actually 

resolve the nucleus of the comet,” said Ed Hirst, the mission system manager. Team 

members had to balance their excitement with responsibilities. “You kind of find snippets of time to steal away to look at the excitement without forgetting that you have 

to keep flying the spacecraft.”143

On 2 January 2004, Stardust flew 236 kilometers ahead of Comet Wild 2 and held 

course. As the faster-moving comet passed close beneath it, the spacecraft trapped 

cometary dust particles smaller than one-hundredth the diameter of a human hair.144

The images were better than the science team expected. Instead of being simply a dirty 

snowball, Comet Wild 2 turned out to feature a diverse landscape.

Pinnacles 100 meters tall and kilometer-wide craters 150 meters deep made up a 

substantial portion of the 5-kilometer-wide comet. The comet was practically living 

and breathing.

“Stardust was absolutely pummeled. It flew through three huge jets that bombarded 

the spacecraft with about a million particles per second,” including some that pierced 

the top layer of the Whipple shields around the spacecraft, said mission manager Tom 

142 Agle, D. C. (2003, 12 December). “Stardust’s big day also approaches.” JPL Universe, 33(24). 1.

143 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with E. Hirst. Located in “Genesis” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

144 “NASA probe set for launch to collect and return comet dust.” (1999, 14 January). Aerospace Daily.
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Duxbury.145 The event received sizable press coverage despite being the second NASA 

press conference of the day. President George Bush had called in to congratulate the 

Mars Exploration Rover team on its successful landing earlier that day.146

Brownlee called the images captured “fantastic,” and the comet “incredible,” noting 

that it achieved its flyby science objectives with a camera that wasn’t technically a science 

instrument but rather was intended primarily to be used as a navigation tool.147 Such 

was the nature of a Discovery project: By keeping the mission concept focused on the 

successful return of samples, in situ observations were sacrificed. Though scientists 

sometimes lamented the lack of in situ capability, previous decades demonstrated that 

a larger, instrument-laden mission might never have gotten off the ground.

Discovery 5

Concurrently, the Discovery Program at NASA Headquarters entered a period of review. 

Months after Stardust launched, two spacecraft were destroyed. On 23 September 

1999, Mars Climate Orbiter—a faster, better, cheaper spacecraft designed to study 

the long-term weather, surface, and atmospheric conditions at Mars—vanished. It 

was later determined to have either burned up in the Martian atmosphere, or to have 

skipped off it and bounded back into deep space.148 Investigators blamed the failure 

on a software error: NASA engineers used metric units in a spacecraft subsystem, 

and Lockheed Martin, which manufactured the spacecraft, used imperial units. On 3 

December 1999, Mars Polar Lander crashed into Planum Australe, near that planet’s 

South Pole. This was likely due to a propulsion system switching off 40 meters above 

the Martian surface.149

A flurry of investigation boards and reports ensued. NASA’s Office of Inspector 

General studied the faster, better, cheaper concept and its implementation.150 NASA 

145 Platt, J. (2004, 17 June). “NASA Spacecraft Reveals Surprising Anatomy of a Comet.” NASA 

news release.

146 Niebur, S. (2009, 4 September). Personal interview with T. Duxbury. Located in “Stardust” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

147 Brownlee, D. E., Horz, F., Newburn, R. L., Zolensky, M., Duxbury, T. C., Sandford, S., 

Sekanina, Z., Tsou, P., Hanner, M. S., Clark, B. C., Green, S. F., & Kissel, J. (2004). “Surface of 

young Jupiter family comet 81P/Wild 2: view from the Stardust Spacecraft.” Science (New York, 

NY), 304(5678), 1764–1769; Niebur, S. (2009, 25 March). Personal interview with D. Brownlee. 

Located in “Stardust” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA 

Headquarters, Washington, DC.

148 Azka Naheem. (2020). “NASA Mars Climate Orbiter Project Failure (1999) Report.” https://doi.

org/10.13140/RG.2.2.15107.94243.

149 Albee, A., Battel, S., Brace, R., Burdick, G., Casani, J., Lavell, J., Leising, C., MacPherson, D., 

Burr, P., & Dipprey, D. (2000). “Report on the Loss of the Mars Polar Lander and Deep Space 2 

Missions.” NASA STI/Recon Technical Report N, 00, 61967.

150 NASA Office of Inspector General. (2001, 13 March). “Faster, better, cheaper: policy, strategic 

planning, and human resource alignment.” IG-01-009.
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convened a special board called the NASA Integrated Action Team to study the results 

and make recommendations that would be applied to all of NASA’s small missions.151

The list of reforms included a reinvestment in the NASA workforce, with a focus on 

hands-on experience, mentoring, and training; invigorating the agency’s technology 

portfolio to better balance existing, new, and emerging technologies; and reemphasizing risk mitigation policies, including project and program reviews, refined success 

criteria, and closer contractor communication.

Though neither lost spacecraft was part of Discovery, the fact that the program 

itself was a manifestation of the faster, better, cheaper philosophy meant extensive, 

expensive new mandates that NASA would have to cover for missions going forward. 

Arguably, no single act would have further-reaching and more devastating budgetary 

and cultural implications for the Discovery Program. For NASA, risk aversion would 

become paramount in a program where risk was intrinsic.

The Integrated Action Team recommendations came following years of internal 

reassessments of best practices of Discovery at a programmatic level. It wasn’t the 

first time a group made such recommendations. Five years earlier, NASA had held 

a “lessons learned” workshop, whose steering committee recommended, among 

other things:152

• Discovery mission selection should be conducted using a two-step process;

• Step 1 proposals should be selected on cost and detailed science evaluation, 

adjusted for risk;

• Step 2 proposals should further include public awareness, educational opportunities, and cost risk;

• A proposal’s science should be evaluated based on its number of objectives, 

the importance of those objectives, and its thoroughness, to be assessed using 

strategies and guidelines by the National Academies Committee on Planetary 

and Lunar Exploration, and NASA;

• Science risk should reflect the probability that the science generated is equal to 

the science proposed, in terms of instrumentation, measurement assessments, 

the quality of data management archiving, and science team composition.

The recommendations overall reflected a desire by the planetary science community to enhance the analytical approach used to select missions. The list would most 

prominently be reflected in the Discovery 5 AO and mission selection the following 

year. The announcement came on 20 September 1996. NASA wanted concepts for a 

151 NASA Integrated Action Team. (2000, 21 December). “Enhancing Mission Success—A 

Framework for the Future.” Downloaded from https://history.nasa.gov/niat.pdf.

152 Saunders, M. (1995, 14–15 June). Report of Workshop on Discovery Lessons Learned.
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Discovery mission that could be developed and prepared for launch within six years—on 

or before 30 September 2002—at a cost of less than $183 million plus $43 million for 

the operations phase (both in Fiscal Year 1997 dollars). Ken Ledbetter, director of the 

Mission and Payload Development Division in the OSS, stated in the press release that 

accompanied the Announcement of Opportunity: “If more than one mission can be 

accommodated within the stated budget, NASA will consider selecting more than one.”153

Language in the cover letter emphasized that the solicitation imposed strict cost 

caps; shortened the procurement cycle; and gave the Principal Investigator responsibility for all aspects of the investigation’s design, development, implementation, launch, 

and operations. Two years later, all three emphases would become huge problems for 

the selected missions. In 1996, however, this was not obvious, and NASA received 34 

proposals, including at least seven that would later be selected in some form, becoming 

CONTOUR, Genesis, MESSENGER, Deep Impact, Dawn, Kepler, and Juno. The Jet 

Propulsion Laboratory alone submitted 20—a number that Gregg Vane, then–deputy 

division manager of JPL’s Observational Systems Division, would later recall as “way too 

many. At the time, the Discovery Program was new to all of us. People didn’t appreciate 

just how much work it takes to create a credible Step 1 proposal.”154

It would become even more work yet. The 1996 AO was the first to use the two-step 

selection process endorsed by the Discovery Lessons Learned Workshop.

Seven months later, NASA Headquarters selected five missions for concept study:

• Aladdin, a mission to the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos, which would 

gather samples by firing four projectiles into the moons’ surfaces and gathering the ejecta during slow flybys before returning the samples to Earth for 

detailed study

• Genesis—a re-proposal of the now-renamed Suess–Urey mission—which 

would collect a sample of the solar wind and return it to Earth for detailed 

analysis

• CONTOUR—the Comet Nucleus Tour—a mission to take images and comparative spectral maps of at least three comet nuclei and analyze the dust flowing from them

• MESSENGER—the MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry 

and Ranging mission—an orbiter carrying seven instruments to image and 

study the nearest planet to the Sun

153 NASA. (1996, 20 September). “NASA seeks proposals for fifth Discovery mission.” News 

release 96-161.

154 Niebur, S. (2009, 22 March). Personal interview with G. Vane. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.
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• VESAT—the Venus Environmental Satellite—an orbiter spacecraft to study 

the atmospheric chemistry and meteorology of Earth’s cloud-covered neighbor using an imager, a near-infrared spectrograph, a temperature mapper, and 

an X-band radar

Each of the implementation feasibility studies would take four months and be funded 

at $350,000, with reports due on 15 August 1997, for a projected October selection.

“This excellent and innovative set of proposals really demonstrates the maturing 

nature of the Discovery Program,” said Wes Huntress, Associate Administrator of the 

Office of Space Science, in announcing the missions chosen for Step 2.155

As hinted at by Ken Ledbetter, on 20 October NASA Headquarters announced the 

selection of Genesis and CONTOUR for implementation, at total costs to NASA of $216 

million and $154 million, respectively. (Although the AO allowed the mission costs 

to grow by up to 20 percent in the four-month feasibility study, JPL-designed Genesis 

did not grow at all, while the APL-designed CONTOUR grew almost 15 percent.)

Genesis was to launch in January 2001 and return to Earth in August 2003. 

CONTOUR was to launch in July 2002, flying by Comet Encke in November 2003, 

Comet Schwassmann–Wachmann 3 in June 2006, and Comet d’Arrest in August 2008.

“This was a very difficult selection,” said Huntress. “We picked two based on our 

distribution of resources and the excellent fit of the timetables for these missions with 

other robotic space science explorers.”156 The Discovery Program had set high standards, 

with each of its first three missions to fly accomplishing great science quickly and at 

low cost. Now it would push boundaries by launching two missions—Stardust and 

Genesis—that would achieve the holy grail of planetary science missions: sample return.

This presented the new, untested challenges of sample collection, handling, storage, 

and Earth re-entry, to say nothing of the required upgrades to laboratories nationwide 

on a scale not seen since the meteoroid debris return from the Long Duration Exposure 

Facility in 1990, as well as lunar samples from both the Soviet Luna missions from 

1970 to 1976 and the Apollo program.

155 NASA. (1997, 23 April). “Five Discovery mission proposals selected for feasibility studies.” News 

release 97-78. Downloaded from http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/text/nasapr_970423.txt.

156 NASA. (1997, 20 October). “Missions to gather solar wind samples and tour three comets selected 

as next Discovery Program flights.” News release 97-240. Downloaded from http://nssdc.gsfc.

nasa.gov/planetary/text/Discovery_pr_971020.txt.
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Figure 2-1: Lunar Prospector spacecraft 

The fully assembled Lunar Prospector spacecraft sits atop the Star 37 Trans Lunar Injection module. Lunar 

Prospector mapped the Moon’s elemental composition, gravity fields, magnetic fields, and resources. 

(Image credit: NASA, image no. ACD97-0047-6)
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Figure 2-2: Stardust Sample Return Capsule 

The Stardust Sample Return Capsule (SRC) shortly after landing in the Utah desert. Stardust was the first 

spacecraft to return a cometary sample and extraterrestrial material from outside the orbit of the Moon to 

Earth. (Image credit: NASA, image no. PIA03669)
Chapter 2: Big Dreams

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Figure 2-3: Aerogel in the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility 

The aerogel grid from the Stardust Sample Return Capsule, fully deployed in the Payload Hazardous 

Servicing Facility for final closeout. The aerogel captured the interstellar dust and cometary particles 

from comet Wild 2 that were returned to Earth. (Image credit: NASA, image no. KSC-98pc1872)

91

The Genesis mission had an advantage over Stardust: without travel to a faraway comet, 

its mission lifetime could be much shorter, and the samples could be returned to Earth 

even before the previously selected Stardust. Born of the challenge to collect a sample of 

the solar wind for laboratory analysis, Genesis would employ five ultrapure collectors, 

new solar array deployment mechanisms, autonomous on-board decision-making, and 

a daring Earth return complete with Hollywood stunt pilots, all to return tiny particles 

of the solar wind totaling the mass of just a few grains of salt (all that was necessary 

for analysis to better understand solar wind).1

To successfully return the samples, the scientists and engineering team would have 

to plan for many different situations and develop contingency plans against numerous 

possible failures. In the end, it would be those contingency plans—printed in binders 

1 “A Little Glitz Goes a Long Way for NASA’s Genesis.” (2004, 3 September). Jet Propulsion 

Laboratory. Downloaded from https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/a-little-glitz-goes-a-long-wayfor-nasas-genesis.

CHAPTER 3

Harsh Landings
NASA′s Discovery Program

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and clutched in arms as the team waited for capsule return at the Utah Test and Training 

Range—that would allow Genesis scientists to save the samples when the spacecraft 

crashed in the desert.

GENESIS

The Genesis mission as flown evolved from an idea that PI Don Burnett had shortly 

after Apollo. He and Marcia Neugebauer, a solar physicist at JPL, had been talking about 

understanding elemental abundances in the solar wind. The astronauts of Apollos 11, 

12, 14, 15, and 16 emplaced aluminum and platinum foil experiments on the lunar 

surface, where their exposure to space, free of Earth’s magnetosphere, would trap solar 

wind particles for a return to Earth. The quantities sent back were inadequate to the 

needs of some scientists.2

Over the next few years, they continued to discuss what might be done, but there 

were no opportunities to propose a mission for flight. They talked to colleagues about 

the concept through the years, recruiting Mark Thiemens, an isotope geochemist at the 

University of California, San Diego.3 When NASA announced the Discovery Program, 

Burnett, Neugebauer, Thiemens, and the other co-investigators recognized an opportunity to revolutionize their science.

They called their initial concept the Solar Wind Sample Return mission. Like the 

other proposals submitted for consideration at the 1992 Discovery Program Mission 

Concept Workshop at San Juan Capistrano Research Institute, it was very conceptual 

(and at that point promoted as part of a larger asteroid sample return mission), but it 

was enough to capture the notice of the reviewers and program officials. The concept was 

not originally selected as one of the ten mission concepts, but after Burnett requested 

reconsideration, NASA Headquarters selected it for funding, and the Solar Wind 

Sample Return mission concept soon evolved into a more detailed mission plan with 

each passing year. The team was able to parlay their successful NASA funding effort 

into additional support from JPL, with both engineering support and direct support 

from three leaders at JPL: Ed Stone, Director of the lab; Assistant Director Charles 

Elachi; and Firouz Naderi, who was assigned to the Genesis team as proposal manager.4

 Burnett and Naderi led the team through the next proposal competition in 1994. 

The mission was renamed Suess–Urey, honoring Harold Urey and Hans Suess, who 

2 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with D. Burnett. Located in “Genesis” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

3 Behne, J. (N.d.). Personal interview with M. Thiemens. Located in “Genesis” file, NASA Historical 

Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

4 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with D. Burnett. Located in “Genesis” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
Chapter 3: Harsh Landings

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wrote an early paper on the origin of the elements; the paper posited that the observed 

abundance of the elements comes directly from their abundance in the stars in which 

they were created.5 Naderi introduced Burnett to key members of the engineering 

team and set up a management plan that got rave reviews from a 1994 review panel, 

according to Burnett.6 It was essentially the same mission as before, minus the asteroid 

sample return, and it was selected for additional funding through a concept study.

In 1996, the team again proposed Suess-Urey to the Discovery Program, this time 

with a new proposal manager, Chet Sasaki, and under a new name: Genesis. Naderi had 

moved to a different management position at JPL by then, and Sasaki was appointed 

on his recommendation. In 1997, after a fiercely fought Phase A competition, Genesis 

and the Comet Nucleus Tour mission, CONTOUR, were selected for implementation.7

Don Burnett was the Genesis PI, with Chet Sasaki as project manager and, not long 

after, Amy Jurewicz as the JPL project scientist.

Pre-proposal, Naderi had recommended Don Sweetnam for mission operations 

and Don Sevilla in mechanical design, a move which Burnett called a stroke of genius. 

“Genesis was very mechanism-intensive,” he said. “Mechanisms always scare review 

panels. But Sevilla was so good, he could stand up and defend all these little things 

about why this would work without any problem, and it did, by the way. His part 

worked 100 percent perfect.”8 (The same could not be said for every element of the 

mission, as we shall see.) Don Sweetnam was project manager. Lloyd Oldham served 

as Deputy Project Manager at Lockheed Martin.

The team faced an immediate challenge, however: overcoming concerns about the 

recent disaster of the JPL-led, Lockheed Martin–built Mars Climate Orbiter—one of the 

two lost spacecraft that impugned the faster, better, cheaper model and, by extension, 

cast a shadow over the Discovery Program, which flew neither mission. The mishap 

had, by the time of Genesis, been scrutinized stem to stern, with investigative committee recommendations implemented on current projects, but Genesis would be an 

early reteaming of JPL and Lockheed Martin on a new project. 

5 Suess, H., and Harold C. Urey. (1956, January). “Abundances of the Elements.” Reviews of Modern 

Physics, 28(1).

6 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with D. Burnett. Located in “Genesis” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

7 Burnett, D. S., Barraclough, B. L., Bennett, R., Neugebauer, M., Oldham, L. P., Sasaki, C.  N., 

Sevilla, D., Smith, N., Stansbery, E., Sweetnam, D., & Wiens, R. C. (2003). “The Genesis Discovery 

Mission: Return of Solar Matter to Earth.” Space Science Reviews, 105(3), 509–534. https://

doi.org/10.1023/A:1024425810605; Cochran, A., Veverka, J., Bell, J., Belton, M., Benkhoff, J., 

Benkhoff, A., Clark, B., Feldman, P., Kissel, J., Mahaffy, P., Malin, M., Murchie, S., Neimann, H., 

Owen, T., Robinson, M., Schwehm, G., Squyres, S., Thomas, P., Whipple, F., & Yeomans, D. (2000). 

“The Comet Nucleus TOUR (CONTOUR): A NASA Discovery Mission.” Earth, Moon, and Planets, 

89(1/4), 289–300. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1021567007750.

8 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with D. Burnett. Located in “Genesis” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
NASA′s Discovery Program

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The Genesis collector arrays were to be built by JPL; the solar wind concentrator 

and solar wind monitors would be built by Los Alamos National Laboratory. Of the 

whole project, mission contamination control lead Eileen Stansbery said, “Everyone 

worked very, very well together.”9

Science

The mission’s first and foremost science requirement: to bring back samples of the 

solar wind.10 Solar wind is the collection of particles and gas ejected from the Sun that 

streams through the solar system and eventually dissipates into interstellar space. The 

particles are tiny—atoms, not molecules—and are invisible to the naked eye. Although 

most people on Earth are unaware of this continuous stream of particles bombarding 

our atmosphere, in sufficient quantities they have caused widespread blackouts of cell 

phones, televisions, and other electronic communications equipment across wide areas. 

Individual particles in the solar wind hold secrets from the dawn of the solar system, 

when they were swept up from the diffuse solar nebula by a spinning protostar that 

grew quickly into the Sun we know today. The elemental composition of the nebula 

is preserved in the solar photosphere, and, by measuring the particles traveling in the 

solar wind, scientists can gain insights into the composition of that pre-solar nebula 

now retained in the photosphere of the Sun.11

The mission had four basic science objectives:

• Provide data on the isotopic composition of solar matter sufficiently precise 

for planetary science studies

• Significantly improve our knowledge of the elemental composition of solar 

matter

• Provide a reservoir of solar matter sufficient to meet the needs of 21st-century 

planetary science

• Provide independent measurements of the different kinds of solar wind12

The elemental and isotopic composition of the protosolar nebula could also be 

used in models of the formation and evolution of the solar system, constraining both 

processes over the billions of intervening years, and answering what had until then 

been unknowable. “Most of our models and how we understand the formation and 

9 Niebur, S. (2009, 25 March). Personal interview with D. Sweetnam and Eileen Stansbery. Located 

in “Genesis” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

10 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with D. Burnett. Located in “Genesis” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

11 NASA. (2001, July). “Genesis set to catch a piece of the sun.” Genesis Launch Press Kit.

12 Ibid.
Chapter 3: Harsh Landings

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evolution of the solar system, processes that formed our planets, asteroids, comets, and...

planetary atmospheres, all of that requires an assumption of an initial starting composition of our solar system,” said Meenakshi “Mini” Wadhwa, Genesis co-investigator 

and cosmochemist at the Field Museum in Chicago. This solar wind composition and 

the composition of the initial solar nebula must be equivalent, she explained, since the 

Sun makes up over 99 percent of the mass of the solar system.13

Genesis would capture the solar wind in a way that was both sensible and innovative. Not all solar wind is the same. Physicists had identified three main types of solar 

wind, but before the Genesis mission, no one knew whether or how the elemental and 

isotopic compositions of different types of solar wind would differ.

The three main types of solar wind are fast, slow, and from coronal mass ejections 

(CMEs). Fast solar wind is high-speed and uniform streams emanating from holes in 

the Sun’s corona. Slow solar wind is, as its name suggests, low-speed, and with variable 

streams originating in the Sun’s streamer belt. CMEs are particles blown in chunks 

from the solar atmosphere. 

Measurements by the Ulysses spacecraft had shown that the very act of ejecting 

matter from the Sun’s photosphere affected the solar wind’s mass composition in a 

predictable way, dependent on properties of each ion such as the “first ionization 

time,” as well as the ion’s mass and the charge. Since the three types (called regimes) 

of solar wind differ in source and ejection, perhaps their composition would differ as 

well.14 Accordingly, Neugebauer insisted that the new mission concept be designed to 

capture each of the known solar wind regimes in separate collectors.

Out of that requirement came the portion of the spacecraft design that included 

three separate collector arrays—one for each kind of material implanted from the 

solar wind. The team now had to determine the material to place in each collector 

tray, figure out how to deploy each tray individually, and decide when to change trays 

to collect different incoming particles. This would be a challenge; although the three 

solar wind regimes were distinct, there would not be time to download each day’s data 

and analyze it before deciding whether change was warranted.

The three types of solar wind could be distinguished by a combination of solar wind 

proton speed (fast vs. slow), temperature and density, abundance of alpha particles 

(also known as helium nuclei), and whether the electron streams were arriving from 

two directions (fast/slow vs. coronal mass ejection). This information, and the need 

to develop the mission within the cost-capped culture of Discovery, drove the design 

13 Harwood, W. (2001, 30 July). “NASA to seek clues to solar system’s origin.” The Washington 

Post. A7–A8.

14 Neugebauer, M. (1991, 19 April). “The Quasi-Stationary and Transient States of the Solar Wind. 

Science, 252(404–409). See also Fisk, L. A., Schwadron, N. A., & Zurbuchen, T. H. (1998). “On the 

Slow Solar Wind.” Space Science Reviews, 86(1/4), 51–60. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005015527146.
NASA′s Discovery Program

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of the mission. The scientists would have to develop an algorithm for determining 

which tray should be deployed for the current solar wind regime, and the engineers 

would have to link the algorithm to a series of mechanisms—moving parts—that 

would deploy and stow each.

Instrument Hardware and Sampling

The Genesis spacecraft was made of aluminum, composite materials, and titanium, 

the goal being to conserve mass without sacrificing strength. Command and data 

handling (C&DH) was performed by a RAD6000 computer: a radiation-hard version 

of the Power PC chip used in Macintosh computers of the time. The system carried 128 

megabytes of random-access memory and three megabytes of nonvolatile memory. 

Two standard silicon solar array panels generated a total of 254 watts at Earth and a 

nickel-hydrogen battery provided power storage.

In terms of layout, the center of the spacecraft held the collector trays—one for 

each solar wind regime—as well as two bulk solar wind collectors in the lid and cover 

of the stacked trays. There was an ion concentrator underneath. The concentrator and 

five collector trays were encased in an aluminum science canister tucked into a sample 

return capsule that was based on the same one under development for Stardust. The 

sample return capsule was encased in its backshell and heatshield on a set of support 

struts and attached to the main body of the spacecraft, which was equipped with the 

avionics and solar panels, as well as thrusters, antennas, and other subsystems. The 

Genesis Ion Monitor instrument (GIM) and Genesis Electron Monitor (GEM) composed the mission’s science instrument payload and were used to monitor impacts 

from the solar wind.

Sample collection would work like this. Data from GEM and GIM fed into the 

onboard computer, and an algorithm in the C&DH spacecraft subsystem translated 

the impacts to real parameters of the solar wind. In addition to physical quantity 

measurements, GEM electron data could determine the presence of bi-directional 

electron streams. When the electrons seem to be coming from two opposing directions 

simultaneously, they were likely part of a coronal mass ejection lifted from the Sun’s 

outer layer. If no such bi-directional electron stream was present, the solar wind was 

either in the “fast” or “slow” regime.

Once the data were taken and analyzed on board for regime identification, the collector trays would move autonomously into position, collecting additional samples and 

protecting that which had already been collected. The correct voltage was applied on 

the solar electrostatic concentrator. The team wrote software and selected mechanisms 

to carry out the commands so that the whole process could be done onboard without 

waiting for the impossibly slow human intervention from Earth.
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“There was no ground decision-making in deciding what got deployed and for how 

long,” said Ed Hirst, the Genesis mission manager who was also part of the Stardust 

mission. “It was pretty innovative.”15 Although some automation on Mars missions 

was by then standard, the level of automation found on Genesis was a departure 

for JPL, which was accustomed to ground-based commands and the ability to make 

changes during mission operations. As such, engineers tested spacecraft mechanisms 

extensively, including the sample return capsule.

But major challenges remained. First, determining the perfect, pure material or 

materials to collect these micron-size grains of solar wind, and second, to manufacture 

and integrate them into the spacecraft such that there were no single-point failures in 

the overall sample collection system—the collector surfaces had to be strong enough 

to withstand the pressures of launch and reentry.

The purity was vital: their composition had to be well known such that their signals could be subtracted from the measurements of any collected microscopic grains.

The highest-priority measurements were the relative amounts of

• O isotopes, because they provide the basis for understanding observed meteorite variations;

• N isotopes, because they are a key reference point in the eventual understanding of large but totally unexplained N isotopic variations in planetary materials; and

• Noble gas isotopes and elements, because they provide the basis for interpreting the compositions of terrestrial planet atmospheres.16

Each of the bicycle-tire-size aluminum collector trays was designed to hold 55 

palm-size hexagonal tiles about 10 centimeters across. Ultimately, the team settled on 

tiles made of diamond, silicon carbide, and diamondlike carbon.17

15 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with E. Hirst. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

16 Burnett, D. S., Barraclough, B. L., Bennett, R., Neugebauer, M., Oldham, L. P., Sasaki, C. N., 

Sevilla, D., Smith, N., Stansbery, E., Sweetnam, D., & Wiens, R. C. (2003). “The Genesis Discovery 

Mission: Return of Solar Matter to Earth.” Space Science Reviews, 105(3), 509–534. https://doi.

org/10.1023/A:1024425810605.

17 Meyer, A. (2009, November). “Collecting Solar Wind.” JPL Website. Downloaded from https://

solarsystem.nasa.gov/genesismission/gm2/mission/collecting.htm.
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The spacecraft instrument payload was kept to the minimum necessary to support 

sample collection. There would be no magnetometer, no energetic particle investigation, no radio wave experiment, or the like; the mission remained focused on sample 

return and the supporting GIM and GEM.18

To measure the bulk concentration of solar wind, a team led by Roger Weins and 

Beth Nordholt, both of Los Alamos National Laboratory, developed an ion concentrator assembly intended to filter out light protons and alpha particles, concentrating 

heavier ions onto a special collector tile under the stack of collector trays. By repelling 

hydrogen, which composes 99 percent of the solar system, the signal of nitrogen and 

oxygen would be improved significantly, with concentrations designed to be increased 

by a factor of 20 while filtering out elements that could obscure later measurements. 

Using the solar wind flow speed and temperature measurements from GIM and GEM, 

the internal ion optics of the concentrator could be optimized for varying conditions 

of the solar wind.19

Mission Design

After launch, the spacecraft would travel 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 miles) from 

Earth to Lagrange Point 1, a stable point between Earth and the Sun where gravity is 

balanced between them. Because of this gravity balance, the Genesis spacecraft, like the 

Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) and other missions, could be kept relatively 

stationary, in a small halo orbit around that point in space, with only the occasional 

need for small station-keeping adjustments from onboard thrusters. After several years 

of collection, the spacecraft would fire its thrusters and return to Earth, deploying the 

sample return capsule for midair capture by one of two helicopters standing by at the 

U.S. Air Force’s Utah Testing and Training Range. The helicopter midair grab was to 

save the samples from even the slight bump of a parachute landing.

The sample return capsule was only 162 centimeters in diameter but weighed 210 

kilograms. Hinged like a clamshell, the capsule opened to reveal the science canister 

with its collectors and the ion concentrator stowed inside. After completion of the collection phase, the capsule would close and seal tightly, shielded with a graphite-epoxy 

composite heat shield covered with a thermal protection system of carbon-carbon to 

18 Barraclough, B., Dors, E., Abeyta, R., Alexander, J., Ameduri, F., Baldonado, J. R., Bame, S.  J., 

Casey, P., Dirks,  G., Everett, D., Gosling, J., Grace, K. M., Guerrero, D., Kolar, J., Kroesche,  J., 

Lockhart, W., McComas, D., Mietz, D., Roese, J., & Wiens, R. (2003). “The Plasma Ion and 

Electron Instruments for the Genesis Mission.” Space Science Reviews, 105, 627–660. https://doi.

org/10.1023/A:1024426112422.

19 Nordholt, J. E., Wiens, R. C., Abeyta, R. A., Baldonado, J. R., Burnett, D. S., Casey, P., Everett, D. T., 

Kroesche, J., Lockhart, W. L., MacNeal, P., McComas, D. J., Mietz, D. E., Moses, R. W., Neugebauer, 

M., Poths, J., Reisenfeld, D. B., Storms, S. A., & Urdiales, C. (2003). The Genesis Solar Wind 

Concentrator. Space Science Reviews, 105(3), 561–599. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1024422011514.
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protect the capsule as it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere. The backshell was also made 

of graphite-epoxy composite covered with a silicon-based material first developed 

by Lockheed Martin for the Viking missions to Mars in the 1970s. When the capsule 

descended to about 30 kilometers above sea level, a gas cartridge would pressurize 

a mortar tube, firing to deploy a 1.6-meter drogue chute to provide stability to the 

falling capsule. At an altitude of about six kilometers, the capsule’s main 10-meter by 

4-meter chute would deploy. This would slow the capsule’s fall to about 5 meters per

second for the midair helicopter capture.

The helicopter would be crewed in part by pilots with Hollywood stunt experience. 

Even Burnett, the mission PI, admitted that the capsule capture plan “raised a lot of 

eyebrows in the beginning.”20 The pilots were agile and eager to participate, however.21 The helicopter teams practiced repeatedly, hoping to eliminate the possibility of 

mistakes. Peter Doukas, Lockheed Martin’s lead mechanical engineer on Genesis, said 

of the helicopter pilots, subcontracted through Vertigo, Inc.: “They’ve done 35 to 40 

missions to practice hooking the parachute and never missed one.”22 This was before 

Genesis had even launched.23

Planetary protection was also not a concern, confirmed John Rummel, the planetary protection officer for NASA. Ions from the Sun “have no biological potential or 

concern associated with them.”24 Burnett said he worried about Earth contaminating 

the samples—not the other way around.25

Management

Risk management was led by mission system engineer Richard Bennett, who had formerly led the Advanced Projects Design Team (Team X) at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 

The twin top risks identified during the design phase were the need to return the samples 

undamaged and contamination-free, and the possibility of cost overages. The second 

requirement implied schedule pressure to make the target launch window. Risks were 

quantified and triaged by likelihood and consequence, with additional analyses that 

produced a list of the 20 percent of the risks that would cause 80 percent of the impact 

to activities—a step that focused management attention. The risk management system 

adapted by Genesis prompted the “buying down” of risk throughout the project, in large 

part by reducing the likelihood of occurrences of risks identified early. For example, the 

20 Dunn, M. (2001, 13 July). “NASA aims to catch a bit of Sun.” The Express.

21 Agle, D. C. (2004, 27 August). “Genesis prepares for copter catch.” JPL Universe, 34(17). 1.

22 Schrader, A. (2001, 29 May). “Genesis craft to go sunbathing.” Denver Post. B3.

23 Dunn, M. (2001, 13 July). “NASA aims to catch a bit of Sun.” The Express.

24 David, L. (2004, 31 August). “Genesis Maneuver Aims Spacecraft Toward Utah.” Space.com.

25 Chien, P. (2004, 5 September). “Spacecraft visible returning from outer space.” The North Lake 

Tahoe Bonanza.
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lack of recent “spin-stabilized” spacecraft experience by team members was shown to 

ripple through the project as potential design errors. To compensate, the project hired 

additional staff with greater experience. This was a small cost when compared with 

the potential expense later in the project. The first risk assessment, completed during 

the project’s Preliminary Design Review, led to half of the high risks being reduced 

to “mediums” and “lows” within a few months. The Critical Design Review (CDR) 

and its preparation identified additional risks, but the number of high risks decreased 

again shortly afterward. Later, when the project approached its launch date, it became 

much more difficult to reduce the likelihood of risk, as engineering decisions would 

be locked down, so the team shifted its approach to mitigating consequence, often 

developing operational workarounds.26

Meanwhile, because the sample return capsule was very similar to the one used 

on Stardust—also developed by Lockheed Martin—the team expedited its testing. 

This seemed reasonable. When engineers made a few small changes to the capsule to 

accommodate a larger sample return, however, they forgot to adjust the gravity switch, 

used for drogue chute timing, and did not catch the change before launch. This would 

have terrible consequences later.27

In contrast to Stardust, having a team spread out across the country was a challenge 

for Genesis. “One of the most difficult problems to overcome is the lack of co-location,” 

said Bennett. “I find many engineers are visual people. We sketch things to make points.” 

In this respect, telephone and e-mail communication could not wholly take the place 

of in-person meetings. “When you get to know people, you understand what motivates 

them and that builds trust,” said Bennett. “When you are working difficult contractual 

issues that means spending more resources, you need to understand and know the 

people you are dealing with in order to maximize the benefits for the whole project.”28

Sample Analysis Preparations

Genesis was the first NASA mission to require a class 10 clean room, allowing only 10 

particles of contaminant per cubic meter. “At class 10, this is the cleanest cleanroom 

complex in NASA. The lab is located in building 31, one floor below the complex of 

26 Roberts, B. B., and Richard B. Bennett. (2000, 20 July). “Risk management for the NASA/

JPL Genesis mission: A case study.” Downloaded from https://trs.jpl.nasa.gov/bitstream/

handle/2014/14256/00-0668.pdf?sequence=1.

27 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with M. Zolensky. Located in “Stardust” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

28 Krueger, A. (1999, 2 September). Personal interview with R. Bennett. Downloaded from https://

web.archive.org/web/20090412093314/http://genesismission.jpl.nasa.gov/gm2/team/people/bennett/

interview1.htm.
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labs that houses the Apollo lunar samples,” noted Carlton Allen, the then-astromaterials 

curator at Johnson Space Center.29 Such stringent measures were to ensure that the 

analyzed samples were of material from space, not material on Earth.

The first draft of the Contamination Control Plan was based on Stardust’s plan, which 

had history tracing back to the Apollo program.30 The eventual Genesis samples would 

also be able to leverage the work done for the meteorite and cosmic dust collections 

curated at Johnson Space Center by fine-tuning sample handling procedures, clean room 

requirements, shipping and tracking procedures, and regular collection maintenance.

“I believe we were able to do it better and easier than anyone else because what we 

could do is take the expertise learned from Apollo,” said Eileen Stansbery, the mission contamination control lead. She worked alongside Jack Warren, a Johnson Space 

Center contractor who had opened the first lunar rock box and taught generations 

of meteoriticists how to handle fine dust in the collections (including the author 

of this text). Also on the team was Judy Allton, a geochemist at Johnson who did the first 

lunar core, and Carol Schwartz, also of Johnson and who managed multiple collections, with experience analyzing every material type ever introduced to NASA’s system 

of astromaterials.

“Since our responsibility is maintaining the scientific integrity of the return samples, 

providing a good understanding of the provenance of those samples and the materials 

that were going to be in the collector boxes was very important,” said Stansbery. “I did 

take advantage of the depth of experience that exists within the organization to develop 

plans that took advantage of all the things that we had learned for the last 30 years.”

31

The Sample Return Laboratory Instruments and Data Analysis program (SRLIDAP) 

was created at NASA Headquarters to fund instrument development at labs nationwide in preparation for the Stardust and Genesis samples. Even the mission would be 

longer than usual, allowing time for funded analysis of the samples before the official 

end of mission. This was a new way of thinking, and one that would be useful in planning future missions such as Mars sample return.32 At Open University in the United 

29 David, L. (2004, 31 August). “The Genesis payload: Just how dangerous are its contents?” Space.com.

30 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with M. Zolensky. Located in “Stardust” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

31 Niebur, S. (2009, 25 March). Personal interview with D. Sweetnam and Eileen Stansbery. Located 

in “Genesis” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

32 Harwood, W. (2001, 30 July). “NASA to seek clues to solar system’s origin.” The Washington 

Post. A7–A8.
NASA′s Discovery Program

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Kingdom, where co-investigators Colin Pillinger and Ian Franchi were to analyze the 

solar wind particles, a new building with a brand-new clean room facility awaited the 

delivery of the samples.33

Launch

Genesis’s original launch date was January 2001. The team proposed a launch slip of 

several months to have more time in ATLO, or “assembly, test, and launch operations,” 

which would give them more time to build and test its systems both individually and 

integrated. Chet Sasaki, the mission project manager, went to NASA Headquarters 

with the request, and, according to Burnett, “He was very, very effective.”34

The proposed delay conflicted with the launch of the Mars Odyssey spacecraft, a 

water-finding orbiter. Burnett later recalled that Jet Propulsion Laboratory management feared that if Genesis had problems, it would deflect attention from the Mars 

spacecraft. The launch was delayed by half a year, but the decision was made after 

ATLO had already been completed.35

Genesis was shipped to the Cape aboard a U.S. Air Force C-17 aircraft and arrived 

at Kennedy Space Center for preflight processing at 3:30 a.m. on 31 May 2001. Over 

the next month and a half, engineers in Florida conducted a battery of tests to ensure 

that nothing had become jarred during transport and that, once spaceborne, everything would work as intended. The sequence of testing was as follows: a functional 

test; an electrical systems test; deployment of the solar arrays; verification of the radio 

links to the Deep Space Network, a global array of communications dishes that talked 

to all NASA spacecraft beyond cislunar space; and, finally, the operations of science 

instruments. After the spacecraft passed all the tests, the solar arrays were cleaned and 

stowed for launch in preparation for flight.

Meanwhile, on 12 June, the Delta 7326 launch vehicle was stacked for launch at 

Pad 17-A. Five days later, the spacecraft was mated to a Star 37 upper-stage booster. 

On 18 July, the spacecraft and booster were mounted on the Delta II, and engineers 

performed a spacecraft functional test to again ensure all was well. On 25 July, the 

payload fairing was installed. Launch was scheduled for 30 July 2001 at 9:36 a.m.36

33 Arthur, C., and Steve Connor. (2004, 9 September). “A blur of speeding metal, then a cloud of dust 

as space mission plummets to Earth.” The [UK] Independent.

34 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with D. Burnett. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

35 Ibid.

36 Heil, M. (2001, 8 June). “Genesis arrives at KSC.” JPL Universe, 31(12). 1.
Chapter 3: Harsh Landings

103

“We Couldn’t Have Killed Anybody If We Tried”

Genesis had two possible launch openings in 2001: a two-week window ending on 14 

August and then another in December. Launch was delayed five times that first week. 

Weather was not accommodating, and then there were concerns about a power supply 

component in the spacecraft’s star tracker. A duplicate model had failed environmental 

testing on the ground in France. No one was sure whether the part on Genesis was defective as well, and JPL and Lockheed Martin performed accelerated testing to determine 

whether a launch was worth the risk. “That turned out to be a last—very last—minute 

call,” recalled David Jarrett, the program manager of the Discovery Program.37

Genesis departed Earth at last on 8 August at 12:13 p.m. EDT, embarking on a 

million-mile path taking it to Lagrange Point 1. It arrived there on 16 November and 

prepared to begin its science mission. Despite Stardust’s head start—it had launched 

two years earlier, on 7 February 1999—Genesis was set to collect its samples and return 

them to Earth long before the comet mission. From the start, the team recognized that 

their plan for a midair capture was a new one to NASA. “We were aware very early 

that this was kind of horrifying to review boards,” said Sweetnam. A daring helicopter catch wasn’t the only thing that worried NASA, however. This would be the first 

sample return to Earth since Apollo.38 As such, in the event of a problem, there were 

few applicable contingency plans on which the mission could rely.

The Genesis team worked out ways that the science might be recovered even in 

case of mishap. Very early in pre-Phase A, they decided to make the material in each 

collector tray a different thickness so that information on the collecting regime would 

not be lost in case of breakage. In terms of science return, said Stansbery, “We thought 

of contingency more in terms of the condition of the samples than the events that can 

go wrong.” The team identified possible end states, such as a slightly leaky sample return 

capsule that would allow reentry gases onto the samples, or even the “shards across 

the desert scenario,” and listed the personnel, roles and responsibilities, equipment, 

and procedures that would follow nearly any disaster.39

The loss of Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003 had a significant effect on Genesis, as 

it did for the entire American space program. At a review in February 2004, Gentry 

Lee, a famed JPL engineer who chaired the review committee, challenged the Genesis 

37 Niebur, S. (2009, 14 May). Personal interview with D. Jarrett and Kate Wolf. Located in “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

38 Niebur, S. (2009, 25 March). Personal interview with D. Sweetnam and Eileen Stansbery. Located 

in “Genesis” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

39 Ibid.
NASA′s Discovery Program

104

team to prove that nothing could go wrong on the spacecraft that would cause loss 

of life on the ground. The sample return capsule was about the size of one tire on the 

Columbia Shuttle.

“We were, in the eyes of the review boards, just woefully unprepared,” said Ed Hirst, 

the Genesis mission manager. “There were so many things that we hadn’t considered. 

And our team was small. We were focused on getting the capsule to the ground, and 

so we had the core engineering done, but there was a lot of other things that we had 

forgotten to think about.” NASA’s risk tolerance had changed, and Discovery missions 

were now being held to a higher standard than they were when proposed. Discovery 

Program leaders worked with the Genesis team on risk assessment and risk communication until the review boards were satisfied—and then insisted on additional

contingency planning in a way that hadn’t been done before.

“The thing about both the Genesis and Stardust capsules is that entry, descent, and 

landing sequence. The things that would happen, [from] the deployment of the back 

shells to deployment of the parachutes, all of that was hardwired into the hardware. 

We couldn’t do anything to change any of it,” said Hirst. Instead, the team spent considerable time and money assessing where the reentry risk lay. Since the assessment 

would only identify the risks, but not change the outcome, not everyone on the team 

was convinced that this was the best way to spend resources, but the team followed 

the recommendations of the review boards all the same, spending millions of dollars 

on extra analyses, reviews, and contingency planning.40

Range safety and the probability of hitting a civilian with a returning object became 

a concern. Range safety has its own language, and several members of the team needed 

to learn it, and fast. The team had to determine and minimize the probabilities of a 

person being hit, of property being damaged, of aircraft being damaged, of boats in the 

sea being damaged—everything. The Utah Test and Training Range is a 2,675-squaremile bombing range west of Salt Lake City, controlled by the Air Force in the air and 

the Army on the ground. The landing ellipse was secure, but the team also had to 

consider the effects should something go wrong along the reentry track. “I led much of 

this work under the guidance of people like Gentry Lee, who was kind of instrumental 

in opening our eyes and saying, ‘Look, you really need to set the precedent for future 

sample return missions...what are the things that we should do to make sure that future 

sample return missions do them properly,’” said Hirst.41

40 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with E. Hirst. Located in “Genesis” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

41 Ibid.
Chapter 3: Harsh Landings

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After all the analysis, documentation, population maps, and distribution probabilities, said Don Burnett, the mission PI, “we couldn’t have killed anybody if we tried...

if we lost all control over the spacecraft, it would crash in northeast Nevada, where 

there was one person per square mile.”42

Battery Scare

Not long after launch, telemetry from Genesis revealed that the battery inside the 

sample return capsule was heating up noticeably, reaching 23 degrees Celsius by early 

November 2001. This caused concern because the temperatures were projected to 

further rise to 42 degrees—well above a 25-degree requirement that engineers had 

planned for. After comparing the performance of similar batteries, mission managers 

judged the projected 42 degrees to be within acceptable limits. Researchers could not 

understand why the temperature was rising rapidly. One theory blamed a potentially 

deteriorating thermal blanket above the battery, so the team sent commands to crack 

the sample return capsule lid open to vent trapped gas and cool itself off. Regardless, the 

team wanted to solve—or at least understand—the problem during cruise to forestall 

any potential problems that would be compounded on re-entry.43

The engineering team advocated closing the spacecraft early, bringing it home without the planned exposure time on the collectors, fearing that the overheated batteries 

would jeopardize the entire mission. But Burnett wanted the full exposure time: the 

solar wind measurements required it—and as PI, he had the final say. The project had 

spent a lot of time and money on the spacecraft’s thermal design, and it didn’t work. 

But after extensive testing of hundreds of batteries on the ground once the anomaly 

was detected, mission engineers determined that even if the sample return capsule 

battery reached 60 degrees, there would be no apparent repercussions to the hardware 

or samples within.44

A Piece of the Sun, Down to Earth 

Sample and data analysis—sometimes an afterthought on planetary science missions 

to be addressed at mythical “later dates”—was always integral to the Genesis plan. As 

Eileen Stansbery, who led the mission contamination control team, explained, 

That was one of the things that I think was most important and unique about Genesis. Don 

Burnett was adamant that he fund the analysis of the samples; that just getting something 

42 Niebur, S. (2009, March 24). Personal interview with D. Burnett. Located in “Genesis” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

43 Ibid.; Young, K. (2001, November 10). “NASA doesn’t think hot battery will curtail probe’s mission: 

Genesis to collect solar wind particles.” Florida Today. 

44 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with D. Burnett. Located in “Genesis” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
NASA′s Discovery Program

106

back on earth wasn’t what the mission was about.... The baseline mission funded two years 

of scientific analysis after recovery just as part of the project.... In addition, not all of the 

instruments that were part of the mission flew. There were two very important instrument developments that were analytical facilities on the ground as part of the project. And 

that was all built into this tiny Genesis mission budget.... And I think that was not just a 

unique, but a very important mental leap for NASA missions.45

Unnerving battery readings from the collection capsule aside, sample capture went 

off without a hitch. The team activated GEM and GIM, the electron and the ion sensors, on 23 and 24 August 2001. They functioned normally, and as they ran for the 

next year, there were no anomalies to report. 

The collectors opened on 3 December 2001 to catch the solar wind. It was exhilarating for team members because the space weather, as described by Wiens, was 

“stormy”—troublesome for some space missions, but ideal for Genesis.46 Just over 

two years after the collectors opened, the work was done. The team deactivated and 

stowed the sample collectors on 1 April 2004. As the month drew to a close, Genesis 

fired its thrusters to begin the long journey home.47

CONTOUR

Selected alongside Genesis was the Comet Nucleus Tour, or CONTOUR. When it 

was chosen as the sixth Discovery mission, Joseph Veverka, the mission PI, was well 

suited to the role, having over three decades of spacecraft experience.48 His graduate 

adviser at Harvard was Fred Whipple, the celebrated astronomer and comet expert 

(and he of the “Whipple shield”). Also on Whipple’s staff was a lecturer and researcher 

named Carl Sagan, who was just 10 years out of graduate school. Sagan would later 

hire Veverka to do data analysis on Mariner 9, NASA’s first Mars orbiter.

After that first taste of mission life, Veverka never looked back. He continued his 

planetary mission involvement with Viking, the life-detection missions to Mars; Voyager, 

the twin spacecraft that revealed the moons of fire and ice beyond the asteroid belt, 

visiting each of the outer planets but Pluto; Galileo, the Jupiter system mission; Mars 

Observer, the mission that vanished at Mars; and CRAF—the Comet Rendezvous 

45 Niebur, S. (2009, 25 March). Personal interview with D. Sweetnam and Eileen Stansbery. Located 

in “Genesis” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

46 Heil, M. (2001, 3 December). “Genesis spacecraft begins mission to collect samples of the sun.” 

NASA Press Release.

47 Pountney, M. (2004, 7 September). “Stunt pilots to catch space capsule.” The Melbourne Herald Sun; 

Erickson J. (2004, 20 August). “Fliers seek to lasso Sun.” The Rocky Mountain News.

48 Matthews, R. (2002, 23 June). “NASA launches probe to see what lies at the heart of a comet: 

Asteroid’s near miss highlights need for mission to prevent impacts on Earth.” The Sunday 

Telegraph. 14.
Chapter 3: Harsh Landings

107

Asteroid Flyby—Cassini’s twin that was to study “surface properties of comets and 

asteroids, eolian processes on Mars, and the connection between geologic processes 

and photometric properties on icy satellites.”49 (Budget cuts in the 1980s killed CRAF.)

During this time, Veverka met a mission planner named Bob Farquhar, who 

joined the Applied Physics Laboratory after serving at NASA Headquarters during 

the Discovery Program’s infancy. (It was Farquhar who processed the funding for Tom 

Krimigis’s study of the NEAR mission.) Farquhar had also worked previously with 

JAXA, the Japanese space agency, “trying to convince them to do sort of a multiple 

asteroid-comet flyby mission” years earlier.50 Farquhar and Veverka got to talking about 

celestial mechanics and the possibilities of sending missions to comets and asteroids 

within the context of the Discovery cost box, and Farquhar came up with “this very 

clever idea which would not only allow you to visit several comets but, in the original 

incarnation, you could actually get to Comet Encke,” recalled Veverka.

Because Encke has a close perihelion to the Sun, it is a hard target to approach 

energetically. But by having a spacecraft in Encke’s orbit, it would re-encounter Earth 

every six to 12 months, depending on celestial mechanics, which would allow engineers 

to change the spacecraft’s trajectory. “It would allow you to redirect the spacecraft to an 

Oort cloud comet if it came by,” said Veverka, “so it did something that most mission 

concepts couldn’t do. You could visit multiple comets.”51

Farquhar put together the trajectory. Veverka put together the science team, relying in large part on people who had worked with him on the CRAF imaging team.

“On a Discovery mission, what you were trying to do is to find people who have 

good instruments, who will deliver them on time, on cost,” said Veverka.52 He selected 

Hasso Nieman, the PI on CRAF’s Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer instrument, 

and his team, including Paul Mahaffey of Goddard Space Flight Center, who later succeeded Hasso as PI.53 Also from CRAF were Jochen Kissel, who led its Cometary Matter 

Analyzer, and his group in Germany, who had just built an instrument for Giotto, the 

European Space Agency’s first deep space mission; and Don Yeomans, who had been 

in charge of radio science investigation on CRAF.54

49 Friedlander, B. (2001, 27 September). “Honoring Veverka, a man who chases snowballs and discovers continents.” Cornell Chronicle.

50 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 September). Personal interview with J. Veverka. Located in the “CONTOUR” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

51 Ibid.

52 Ibid.

53 Weissman, P., & Neugebauer, M. (1991). “The Comet Rendezvous Asteroid Flyby Mission: A Status 

Report.” Asteroids, Comets, Meteors 1991, vol. 765, 235.

54 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 September). Personal interview with J. Veverka. Located in the “CONTOUR” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
NASA′s Discovery Program

108

Several scientists at APL joined the team, including Andy Cheng, the NEAR Project 

Scientist, and Scott Murchie, a geologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Steve Squyres, 

who had previously led a competing proposal called RECON—Rendezvous with a 

Comet Nucleus—in the 1994 competition, was added to the team in 1996. Andy 

Cheng coined the name CONTOUR.55 Regarding the inventive trajectories from Bob 

Farquhar, Cheng recalled: “To this day, I don’t know when those trajectories were 

actually discovered, whether it was, you know, decades earlier. He just came in and 

had boxes and boxes of folders and things like that.... I’ve never known a time when 

Bob wasn’t talking about something like the CONTOUR mission because that’s always 

been his first love: multiple flyby, and comets.”56

Veverka avoided naming a project scientist. “On a project as small as a Discovery 

mission,” he said, “I don’t think you need a project scientist because what it implies 

is that the project scientist is a conduit for some information from the science team 

to the engineering project team.... I think that’s a bad idea on a Discovery mission. I 

think everybody is one team.”57

CONTOUR was one of the initial “$100,000 studies” that emerged from San Juan 

Capistrano, but it was not selected, mostly for reasons of cost.58 It had been conceived 

as a big, traditional spacecraft launching on a big rocket. That would have to change. 

The team brought Mary Chiu on as project manager. She was, at the time, the spacecraft 

manager of the ACE, a space weather probe at Lagrange Point 1.

Veverka and Chiu forged a close working relationship as PI and project manager, 

respectively, which included a weekly tag-up about “anything and everything,” said 

Chiu. They also talked throughout the week when issues arose. “He was also in contact 

with a lot of the instrument developers at APL.”59

This took a light hand on Veverka’s part. “On the one extreme, you have a PI who 

gets involved in everything and makes life miserable,” said Veverka, “And then, on 

the other extreme, you have people who basically just disappear after the mission has 

been selected. And, when the data start coming on, they reappear again.” He called 

55 Niebur, S. (2009, 31 July). Personal interview with A. Cheng. Located in “Discovery Program” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

56 Ibid.

57 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 September). Personal interview with J. Veverka. Located in the “CONTOUR” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

58 Ibid.

59 Niebur, S. (2009, 16 September). Personal interview with M. Chiu. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.
Chapter 3: Harsh Landings

109

both extremes unhelpful, explaining, “I tried very hard not to get in the way of people 

who knew what they were doing.... But, I think, to be honest, it’s nothing that I did. 

It’s the fact that we had a first-rate group of people.”60

The people set the mission up for success, but what put it over the top was its mission design. Yet again, Bob Farquhar came up with a trajectory that proved to be the 

mission’s breakthrough feature. “This very, very creative mission design,” said Chiu, 

“allowed us to have a relatively small low-cost spacecraft to fly by three comets. I mean, 

that’s an absolutely incredible feat.”61

Rather than launch on a large, expensive rocket to get the power and precision 

necessary to visit multiple comets, which was CONTOUR’s aim, Farquhar calculated 

that it was much easier to launch into Earth’s orbit, and from there, fire a payload assist 

rocket stage. You could avoid all the variables of Earth’s atmosphere, with the bonus of 

precise tracking and extreme accuracy in how you employ velocity changes. In other 

words, by buying a million-dollar payload stage rocket, you could save ten million 

dollars.62 CONTOUR would come in at half the cost cap of a Discovery mission: $153 

million, which included the launch vehicle, mission operations, and reserves.63 NASA 

selected the mission for flight in August 1997.

More Ideas Than Facts

Comets are not studied simply because they are strange and beautiful. Rather, they may 

possess the answers to the most fundamental questions vexing humankind. “Comets are 

the building blocks of the early solar system,” explained Don Yeomans, a co-investigator 

on CONTOUR and one of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s comet experts.64 One of 

the ways planetary scientists study the nature of comets as they relate to Earth is 

by measuring their compositions. “What is the deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio in the 

atmosphere of the comet and is that ratio the same as the ratio of the earth’s oceans? 

If it is, comets are likely the source of much of the earth’s oceans.”65 Among the other 

60 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 September). Personal interview with J. Veverka. Located in the “CONTOUR” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

61 Niebur, S. (2009, 16 September). Personal interview with M. Chiu. Located in “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

62 Morring, F. (2002, 24 June). “Hardened probe targets two comets.” Aviation Week & Space 

Technology. 94.

63 Niebur, S. (2009, 31 July). Personal interview with E. Reynolds. Located in the “CONTOUR” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC; 

Farquhar, R. (2011). Fifty Years on the Space Frontier: Halo Orbits, Comets, Asteroids, and More.

Denver: Outskirts Press. 215.

64 Lane, E. (2002, 25 June). “NASA to launch a flyby of comets.” Newsday.

65 Morring, F. (2002, 24 June). “Hardened probe targets two comets.” Aviation Week & Space 

Technology. 94–95.
NASA′s Discovery Program

110

questions asked: Is it plausible that the air we breathe in the atmosphere was once 

comet stuff? Is it likely that the original input of molecules that led to the origin of life 

on Earth came from comets?66

To help answer these questions, and assess the diversity of comets in the inner solar 

system, the CONTOUR mission carried four instruments: the CONTOUR Remote 

Imaging SPectrograph (CRISP); the CONTOUR Forward Imager (CFI); a Neutral Gas 

and Ion Mass Spectrometer (NGIMS), provided by Goddard Space Flight Center; and 

the Comet Impact Dust Analyzer (CIDA).67 CRISP and CFI were expected to return 

images an order of magnitude more resolved than Deep Space 1’s pictures of Comet 

19P/Borrelly and 25 times better than Giotto’s images of Comet 1P/Halley, itself the 

first flyby close enough to image a comet’s core.68 NGIMS would measure noble gases 

like xenon and krypton in the atmosphere of the comets. If the isotopic ratios of xenon 

and krypton isotopes matched those in Earth’s atmosphere, it would be an indication 

that Earth’s atmosphere indeed came from comets.69 CIDA, meanwhile, would do gas 

chemistry in the coma.

“We really have more ideas than facts,” said Michael Belton, CONTOUR’s Deputy 

Principal Investigator.70 The mission had 18 co-investigators, including Fred Whipple, 

the “grand old man of comets,” as Carolyn Shoemaker later wrote in his obituary.71 It 

was he who, in the 1950s, argued that comets are icy conglomerates, or “dirty snowballs” 

of ice, ammonia, methane, and carbon dioxide at the core, with a disperse particle tail. 

He was correct, and he joined the CONTOUR mission in 1999 at age 92.72 “Hopefully, 

if I live to be 100,” Whipple said at launch, “I’ll get to see the samples of a comet that 

CONTOUR brings back.”73

66 David, L. (2002, 12 June). “CONTOUR’s tale of two comets.” Space.com.

67 Cochran, A., Veverka, J., Bell, J., Belton, M., Benkhoff, J., Benkhoff, A., Clark, B., Feldman, P., 

Kissel, J., Mahaffy, P., Malin, M., Murchie, S., Neimann, H., Owen, T., Robinson, M., Schwehm, G., 

Squyres, S., Thomas, P., Whipple, F., & Yeomans, D. (2000). “The Comet Nucleus TOUR 

(CONTOUR): A NASA Discovery Mission.” Earth, Moon, and Planets, 89(1/4), 289–300. https://

doi.org/10.1023/A:1021567007750.

68 Ibid.; Singer, E. (2002, 1 July). “Tailing comets for clues to life: NASA plans this month to launch 

CONTOUR, its latest probe to explore these celestial balls of dust and ice, which hold secrets older 

than Earth.” Los Angeles Times. A-10.

69 Lane, E. (2002, 25 June). “NASA to launch a flyby of comets.” Newsday.

70 Ballingrud, D. (2002, 1 July). “On the trail of comets.” St. Petersburg Times.

71 Obituary of “Fred L. Whipple (1907–2004).” (2004, 31 August). Boston Globe.

72 Ballingrud, D. (2002, 1 July). “On the trail of comets.” St. Petersburg Times; “Fred Whipple, WorldRenowned Astronomer, Dies.” (2004, 7 September). Space Daily. Downloaded from http://www.

spacedaily.com/news/comet-04j.html on 11 August 2021, and available in the NASA Archives, 

“CONTOUR” folder.

73 Szaniszlo, M. (2002, 6 July). “Dr. Comet’s pioneering ideas take off.” Boston Herald. 5.
Chapter 3: Harsh Landings

111

Despite his age and prominence, Whipple was no figurehead. He was a full member 

of the science team, and worked as such, attending meetings when they were held in 

the Northeast. As Veverka recalled: “He occasionally would give a talk. He took this 

very, very seriously.”74

CONTOUR was scheduled for launch into a highly elliptical initial orbit at 2:56 a.m. 

on 1 July 2002. It would leave Earth on a 7425 Delta II with four solid-fuel tanks. Seven 

weeks later, the spacecraft would fire its payload assist stage—a Star 30 solid rocket 

motor—to push it into its initial trajectory. Over a projected four-year mission lifetime, 

the spacecraft would use four Earth gravity assists to reach the comets, which then 

were in a difficult-to-encounter position in the inner solar system. “It’s like having two 

launches,” explained Bobby Williams, leader of the team that landed NEAR on Eros 

in 2001 and member of the CONTOUR navigation team. “We have to fire a rocket to 

go into orbit around earth and then about six weeks later fire another rocket to push 

the spacecraft out of earth orbit.”75 Unbeknownst to Williams, that “second launch” 

would prove catastrophic.

Found to Be Good, or So We Thought

Costs were climbing for CONTOUR. Between the mission’s selection by NASA 

Headquarters and its actual implementation at APL, prices grew due to factors no 

one could have foreseen. “It was right after the Mars problems,” explained Mary Chiu, 

the project manager. “For some reason, it was also a time when salaries shot up.” (That 

reason was a rise in base government pay, signed into law by President Bill Clinton, 

which rippled across government vendors as well.)76 This significantly inflated staff 

and contractor costs. “The biggest cost that we had was people. If you got a fairly hefty 

increase in just that, you’ve blown your reserve. And that’s what hit. We blew our 

reserve almost before we started out.”77

Moreover, in the aftermath of the failed Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar 

Lander, NASA Headquarters implemented project “red team reviews” to find flaws 

in missions before launch. “What was coming through was a lot more scrutiny, a lot 

more paperwork, a lot more reviews,” said Chiu, and they weren’t cheap. “We had not 

74 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 September). Personal interview with J. Veverka. Located in the “CONTOUR” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

75 “JPL Navigators Drive Two-for-one Comet Mission.” (2002, 1 July). Press release. 

76 Folkenflik, D. (1999, 9 September). “4.8% pay increase for federal employees OK’d; Congressional 

negotiators lift past Clinton request; full Congress to vote.” Baltimore Sun. Retrieved 28 July 2022 

from https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1999-09-10-9909100269-story.html.

77 Niebur, S. (2009, 16 September). Personal interview with M. Chiu. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.
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112

anticipated that at all. So, we got hit by a double whammy.”78 Use of the Deep Space 

Network (DSN) proved more expensive than APL management had anticipated, through 

no fault of CONTOUR. None of this was helping the lab’s stellar record with respect 

to handing in projects within cost. In the end, it was CONTOUR’s undoing. To save 

$300,000, the project purchased a Star 30 solid rocket motor that was two years older 

than its shelf-life.

“CONTOUR was, you might say, a victim of being exceptionally cost-conscious,” 

recalled Krimigis, who was by then head of the Space Department at APL. The Star 

30 was bought secondhand from Hughes Aerospace Corporation and recertified for 

flight by Alliant Techsystems. The project did not test fire the rocket before launch.79

“Everybody was very reassuring,” said Krimigis. “And the NASA review teams, 

you know, the excellent review teams, nobody raised a flag on that. Ultimately, it was 

my fault because we were running tight.”80 When CONTOUR was selected for flight 

by Ed Weiler, the Associate Administrator of NASA’s Space Science Enterprise, it was 

approved without a mass spectrometer. The project was not confident that the instrument would fit at the proposed cost of the mission.

To get the critical science instrument on board, Krimigis cut a deal. “I said, ‘Look, 

you know that we are not likely to go much into the contingency,’ so I said, ‘If you 

increase the program cost, if you put in five million, I’ll guarantee you that we’ll never 

use five million of the contingency.’ He said, ‘Okay.’ That’s how the mass spectrometer 

got on board the spacecraft.”81 It was a smart move, but the project had to remain 

mindful of the cost cap at all times, because the moment it was in danger of exceeding 

its proposed price tag, the mass spectrometer would have been descoped.

“I always viewed myself as the guardian of the science, and that’s why I was insisting, for example, that the mass spectrometer on CONTOUR stay on the payload—I 

mean, I understood the science,” said Krimigis. “I really felt that the whole philosophy 

of the department was that we’re here to maximize the science.”82

Saving money on a kick stage was one way to ensure that the mission would achieve 

a maximal amount of science return. The STAR30-BP Thiokol motor was a known 

quantity at selection, having been used routinely in space missions since its introduction 

78 Ibid.

79 Niebur, S. (2009, 27 September). Personal interview with T. Krimigis. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

80 Niebur, S. (2009, 27 August). Personal interview with T. Krimigis. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

81 Ibid.

82 Niebur, S. (2009, 27 September). Personal interview with T. Krimigis. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.
Chapter 3: Harsh Landings

113

in 1984, with only two failures in 86 missions. NASA had used solid rocket motors in 

other missions, including Magellan, where one worked perfectly even after 15 months 

of transit time to Venus.83

Originally, there were three comets in CONTOUR’s planned trajectory: Encke, 73P/

Schwassmann–Wachmann 3, and 6P/d’Arrest. The kick stage was essential to the plan.

Comet 2P/Encke, first discovered in 1786 by astronomer Johann Franz Encke, is 

an older, quieter comet. “Although it does have gases and dust coming out forming 

an atmospheric coma, Encke really does not have the kind of classical tail that you 

associate with a very bright comet,” explained Veverka.84 There is evidence that Encke, 

4.8 kilometers in size, broke apart from a giant 80-kilometer comet about 20,000 years 

ago, creating a disperse trail of dust and debris that Earth encounters every June and 

November.85 This dust stream is popularly known as the Taurids. It was Fred Whipple 

in 1940 who figured out that the meteor shower was connected to Encke.86

Schwassmann–Wachmann 3, in contrast, is much younger, with dust clouds, and 

was described by Don Yeomans, a CONTOUR co-investigator, as a “young, fragile 

object,” in contrast to “tough, blackened, old Comet” Encke.87 The spacecraft would 

quickly fly near Comet Encke so Tony Taylor, the chief of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s 

navigation team, viewed his team’s job as protecting the ten minutes of time available to obtain science data. The spacecraft would have to be more careful around 

Schwassmann–Wachmann 3, which had split into at least three pieces only a few years 

earlier, in 1995. Loose particles from the cometary cataclysm made the encounter 

more dangerous, but it also made it undeniably attractive. Young comet surfaces are 

rare, and this one would likely be exposing pristine material from its creation. Still, 

CONTOUR would pass so close to Encke—anywhere from 100 to 160 kilometers—

that any comet dust impacting the spacecraft would hit much harder than a speeding 

83 Moomaw, B. (2002, 26 August). “Full impact of CONTOUR mission destruction remains to be 

seen.” Space Daily. Downloaded from http://www.spacedaily.com/news/contour-02i.html on 11 

August 2021, available in the NASA archives, “CONTOUR” folder.

84 Ray, J. (2002, 3 July). “Probe launched to see fossils from formation of planets.” Spaceflight Now.

85 Matthews, R. (2002, 23 June). “NASA launches probe to see what lies at the heart of a comet: 

Asteroid’s near miss highlights need for mission to prevent impacts on Earth.” The Sunday 

Telegraph. 14.

86 Whipple, F. L. (1940). “Photographic Meteor Studies. III. The Taurid Shower.” Proceedings of the 

American Philosophical Society, 83, 711–745.

87 Singer, E. (2002, 1 July). “Tailing comets for clues to life: NASA plans this month to launch 

CONTOUR, its latest probe to explore these celestial balls of dust and ice, which hold secrets older 

than Earth.” Los Angeles Times. A-10.
NASA′s Discovery Program

114

bullet. Engineers performed simulations on Earth using 10 inches of Nextel ceramic 

covering and Kevlar, which would shield the spacecraft, hitting the barrier with nylon 

pellets flying 15,000 miles per hour.88

Such a hazardous environment made camera design difficult as well. “Dust particles 

at 28 kilometers per second are not very good for precision optics,” said Jeff Warren, 

CONTOUR’s camera systems engineer. The high-resolution camera would be kept 

under the dust shield until the last possible moment.89

Testing

Leading up to launch, set for 1 July 2002, the CONTOUR spacecraft was submitted to 

rigorous testing to ensure that there would be no surprises in deep space. Vibration, 

spin balance, and acoustic tests were conducted with an inert Thiokol Star 30 solid 

rocket motor attached. (It weighed 70 pounds more than the one used for flight.) To 

simulate the motor for thermal vacuum testing, the inert motor was replaced with 

heaters. The only time the spacecraft and actual flight motor were tested together during the final, pre-launch checkout at the Cape was limited to spin balance testing.90

CONTOUR engineers, meanwhile, conducted all the recommended tests of the 

Star 30 solid rocket motor. To verify the integrity of its welds, for example, they even 

brought the spacecraft to a medical facility and placed it in an x-ray machine. Fuel 

samples were tested constantly.

In late June, launch preparations were delayed by some of the very types of particles 

that scientists had hoped to collect: dust. This was after spiders had been found near 

the spacecraft.91 (The would-be arachnid astronaut worried mission managers but 

did not delay the launch—not even the one crawling on the rocket’s third stage was 

deemed consequential enough to delay things.) Then, however, after the eight-sided 

spacecraft had been loaded atop a Delta II rocket at Cape Canaveral, and as technicians 

were installing the payload fairing to seal in CONTOUR, they noticed a fine layer of 

dust on the spacecraft’s top solar panel.92

That was a showstopper. It was soon determined that a HEPA filter had not been 

changed recently in the clean room at the top of the launch pad, which meant the 

88 Young, K. (2002, 8 July). “Experts set to check comet chaser: CONTOUR to undergo tests as spacecraft orbits Earth.” Florida Today.

89 Kridler, C. (2002, 22 July). “Images of universe not easy to capture: Space photography much more 

complex than point and shoot.” Florida Today.

90 Morring, F. (2002, 2 September). “CONTOUR team wants to build a new probe.” Aviation Week & 

Space Technology. 40.

91 Young, K. (2002, 1 July). “Dusty coating delays launch of comet-bound probe.” Florida Today.

92 Berger, B. (2002, 28 June). “Fine layer of dust halts CONTOUR launch preparations.” SpaceNews.
Chapter 3: Harsh Landings

115

spacecraft would need to be cleaned before liftoff.93 Siad Ali, the project’s contamination and quality assurance representative at the Cape, called the situation totally 

unacceptable. Launch was postponed by two days.94

Already, the project was planning an extended mission for CONTOUR. After it 

encountered Encke and Schwassmann–Wachmann 3, Farquhar’s trajectory allowed a 

2008 encounter with Comet d’Arrest, Comet Boethin, Comet Wilson–Harrington, or 

another “target of opportunity” that might arise after launch.95 “If you want to look at 

the diversity of cometary nuclei, this is the way to do it,” said Farquhar.96

To that end, the CONTOUR team and the team from Rosetta, a European Space 

Agency mission set originally to launch in 2003 and visit Comet 46P/Wirtanen, were 

already working together to improve each other’s science. The project scientist of 

Rosetta, Gerhard Schwehm, even served on both missions, along with Jochen Kissel 

of the Max Planck Institut for Extraterrestrische Physik in Germany. “We’re all after 

the same knowledge,” said Schwehm. “What we learn from the NASA missions will 

help us to be even better prepared for our big task at Comet Wirtanen.”97

In a news briefing before launch, Colleen Hartman, Director of the Solar System 

Exploration Division, highlighted the constellation of missions being launched by 

NASA and ESA that would begin observations in the next few years, saying, “We’re 

about to enter into a golden era of comet investigation.”98 And indeed it was poised 

to be. If all had gone well, CONTOUR would have reached Encke right before the 

launch of Deep Impact (a NASA spacecraft designed to study the interior of Comet 

9P/Tempel) and just before Stardust’s flyby of Wild 2, with Rosetta reaching far-off 

Comet Wirtanen in 2011.

Launch

Liftoff promised an astonishing journey ahead. “It was a great launch,” Veverka said. 

“What was amazing was that within hours of the launch, the spacecraft was working 

93 Ibid.; Niebur, S. (2009, 14 May). Personal interview with D. Jarrett and Kate Wolf. Located in 

“Discovery Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA 

Headquarters, Washington, DC.

94 Behne, J. (2009, 16 September). Personal interview with M. Chiu. Located in “CONTOUR” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

95 Young, K. (2002, 9 June). “CONTOUR spacecraft explores comet’s center.” Florida Today; Ray, J. 

(2002, 3 July). “Probe launched to see fossils from formation of planets.” Spaceflight Now.

96 Ruane, M. E. (2000, 13 July). “Up close and personal with comets; Hopkins scientists hope new 

satellite will provide rare glimpse of history.” The Washington Post. M10.

97 (2002, 1 July). “Rosetta wishes CONTOUR luck chasing comets.” ESA news release.

98 David, L. (2002, 12 June). “CONTOUR’s tale of two comets.” Space.com.
NASA′s Discovery Program

116

amazingly.” They were able to test all spacecraft subsystems but the camera, the latter 

set to be turned on after the spacecraft had left Earth’s orbit so as to protect it from 

debris or distortion from the firing of the solid rocket motor.99

As planned, Mary Chiu retired, taking a post-retirement vacation with her family, 

and Ed Reynolds became project manager at launch. CONTOUR was to fire its Thiokol 

Star 30 solid rocket motor 42 days after launch, at 4:49 a.m. EDT, 15 August, putting it 

on a path toward Encke. It was a routine maneuver; when a spacecraft is scheduled for 

an engine burn and course correction, there is typically tension—years and sometimes 

entire careers are atop those boosters—but NASA has been doing this a long time.

“I was in the control room,” recalled Reynolds. “The burn has to happen at perigee. It just so happened that perigee occurred, like, 100 miles over the middle of the 

Indian Ocean. There’s no ground stations. We got the spacecraft spinning.... [I]t was 

pointed perfect. The ops team pretty much watched it go over the horizon,” Reynolds 

continued, saying everything was nominal. 100 “So, you let it go at, like, 4:30. And then, 

40 minutes later, you kind of say, ‘Okay, it’s burning now....’ And I forget what the time 

duration was, but it was like an hour after the burn to get a contact.”101

The DSN antennas on Earth, located in California, Australia, and Spain, should 

have picked up a signal at 5:35 a.m., just as the East Coast was waking up. But the 

signal never came. The spacecraft, built to be bulletproof in a five-layer dust shield of 

Kevlar and Nextel, was no longer there.

“It was nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing,” described Reynolds of the interminable 

wait for a signal from the spacecraft. An hour or two elapsed. “They were calling in 

our best RF [radio frequency] people to interact with the DSN and JPL people. Then, 

at one point they kind of were like, ‘We’re seeing a signal.’ And you get real hopeful. 

‘Okay. All right, it’s there. It’s still broadcasting.’ And then, you find out that that was 

noise.... I think it was a day and half of just looking, looking, looking, looking.”102

On that first day, mission controllers at APL searched for the spacecraft along its 

predicted trajectories. There was plenty of hope for a successful recovery. Mission managers first assumed that the problem was with the DSN stations in California, Australia, 

or Spain, which were to first receive the signal.103 After it became clear that the global 

antenna array was not the problem, they faulted the spacecraft telemetry, holding out 

hope that a planned resend of the signal might be received. As a safeguard, the mission 

99 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 September). Personal interview with J. Veverka. Located in the “CONTOUR” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

100 Niebur, S. (N.d.). Personal interview with T. Carro. Susan Niebur’s personal collection.

101 Niebur, S. (2009, 31 July). Personal interview with E. Reynolds. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

102 Ibid.

103 Young, K. (2002, 17 August). “Comet-chasing probe feared lost.” Florida Today.
Chapter 3: Harsh Landings

117

had an automatic backup computer program—set to run 24 hours after any loss of 

contact after the engine burn—that would fire small thrusters, turning the spacecraft 

so that it would use another of its four antennas to send signals back to Earth.104

NASA called the North American Aerospace Defense Command to request help 

locating the spacecraft. Several military assets, such as ground radars used by the 

Air Force and Defense Support Program infrared early-warning satellites, could have 

observed the 50-second burn on 15 August.105 The press criticized the agency for 

performing the rocket burn, a critical maneuver, “in the blind,” as had been done a 

few years earlier, during Mars Polar Lander’s failed descent to the planet’s surface.106

Astronomers joined in the search for the lost comet hunter. Researchers at Kitt Peak, 

Arecibo, and Goldstone, as well as amateurs around the world, pointed their telescopes 

at CONTOUR’s last known location, the point where it was expected to be if the engine 

had fired normally, and many points in between, as well as other likely locations.

By the next morning, the news had broken that the spacecraft had been observed 

in two pieces. Jim Scotti, planetary scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory 

at the University of Arizona, and colleague Jeff Larsen, using the 70-inch telescope at 

Kitt Peak, had captured a picture of two objects, just 155 miles apart, moving past the 

Moon’s orbit and away from Earth, approximately where the spacecraft was expected 

to be.107 The spacecraft had broken into several pieces, just as Comet Schwassmann–

Wachmann 3, its intended target, had broken seven years earlier.

“We called everyone into the meeting room,” recalled Reynolds. “We had to just say, 

‘There’s three pieces. It looks bad. And we’ll keep looking, but it really does look bad.’ 

...[A]t that point it was not really recoverable, and everybody kind of accepted it.”108

The mission was not immediately declared a failure; there was still hope that the 

two pieces were an intact spacecraft and a piece of insulation, or the dust shield.109 In 

addition to the 16 August planned rotation of CONTOUR to use a different antenna 

to send its signal, the spacecraft would also send a distress signal—using both transmitters and all four antennas simultaneously—96 hours after the burn.110 This set of 

104 Carreau, M. (2002, 17 August). “Images show NASA craft in two pieces.” Houston Chronicle. 1; 

Zabarenko, D. (2002, August 16). “NASA loses contact with comet-chasing spacecraft.” Reuters.

105 Morring, F. (2002, 19 August). “Comet probe feared lost after maneuver.” Aviation Week & Space 

Technology. 27.

106 “Comet tour: learn and try again.” (2002, 26 August). Aviation Week & Space Technology. 74.

107 Antczak, J. (2002, 17 August). “Telescope image suggests catastrophe for lost NASA spacecraft.” 

AP Newswire.

108 Niebur, S. (2009, 31 July). Personal interview with E. Reynolds. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

109 Morring, F. (2002, 26 August). “Hopes are fading fast for lost comet probe.” Aviation Week & Space 

Technology. 68.

110 Leary, W. (2002, 17 August). “Missing spacecraft may have broken apart.” The New York Times.
NASA′s Discovery Program

118

signals would continue for 60 hours, from 19 to 22 August.111 Farquhar optimistically 

said that the two-object image meant that the mission controllers “know where to look 

now.”112 The CONTOUR team was given continuous use of the DSN antennas around 

the world on both 16 August and 19 August, but to no avail. DSN access was reduced 

to once a week after 25 August.113

The science team reacted strongly to the loss. Peter Thomas, a co-investigator and 

astronomer at Cornell, told a local newspaper, “At this point, it is in the hands of the 

folks who know how to track the spacecraft down.”114 Thomas had been through a burn 

anomaly before, with NEAR, which had been out of contact for 27 hours before it was 

recovered. Jim Bell, a co-investigator and assistant professor of astronomy at Cornell, 

also hoped for a NEAR repeat.115 Anita Cochran, a co-investigator and astronomer 

at the University of Texas, said, “If indeed the picture is what it appears to be, we can 

only hope to learn why it happened.”116 Instead of hearing the signal they hoped for, 

however, on 22 August, the team learned that new telescopic observations confirmed 

three objects in the field where CONTOUR went missing.117

The mission controllers tried repeatedly to contact the spacecraft during the window 

between solid rocket burn and the point of no return: the time when the spacecraft’s 

hydrazine tanks would no longer be sufficient to return it on a trajectory back to Earth. 

Farquhar admitted that the chance of contact was, by then, “one chance in 10,000.”118

They continued to search for the spacecraft, listening over the DSN for nine days 

straight, and then for eight hours once a week until December.119

By this time, the CONTOUR team and NASA were beginning to understand what 

had happened. The solid rocket motor shut down early, 48 seconds into the 50 second 

burn, just 3 percent shy of its optimum performance. What was not well understood 

was why, or what might have been observed by possible “dark assets” believed to have 

been deployed to watch CONTOUR’s burn over South Asia.120 Shortly thereafter, a 

111 Boyd, R. (2002, 22 August). “What’s in the core? Comets.” The Lexington Herald Leader. B8.

112 “Astronomers not giving up on missing US space probe.” (2002, 18 August). Agence France-Presse.

113 Morring, F. (2002, 26 August). “Hopes are fading fast for lost comet probe.” Aviation Week & Space 

Technology. 68.

114 James, R. (2002, 20 August). “Cornell’s comet mission goes to pieces.” The Post-Standard. A2.

115 “Cornell scientists holding out hope for comet mission.” (2002, August 20). AP Newswire.

116 James, R. (2002, 20 August). “Cornell’s comet mission goes to pieces.” The Post-Standard. A2.

117 “More evidence shows breakup of cometary probe.” (2002, August 22). Los Angeles Times. A17.

118 Morring, F. (2002, 26 August). “Hopes are fading fast for lost comet probe.” Aviation Week & Space 

Technology. 68.

119 Bridges, A. (2002, 26 August). “Scientists consider replacing comet probe.” Contra Costa Times. 12.

120 Morring, F. (2002, 26 August). “Hopes are fading fast for lost comet probe.” Aviation Week & Space 

Technology. 68.
Chapter 3: Harsh Landings

119

U.S. Space Command spokesman confirmed that they were watching, saying that the 

data would be made available to the CONTOUR Mishap Investigation Board on a 

“need to know” basis, and with appropriate security clearances.121

Farquhar characterized the members of his team as “heartsick” and “pretty depressed” 

over the loss.122 But the team regrouped.

On Monday, 25 August—10 days after the ill-fated rocket burn—CONTOUR mission leadership conceded that there was little hope of salvaging the mission. They 

immediately announced their plans to launch a replacement, CONTOUR 2, as early 

as April 2006. A 2006 launch would enable them to reach Encke and Schwassmann–

Wachmann 3 as planned. An immediate start to the sequel project would keep the 100 

APL team members and 60 scientists and engineers at other institutions from facing 

job losses or career changes.123

A rebuild of the CONTOUR spacecraft—sans solid rocket motor—would save 

$10 to $20 million over the first spacecraft’s $159 million cost, according to mission 

planners. There is no doubt that technical, management, and cost reviews would have 

scrutinized this proposal and cost estimate carefully, delving into the details of whatever would replace the Star 30 solid rocket motor—if, indeed, the Star 30 would be 

replaced. As Veverka admitted, “I have been trying to talk Bob [Farquhar] into not 

using a solid rocket motor on this particular mission.”124

Farquhar, in a separate interview, was on the same page, observing that a 2006 launch 

would not require a two-phase launch strategy and solid rocket motor.125 Instead, the 

spacecraft could utilize a Delta II Heavy launch vehicle with nine strap-on boosters 

and a greater hydrazine fuel load to use for larger course corrections that would be 

necessary during flight.126

The team was planning to “proceed aggressively with CONTOUR 2,” as Veverka, 

who would again be Principal Investigator, explained at the time.127 NASA Headquarters 

expressed less enthusiasm and did not solicit plans for CONTOUR 2; it would have to 

wait until the next Discovery competition four years away, in 2006.

121 David, L. (2002, 9 September). “CONTOUR loss viewed by U.S. military sensors.” Space.com.

122 Roylance, F. (2002, 24 August). “Hopes of recovering spacecraft are slim, NASA official says: 

CONTOUR, sent to study comets, fell silent Aug. 15.” The Baltimore Sun.

123 Roylance, F. (2002, 27 August). “Another CONTOUR could be launched: After loss of spacecraft, 

scientists quickly plan new comet-probe mission.” The Baltimore Sun. 3A.

124 Young, K. (2002, 26 August). “Comet craft likely lost; replacement postponed.” Florida Today.

125 Lane, E. (2002, 27 August). “2nd Comet craft envisioned.” Newsday. A16.

126 Morring, F. (2002, 9 September). “CONTOUR team wants to build a new probe.” Aviation Week & 

Space Technology. 40.

127 Roylance, F. (2002, 27 August). “Another CONTOUR could be launched: After loss of spacecraft, 

scientists quickly plan new comet-probe mission.” The Baltimore Sun. 3A.
NASA′s Discovery Program

120

As an act of due diligence, mission controllers on 17 December 2002, sent commands 

to the largest piece of the tracked spacecraft, using 34-meter and 70-meter antennas 

in the DSN, and listened for a response. The session lasted 12 hours, ending just past 

midnight. The team tried again to contact the spacecraft during a 4-hour window on 

Friday, 20 December, when the spacecraft antenna, if it still existed and was attached to 

a functional spacecraft, would again be pointed at Earth. When no signal was received 

that week, NASA and the Applied Physics Laboratory declared CONTOUR lost.128

APL received support for the ensuing investigation, but the science team did not 

receive sufficient funds for an orderly closeout and archiving of the project, according 

to Veverka.129

CONTOUR Mishap Investigation Board

Almost immediately, NASA convened a CONTOUR Mishap Investigation Board 

(MIB) to investigate the loss.130 APL had its own mishap investigation board, as did 

Alliant Techsystems. Each had its own motivations, and each wanted to know what 

had gone wrong.131

Ed Weiler, the Associate Administrator for space science at NASA Headquarters, 

appointed Theron M. Bradley, Jr., the agency’s chief engineer, to lead the investigation. The board would have an estimated work time of six to eight weeks.132 To help 

ameliorate “information overload,” the MIB used new NASA Investigation Organizer 

software to map the 145 CONTOUR mission review documents and 50 photos onto 

a representation of the main spacecraft system. Beyond that, little is known publicly 

because of U.S. intelligence assets involved in the investigation, and only those with 

an appropriate security clearance could attend every briefing.133

The NASA MIB rarely commented on its work. In February 2003, Bradley broke 

the board’s silence, telling the Associated Press that, while other causes for the loss of 

CONTOUR, such as collision with space debris, had not been ruled out, “the leading 

cause in our report” will be a faulty design of the spacecraft, with the motor positioned 

so that hot gases from the engine exhaust unexpectedly heated the probe.134

128 Leary, W. E. (2002, 21 December). “NASA gives up on CONTOUR.” New York Times. 17; and 

CONTOUR MIB report.

129 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 September). Personal interview with J. Veverka. Located in the “CONTOUR” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

130 NASA. (2003, 31 May). Contour mishap investigation board report. 

131 Niebur, S. (2009, 31 July). Personal interview with E. Reynolds. Located in the “CONTOUR” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

132 Carreau, M. (2002, 27 August). “NASA begins investigation into lost craft.” Houston Chronicle.

133 David, L. (2002, 27 August). “CONTOUR investigation using new software to probe mishap.” Space.com.

134 Bridges, A. (2003, 13 February). “Design defects may have doomed CONTOUR spacecraft.” The 

Associated Press.
Chapter 3: Harsh Landings

121

The final report bore this out, calling the hot exhaust plume from the solid rocket 

motor the “probable proximate cause” without ruling out three other possible causes: 

orbital debris, failure of the control systems, or catastrophic failure of the kick motor.135

The report of the CONTOUR MIB included a fault tree with details on each of these 

possible proximate causes and their potential relevance, as well as the identification 

of three root causes; seven significant observations; and additional recommendations 

addressing the effectiveness of communicating NASA’s lessons learned, engineering 

and documentation rigor, and the level of detail in technical reviews. The root causes 

include the CONTOUR project’s reliance on “analyses by similarity,” inadequate systems 

engineering processes, and inadequate reviews. Significant observations included the 

lack of telemetry during a critical event; significant reliance on subcontractors without 

adequate oversight, insight, and review; inadequate communication between APL and 

subcontractor Alliant Techsystems; use of Alliant Techsystems analytic models that 

were not specific to CONTOUR; limited understanding of plume heating environments 

for the solid rocket motor in space; no plan for encounters with orbital debris; and a 

limited understanding of CONTOUR and solid rocket motor operating conditions.136

Veverka recalled of the investigation: “I was not even invited into some of the 

reviews of the mishap. I had to get the information through Ed Reynolds. It was very 

bad.... It kind of illustrated this thing that—we pretend that the PI is in charge of a 

Discovery mission, but not really.”137 Interestingly, Project Manager Mary Chiu was 

never contacted by the MIB, despite being in overall charge of spacecraft success.138

Looking back, memories would differ about the fundamental issues of the solid 

rocket motor. Recalled Chiu, “Bob keeps saying that it was over its lifetime. I don’t 

remember that. I thought it was within lifetime.... I knew it was near the end of its 

lifetime, but I don’t think it was over, because I think we’d have run into some problems 

on that one. But the details kind of blur a little bit.”139

Farquhar, now deceased, described in his memoir the CONTOUR disaster data 

captured by military assets, along with his disdain of the MIB’s findings:

The 50-second burn appeared to go as expected for 48 seconds, but with only two seconds remaining, there was a dramatic increase in brightness. Although I am not an expert 

at interpreting the satellite data, it was fairly obvious that something catastrophic had 

occurred. This conclusion was later confirmed by telescopic observations that showed three 

135 NASA. (2003, 31 May). Contour mishap investigation board report.

136 Ibid.

137 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 September). Personal interview with J. Veverka. Located in the “CONTOUR” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

138 Niebur, S. (2009, 16 September). Personal interview with M. Chiu. Located in “CONTOUR” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

139 Ibid.
NASA′s Discovery Program

122

separate objects following CONTOUR’s targeted heliocentric trajectory. The telescopic data 

was consistent with an incomplete solid-rocket burn.140

He blamed residual solid rocket fuel that failed to remain bonded to the rocket 

wall breaking away, plugging the nozzle, and exploding. “NASA’s Mishap Investigation 

Board admitted that this failure scenario was a possibility, but they preferred to believe 

that the failure was caused by an improbable sequence of events that only someone 

like Rube Goldberg could envision.”141

Ultimately, though, was it all a waste? Ed Reynolds said not entirely. “People will 

say, ‘Oh, you blew $150 million....’ The money got distributed across the country really 

nicely. But we missed out on doing the science that we said we were going to do.”142

GENESIS AND STARDUST REVISITED

On 8 September 2004, just as the Discovery Program was regaining equanimity after 

the loss of CONTOUR, the Genesis sample return capsule crashed into Earth.

“Between an Eight and Nine”

On 8 September 2004, Hollywood stunt pilots planned to capture a capsule containing bits of the Sun. It would be the first NASA craft to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere 

since the Shuttle Columbia’s destruction in February the previous year.143 The Genesis 

team was ready. The helicopter pilots were ready, though one of them, interviewed at 

a NASA pre-return briefing, said of the challenge of a midair snag: “Out of a scale of 

one to ten, this is between an eight and nine.”144

NASA had never retrieved a sample in midair before. For that matter, the last NASA 

sample return had been done manually by the Apollo astronauts, who literally picked 

up rocks and carried them home. Still, midair capture had been around for a while. 

Nearly 50 years earlier, the Air Force had used a similar technique, and for decades it 

retrieved hundreds of film canisters from photoreconnaissance satellites.145

The reentry of a human-made object at a precise date and time provided opportunities for other types of research to be done as well. NASA’s Near Earth Object 

Observations program treated the incoming spacecraft as a tracking test, “to see if 

140 Farquhar, R. (2011). Fifty Years on the Space Frontier: Halo Orbits, Comets, Asteroids, and More. 

Denver: Outskirts Press. 220.

141 Ibid.

142 Niebur, S. (2009, 31 July). Personal interview with E. Reynolds. Located in the “CONTOUR” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

143 David, L. (2004, 31 August). “The Genesis payload: Just how dangerous are its contents?” Space.com.

144 Klotz, I. (2004, 21 August). “Probe set to return with sun sample.” The Discovery News.

145 Day, D. (1998). Eye in the Sky: The Story of the Corona Spy Satellites. Washington, DC: Smithsonian 

Institution Press.
Chapter 3: Harsh Landings

123

our software can predict a real impactor, instead of a near miss,” said Don Yeomans, 

previously of the CONTOUR team, and the Near Earth Object Observations project 

manager at JPL.146 Other astronomers prepared to watch the hot shock wave expected 

in front of the capsule during reentry, in hopes of learning more about entry conditions 

for incoming meteors.147 An Air Force plane, the Flying Infrared Signature Technologies 

Aircraft (FISTA), planned to observe the spectrum of the radiation associated with 

the spacecraft’s reentry as the air molecules around it became hot. Several groups 

of engineers were interested in the condition of the return capsule itself: data on its 

condition would help future mission designers determine the necessary parameters 

for future Earth return payloads of dust, rocks, and even astronauts.148

Engineers at Lockheed Martin were so confident of hitting the target ellipse that 

they actually set up a betting pool, complete with a map of the Utah Test and Training 

Range, to guess where in the ellipse the capsule would land. They expected the spacecraft 

to hit the 20.5-mile by 6.2-mile target (known as “the keyhole”) in the atmosphere over 

Oregon and the sample return capsule to return to Earth at just the right angle for the 

safe delivery of its contents. “The angle has to be controlled to better than a tenth of 

a degree,” said Joseph Vellinga, the Genesis project manager at Lockheed Martin. “It 

has to be hit very accurately.”149

The preceding 6 September critical trajectory maneuver was “right on the money,” 

according to Kenny Starnes, Genesis Team Chief at Lockheed Martin.150 Everything 

was lined up for a thrilling day.

A Thrilling Day

After 884 days collecting solar wind, on 8 September 2004, at 9:52 a.m. MDT, the 1.5-

meter, 210-kilogram sample return capsule entered Earth’s atmosphere “with pinpoint 

accuracy,” according to Chris Jones, Director of Solar System Exploration at JPL.151 It 

streaked across the sky over Oregon at 24,861 miles per hour, with energy “like a 4.5 

million pound freight train traveling at 80 miles per hour,” according to Bob Corwin, 

the Lockheed Martin capsule recovery chief.152 As hoped, it entered the entry ellipse 

at the Utah Test and Training Range. Two helicopters were in the air, ready to catch 

the spacecraft after its two parachutes deployed, first a small drogue chute and then 

a larger, rectangular one. Crowds in Utah and across the country watched events 

146 McKee, M. (2004, 5 September). “Capsule to bring the sun down to Earth.” New Scientist.

147 Pountney, M. (2004, 7 September). “Stunt pilots to catch space capsule.” The Melbourne Herald Sun.

148 McKee, M. (2004, 5 September). “Capsule to bring the sun down to Earth.” New Scientist.

149 Erickson, J. (2004, 6 September). “Rocket scientists take their best guesses on Genesis.” Scripps 

Howard News Service.

150 David, L. (2004, 7 September). “Genesis hits the mark for Utah reentry Wednesday.” Space.com.

151 McKee, M. (2004, 9 September). “Solar wind space capsule crashes.” The New Scientist.

152 Gugliotta, G. (2004, 9 September). “Spacecraft crashes with solar data.” The Washington Post. A3.
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unfold live on television. The helicopters were in the air at 9:25 a.m. The first images 

of the returning capsule appeared visible at 9:53 a.m. The spacecraft grew larger and 

larger as it approached. The pilots waited. The crowds waited. The parachutes waited. 

The helicopters waited. The capsule wasn’t slowing down. The drogue chute, expected 

to open two minutes and seven seconds after atmospheric entry, at an altitude of 

33 kilometers, did not deploy. The larger parafoil, intended to open six minutes later, 

at 6.1 kilometers, did not either.

“We do not see a drogue,” said a voice on television.153 Rather than drift gently for 

Hollywood stunt teams to snatch and set down, the spacecraft began to tumble wildly, 

falling far faster than anyone expected to see that day. Mission scientists, gathered for 

the moment of triumph, watched stone-faced.154

Chris Jones, the Director of Solar System Exploration at JPL, was on the air at the 

time. “Clearly something has gone wrong,” he said.155 The next words that television 

viewers around the world heard were those of the mission controller: “Ground impact.”156

The precious samples of the Sun that NASA had spent over $350 million to obtain 

and prepare for analysis hit the ground at 190 miles per hour. Half of the canister jutted pitifully from the earth; it and its inner sample container plates were breached and 

contaminated with mud. The soft floor of the Great Salt Lake Desert was the capsule’s 

salvation—it acted as a cushion for the human-made impactor. As Eileen Stansbery, 

the mission contamination control team lead, explained: “We actually landed sort of 

in a mud puddle. So, we had damp Utah soil interacting with the collector materials, 

although the energy associated with the impact sort of flash dried it...and therefore 

turned into concrete.”157

Genesis Project Scientist Amy Jurewicz later admitted that her first thought was, “Oh, 

my God. It’s a pancake.”158 Don Burnett, the mission PI, later recalled: “We were too busy 

to be traumatized. We had work to do. This was a contingency we had planned for.”159

Burnett pulled out the binder of landing contingencies the team had written years 

earlier. “We didn’t think we’d ever have to use it, but we were ready for it,” he later said. 

“The problem was the rest of NASA management didn’t know how ready we were.” 

The team had rehearsed an impact scenario a week earlier. They knew who would go 

153 Chong, J. (2004, 9 September). “In the end, Genesis finds mud on Earth.” The Los Angeles Times.

154 “Movie magicians fail to catch star dust.” (2004, 9 September). ABC News.

155 Chang, K., and Maria Newman. (2004, 9 September). “Space capsule crashes in Utah.” The 

New York Times.

156 Ibid.

157 Niebur, S. (2009, 25 March). Personal interview with D. Sweetnam and Eileen Stansbery. Located 

in “Genesis” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

158 Erickson, J. (2006, 15 March). “Genesis findings emerge.” Rocky Mountain News.

159 Rincon, P. (2006, 16 March). “Solar riches survive probe crash.” BBC News.
Chapter 3: Harsh Landings

125

to the site and what they would do there. “We knew the plan was to go out and pick 

up the pieces. It was worse than what we thought.... Everything was bent and broken, 

and there was a lot of stuff spilled out. Most of the material was contained inside, all 

broken. Karen [McNamara, the Genesis curation recovery lead] went out for two 

days and picked up stuff out of the dirt. She just shoveled the dirt in at some point.”160

Dave Lindstrom, the Program Scientist for the mission at NASA Headquarters, 

explained just how bad the situation was, saying, “The canister has been ripped open, 

and there is a six-inch gap between the top and bottom...the spacecraft is on one edge 

so that one major part of the cylindrical sample container was severely crushed. The 

other side was undamaged.”161

The sample recovery team secured the capsule and moved it to a temporary clean 

room at the Dugway Proving Ground, a U.S. Army facility south of the Utah Test and 

Training Range. The press had questions.162

Colin Pillinger, a co-investigator and professor at the Open University in the United 

Kingdom, told the BBC, “There could be fragments inside there that still contained 

some kind of scientific information. But the contamination from the desert is going to 

be a killer at the end of the day for the scientists.”163 Kevin McKeegan, a co-investigator 

and professor at UCLA, reminded reporters, “The solar wind ions cannot fall out from 

being hit hard.”164

Before shipping the samples to Houston, the team spent weeks in Utah painstakingly documenting the state of the samples and collector material. Everything was 

photographed, hand-drawn, and measured for its size and shape with notation on 

its configuration (e.g., this is highly scratched; that has mud splotches; that endured 

salt spray from the vaporizing of the dirt on impact). Everything was then extracted 

and packaged to minimize further damage and mitigate any further contamination 

during shipping.

According to Eileen Stansbery of the sample recovery team, the original plan called 

for the samples to be shipped to Houston by truck. She convinced the Director of 

Johnson Space Center to send an airplane for the sample team and the recovered 

160 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with D. Burnett. Located in “Genesis” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

161 Gugliotta, G. (2004, 10 September). “NASA hopes data can be salvaged from crashed craft.” The 

Washington Post. A3.

162 “Solar capsule crashes into Earth.” (2004, 9 September). BBC News.

163 Ibid.; Radford, T. (2004, 9 September). “Scientists left to pick up the pieces over the $250M can that 

fell to Earth.” The [U.K.] Guardian.

164 “Movie magicians fail to catch star dust.” (2004, 9 September). ABC Online.
NASA′s Discovery Program

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material. “We basically rode the samples home on the aircraft, on the NASA jet,” she 

recalled. “It was a much smoother ride. It took less time....”165 The rest of the capsule 

was shipped to Lockheed Martin for use in their investigation of what had gone wrong.

In a rare bit of good news, the spacecraft’s ion concentrator, which filtered out light 

protons and alpha particles, concentrating heavier ions onto a special collector tile, 

survived the crash. “Finding these concentrator targets in excellent condition after the 

Genesis crash was a real miracle,” said Roger Wiens, a mission co-investigator and the 

lead for the instruments provided by Los Alamos National Laboratory. “It raised our 

spirits a huge amount the day after the impact.”166 Andy Dantzler, the Director of the 

Solar System Exploration Division, credited the robustness of the spacecraft design 

with saving the samples despite the catastrophic landing.

The materials safely in Houston, the sample team got to work. “In addition to what 

was done in Utah, we would take a couple more images to sort of give you a gross 

characterization of how dirty it is before we start,” said Stansbery. “We have an imaging system that we were developing techniques on to count up the size and number 

of particles on a surface. So, you basically get an average dirt load off of it. We also 

needed to identify which regime that particular wafer was. That was something we 

could not do in Utah.”167

Because each of the five collector trays was designed with a different thickness, the 

team was able to use a measurement device to determine with certainty which tray 

the samples came from. 

Physics made cleaning the sample trays difficult. “The energy of the impact pulverized a lot of stuff to extremely small particle sizes—small enough particle sizes to where 

those particles, although sitting on the surface, they were attached by van der Waals 

forces,” Stansbery recalled. Ultrasonic cleaning with pure water was inadequate to the 

task. “Because the particle sizes were sufficiently small, we had to go to megasonic 

frequencies on the ultra-pure water.” Before the spacecraft had launched, the team had 

developed the megasonic technique to clean the collector array body.168

165 Niebur, S. (2009, 25 March). Personal interview with D. Sweetnam and Eileen Stansbery. Located 

in “Genesis” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

166 “NASA Announces Key Genesis Science Collectors In Excellent Shape.” (2005, 20 April). NASA 

Press Release. Downloaded from https://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2005/apr/HQ_05102_

genesis_collectors.html; Genesis Mission Status Report. (2004, 10 September). NASA Press Release. 

Downloaded from https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/genesismission/mission/status_report5.html.

167 Niebur, S. (2009, 7 July). Personal interview with E. Stansbery. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

168 Niebur, S. (2009, 7 July). Personal interview with E. Stansbery. Located in “Genesis” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
Chapter 3: Harsh Landings

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They started with the worst, most compromised samples—tiny fragments with little 

conceivable scientific utility—and sought to determine whether the cleaning technique 

would work. NASA Headquarters signed off on the experiment. In addition, the team 

sent out several samples to different labs to develop new cleaning techniques. Though 

the samples were consigned by the project to oblivion, in the end, those materials 

yielded science as well.

Mishap Investigation Board

NASA Headquarters appointed the Genesis Mishap Investigation Board (MIB) within 

three days of the crash landing, per agency protocol. They announced on 10 September 

2004 that the MIB would be led by Dr. Michael Ryschkewitsch, the director of the 

Applied Engineering and Technology Directorate at Goddard Space Flight Center. 

One week after the crash, the MIB held its first meeting. Their task was to determine 

the proximate cause of the crash, the root cause, and contributing factors, and to make 

recommendations for preventing similar problems with missions such as Stardust, 

which was next to return and used some similar design elements.

Ed Hirst, the mission manager of Genesis, recalled well the moment he found out. 

“Monday, as I’m driving into work, I got a phone call that says, ‘You need to make 

arrangements to go to Utah.’ And I’m on a plane by, like, two o’clock that afternoon,” 

he explained. “My job at that point was to be able to answer questions—as many questions as I could—from the Mishap Board.” He brought all the procedures, materials, 

and information he had available to the Utah Test and Training Range, where he met 

investigators and other members of the team.169 Ryschkewitsch, for his part, was careful not to hinder the science recovery underway.170

The first observed problem was that the drogue chute did not deploy. The drogue 

chute did not deploy because the pyrotechnics did not fire. The immediate question 

raised by the MIB was why the explosives didn’t go off. Was it the overheating battery 

that vexed the spacecraft early on? The explosives, Bob Corwin, the Lockheed Martin 

capsule recovery chief, pointed out, are part of a chain reaction. If the battery had 

failed, the pyrotechnics would not have ignited and the drogue chute and parafoil 

would not have deployed midair.171

169 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with E. Hirst. Located in “Genesis” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

170 Niebur, S. (2009, 25 March). Personal interview with D. Sweetnam and Eileen Stansbery. Located 

in “Genesis” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

171 Harwood, W. (2004, 9 September). “Genesis capsule slams back to Earth.” Spaceflight Now.
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Other possible culprits included issues with the onboard gravity sensor, intended 

to indicate Earth arrival, or some sort of electronic glitch in the capsule.172 Navigation 

had been precise, the spacecraft landing within the intended eight kilometers of target 

area. The navigation team felt certain whatever went wrong was not their work.

Initial analysis soon indicated that the likely cause of the crash was a flawed gravity switch design. It was installed properly, but a flaw prevented it from sensing the 

slowdown caused by the spacecraft’s atmospheric entry, and thus it did not start the 

timing sequence leading to the drogue and parafoil deployments.

The problem, at least in theory, could have been caught by pre-launch testing and 

initial reviews. Sweetnam explained, “I believe that there was a point early in the design 

phase where you’re essentially at a peer review level. Your avionics engineers, who 

really know about this, I think that’s the point where we had the best shot of catching 

this error.” As for prelaunch testing, he explained, it wasn’t simply a lapse in procedure. 

Rather it was the nature of the Discovery Program. “We were constrained. And so, we, 

the project, convinced itself that it didn’t need to do a system level test of the capsule. 

So, this was a money and time integration issue. They did some limited testing of the 

avionics boxes. They dropped them and the [gravity] switches worked. Well, okay, but 

had they put the capsule on a spin table and spun it up to simulate the deceleration 

forces, and actually gone through the process to simulate the entry deceleration curve, 

it would have caught it.”173

Though Stardust and Genesis shared similar hardware, the latter spacecraft’s avionics 

were sufficiently different that, regardless of the tests that Stardust ran, they would not 

have applied to Genesis. On 7 January 2006, the Salt Lake Tribune quoted Ryschkewitsch 

as saying Lockheed Martin had skipped a critical pre-launch test. “Clearly there was an 

error made, and there were some shortfalls in processes that you would hope would 

catch it.... [T]he safety nets were not there.”174 The MIB report released on 13 June 2006 

in part faulted the faster, better, cheaper philosophy for the disaster.175

A Good Planet to Crash Into

Eileen Stansbery, who led the sample recovery team, later recalled a quote by Don 

Burnett: “If you have to crash into a planet, Earth’s a good one to crash into because 

172 David, L. (2004, 9 September). “Bad battery may have doomed Genesis.” Space.com.

173 Niebur, S. (2009, March 25). Personal interview with D. Sweetnam and Eileen Stansbery. Located 

in “Genesis” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

174 Salt Lake City Tribune. (2006, 7 January). “Testing oversight may have doomed NASA’s $264M 

Genesis capsule.”

175 NASA. (2005, 30 November). Genesis Mishap Investigation Board Report.
Chapter 3: Harsh Landings

129

you can go get it.”176 The team had great success in recovering samples. Just 18 months 

after the crash landing, mission co-investigators presented their first science results 

at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, TX.177 Stansbery 

explained, “Even though the recovery was not the nominal plan, it all worked because 

the team was a good team, had good relationships, and everyone knew what to do in 

a wide variety of circumstances.”178

Amy Jurewicz credited the mission PI for the good relationships and strong communication among the missions’ scientists. “Don has been very innovative about making sure that everybody he could possibly get involved is involved.... He’s gone out to 

select not only people who are good at what they do, but also people who get along 

well together.”179

In late 2009 Ansgar Grimberg and colleagues published a striking analysis of the 

Genesis metallic glass exposed to the solar wind, their findings reverberating back to 

Apollo’s “aluminum foil experiments.” The Moon-based science project saw pieces of 

aluminum foil left on the ground for up to 45 hours at each of the five Apollo landing 

sites and then brought back to Earth for study. The idea was to collect atomic particles 

hailing from the Sun. Analyses showed that there was inconsistent enrichment of the 

captured heavier isotopes. Scientists attributed the variable enrichment to discrete 

high-energy events.180 The measurements of the Genesis metallic glass samples, on 

the other hand, revealed no need for such events.

Researchers using the Genesis samples were able to solve this long-debated quandary due to two aspects of good experiment design: the exposure environment was 

well-defined, and the selection of materials was an improvement over the foils used 

in the past. The metallic glass sample was exposed for three years, during which the 

state of the solar wind was consistently measured by other heliospheric spacecraft, 

including the Advanced Composition Explorer. ACE data showed that although there 

were significant high-energy solar flares during the time of flight, the fluence of the 

particles was far too small to reproduce the neon ratios seen in the lunar samples. 

Further, the time of flight was so short that very little neon would have been added to 

176 Niebur, S. (2009, 25 March). Personal interview with D. Sweetnam and Eileen Stansbery. Located 

in “Genesis” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

177 Rincon, P. (2006, 16 March). “Solar riches survive probe crash.” BBC News.

178 Niebur, S. (2009, 25 March). Personal interview with D. Sweetnam and Eileen Stansbery. Located 

in “Genesis” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

179 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with A. Jurewicz. Located in “Genesis” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

180 Geiss, J., Bühler, F., Cerutti, H., Eberhardt, P., Filleux, Ch., Meister, J., & Signer, P. (2004). “The 

Apollo SWC Experiment: Results, Conclusions, Consequences.” Space Science Reviews, 110(3/4), 

307–335. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:SPAC.0000023409.54469.40.
NASA′s Discovery Program

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the sample by the spallation of cosmic rays. These additional components could thus 

be ignored, and the investigators could determine whether the observed neon was 

consistent with a single source: the quiescent solar wind. 181

Unlike the aluminum foil, when the bulk metallic glass was cleaned (etching in 

vacuo), the material allowed researchers to create high-resolution depth profiling of 

the implanted noble gases. Researchers were ultimately able to eliminate the need for 

an additional flux of high-energy solar particles that had long been theorized for the 

lunar foils.182

The Care and Feeding of a Discovery AO

In 1998, the Discovery Program held a “lessons learned” workshop—something it 

had done consistently so as to keep the program “of the community.” Attendees were 

candid in their responses. Ultimately, NASA Headquarters accepted several recommendations to emerge from the community: First, the Discovery Program would 

increase the number of proposal reviewers. It would also constrain the proposal summary issued with the post–Step 1 press release, to protect proprietary information. 

The program would shorten the evaluation process. Moreover, NASA would establish 

a steering committee to investigate the possibility of funding future mission studies 

and to provide recommendations for implementation.

On 31 March 1998, NASA’s Office of Space Science Applications released the 1998 

Discovery Announcement of Opportunity. This AO was the first with Technical, 

Management, Cost, and Outreach (TMCO, later called TMC) to be run by the program support office at NASA’s Langley Research Center. This process would remain in 

effect for the next decade. Wayne Ritchie was the first Discovery Acquisition Manager 

at Langley; Brad Perry succeeded him in this role and was then named director of the 

Science Support Office (later called the Science Office for Mission Assessments). Gloria 

Hernandez, and later, Carlos Liceaga, filled the acquisition manager role for Discovery.

The process by which the AO had been drafted was by then well established, having been hashed out previously over several AO cycles led by the Discovery Program 

Office at NASA Headquarters and implemented by the Lunar and Planetary Institute 

in Houston. The Langley office further formalized the process, crystallizing it into 

standard operating procedures. When an AO was to be released, the program scientist at NASA Headquarters took the previous AO and made modifications in accordance with policy changes prompted by reviews, management, and lessons learned. 

181 Wimmer-Schweingruber, R. F., SOHO (Artificial satellite), & Advanced Composition Explorer 

(Artificial satellite) (Eds.). (2001). “Solar and galactic composition: A joint SOHO/ACE workshop”: 

Bern, Switzerland, 6–9 March 2001. American Institute of Physics.

182 Grimberg, A., Baur, H., Bochsler, P., Bühler, F., Burnett, D. S., Hays, C. C., Heber, V. S., Jurewicz, 

A. J. G., & Wieler, R. (2006). “Solar Wind Neon from Genesis: Implications for the Lunar Noble Gas 

Record.” Science, 314(5802), 1133–1135. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1133568.
Chapter 3: Harsh Landings

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Approximately six months before the release date, the program scientist would share 

the plans and revisions with a corresponding acquisition manager at Langley. Together, 

they would review the AO for clarity and to ensure that the necessary details—and 

only the necessary details—were requested as requirements or guidelines. In other 

programs, this work was often done in concert with the program executives as well, 

but “in planetary, it traditionally has always been a very strong interface role with the 

program scientist,” said Brad Perry in a 2009 interview.183

The acquisition manager would then populate a program library with supporting 

documentation. This program library was originally released with each AO but now 

lived on a static website (updated before the release of each AO) that could be used by 

the community in planning future missions even before the AO was released.

Langley would support and implement a “pre-proposal bidders’ conference” for PIs, 

project managers, and, increasingly, new business representatives from the management institutions and industry partners wishing to bid. At this conference, extensive 

question-and-answer sessions were encouraged, and a transcript would be posted 

online afterward so that the discussion could be done “fairly, uniformly, inclusively,” 

in Perry’s words.184 In later days, the bidders’ conferences would be opened to participation by telephone and/or streamed live over the web to ensure that prospective 

bidders’ questions would be answered in full view of competing teams.

Even before proposals were submitted, TMCO review teams had been selected 

from experts in the community and leaders in their subfields. They were the proposers’ peers: people who had substantially contributed to previous missions in the space 

science community. Staffing such panels could be difficult, as in the search for wellqualified reviewers, the majority of people still working on space science missions were 

either still involved in proposing space science missions, collaborating with scientists 

or managers listed on current proposals, or employed by an institution proposing to 

the particular opportunity they would be reviewing. People in any of those situations 

would be “conflicted” and thus not eligible to serve on review panels. To streamline 

the forming of review panels, many reviewers were pre-selected during the proposal 

period from people not involved in any form or fashion with the proposing teams. 

The standard areas of cost, schedule, and management could be filled this way, with 

specific technology experts added as the need for them became apparent based on 

the proposals received by the due date.

After a compliance screening by the program scientist and other program support specialists at NASA Headquarters and their contractor staff, the Discovery 

183 Niebur, S. (2009, April 27). Personal interview with B. Perry. Located in the “Discovery Program” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

184 Ibid.
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Program Acquisition Manager at Langley would then lead an independent Technical, 

Management, Cost review of all proposals and attend the categorization, steering, and 

selection meetings at NASA Headquarters.

Separately, the program scientist would lead a review of the proposals’ scientific 

merit with planetary scientists and exoplanet scientists from the community, and 

education and outreach professionals would evaluate the completeness of the education and outreach plans. Some years, the latter part was done by education and 

public outreach professionals serving on the Technical, Management, Cost panels; 

some years, the education and outreach plans would be reviewed separately under 

the direction of the Science Mission Directorate education and public outreach lead 

or his or her designee. In all, the proposals would be evaluated using the five criteria 

from the 1998 AO:

• Scientific merit of the investigation

• Total cost of the mission to NASA

• Technical merit and feasibility of the science investigation

• Feasibility of the mission implementation scheme

• Education, outreach, technology, and small disadvantaged business activities185

The “scientific merit” criterion was given the greatest weight, with the “cost of the 

mission to NASA” item given a slightly lower weight. The remaining three criteria were 

given still lower and approximately equal weighting.186 The results of these reviews could 

be summed up in a matrix consisting of scientific merit adjectival ratings (Excellent, 

Very Good, Good, Fair, Poor) and TMC/TMCO risk ratings (Low Risk, Medium Risk, 

High Risk). These ratings were presented at a NASA Headquarters Categorization 

Committee, which, based on the ratings alone, would divide the mission concepts 

into four categories.

A mission rated “Excellent” and “Low Risk” was typically Category I or II. A mission rated “Fair” or “Good” and “High Risk” would be Category IV. A mission that 

would be Category I except for a single risky technology could be called Category III 

if funds were available to help the proposing institution or institutions develop that 

technology to a satisfactory technology readiness level in the near term, but this was 

not a requirement on NASA Headquarters; such missions could easily be assigned 

Category IV in years where insufficient money was available to assist.

After categorization came the steering committee, an ad hoc NASA Headquarters 

committee that evaluated how the review panels were run and the categorization decided. 

185 Bergstralh, J. (1998, January 28). “AO Overview, Proposal Review Process, Categorization, & 

Evaluation.” Presentation to the Discovery Missions Program Lessons Learned Workshop.

186 Ibid.
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Once the steering committee determined that the review had been held appropriately 

and the categorizations were upheld, the program scientist and acquisition manager 

could take the Category I mission concepts to the Associate Administrator for selection. 

The selection meeting was a formal affair, attended by the Associate Administrator, one 

or more of his or her deputies, all the division directors, including resource management, as well as many top-level managers in the office, including the chief scientist, 

chief engineer, and chief technologist. The discussion would be pre-decisional and 

confidential. After the discussion, the program scientist and division director, among 

others, would prepare a press release, signed and released by the Associate Administrator, 

with three to five mission concepts formally selected for further study.

After the proposing teams were debriefed, those funded for mission concept studies—often called Phase A—were invited to a kickoff meeting, typically at or near NASA 

Headquarters. Since the competing concept studies were being reviewed almost entirely 

for their respective technical, management, cost, small business, and outreach plans, 

the Concept Study Review kickoff meetings and presentations were led in large part 

by the acquisition manager at Langley, who defined the rules of engagement for the 

proposing teams as they performed the next stage of work, prepared their Concept 

Study Report, and hosted the TMC reviewers for a site visit.

The proposing teams would have several months to perform a concept study and 

refine their mission concept while reducing perceived risks to the mission. After each 

concept study was completed, 30 to 50 copies of the report would be delivered to NASA 

Headquarters. The reports would then be thoroughly dissected by TMC reviewers, 

who would provide each team with questions of clarification to be answered at the site 

visit, rather than impetuses for new work. Typically, the questions were provided only 

a few days to a couple of weeks before the site visit. The TMC reviewers contracted by 

Langley were heavily engaged in both review processes and site visits. The site visits 

were a chance for a two-way exchange between select reviewers, representing all the 

major areas of review, and the mission teams. This “Step 2 review” was in sharp contrast 

to the parameters observed in the Step 1 review, where the reviewers gave reasonable 

benefit of the doubt to each proposal team.

“If they have an inconsistency in their proposal between one section and another, 

we try to read what their intent was,” said Brad Perry, then–Discovery acquisition 

manager at Langley. “If it is within reason to give benefit of the doubt, we do that. 

We try to not have interaction with the proposal teams during this first step review 

process. All of that is changed when we do the site visit process on Step 2 or Phase A 
NASA′s Discovery Program

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Concept Study Report review. There we get to drill down and get absolute detail at the 

lowest available information level so that we can completely understand the situation 

and eliminate any doubt.”187

Select reviewers would visit the proposing team’s location of preference, hear the 

answers to the submitted questions, and interact fully with the team, producing a 

supplemental set of information complementing the Concept Study Report. Activities 

were in large part up to the proposing team, who often arranged a site tour, a technology demonstration, science exhibits, and anything else that might be convincing to 

the reviewers that the team was up to the challenge.

Phase A by 1998 was very competitive, as both the stakes and the odds of selection 

were higher when just a handful of teams were competing for the chance to build a 

$300 million mission.188 AO parameters that year allowed the proposal of investigations 

addressing elements of solar system exploration, or the search for extrasolar planetary 

systems. Missions were cost-capped at $190 million in Fiscal Year 1999 dollars over 

36 months, with a total mission cost of $299 million. Any mission was required to 

launch by 30 September 2004.

Missions of opportunity, as well as proposals for scientific investigations and instrumentation as part of a foreign mission, were encouraged to be submitted at the same 

time; the number of opportunities for U.S. scientists to fly instruments on non-NASA 

missions had increased without a corresponding funding avenue for instrument design 

and construction, or subsequent data analysis. Previously, instrument PIs on nonNASA missions could propose for support using an unsolicited proposal to NASA 

Headquarters, but there was no infrastructure, published guidelines, or peer review 

for this process. By allowing this opportunity in the Discovery Program, such smaller, 

$35 million–capped investigations could undergo scientific merit, technical, management, and cost reviews with rigor approximating the rigor with which full missions 

were reviewed and selected.189

Once the AO went out, “notice of intents” from proposers were due in one month: 

on 30 April 1998. Full proposals were then due two months after, on 29 June. While the 

proposals were in review, Wes Huntress, who had spearheaded the Discovery Program 

and was a selecting official for the AO, retired from NASA. On 28 September 1998, 

Ed Weiler—who had served as the science director of the Astronomical Search for 

Origins and Planetary Systems theme of the OSS since March 1996—was appointed 

187 Niebur, S. (2009, 11 April). Personal interview with B. Perry. Located in the “Discovery Program” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

188 Ibid.

189 Niebur, S. (2008, October). Personal interview with J. Bergstralh. Located in “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.
Chapter 3: Harsh Landings

135

acting Associate Administrator. The same week that the Discovery selections were 

announced, Weiler assumed the role permanently. He lavished praise on the concepts 

under study, saying: “The degree of innovation in these proposals climbs higher each 

time we solicit ideas.”190

On 12 November 1998, NASA Headquarters selected five missions for concept 

study out of 30 proposals: Aladdin, Deep Impact, INSIDE Jupiter, MESSENGER, and 

VESPER. (Of the 30, seven were to explore comets and asteroids; seven would explore 

elements of the Mars system; four each were proposed for Mercury and Venus; two 

were set for the Moon; one would observe Jupiter; four were telescope-type investigations; and one was a mission of opportunity to contribute to an instrument on the 

European Space Agency’s Mars Express.)

Aladdin would send small impactors to the surface of the two Martian moons, 

Phobos and Deimos; fly through the plumes of excavated material; and deploy a “flying 

carpet” to collect the samples before returning them to Earth.191 The mission would be 

led by Dr. Carle Pieters of Brown University and developed by APL at a total mission 

cost to NASA, including launch vehicle and operations, of $247.7 million.

Deep Impact would be a flyby mission designed to fire a 1,100-pound (500-kilogram) 

copper projectile into the Comet 9P/Tempel 1, excavating a large crater more than 65 feet 

(20 meters) deep to expose its pristine interior of ice and rock. Deep Impact would be 

led by Dr. Michael A’Hearn of the University of Maryland. The proposal manager was 

Dr. Cliff Anderson at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The planned trajectory included 

launch in January 2004, an Earth gravity assist flyby in January 2005, and arrival at 

Tempel 1 in July 2005, just five months earlier than the planned DS-4/Champollion 

landing on a comet. Measurements would include camera; white-light and mediumband images of the impact and resulting crater; and near-infrared spectral images of 

the outflowing hot debris, surface, and outgassing to the coma before, during, and 

after the event. The total proposed cost was $203.8 million.192

The Interior Structure and Internal Dynamical Evolution of Jupiter, or INSIDE 

Jupiter, would orbit Jupiter in a high-inclination orbit passing within 1,000 kilometers 

of the surface of the planet. The mission would be led by Dr. Edward Smith, Ulysses 

project scientist, with Tom Spilker as proposal manager and a co-investigator. INSIDE 

Jupiter would launch on a Delta II rocket in February 2004, fly by Earth in January 2006, 

and arrive at Jupiter in April 2008. It would observe and study the gas giant’s interior 

and its relationship to the atmosphere for 15 months before mission’s end in August 

2009. The high-inclination orbit would be ideal for mapping the planet’s gravity and 

190 “JPL-teamed Discovery proposals selected for study.” (1998, 25 November). JPL Universe, 28(24). 1.

191 Taverna, Michael A., “Mercury and Venus sample returns eyed,” Aviation Week & Space Technology, 

15 February 1999, p. 23.

192 “JPL-teamed Discovery proposals selected for study.” (1998, 25 November). JPL Universe, 28(24). 1.
NASA′s Discovery Program

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magnetic fields. Co-investigator John Anderson led the gravitational fields investigation. Other investigations would include radio occultation experiments to study the 

atmospheric structure and an energetic particle spectrometer (led by co-investigator 

Neil Murphy) to study magnetic fields and characterize the environment. Other coinvestigators included Andrew Ingersoll of Caltech, David Hinson of Stanford, William 

Hubbard of the University of Arizona, Barry Mauk of Johns Hopkins University, David 

Stevenson of Caltech, and G. Leonard Tyler of Stanford. The spacecraft would be 

designed and built by Ball, with program management by the PI’s institution, JPL. It 

would cost $227.3 million.193

The MErcury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging mission, 

or MESSENGER, would carry seven instruments to image the entire planet Mercury 

for the first time. MESSENGER would be led by Dr. Sean Solomon of the Carnegie 

Institution, Washington, DC, and developed at APL, for a total cost of $279.3 million.

The Venus Sounder for Planetary Exploration, Vesper, was an orbiter concept carrying four instruments to measure the composition and dynamic circulation of the 

middle atmosphere of Venus and its similarities to processes in Earth’s atmosphere. 

Vesper would be led by Dr. Gordon Chin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, 

Greenbelt, MD, at a total cost of $195.8 million. Aladdin and MESSENGER had also 

been finalists in the previous round of Discovery Program mission selections in 1997.

NASA’s Office of Space Science also announced the selection of a mission of opportunity without the need for concept study. The funded investigation would supply 

portions of an instrument—the Analyzer of Space Plasmas and Energetic Atoms, or 

ASPERA-3—to study the interaction between the solar wind and Martian atmosphere. 

It would fly on ESA’s Mars Express in 2003. ASPERA-3’s PI was Dr. Rickard Lundin of 

the Swedish Institute of Space Physics in Kiruna, Sweden. The co-investigator funded by 

NASA was Dr. David Winningham of the Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, 

TX. NASA would provide approximately $5.3 million for the electron and ion spectrometer to be prepared for launch in 2003 aboard the Mars Express mission. In the 

same announcement, NASA confirmed that Missions of Opportunity would be welcome 

in all future Discovery and Explorer Program Announcements of Opportunity.194

Each team received $375,000 to conduct a four-month implementation feasibility 

study focused on technical, management, and cost plans, including small business and 

193 Ibid.

194 NASA. (1998, 12 November). “Five Discovery Mission proposals selected for feasibility studies.” 

NASA press release 98-203.
Chapter 3: Harsh Landings

137

educational outreach. Cost was allowed to grow 20 percent. Concept study reports 

would be due 31 March 1999. APL submitted only two proposals to this round; both 

were selected for concept study.195

Discovery Program Office

While the teams were performing concept studies and writing their Phase A reports, 

NASA and the Discovery Program were not standing still. Dan Goldin was executing 

yet another massive Reduction in Force at NASA Headquarters and sending program 

management to agency centers across the country. Program management of Discovery 

had been transferred to the NASA Management Office (NMO) at JPL, who filled the 

position of Discovery Program Manager with Dave Jarrett in February 1999. Jarrett, 

already program manager of Discovery at NASA Headquarters, thus became a NASA 

Headquarters civil servant stationed at the NMO overseeing projects that were managed by JPL and its competitors. He was to be supported by Bob Metzger, who was 

to run the Discovery Program Support Office, and JPL personnel. Metzger had just 

finished working with New Millennium, a NASA project to improve the engineering validation of new technologies for space applications. Both men reported to Bob 

Parker, who led the NMO.

Jarrett met with Jim Barrowman of the Explorers Program Office at Goddard Space 

Flight Center and worked with Metzger to define the office needs. Several of the first 

hires, such as Sherry Asplund, a strong advocate for education and public outreach, 

and Kate Wolf, NMO contracting officer and procurement specialist, continued to support the program for years. Wolf ’s civil servant position was critical, as the Discovery 

Program budget required distribution of funds to APL, the Southwest Research Institute, 

and universities across the country—a task that JPL contractors, many of whom were 

Caltech employees, could not tackle. Wolf received the budget and contracting information from Craig Tupper at NASA Headquarters and was immediately set to work 

keeping the money flowing, particularly at critical junctures such as phase transitions—colloquially called “bridge funding”—which would be a contracting challenge 

for several AO competition cycles.

Bridge funding was to help proposal teams move from phase to phase financially 

seamlessly, even though proper contracts took many months to fully execute. Bridge 

funding and the need to set up multiphase contract vehicles (which JPL practices 

did not support at the time) had been an issue since the 1992 San Juan Capistrano 

Workshop. The trouble was exacerbated by the fact that JPL itself was run under contract 

195 Roylance, F. (1998, 27 November). “Maryland would play major role in 4 missions considered to 

planets; Universities, Goddard make space big industry. “The Baltimore Sun. 2B.
NASA′s Discovery Program

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to Caltech; JPL was not allowed to issue contracts beyond the period of performance 

of their own contract, presenting difficulties for every mission that overlapped two 

JPL periods of performance.196

Jarrett and Wolf eventually met with numerous offices, including Goddard’s legal 

department and JPL’s legal department, to enable multiphase contracts that ran from 

the selection of the investigation to the end of the mission, with huge benefit to the 

Discovery Program and its missions.

Jarrett and Wolf would go on to streamline other contracting changes, including 

changing the Genesis and Stardust PI funding vehicles from grants issued by the project 

(which then reported to the PI) to contracts developed by the NMO and issued by 

NASA Headquarters. The contract structure allowed monthly reports from the PI to 

NMO and NASA Headquarters, where the previous grant-from-the-project structure 

would have had the PI reporting to the project, which reported to the PI, which was 

effectively circular. The change increased accountability from the PI directly to NASA, 

in keeping with the goals of NASA Headquarters at the time. It also reduced overhead 

necessary when JPL, for example, administered a PI’s grant, as no JPL overhead funds 

would be necessary if the funding vehicle was issued directly from procurement at 

NASA Headquarters.

Wolf and Jarrett also made an effort to start the contracts at concept study, to avoid 

later procurement-based delays, but this effort was thwarted by the NASA Headquarters 

procurement office, which preferred to issue a single contract for the concept study 

to the lead institution, rather than separately to APL, JPL, Goddard, and the PIs as 

would be required.

Jarrett would hold annual project retreats to increase communication between the 

project office, the project managers, and the PIs in the different projects. At first, he 

said, he was asked point-blank why a program office was necessary, as the projects 

didn’t really need to communicate. Over time, that changed, and the retreats became 

once or twice a year, depending on whether an AO was out in the wild. Jarrett recalls 

interactions with Joe Veverka, the experienced CONTOUR PI, when he arrived, who 

argued that the APL funding should flow through his institution, Cornell, instead 

of through JPL or directly from NASA Headquarters. If one is to consider issues of 

accountability, Veverka was right on target with this request. The person who holds 

the contract is, de facto, in charge. Jarrett and Wolf were convinced...to an extent. To 

avoid the overhead imposed by Cornell on pass-through funds to APL or JPL, Wolf 

created a form that required the PI’s signature before any funds would be transferred 

196 Niebur, S. (2009, 14 May). Personal interview with D. Jarrett and Kate Wolf. Located in “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.
Chapter 3: Harsh Landings

139

for the project. Once the PI signed, she would request that NASA Headquarters send 

the funds directly to APL or JPL, avoiding the overhead on the pass-through yet giving 

the PI full control of the distribution of funds.197

Just as the project office was getting into the swing of things with the CONTOUR, 

Genesis, and Stardust missions, NASA selected two new missions on 7 July 1999: the 

comet impact mission Deep Impact, and MESSENGER, the “flagship-quality” mission to Mercury.198

Figure 3-1: Genesis spacecraft 

Workers in the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility check the solar arrays on the Genesis spacecraft. 

The white object on the end, in front of the arrays, is the Sample Return Canister backshell, inside of 

which are the collector arrays. (Image credit: NASA, image no. KSC-01pp1073)

197 Ibid.

198 “NASA Selects Missions to Mercury and a Comet’s Interior as Next Discovery Flights.” (1999, 

7  July). NASA Press Release. Downloaded from http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/news/

discovery_pr_19990707.html.
NASA′s Discovery Program

140

Figure 3-2: Genesis Sample Return Capsule

The Genesis Sample Return Capsule on the ground in Utah. The impact occurred near Granite Peak on 

a remote portion of the Utah Test and Training Range. (Image credit: USAF 388th Range Sqd./NASA)

Figure 3-3: Genesis sample returns to Johnson Space Center 

Containers of solar wind samples from the Genesis Sample Return Capsule are unloaded upon arrival at 

Johnson Space Center (JSC). Samples are en route to the JSC Astromaterials Curation Facility. (Image 

credit: NASA, image no. jsc2004e43847)
141

STARDUST SAMPLE RETURN AND STARDUST NEXT

The Genesis crash landing set off a cascade effect across NASA’s planetary science 

program, beginning with Stardust, which shared spacecraft design elements. “It 

affected us because Genesis had done everything right,” said Don Brownlee, the PI 

of Stardust. The project endured a dozen reviews in the Genesis aftermath. “A lot of 

money and a lot of time. A tremendous amount of strain on people when they should 

have been really worried about making sure everything worked right. They had to do 

all these studies.”1

Even Mars was dragged into the fray. Lockheed Martin, which had built the illfated Genesis and, before that, the doomed Mars Climate Orbiter, endured additional 

agency oversight as it continued building a new spacecraft, the Mars Reconnaissance 

1 Niebur, S. (2009, 25 March). Personal interview with D. Brownlee. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

CHAPTER 4

Applying Lessons Learned
NASA′s Discovery Program

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Orbiter.2 Even missions still on the drawing board were given additional scrutiny. In 

the distant future, the Mars Program was set to culminate with a sample return mission. What if a capsule of pristine soil from Mars crashed on Earth? Mars microbes 

could conceivably spill onto the surface of Earth.3

NASA required the Stardust project to conduct additional ground tests to ensure that 

the robot in space would work as planned. Engineers pulled blueprints for analysis and 

studied pre-launch photos of the Stardust hardware for any possible oversights. They even 

looked at previous spacecraft for insight on what they might expect. Another rigorous 

investigation lasted more than three months and was intended to determine whether 

the gravity switches on the Stardust capsule were installed in the correct orientation.

“In the end,” Brownlee said, “we felt very confident that if there was some screw up 

it was not for some entirely stupid thing.”4 According to Tom Duxbury, the Stardust 

project manager, “Because of the Genesis mishap, we had full JPL management attention. Shortly after that, we had mission assurance, system engineering, navigation chief, 

safety, etc. positions filled and review boards beyond our imagination.” Testing had to 

account for return conditions very different for Stardust versus Genesis. “Significantly 

more effort was required for reporting and review. Genesis operated in broad daylight 

at three o’clock in the afternoon at 70-degree temperatures. We came in at 3:00 in the 

morning at minus 20 degrees where it could be snowed in, fogged in, or rainstorms.”5

At a pre-return news conference in December 2005, Ed Hirst, Stardust mission manager, stated that his team was very confident that the Genesis problem would not be 

repeated on Stardust.

The team started working through the worst-case scenarios one by one. “If we do 

hit hard, what do we expect to happen, and what should we be prepared to do? If we 

land in a puddle—there was a list of, half a dozen things that we needed to be ready to 

address,” Hirst recalled. “That was the second part of the lesson learned: Don’t assume 

everything’s going to happen nominally.”6

2 “NASA putting extra scrutiny on other missions in wake of Genesis.” (2004, 19 October). Aviation 

Week’s Aerospace Daily, 21(13).

3 David, L. (2004, 20 September). “Genesis mishap renews debate about Mars sample return.” 

SpaceNews. 8.

4 Niebur, S. (2009, 25 March). Personal interview with D. Brownlee. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

5 Niebur, S. (2009, 4 September). Personal interview with T. Duxbury. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

6 Niebur, S. (2009, August 10). Personal interview with E. Hirst. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.
Chapter 4: Applying Lessons Learned

143

Duxbury recalled the hours before Stardust’s arrival at Earth. “We had clear skies 

and nearly a full moon with the temperature near freezing, much better than what we 

trained and were prepared for,” he said. In addition to the recovery team of 15 members 

of the Stardust project, “mission control” at the Utah Test and Training Range hosted 

officials from the Army, the Air Force, NASA, and JPL. He said the team modeled its 

recovery effort on that used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.7

Just after midnight on Sunday, 15 January, the Stardust spacecraft released its 

46-kilogram sample return capsule. Four hours later, it entered Earth’s atmosphere 

over California near the Oregon border.8 The Stardust capsule blazed through the 

atmosphere at 46,440 kilometers per hour.9 Duxbury said, “When we saw that drogue 

chute open, we knew we were home safe.”10

People in California, Nevada, and Utah who were up at this early hour had a spectacular view of the capsule’s arrival. When it reached ten thousand feet at 5:05 a.m., 

Duxbury said over the radio: “All stations, the main chute is open, and we’re coming 

down slow.” Shortly thereafter, he added: “Okay, we’re on the ground.” Unlike Genesis, 

which also arrived on the ground, the Stardust capsule did so gracefully. The spacecraft return capsule bounded five times through soft mud due to wind at the landing 

site, settling on its rim before rolling, wobbling, and spiraling to a rest at 5:12 a.m. 

EST.11 Three helicopter crews raced to find the capsule in the pre-dawn darkness, a 

task made more difficult by winds that morning. A storm had preceded the landing, 

and another followed.12

The team had intended to have a television camera set up onsite to send back live 

coverage of the recovery, but at the last minute, the Blackhawk helicopter and crew were 

dispatched to Iraq. (The United States had invaded the country three years earlier.) A 

smaller Bell helicopter, assigned now to the recovery, did not have enough room for 

both the recovery team and TV equipment.

The first helicopter sighted the main parachute on the ground at 5:43 a.m., 

and the capsule itself six minutes before 6 a.m. on Sunday, 15 January 2006. “The 

7 Niebur, S. (2009, September 4). Personal interview with T. Duxbury. Located in “Stardust” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

8 Gugliotta, G. (2006, January 16). “Stardust capsule brings first comet sample to Earth.” The 

Washington Post.

9 Potter, N. (2005, December 22). “Comet mission set for return to Earth.” ABC News; Niebur, S. 

(2009, September 4). Personal interview with T. Duxbury. Located in “Stardust” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

10 Hunt, K. (2006, January 18). “Galaxy’s secrets land safely in desert.” Tooele (UT) Transcript Bulletin.

11 Gugliotta, G. (2006, 16 January). “Stardust capsule brings first comet sample to Earth.” The 

Washington Post; Bauman, J. (2006, 18 January). “Stardust cargo is flown to Houston.” Deseret 

Morning News (UT).

12 Niebur, S. (2009, 4 September). Personal interview with T. Duxbury. Located in “Stardust” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
NASA′s Discovery Program

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canister is closed tight,” reported Scott Sandford, a co-investigator and member of 

the recovery team.13 The capsule was pristine. No water penetrated it upon landing 

in the muddy ground.

The recovery teams collected the capsule and flew it to the clean room at Dugway 

Proving Grounds. Duxbury recalled: “Everyone wanted to jump in a helicopter and go 

see the capsule while it was being prepared to be brought back.... We all wanted to be 

there.”14 A support team remained ready at the command center in case the recovery 

team encountered problems. 

Inside the cleanroom, the capsule was opened by unscrewing the backshell, removing 

it and the heat shield, and then extracting the science canister. The sample team purged 

the canister with nitrogen and packed it carefully for its flight to Johnson Space Center.

Thin slices of the already microscopic grains of dust collected by the Stardust aerogel collectors were distributed to 180 scientists worldwide. Early results included the 

identification of complex carbon molecules, along with organics—the kinds necessary 

for the evolution of life, giving credence to the concept that the precursor ingredients 

for life on Earth may have originated in space.15 These organics were unusual enough, 

oxygen- and nitrogen-rich, with large amounts of alcohols and other volatiles, to lead 

Sandford to conclude, months later, “A portion of the organic material in the samples 

is unlike anything seen before in extraterrestrial materials.”16

By March 2006, researchers had announced that the cometary particles contained 

minerals that formed under extremely high temperatures, indicating their formation 

around a star, either our own or one elsewhere in the galaxy. “In the coldest part of 

the solar system we’ve found samples that formed at extremely high temperatures,” 

Brownlee explained. “When these minerals were formed, they were either red-hot 

or white-hot grains, and yet they were collected in a comet, the Siberia of the solar 

system.”17 This was an unexpected result for grains contained in a comet formed in the 

icy-cold outer edges of the solar system. By December, researchers had found a very 

unusual particle indeed—one that contained 150 percent more heavy oxygen (17O or 

18O) than typical for the Sun, Earth—indeed, the whole solar system.18

13 “Pinch of comet dust lands safely on Earth.” (2006, 18 January). New Scientist.

14 Niebur, S. (2009, 4 September). Personal interview with T. Duxbury. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

15 Leake, J. (2006, 5 March). “Comet dust holds building blocks of life.” Times of London.

16 Bluck, J. (2006, December). “NASA study finds new kind of organics in Stardust mission.” 

Astrogram. 3.

17 “Comet samples add to ‘Mystery Story’.” (2006, 20 March). SpaceNews. 15.

18 Bryner, J. (2006, 14 December). “Space probe brought real stardust down to Earth.” Space.com.
Chapter 4: Applying Lessons Learned

145

Grain by Grain

The analysis of the Stardust material was grain by grain, and three years after analysis 

began, pieces of nearly every particle remained. In the end, although NASA rules 

(from the AO) allowed the Stardust team to consume up to 25 percent of the sample 

during the funded period, the measurements were so painstaking and so precise that 

the team consumed less than 1 percent of the returned sample initially and only a few 

percent of the samples in the first three years.19

Meanwhile, one-third of the aerogel cells were removed and sent to White Sands for 

safekeeping. These were contingency samples that could be analyzed for generations 

using whatever techniques might be state-of-the-art a century from now.

Already, though, the samples were a science bonanza. In addition to the 2006 discovery of glassy particles that required high temperatures to form, in 2009, researchers 

at Goddard Space Flight Center announced the discovery of glycine, an amino acid, in 

the Stardust samples.20 Jamie Elsila, first author of the paper published in the journal 

Meteoritics & Planetary Science, commented, “Our discovery supports the theory that 

some of life’s ingredients formed in space and were delivered to Earth long ago by 

meteorite and comet impacts.”21 Interestingly enough, this important discovery was 

made not by studying the particles in aerogel, but by examining the bonus surfaces—

the aluminum foil that the team used to line the chambers. Elsila believed that some 

gaseous molecules adhered to the foil when going through the aerogel. 

In nearly every conceivable way, the daring, low-cost sample return mission encapsulated what could be done in the Discovery Program and set the stage for planetary 

missions that otherwise would have been impossible. NASA had brought home the 

stuff of comets. For their next trick, the agency was going to pulverize one.

DEEP IMPACT AND EPOXI

Mike Belton, a planetary scientist at the National Optical Observatory, and Alan 

Delamere, an engineer at Ball Aerospace, wanted to smash a comet with an impactor, 

and they knew immediately that the Discovery Program would help them do it. They 

first proposed the mission concept at the San Juan Capistrano meeting of Discovery 

in 1992 and did so again in 1994. Neither proposal was selected. Michael A’Hearn 

of the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural 

19 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with M. Zolensky. Located in “Stardust” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

20 Williams, C. (2006, 16 March). “Stardust finds comets are born of fire and ice.” (UK) Register.

21 Elsila, J. E., Glavin, D. P., & Dworkin, J. P. (2009). “Cometary glycine detected in samples returned by Stardust.” Meteoritics & Planetary Science, 44(9), 1323–1330. https://doi.

org/10.1111/j.1945-5100.2009.tb01224.x.
NASA′s Discovery Program

146

Sciences later joined the team, and they modified the concept this time to hit an 

asteroid, 3200 Phaethon, with a dumb impactor. They submitted it under the name 

“Deep Impact” to the 1996 AO. Again, they were passed over—such was the nature of 

Discovery—but comments by reviewers encouraged them to keep going, and the trio 

again submitted the mission in 1998. This time, they would again target a comet—

9P/Tempel 1—but do so using a “smart impactor” with guidance capabilities.

NASA selected the mission for flight, with A’Hearn as its Principal Investigator, 

Belton as his deputy, and Delamere as a co-investigator. Their team of co-investigators 

was made up of five veterans of CONTOUR: Belton; Joe Veverka of Cornell; Joachen 

Kissel of the Max Planck Institut for Extraterrestrische Physik in Germany (who had 

also been on Stardust); Peter Thomas of Cornell; and Don Yeomans of the Jet Propulsion 

Laboratory (who had also been on NEAR). Other co-investigators included Karen 

Meech, who would lead ground-based observations from the University of Hawaiʻi; 

Jay Melosh of the University of Arizona; Peter Schulz from Brown University; and 

Jessica Sunshine of Science Applications International Corporation.

Studying comets was nothing new. The innovation of Deep Impact was the concept 

of destroying part of one in the name of science. “The whole science community has 

been studying comets for a long time,” said Orlando Figueroa, the Deputy Associate 

Administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. “We have 

flown by them, we have observed them from afar, and this year we go for the home run.”22

Selection

Ed Weiler, the Science Mission Directorate Associate Administrator, described 

Deep Impact as a complement to the other two small bodies missions already in the 

Discovery Program, Stardust and Genesis.23 Deep Impact’s science goal was to determine the composition of a comet both at the surface of its nucleus and in its interior 

so as to understand the differences between both. Moreover, the mission would help 

scientists understand the evolutionary processes at work in those outer layers.24 In 

addition to composition, the mission would answer longstanding questions about the 

structures of comets: were they tightly packed or porous?

At its heart, the mission was an excavation intended to reveal primordial material 

that yielded our world and the solar system all around us. “We’re doing celestial archae22 Malik, T. (2005, 12 January). “NASA’s comet smashing mission ready to fly.” Space.com.

23 “Lab wins Discovery mission.” (1999, 9 July). JPL Universe, 29(14).

24 A’Hearn, M. F., Belton, M. J. S., Delamere, A., & Blume, W. H. (2005). “Deep Impact: A LargeScale Active Experiment on a Cometary Nucleus.” Space Science Reviews, 117(1–2), 1–21. https://

doi.org/10.1007/s11214-005-3387-3.
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ology, digging up the past to see what the solar system was made of 4.5 billion years 

ago,” said Lucy McFadden, the mission’s education and public outreach coordinator.25

Comet Tempel 1, the mission’s target, was discovered in 1867 by Ernst Wilhelm 

Tempel, a German astronomer. Tempel 1 is a dark-colored comet, 7.6 miles long and 

4.9 miles wide, with an orbital period of 5.56 years. The comet was nothing special, 

all things considered, and the team chose it for convenience.26 And yet, this ordinary 

pickle-shaped icy dirt ball held secrets. Jessica Sunshine said of it: “We may finally 

learn whether these comets...are dirty snowballs, as many astronomers have thought, 

or snowy dirtballs instead.”27

Because the nucleus of a comet is hidden beneath its surface and coma, the design 

of Deep Impact was necessarily different from previous such missions. This mission 

would be less an expedition and more an experiment, and the first of its kind in that 

its impact and observations were both done on flight. (Lunar Prospector, the third 

Discovery mission selected for flight, collided with the Moon at the end of its science 

phase, but the study and data collection of the collision’s aftermath were conducted 

from Earth-based observatories and the Hubble Space Telescope.) The daring Deep 

Impact design relied on a two-part spacecraft consisting of the flyby spacecraft and a 

copper smart impactor.

“With most missions, you send a spacecraft out to fly by something and you look 

at it from a distance,” said co-investigator Peter Thomas at the time. “The fun thing 

about this mission is we’re doing an active experiment—trying to make a crater in this 

comet, thereby seeing what’s on the inside.... We don’t have a good idea as to what’s 

going to happen.”28

To see beneath the surface of the comet, Deep Impact approach would Tempel 1 

at speeds greater than 37,014 kilometers per hour—ten times faster than a bullet fired 

from a rifle—and release the impactor. The 372-kilogram projectile would smash a 

hole in the comet’s surface, exposing the nucleus beneath. Instrumentation on the flyby 

spacecraft would concurrently observe the impact at different wavelengths, including optical, to help scientists understand what actually happened during impact and 

immediately afterward. The task—to hit a comet accurately and observe the results 

during a single flyby—was daunting, and there would be no second chances. Deep 

Impact could not reload.

25 “Md. Spacecraft to fly collision mission.” (2004, 19 December). The (Hagerstown, MD) 

Herald-Mail.

26 Maugh, T. (2005, 3 July). “NASA’s spacecraft closes in on comet.” Los Angeles Times.

27 Perlman, D. (2005, 2 July). “Scientists on edge of seats: ship zooms toward comet.” San 

Francisco Chronicle.

28 “Smashing Idea: Craft set to blast comet tonight.” (2005, 3 July). NY Daily News.
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Scientists and engineers were not sure what to expect from the impact. Since this 

mission would be the first such interception of a comet, the exact nature of the crust—

and its reaction to a solid impactor—were unknown. A hard, icy crust would react 

quite differently than a thin, fragile crust held together by gases or liquid.

Predictions ranged from a small hole to a football stadium–size crater 14 stories 

deep.29 A light, fluffy comet, like packed snow, for example, could absorb the impactor 

deep into the nucleus while creating only a small surface crater. A very porous comet, 

packed as loosely as a bowl of corn flakes, could fail to stop the impactor entirely. It 

would simply punch clean through the celestial object.30

SETI Institute astronomer Peter Jenniskens and his colleague Esko Lyytinen stated: 

“If Comet 9P/Tempel 1 breaks during NASA’s Deep Impact mission, a meteoroid stream 

will be created in much the same manner as what causes most of our meteor showers.... 

Depending on how the kinetic energy of the impact will be distributed, there is a real 

possibility that sufficient internal gas pressure builds up to break the comet apart.”31

Don Yeomans, however, reduced this possibility to a “way outside chance,” saying, 

“The bottom line is that we have an object the size of a washing machine colliding with 

a comet the size of Manhattan Island. No contest.”32

Due to its impact speed—greater than 10 kilometers per second—there was no 

need to add explosives to the impactor. Any heavy material would have sufficed to 

blow a hole in Tempel 1, given sufficient mass. The best match, however, would be 

something similar to the comet’s expected density.33 Since the impactor was expected 

to vaporize upon impact, mixing in with any ejecta, the prudent choice was an element 

not expected in comets and one that wouldn’t combine with water ejecta that would 

confuse the spectrometers observing the impact. Since noble metals like gold, silver, 

and platinum were far outside a Discovery-class budget, engineers decided to make the 

material out of copper. Of the 372 kilograms that composed the entire projectile, 112 

kilograms were simply copper ballast to magnify the impact. It carried also a mediumresolution telescope instrument called the Impactor Targeting Sensor—essentially the 

same one the spacecraft deploying the impactor would carry, though without a filter 

wheel. Whereas the impactor was simple, the flyby spacecraft carried four additional 

instruments for observation of the impact event.

29 David, L. (2004, 9 October). “Comet crashing mission prepped for launch.” Space.com.

30 Leary, W. E. (2005, 11 January). “Blasting into the core of a comet to learn its secrets.” The New 

York Times. 11. 

31 Jenniskens, P., & Lyytinen, E. (2005). “Meteor Showers from the Debris of Broken Comets: 

D/1819 W 1 (Blanpain), 2003 WY 25, and the Phoenicids.” The Astronomical Journal, 130(3), 

1286–1290. https://doi.org/10.1086/432469.

32 David, L. (2005, 28 June). “Cosmic crash won’t destroy comet or Earth.” Space.com.

33 Reichardt, T. (2005, April–May). “Comet cracker: A summer mission has a simple plan: launch. 

Crash. Watch.” Air & Space. 36–39.
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The Deep Impact flyby spacecraft’s High Resolution Instrument (HRI) was “the most 

powerful camera to fly in deep space,” said Michael A’Hearn, the Principal Investigator. 

“We know so little about the structure of cometary nuclei that we need exceptional 

equipment to ensure that we capture the event, whatever the details of the impact turn 

out to be.”34 The instrument incorporated a 30-centimeter (11.8-inch) telescope that 

fed light to the multispectral camera and infrared spectrometer, with a resolution of 

four to six feet on the comet’s surface at closest approach. The Medium Resolution 

Instrument, meanwhile, contained a 12-centimeter (4.7-inch) telescope and imager.

Mission formulation began on 3 January 2000, with implementation scheduled to 

start in April 2001. It would launch on 3 January 2004. Originally, Deep Impact was 

intended to have an 18-month cruise phase—time enough for checkout, software 

development, revisions, and plenty of practice runs—hitting the comet on 4 July 2005. 

Budget shortfalls in 2002 and 2003 required significant revisions to the mission, however. As altered, the flight would take just six months—practically instant gratification 

in space exploration. Budget cuts also affected the mission’s launch vehicles, requiring 

a change from a Delta II Heavy to a Delta II with fewer strap-on boosters.

Mission development, meanwhile, was complicated by the building of additional, 

fully functional “smart” hardware. “In a sense, this program is building two 100-percent 

capable spacecraft. And that has been a big challenge,” said Monte Henderson, the 

Deputy Project Manager at Ball Aerospace. “The impactor has become a very smart, 

fully-autonomous spacecraft. It’s capable of maneuvering and taking care of its 

own positioning and targeting completely independent of what’s going on with the 

flyby spacecraft.”35

Missions designed and implemented by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory are required 

to follow the JPL Design Principles, a set of rules and guidelines proven to yield successful spacecraft and minimize risk. In 1998, those principles required that every 

mission retain mass, power, and schedule margins at major reviews. New technology and one-off missions required margins above and beyond the standard: it was 

not uncommon for some untested technology to retain a one hundred percent mass 

margin until it reached a mature benchmark. (All three kinds of margin are necessary for most missions, as it is not always predictable which will be strained the most 

during development.)

Deep Impact experienced a number of changes in design, which strained the schedule margin to its limits. One such alteration was due to the rocket’s fairing size: Early 

in development, Brian Muirhead, then–project manager of the mission, discovered 

34 “Comet probe prepares for lift-off.” (2005, 12 January). BBC News.

35 David, L. (2003, 25 November). “Deep Impact: Probing a comet’s inner secrets.” Space.com.
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that the spacecraft as designed wouldn’t quite fit inside its intended payload fairing, 

necessitating a redesign of the flyby spacecraft.

Another design issue and necessary change highlighted differences between the 

JPL approach and the Ball way of doing things. The problem involved how the mission 

would manage heat generated by the impactor. “The impactor started out with the 

front end being a thermal radiator. As we went along, Ball decided to change it—so 

they covered it with blankets,” said A’Hearn, the Principal Investigator. “I didn’t catch 

this early on,” he continued. He realized that thermal blankets would be penetrated by 

dust and potentially send chaff in front of the camera. “So, then we had a fight between 

Ball and JPL about how to deal with that issue.”36

The conflict was not quickly resolved and proved eventually to be a useful lesson 

for the Discovery Program overall in how Principal Investigators manage—and, when 

necessary, mandate—changes.37 The culture clash would become even more evident 

during spacecraft testing processes, which play a much larger role on planetary missions 

than on orbital Earth missions. “Ball has a philosophy from their Earth orbital heritage 

of putting as little money as possible into testbeds, but once you’re in orbit around the 

Earth you can fix things in software. You can’t do that on planetary missions,” A’Hearn 

explained. “There are so many one-shot events where you don’t know the problem 

until you get there if you don’t have really good testbeds.”38 He explained that from 

his desk, it seemed that Ball thought of testing more as conceptual sequences rather 

than detailed command-by-command sequences that are reviewed very thoroughly 

and run through testbeds again and again.

“This was just a lack of communication between JPL and Ball,” the PI continued. 

“It is a culture difference. They would use the same terms thinking they meant same 

thing. Testbed didn’t mean the same thing on the one side of the Rockies and the 

other.”39 A’Hearn learned quickly that when dealing with engineers from different 

aerospace companies and institutions, it is not enough to use the same words. One 

must understand whether the words mean the same thing. This, too, was a valuable 

lesson learned for future Principal Investigators about the consequences of failing to 

ask probing questions.

Clashes over budgets did not help the relationship. Each institution brought its best 

approaches and skillsets to fiscal issues, but, as A’Hearn recalled: “There were prudent 

36 Niebur, S. (2009, 11 March). Personal interview with M. A’Hearn. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid.

39 Ibid.
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decisions on where to cut costs. Part of the driving thing was JPL’s focus on getting it 

right and Ball’s focus on trying to stay in cost. That drove part of the conflict.”40

In May 2000, the project held its first gateway review; a year later, its preliminary 

design and confirmation reviews. Mission costs had grown with spacecraft redesigns 

and a mandated mass reduction of the impactor. The effort ate $11 million in reserves 

in order to remain under the cost cap.

Depending on one’s perspective, Deep Impact had the misfortune (or fortune) of 

holding its Preliminary Design Review just two years after the twin failures of Mars 

Polar Lander and Mars Climate Orbiter. It was thus subjected to a level of scrutiny 

more intense than that of any previous Discovery mission. Steve Wissler, Deep Impact’s 

mission operations systems engineer, was a team member on both Stardust and Deep 

Impact. The subsystem Preliminary Design Review for Stardust’s mission operations 

systems was essentially a couple of viewgraphs at the wider project review, he remembered. The same subsystem review for Deep Impact was “a multi-day [mission operations systems] [Preliminary Design Review] with a stack of documentation about that 

thick [gestures] that we had to produce. So, part of that is the changing environment 

between when the project is originally costed and the risk you’re allowed to actually

have at the time you launch.”41

In a first for the Discovery Program, Deep Impact was not confirmed immediately 

after its original confirmation review—another consequence of the Mars failures, the 

ensuing NASA Integrated Action Team report, a change in the agency’s risk posture, 

and increased attention to the evaluations of reviewers. The program went into an 

extended Phase B. NASA issued stronger guidelines for the project, with open issues 

that needed to be addressed—everything from the mass and cost margin definition 

to mission/system complexity. Moreover, to pass its “delta” confirmation review, the 

project had to demonstrate 20 percent cost reserves.42

Additional funding of $8.7 million—which could not be applied to the new reserve 

requirement—was provided by NASA Headquarters to cover costs for “mission success enhancements” and to address unforeseen post-Mars recommendations by the 

NASA Integrated Action Team. The new cost cap was $279.2 million. The Deep Impact 

team could do no long-lead procurements or development work until after the delta 

40 Ibid.

41 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with B. Blume, Tim Larson, Al Nakata, and 

Steve Wissler. Located in “Deep Impact” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History 

Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

42 Weiler, E. (2001, 30 March). Letter to Mike A’Hearn, cc’d to 16 additional people.
NASA′s Discovery Program

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review.43 They passed on 23 May 2001, and NASA issued a press release the next day 

confirming the confirmation.44

At a Critical Design Review held from 29 January to 2 February 2002, the review 

team concluded that Ball Aerospace was overstaffed due to instrument problems. A 

few months later, the project discovered what it believed to be a cost phasing problem. 

That issue intensified over the summer, and, in August, the project admitted to NASA 

Headquarters that the problem was more than accounting issues: Deep Impact was 

going to exceed the projected estimate to completion by $1 million.

Headquarters called for a cost review. Jet Propulsion Laboratory management, 

meanwhile, added Tom Gavin, deputy director of the Space and Earth Science Programs 

Directorate and a longtime lab engineer with deep experience in launching successful spacecraft, to the project. The cost review, completed in September, revealed that 

Deep Impact required an additional infusion of $15 million in order to complete its 

mission and restore its reserves.

NASA Headquarters thus initiated a mission termination review, held on 10 October 

2002. Every aspect of the mission—including cost, schedule, technical, risk, and future 

performance goals—was subjected to inquiry. The agency was taking a hard line on 

mission cost overruns. Joe Boyce, the program scientist, recalled of the meetings: “I’d 

hear associate administrators, as they’d come along, division directors, administrators, 

saying that what we need to do is cancel one of these damn things—that’ll teach them. 

I kept thinking: Which them are you talking about? Them is you too!”45

In the end, NASA Headquarters allotted Deep Impact an additional $7.4 million 

for costs outside of project’s control but required follow-up meetings and changes. The 

project reported significant changes on 13 November 2002, including replacing its 

project manager, replanning its schedule, initiating weekly review boards, conducting 

staffing level analysis, renegotiating the award fee for Ball Aerospace, and meanwhile 

continuing its progress toward all science objectives and committing to delivering the 

spacecraft within the cost cap. The shakeup required a new letter of intent, which was 

signed by the University of Maryland, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Ball.46

Ed Weiler, the Associate Administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA 

Headquarters, wasn’t satisfied. The following week, he sent a letter to the team stating 

43 Ibid.

44 Tune, L. (2001, 24 May). “NASA Gives Go Ahead for Building of ‘Deep Impact’ Spacecraft.” 

NASA press release. 

45 Niebur, S. (2009, 22 March). Personal interview with J. Boyce. Located in “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

46 NASA. (2005). Program Assessment Rating Tool. Downloaded from https://web.archive.org/

web/20051005023614/http://www.ombwatch.org/regs/2005/PART/2005budget/PARTs/nasa.pdf

on 16 August 2021.
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that several conditions for the project’s continuation were not fully met. Technical, 

schedule, and cost were fully integrated; personnel changes were not complete; and 

negotiations with Ball were not the same thing as a new award fee agreement. He 

declared that there would be a delta termination review in two months, mid-January 

2003. He also wanted ongoing weekly status reports.

NASA held the second termination review on 21 February 2003. It was clear to 

everyone involved that the original launch date was no longer viable and that the mission would be delayed a year. Still, the mission survived. Despite the much later launch, 

the spacecraft would still arrive at the comet on time, as the original proposal had 

included an extra one-year loop around the Sun on the mission’s outset so as to comply 

with launch date constraints mandated in the 1998 Announcement of Opportunity.

“At that time, I was still not coming to grips with how badly things had been underestimated in cost.... I don’t know how much of that was changes driven by design and 

how much was just actual bad bid,” said Michael A’Hearn, the mission PI.47

In March, Colleen Hartman, the director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA 

Headquarters, told the project that an additional $14.4 million had been approved so 

that it might launch on time, with its required reserves of 20 percent. In all, this brought 

the mission cost to $298.2 million, excluding Deep Space Network costs. She noted 

that the mission’s overruns were coming at a price to the broader scientific community: 

because of Deep Impact, NASA would delay the next Discovery AO.

When Lindley Johnson, a civil servant with years of Defense Department experience, moved to NASA Headquarters as a program executive in October 2003, the Deep 

Impact team—a year from launch—was enduring yet another problem: an unexpected 

delay in the delivery of the flight computers.48

NASA again held a continuation review on 23 January 2004. Though it was specifically not called a “termination review,” an experienced termination review board might 

have thought it was. “There was serious talk about terminating Deep Impact because 

it was going to be a serious overrun on the program, something like $30 million,” said 

Johnson. “In fact, I have the draft of the termination letter on my computer. I was 

asked to go ahead and draft it up and have it ready to go if that decision was made.”49

Ed Weiler, the Associate Administrator, levied a new requirement that all Science 

Mission Directorate missions henceforth have 25 percent unencumbered reserves 

through the end of Phase D, minus launch vehicle, at confirmation. (The requirement 

47 Niebur, S. (2009, 11 March). Personal interview with M. A’Hearn. Located in “Deep Impact” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

48 Niebur, S. (2009, 4 September). Personal interview with L. Johnson. Located in “Deep 

Impact” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

49 Ibid.
NASA′s Discovery Program

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was not retroactive but did apply to missions such as Dawn and Kepler, then in the 

study phase.)50

In retrospect, said Steve Wissler, the mission operations systems engineer, Deep 

Impact “should have never been a Discovery class mission. This was horribly underfunded for what we had to do.”51 He explained that “the last 18 months of the mission, 

people were working 60-to-80-hour weeks for 18 months straight. There were some 

100-hour weeks leading up to launch.”52

It didn’t help that the mission had no permanent project manager. Lindley 

Johnson recalled:

When I first came on, John McNamee was the project manager, but it was only a few 

months later that Rick Grammier took that position. And so, there was some turmoil still 

through that period at the management level on the project. But, when Rick came on, I 

think some of the things that they did was focus teams a little bit more on various aspects, 

various problems, as opposed to what I think was before was kind of a blanket approach, as 

everybody was trying to work everything. I think Rick also spent quite a bit of time helping 

to rebuild the relationship with the prime contractor, because I know previous to my being 

on there, that relationship was pretty adversarial.... You’ve got to be as efficient as you can. 

So, you’ve got to have everybody feel that they’re part of the same team as opposed to, oh, 

they’re the contractor and we’re the implementing agency. I think Rick did a lot to try to 

improve that relationship.53

Tim Larson and Keyur Patel subsequently joined the team as project manager and 

deputy project manager, respectively.

“It was an interesting project. Never had we seen so many people so demoralized about a mission,” said Patel. “They didn’t believe they could actually make it 

happen.”54 The technical issues alone were overwhelming. It was not until nine months 

from launch that the spacecraft got its flight computer. The delay was a direct result 

of manufacturing problems with field programmable gate arrays at the Southwest 

Research Institute in Boulder.

50 NASA. (2005). “Program Assessment Rating Tool.” Downloaded from https://web.archive.org/

web/20051005023614/http://www.ombwatch.org/regs/2005/PART/2005budget/PARTs/nasa.pdf 

on 16 August 2021.

51 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with B. Blume, Tim Larson, Al Nakata, and 

Steve Wissler. Located in “Discovery Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, 

History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

52 Ibid.

53 Niebur, S. (2009, 4 September). Personal interview with L. Johnson. Located in “Discovery” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

54 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with K. Patel. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.
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Steve Wissler explained of the project manager roulette: “We had several turnovers 

in senior project management that was, I think, very hard on the rest of the team.” Each 

manager, he said, had his own method for running Deep Impact, which amounted 

to complete project reorganizations multiple times. “Since people were doing multiple tasks, it took a while to settle down after a project management change to really 

understand what your new role is and where you fit in.”55

One Year Before Launch

From a project management perspective, when Patel and Larson joined the project, 

things looked grim. “The fault protection was still open, flight software—a host of 

issues,” said Patel. “That’s always a problem, but a year before launch, you’re fixing 

bugs, not working out basic functionality-type stuff.... The gyros had an issue with 

cracked wells and all of that type of stuff. And then, the whole 800-pound gorilla in 

the room: ‘How do you hit a comet?’”56

That question is what made the flight computer problems so vexing. “If you’re just 

checking off level three requirement boxes and you’re not executing the system as 

a mission and finding those bugs, you don’t discover those bugs,” Patel explained.57

The Deep Impact team, overexerted and demoralized, risked falling into abject 

despair. To introduce a new vitality to the group, Patel brought in several new managers and key engineers: people, he said, “with experience on other projects, can-do 

attitude, and a lot more doing than talking or whining.”58 Management was confident 

and committed up front to instilling that same sense of confidence in the team: to 

remain positive about finishing this star-crossed spacecraft on time and with precision.59

Before launch, Patel recalled that the spacecraft only managed to hit the comet 

once or twice in simulation. “One of the issues we had was everybody had assumed 

a different reference frame.” This was the coordinate system to which a spacecraft’s 

attitude is referenced. “Simulation had assumed a different reference frame. The nav 

guys had a different reference frame. The attitude guys had a different reference frame. 

The system that displayed telemetry had a different reference frame.”60

Engineers determined that what was needed was a “Rosetta stone” of reference 

frames: how to get you from one reference frame to another. “We were fighting this 

55 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with B. Blume, Tim Larson, Al Nakata, and 

Steve Wissler. Located in “Deep Impact” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History 

Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

56 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with K. Patel. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

57 Ibid.

58 Ibid.

59 Ibid.

60 Ibid.
NASA′s Discovery Program

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six months before launch,” Patel explained. His dual roles on the project helped move 

some decisions along. “I was the chief engineer and the Deputy Project Manager, so 

in a way it was nice, because I could recommend something on one side and hammer 

it home on the other side.” By the end of March, Patel was confident that the mission 

would be a success.61

To solidify the ever-frayed relationship between the Deep Impact team and its contractor workforce, the project put boots on the ground. The idea, said Lindley Johnson, 

the mission’s program executive, was to build bonds. “They’re not just somebody at 

the other end of the phone or the other end of the video-con. They’re somebody real, 

somebody that’s another individual, too, just trying to do the best damn job they can 

on the project,” he said.62

Communication opened a lot of doors. “The way Ball was used to doing business 

with their other partners, they would be given a very detailed list of requirements and 

it’d probably match something that they’d already built before, and so they would get 

those requirements, go off and build a spacecraft, and then turn it over to the customer,” 

said Steve Wissler, the mission operations systems engineer. “JPL doesn’t really work 

in that environment, especially with these one-of-a-kind. There was just this constant 

back and forth on the requirements and the validation and the amount of work that 

Ball had to do I think was far more than they had really considered. They ended up 

building a great spacecraft, but there was, again, a lot of tension back and forth on how 

much oversight JPL had, and what it was doing in terms of the profit Ball was going 

to make on this big op, at the end.”63

The 976-kilogram Deep Impact spacecraft launched from Pad 17B on a Delta II 

rocket on 12 January 2005. Its next stop was Comet Tempel 1, a comet 83 million 

miles away (though because of celestial dynamics, had to travel 268 million miles to 

get there). The mission originally was to have an 18-month cruise phase, during which 

the operations team could become intimately familiar with their spacecraft and how it 

responded in space. Because the mission lost a full year on the ground due to developmental woes, the team would have to learn how to fly their spaceship in six months.

Al Nakata, who worked mission operations, recalled: “Both teams are pretty busy. 

The cruise team was just busy every day during the six-month cruise mission phase 

operating the spacecraft and conducting instrument calibrations and trajectory correction maneuvers. And of course, the encounter team is conducting encounter develop61 Ibid.

62 Niebur, S. (2009, 4 September). Personal interview with L. Johnson. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

63 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with B. Blume, T. Larson, A. Nakata, and 

S.  Wissler. Located in the “Discovery Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, 

History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
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ment plus testing, and Steve [Wissler, the mission operation systems engineer] had 

the most work to do.”64 That was yet another consequence of the mission’s budgetary 

issues. It wouldn’t be the last.

Extreme Optimism

Over the course of the project, costs had increased for reasons beyond the technical. As Bill Blume, the mission design lead, put it: “Deep Impact was proposed in 

the Faster, Better, Cheaper environment, and the first proposal went out—the Step 1 

proposal in 98 and the Step Two in 99—and Deep Impact was accepted just months 

before the Mars ’98 failures.... People were making cost estimates with just extreme 

optimism, and there’s a competitive nature in the proposal process that just makes 

you optimistic.”65

Moreover, public failures unrelated to Deep Impact suddenly became Deep Impact’s 

problem. As Wissler explained, “The rules kept changing out from under us. Every time 

there would be a mission failure or something, we would be held to a higher standard 

than what had been costed originally.”66

This manifested at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the form of new sets of stringent, 

conservative, structured approaches to spacecraft development called Flight Project 

Practices and Design Principles. After the twin embarrassments of two consecutive 

Mars failures, the lab was tightening screws, and no one was exempt.

The lab’s new guidelines meant a stringent, independent verification and validation 

review process on the hardware, software, processes, and subsystems to certify the 

spacecraft as ready for launch. It felt invasive to Deep Impact’s leadership. No previous project had faced such scrutiny, and budget increases did not accompany the new 

expensive reviews and processes.

Already overworked in the runup to launch, with the added stressors of verification and validation processes, the handoff from the integration and testing team to the 

mission operations team “was really a shaky process,” recalled Wissler.67 Losing that 

year meant losing precious time in space to do spacecraft and instrument calibrations.

Having only six months from launch to encounter made the cruise phase a crucible. 

The team had to work out bugs in everything from “fault protection” mechanisms in 

the spacecraft to navigation. The High-Resolution Instrument, for example—one of 

the largest experiments ever built for a planetary science mission, and essential to mission success—failed to yield “perfect focus.” Initial images were blurry, but a routine 

“bake out” of residual moisture accumulated during launch should have sharpened 

64 Ibid.

65 Ibid.

66 Ibid.

67 Ibid.
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things. It did not.68 The quality was adequate for the spacecraft’s auto-navigation but 

had the potential to diminish the optical navigation campaign during the approach 

to the comet. The science team developed new image processing and calibration techniques to improve the situation.69 (Ultimately, investigators determined that it was a 

manufacturing flaw.)

If Deep Impact was still getting its space legs and giving its team a lot of sleepless 

nights, Tempel 1 was doing all it could to help make the mission a success. Data from 

the Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Telescope revealed that the comet had 

a 41-hour period of rotation—very slow, and perfect for a thorough imaging of the 

post-impact crater.70

And upon impact, everyone, it seemed, would be watching. NASA coordinated with 

the leadership of several space telescopes, including Hubble, Spitzer, the Chandra X-ray 

Observatory, and the Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite (which was awakened 

from an eleven-month hibernation) to observe the comet before and after impact. 

Observation conditions were ideal: the crater would be lit by the Sun because of the 

comet’s angle. The telescopes would be observing everything from geology to possible 

water molecules vaporized during or after impact.71

On Earth, meanwhile, ground-based observatories and telescopes everywhere 

from Hawaiʻi to Boulder would be trained on the comet before, during, and after the 

impact. These included every telescope on Mauna Kea and two on Haleakalā, both 

in Hawaiʻi; Palomar Observatory, Lick Observatory, and Mount Laguna Observatory 

in California; and telescopes in Spain and Australia.72 In addition, the project’s public 

outreach campaign encouraged private astronomers to try observing the impact. If 

the impactor hit the comet in a bright spot, even binoculars should have been able 

to view the event.

While “practicing” on 14 June 2005 for the 4 July impact event, the Hubble Space 

Telescope captured a plume erupting from Tempel 1, blasting 1,400 miles toward the 

Sun. This was unexpected and raised hopes by some scientists that the NASA mission’s 

68 NASA. (2019, 24 July). “Deep Impact/EPOXI In Depth.” Downloaded from https://solarsystem.

nasa.gov/missions/deep-impact-epoxi/in-depth/; NASA. (2005, 25 March). “NASA Releases Deep 

Impact Mission Status Report.” Downloaded from https://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2005/

mar/HQ_05086_deep_impact.html.

69 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with B. Blume, Tim Larson, Al Nakata, and 

Steve Wissler. Located in “Deep Impact” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History 

Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

70 Roylance, F. D. (2005, 5 July). “Spacecraft races to rendezvous with a comet.” The Baltimore Sun; 

Bakich, M. E. (2005, June 22). “Getting set for Deep Impact.” Astronomy Magazine.

71 Ferster, W. (2005, 11 July). “Satellite awakened to study probe’s collision with comet.” 

SpaceNews. 9.

72 TenBruggencate, J. (2005, 28 June). “Island eyes on heavens for Deep Impact.” Honolulu 

Advertiser; Lieberman, B. (2005, 5 July). “Collision of spacecraft, comet may be visible.” The San 

Diego Union-Tribune; Rincon, P. (2005, 5 July). “Comet crash clues for Europe.” BBC News.
Chapter 4: Applying Lessons Learned

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impactor might cause quite a spectacular event. Paul Feldman, an astronomy professor at Johns Hopkins University and a co-investigator on the CONTOUR mission, 

attributed the plume creation to a ray of Sun heating a pocket of subsurface volatile 

gas such as carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide ice.73

The Planetary Society, a nonprofit space advocacy outfit, started a betting pool 

for people to predict what would happen on impact. The Deep Impact science team 

even joined in.74 The Pasadena, California–based group sponsored an online contest 

for space enthusiasts to guess the size of the crater.75 But first the impactor had to 

actually hit the comet.

Rick Grammier, one of the mission’s many former PMs, explained the difficulty of 

the far-off maneuvers by saying, “It’s a bullet trying to hit a second bullet with a third 

bullet, in the right place at the right time.”76 It was more than a collision, though: the 

impactor would be released ahead of time and sent into the comet’s path.77

Sixty-nine days before impact and 39.7 miles away, the spacecraft was close enough 

to the comet to begin tracking it visually.78 Those cometary plumes and outbursts were 

proving much larger than expected and erupting much more often than predicted. 

Events occurred in as short a span as two days apart. This was more than a bit unnerving to some at NASA, who feared the spacecraft might be destroyed.79

Before Encounter

As Deep Impact closed in on the comet, the Deep Impact team continued closing 

out computer issues and anomaly reports. The issues were not always minor. Going 

into the encounter phase of the mission, the star tracker component built by Ball and 

used for navigation began reporting peculiar data. It was not tracking stars properly 

(a nontrivial issue for a star tracker), reporting inaccurate quaternions. Keyur Patel, 

the Deputy Project Manager, was incensed. “Now, it’s amazing in the sense that there 

were people at Ball who knew about this, but the Ball guys from Deep Impact were 

73 Dominguez, A. (2005, 28 June). “Hubble comet image preview of July 4 collision.” Associated 

Press; Graham, S. (2005, 28 June). “Comet puts on show while waiting for its close-up.” 

Scientific American.

74 Dayton, L. (2005, 28 June). “Betting on a Big Bang.” Australian.

75 “Smashing Idea: Craft set to blast comet tonight.” (2005, 3 July). NY Daily News.

76 Leary, W. E. (2005, 28 June). “Spacecraft is on a collision course with a comet, intentionally.” The 

New York Times.

77 Chwallek, G. (2005, 12 January). “Deep Impact on Independence Day.” The [SA] Star & 

Independent.

78 “NASA’S Deep Impact Spacecraft Spots Its Quarry, Stalking Begins.” (2005, 27 April). NASA 

News Release 05-108.

79 Dornheim, M. (2004, 4 July). “Crash Course.” Aviation Week.
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never told about this.”80 The problem, it turned out, could be corrected in software. 

They loaded it on the impactor spacecraft but decided against installing it on the 

flyby spacecraft.

That was nothing next to another issue plaguing the impactor. “In all the simulations 

we did,” said Patel, “the impactor, as it was going in, would do the zigzag maneuver.”81

The impactor, on final approach, would perform three targeting maneuvers. The first 

put the spacecraft on course with the comet. The second veered way off course, sure 

to miss it. And then the third maneuver put the impactor back on course. It was a 

strange interaction between the auto-navigation system, the attitude determination 

and control system, the gyros, and other spacecraft subsystems. Even after correcting 

ancillary issues discovered by the team, every time they ran the simulation, the zigzag 

behavior remained unchanged.

“So, now it comes,” said Patel. “We know how to fix this thing. We’ve got a couple 

of months to go, or three months to go.... And my position is: we’re not fixing it.”82

He explained that there was no need to compensate for the weird behavior. Despite

the zigzag, it still worked every time.... The decision by the project manager, Rick 

Grammier, was we’re going to fly as-is, based on all the test history and everything else.”

Then, a few days before the encounter, the comet itself threw the team a curveball. 

A plume, to be specific.

“Everybody starts freaking out,” recalled Patel. “What if that happens as you’re going 

in? How’s the auto-nav going to behave?” He wasn’t worried—they had accounted for 

“anything and everything” in the navigation algorithms.83 “That last 24 hours,” said 

Tim Larson, “those were kind of like this Zen-like calm. Because there wasn’t a whole 

lot that could be done at that point.”84

Indeed, the final full day before the encounter, the team made as few decisions as 

possible. Nobody yet knew exactly what the comet would look like and how they would 

handle it. As images arrived, it looked first like a banana, and then like a boat. Neither 

mattered. The team had laid out a detailed decision tree a priori. “We did not want to 

decide anything going in or put anything up for debate,” said Patel. “If it was less than 

this, greater than this, do this, this, this thing. It was a flow chart, right. And everybody 

wanted to know what the decision was that it gave.” Nominal decisions were locked in, 

80 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with K. Patel. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

81 Ibid.

82 Ibid.

83 Ibid.

84 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with B. Blume, T. Larson, A. Nakata, and 

S.  Wissler. Located in the “Discovery Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, 

History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
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and for off-nominal decisions, information could be plugged into the decision matrix. 

Said Patel, “We never had a single off-nominal moment.... We released and watched 

it for two hours. I went home, slept like a baby, because my issues were over.”85

The impactor behaved exactly as the team knew it would. “One thing most people 

don’t know about on Deep Impact is there was no communication between the flyby 

spacecraft and the impactor,” said Patel. “The flyby was just a bent pipe, but the flyby 

had to independently figure out where the impactor was going to hit, because it never 

knew where the impactor was going.”86 The impactor zigzagged just as the simulations 

predicted. And just as the simulations predicted, it corrected itself perfectly for the 

third maneuver.

No Threat to Earth

PI Michael A’Hearn believed the final 24 hours of the impactor’s life would yield truly 

landmark cometary science data. He realized that so little was known about cometary 

nuclei that this mission would be revolutionary. 

Don Yeomans, a mission co-investigator, had to correct the record on a sensational 

rumor seeping into news stories: that the comet might be bumped into a collision 

course with Earth. “In the world of science, this is the astronomical equivalent of a 

767-airliner running into a mosquito,” he said. “The impact simply will not appreciably 

modify the comet’s orbital path.”87

Impact occurred at 1:52 a.m. Eastern Time on 4 July 2005. The copper impactor 

collided with the comet and vaporized, creating a hole and releasing debris. The flyby 

spacecraft was a scant 5,300 miles away at the time.

According to Steve Wissler, just days before the encounter, there didn’t seem to 

be high confidence that they were actually going to pull this thing off. But the team 

had images coming down in real time at the mission support area. “That first impact 

image was so spectacular that everybody just erupted, jumped up and down and 

erupted.” They had hit a bullet with a bullet fired from another bullet. “That was one of 

the probably most exciting moments in my life, seeing that first image come down.”88

There was such pandemonium in the mission support area, with cheering and 

celebration, that Wissler had to get on the radio network and remind everyone that 

their work wasn’t finished: they still had a spacecraft with a job to do for another 

85 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with K. Patel. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

86 Ibid.

87 “NASA Announces Spectacular Day of the Comet.” (2005, 9 June). NASA news release.

88 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with K. Patel. Located in “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.
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13 minutes, until closest approach. During that time, the spacecraft took pictures of 

the impact site before turning to shield itself from particles during its closest shave 

with the comet—310 miles—which occurred at 2:06 a.m. After it cleared the coma, 

the spacecraft swiveled around to take more images of the receding Tempel 1.

On impact, the plume expanded rapidly at 3.1 miles per second.89 In fact, the 

impact released two plumes of cometary dust and gas—one likely softer, layered material on the surface and the other, thick, hard crust, each stretching for thousands of 

kilometers into space.

On 14 October 2005, the journal Science published a special issue for Deep Impact’s 

early results. These included the first detection, with imaging, of water ice on the surface 

of any comet, and a delayed flash and asymmetrical plume indicating a highly porous, 

fine-grained, compressible surface like fluffy snow, which created a fog that blocked 

the spacecraft’s view of the crater.90

Sixteen days after impact, NASA Headquarters agreed to retarget the flyby spacecraft and its high-powered, if slightly out-of-focus, planetary telescope for a new, 

future mission to a nearby comet or asteroid. After downloading the captured data 

and performing a post-encounter calibration, Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers 

issued commands to the spacecraft to fire its thrusters and change its course. It would 

orbit the Sun and swing back near Earth by 2008. Deep Impact went into hibernation 

while NASA decided what to do with it next.

STARDUST NEXT

Comet 9P/Tempel 1, however, was still awake...and so was the Stardust spacecraft. 

Indeed, the Discovery Program had three capable small-body spacecraft in orbit 

around the Sun now—Stardust, Genesis, and Deep Impact—and scientists were not 

short on ideas for how to use them. Though its sample collection mission had been 

completed successfully, with planetary scientists on Earth gleefully studying fragments of Wild 2, the Stardust spacecraft and its payload of science instruments—a 

camera, a dust analyzer, and a dust flux monitor—were as functional as the day they 

launched from Earth.

Joe Veverka of Cornell, formerly Principal Investigator of the ill-fated CONTOUR 

and co-investigator on Deep Impact, had an idea for a new mission for Stardust after its 

sample return was complete. He called it Stardust NExT (New Exploration of Tempel 1), 

saying it was “the tale of two missions: Deep Impact and the Stardust mission.”91

89 Gugliotta, G. (2005, 5 July). “NASA succeeds in crashing craft into comet.” The Washington Post.

90 Roylance, F. D. (2006, 13 January). “Mission to comet finds complexity.” The Baltimore Sun.

91 Veverka, J. (2010, 10 September). “25 Years: First Comet Encounter.” From NASA event 

presentation.
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When NASA Headquarters released the 2006 Discovery Announcement of 

Opportunity, it decided to try an experiment of its own. Large strategic science missions—the multi-billion-dollar “flagships” such as Galileo and Cassini—had defined 

procedures involving senior reviews to extend their purpose each time a science mission was completed. The Solar System Exploration Division had no such process for 

the small Discovery-class missions. The 2006 AO would solve that. The agency would 

competitively select mission extensions—proposals to do new science—with an existing spacecraft. This was the first time that NASA’s planetary missions had to compete 

for an extended mission. Any proposal would have to undergo both a Step 1 and a 

Step 2 review process.

Veverka’s proposal, originally called Scar Quest, was led by a team of scientists from 

previous missions. Indeed, of the dozens of co-investigators, only five were first-timers 

to Discovery.92 To call it an experienced team was an understatement, and Veverka 

himself was a veteran of NASA’s Mariner 9, Viking, Voyager, Galileo, Mars Global 

Surveyor, NEAR, Deep Impact, CONTOUR, and Cassini missions.

The science objectives of Stardust NExT were to return to Tempel 1, whence Deep 

Impact had just returned, and

• document the surface changes on the comet’s nucleus between successive 

perihelion passages;

• measure the comet’s dust properties and compare them with data taken from 

Wild 2;

• provide additional information on enigmatic layering and flow features discovered by the Deep Impact mission; and

• use on-board instruments to image the comet’s nucleus surface and jets, count 

the size and distribution of its dust particles during closest approach, and 

study the dust composition for further ground analysis.

Moreover, Stardust NExT would determine how the Deep Impact experiment 

modified the surface of Tempel 1, including studying the crater the impactor had 

created.93 This latter objective was important because Deep Impact’s view of the crater 

was obscured by fine dust and ice ejected upon impact. The mission would “get the 

glimpse we never got with Deep Impact,” said co-investigator Jay Melosh, who was 

also part of the Deep Impact mission.94

92 Erickson, J. (2006, 16 March). “Colorado craft could return to the stars.” Rocky Mountain News.

93 “Stardust NExT.” (N.d.) Downloaded from https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/stardust-next on 

16 August 2021.

94 Erickson, J. (2006, 16 March). “Colorado craft could return to the stars.” Rocky Mountain News.
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The Stardust NExT proposal received $250,000 for the team to conduct concept 

studies. It was selected by NASA Headquarters for implementation. Compared to 

Deep Impact, the Stardust spacecraft, packing a smaller instrument payload, was a 

breeze to operate.

Michael A’Hearn, PI of Deep Impact and co-investigator of Stardust NExT, compared 

the two spacecraft, explaining: “Stardust NExT has PI owned instruments. Deep Impact 

did not: they are all facility instruments, so the whole team owns all the data. That’s 

not true on Stardust NExT.” The division of responsibilities would lead to an easier 

flow of information. Moreover, he said, “Stardust NExT was much easier to fly, for two 

reasons: First, it is built and flown by Lockheed. It is not flown by JPL. Lockheed flies 

a low budget operation. Second, the spacecraft is far less capable and therefore designing observance sequences is trivial. There is one camera that you can use at encounter 

in parallel with the dust counter that takes data. The [Cometary Secondary Ion Mass 

Analyzer] analyzes its particles, and that’s it. You don’t have enough memory storage 

to do very many images. So, the observing sequence is trivial.”95

NASA approved the mission on 3 July 2007. It would encounter Tempel 1 on 

Valentine’s Day, 2011. When it arrived, it would zip by the comet in just 20 minutes—

more than enough time to achieve its goals.

Education and public outreach would also be easy, compared to most missions. 

Aimee Meyer, who had previously led EPO for Magellan, Mars Pathfinder, and Stardust, 

still had her army of Education Fellows engaged with the mission and interested in 

seeing it continue. “I honestly believe that we got extended because of the fact that there 

were so many teachers who probably wrote letters to continue the mission,” she said.96

EPOXI 

A’Hearn had an idea for how best to repurpose the dormant Deep Impact, and he 

called it DIXI: the Deep Impact Extended Investigation. They could send the probe 

to another comet, collect data, and perform comparative science. “Half the discoveries at Tempel 1 were from the flyby data taken before impact,” he said. “DIXI can 

95 Niebur, S. (2009, 11 March). Personal interview with M. A’Hearn. Located in “Deep Impact” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

96 Niebur, S. (2009, 2 September). Personal interview with A. Meyer. Located in “Stardust” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
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return half the science of Deep Impact for much less than 10 percent of the cost of 

Deep Impact.”97

They would visit the Comet 85D/Boethin in December 2008, image its nucleus, 

and increase the scientific understanding of comet diversity. The small, short-period 

comet had never before been visited. Doing so would allow the Discovery Program to 

recover some of the science lost with the 2002 failure of the CONTOUR mission—itself 

intended to do comparative studies of multiple comets.

That wasn’t the only idea for what to do with Deep Impact, however. L. Drake Deming 

of Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Maryland, wanted to look outward from 

our solar system and find Earth-size planets circling other stars. The Deep Impact 

spacecraft and its powerful planetary telescope was the perfect tool for the job. He 

called it EPOCh—the Extrasolar Planet Observation and Characterization mission—

and it could take special advantage of Deep Impact’s flawed high-resolution camera.

To find planets circling other stars, rather than image them directly, as the Hubble 

Space Telescope might look at Jupiter or Mars, the project would infer the existence 

and characteristics of a planet or planets, should any be discovered, using transit 

detection. The camera would measure variations in a star’s brightness. A planet passing in front of a star would dim the star; accordingly, brightness levels, the rate of the 

transit, and known information about the star, among other data points, could reveal 

information about the planet found. Moreover, the camera would observe previously 

discovered planets and use changes in known measurements to determine variations 

in cloud structures and measure the planets’ temperatures. Indeed, much more than 

that might be detected.98

“We have bright stars that we know have transiting planets, at least one transiting. 

But, if you stare at them for a long time, they may have another planet in the system 

whose transit is too infrequent and too shallow to have been noticed before.” Even 

planetary systems were possible to detect. “The giant transiting planets themselves 

may have moons or rings or other subtle signatures in their transit light curves that 

can be extracted from high-precision photometry.”99

Because the Deep Impact camera was out of focus, the light from measured stars 

would be seen not as a single point, but as a gradient across multiple pixels. This 

would actually lessen the noise in the data—perfect for EPOCh’s purposes. As Deming 

97 University of Maryland. (2006, 16 May). “Two Deep Impact daughter comet missions proposed.” 

News release. Downloaded from http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0605/16deepimpact/ on 

16 August 2021.

98 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 July). Personal interview with D. Deming. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC. 

99 Ibid.
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explained, “We convert that focus flaw into an asset.”100 It would make its observations 

during the spring and summer of 2008.

The team proposed initially to move spacecraft operations from the Jet Propulsion 

Laboratory to Goddard, though NASA killed that idea pretty quickly. “It’s probably a 

good thing,” said Deming. “Goddard is wonderful, but it’s a very complicated spacecraft. It would have been a really steep learning curve and it probably would have cost 

a lot more.”101

Both missions stood independently, but A’Hearn anticipated that NASA 

Headquarters, rather than approving one or the other, might mandate that the mission concepts get merged into a single super mission. “We coordinated writing the 

proposals so that they would be easy to combine, but kept them separate in case NASA 

wanted to pick one but not the other.” They knew that NASA could not approve both 

as independent Missions of Opportunity; the budget would not allow it. Ultimately, 

the agency did as expected and had the principal investigators fuse the missions into 

a single concept study.102

One of Deming’s colleagues at Harvard, Dave Charbonneau, came up with the idea of 

taking EPOCH and DIXI and gluing the two acronyms together, with EPOXI.103 When 

A’Hearn presented the merged project to Alan Stern, the Associate Administrator of 

the Science Mission Directorate, the first thing Stern said was, “Oh, nice acronym.”104

On 3 July 2007, NASA selected EPOXI, the extended mission of Deep Impact, for 

implementation, with A’Hearn as its Principal Investigator.

COMET BOETHIN

Stardust NExT soon experienced a first for planetary science: its target of exploration 

disappeared.105 Before Stardust NExT, Comet Boethin, its intended quarry, had been 

spotted only twice: when it was discovered in 1975, and again in 1986. Though it had 

100 Shiga, D. (2006, 1 November). “Deep Impact’s blurry camera may study exoplanets.” New Scientist.

101 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 July). Personal interview with D. Deming. Located in “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

102 Niebur, S. (2009, 11 March). Personal interview with M. A’Hearn. Located in “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

103 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 July). Personal interview with D. Deming. Located in “Deep Impact” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

104 Ibid.

105 Niebur, S. (2009, 11 March). Personal interview with M. A’Hearn. Located in “Deep Impact” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, 

DC; Chang, A. (2007, 5 July). “New tasks given to old NASA spacecraft.” NASA press release.
Chapter 4: Applying Lessons Learned

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not been spotted in 1997, astronomers were unsurprised at the time, as the Sun’s glare 

would have concealed it due to the relative positions of the comet, the star, and Earth.

It is possible that during that solar approach, the comet disintegrated, though it 

was an unlikely scenario. Only one comet had theretofore done such a thing: Comet 

C/1999 S4 (LINEAR), which vanished in 2000. More likely, telescopes just weren’t 

looking in the right place; due to the paucity of previous observations, astronomers 

never calculated its orbit with extreme precision. The main reason the Deep Impact 

team had chosen it as a target is because it was quick and easy to reach. With it vanished 

from the cosmos, clearly that was no longer the case.

Thankfully, the team had a secondary target: Comet 103P/Hartley (Hartley 2), a 

small, Jupiter-family comet with a 6.47-year orbit. “When Comet Boethin could not 

be located, we went to our backup, which is every bit as interesting but about two years 

farther down the road,” said Tom Duxbury, the EPOXI project manager.106 That two-year 

cruise phase extension would cost NASA another $40 million. The spacecraft would fly 

within 620 miles of Hartley 2, with its rendezvous scheduled for 11 October 2010.107

EPOCH, meanwhile, had problems of its own. The camera’s charge-coupled device, 

or CCD—its image sensor—had a resolution of 1,024 × 1,024 pixels, though because 

of memory constraints for long star transit observations, the team planned to use 

only 64 × 64 pixels. A star in focus would occupy only about 10 pixels. In practice, 

that didn’t work because of pointing jitter and absolute pointing accuracy. The team 

ended up using a 128 × 128 mode for most of its work, with which, even then, it proved 

difficult to keep the star centered.

“If you were off center slightly,” said Drake Deming, the PI of the EPOCH portion 

of EPOXI, “then with the pointing jitter, sometimes it would actually leave the array, 

and we would lose data. Now, it’s not a complete disaster to lose data because we’re 

looking for the star for weeks at a time, and we lose data anyway because we turn the 

spacecraft to downlink, and we’re not observing. So, it wasn’t that big of a disaster, 

but, of course, when we don’t want to lose data is when there’s an actual transit or a 

secondary eclipse of the planet.”

JPL engineers created a mode that used a 256 × 256 subarray during periods of 

transit and eclipse, and a 128 × 128 subarray at other times. “This kind of mode meant 

that during a critical part, we would always have the star,” said Deming. “The reason 

that we didn’t propose anything like that was because, in the initial proposal, I wasn’t 

106 Borland, J. (2007, 14 December). “Aging spacecraft set on new comet hunt.” Wired.

107 O’Brien, D. (2008, 16 February). “Spacecraft to look for Earth-like planets; Second life for comet 

chaser.” The Baltimore Sun. 1A. 
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sure how much DSN time we would get. It turns out that we were able to get DSN 

downloads every couple days. So that meant that we could store more data.”108

Over the course of the mission, the CCD changed as pixels died due to space 

radiation—no problem when imaging a comet up close, but brutal for something as 

delicate as searching for planets transiting stars.

EPOCH also made observations of Earth, reducing it to a single pixel and studying its rotational light curves. The idea would be to figure out what such data looked 

like for a known planet so that it could be applied to unknown planets circling distant 

stars. The team found that when the Pacific Ocean rotated into view, the blue light 

curve peaked.

“So, you can mathematically invert that to say that the planet must have an ocean 

blob at that location,” said Deming. The maps had no latitudinal resolution, but “nevertheless, you could see, there are two oceans and two land masses. The two land 

masses are Europe, Asia, Africa as one big blob, and then the Americas. So, to be able 

to infer the existence of continents and oceans on another world would be, of course, 

astounding. And so, we demonstrated that that’s possible with signal-to-noise ratios 

that would be reasonable for extrasolar earthlike planets.”109

108 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 July). Personal interview with D. Deming. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

109 Ibid.
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Figure 4-1: Deep Impact—Comet Tempel 1 just after impact

Comet Tempel 1, imaged by Deep Impact’s flyby spacecraft after impact on 4 July 2005. The burst of light 

on the right side of the comet is sunlight reflected from the ejecta thrown up by the impact. (Image credit: 

NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Maryland, image no. PIA02137)
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Figure 4-2: Deep Impact spacecraft

The Deep Impact spacecraft inside the mobile service tower on Launch Pad 17-B at Cape Canaveral Air 

Force Station, awaiting fairing installation. (Image credit: NASA, image no. KSC-05pd-0074)
171

MESSENGER: AN AMAZING CONCEPT

The MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging spacecraft, 

or MESSENGER, was, without a doubt, the most ambitious mission ever selected in 

the Discovery Program.

It was the second effort to get such a Mercury mission going. An earlier, $257 million (in Fiscal Year 1996 dollars) proposal was selected for a concept study but was 

not selected for flight. When it was proposed again in 1998, the price had increased to 

$286 million (Fiscal Year 1998 dollars) with a few significant upgrades to the instruments, namely: the gamma ray spectrometer became the Gamma Ray and Neutron 

Spectrometer (GRNS), and the energetic particle spectrometer became an energetic 

particle and plasma spectrometer.

MESSENGER was thus selected, first for study on 7 July 1999, and then, after 

being chosen for flight, it entered the implementation phase on 7 June 2001. At the 

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time of selection, NASA Headquarters scientists and managers heralded the team’s 

plan to go back to Mercury for the first time in over 20 years, and with a large suite of 

instruments and ambitious goals.1

The Team

Sean Solomon, a planetary geologist and geophysicist at the Carnegie Institution of 

Washington, led the science team as its Principal Investigator. The project manager was 

Max Peterson at APL. The MESSENGER team was an all-star one: Ralph L. McNutt, 

also at APL, was the project scientist; Brian J. Anderson and Deborah L. Domingue 

were deputy project scientists at APL. Bob Farquhar was mission manager (as he had 

been on NEAR and CONTOUR). Robert Gold was the payload manager on both 

MESSENGER and NEAR. In fact, nine of the 20 original co-investigators, including 

McNutt, had been co-investigators on NEAR, APL’s previous Discovery mission.

Solomon had been participating in space science missions since graduate school, 

when his graduate adviser, Navi Toxos, led the seismic experiments on Apollo 11 and 

12. Eleven years later, he joined his first mission as a co-investigator on Magellan, which 

explored Venus. He also worked on the altimetry teams for Mars Observer and Mars 

Global Surveyor with Dave Smith at Goddard Space Flight Center and served on the 

Committee on Planetary and Lunar Exploration (COMPLEX) and other such advisory 

groups. Solomon was the rarity among Discovery PIs in that he had not originally 

proposed at the 1992 Discovery Workshop at San Juan Capistrano.

MESSENGER, in fact, while PI-led, was not even conceived by the PI. APL began 

working on a Mercury orbiter concept in March 1996, soon after word came down from 

NASA Headquarters of the upcoming Discovery 1996 Announcement of Opportunity.2

Solomon said, “APL was a very lean organization with not a lot of hierarchical 

structure and fit very well into developing low-cost but technically ambitious missions 

and were always looking for good ideas.”3

Lab scientists and management at APL recruited a science team to work out the key 

unsolved science questions of Mercury and how best to answer them. The first people 

they approached worked on the NEAR spacecraft to the asteroid Eros. John Applebee, 

1 NASA. (2001, 8 June). “NASA gives official nod to robotic mission to Mercury.” NASA News release.

2 McNutt, R. L., Solomon, S. C., Gold, R. E., & Leary, J. C. (2006). “The MESSENGER mission 

to Mercury: Development history and early mission status.” Mercury, Mars and Saturn, 38(4), 

564–571. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asr.2005.05.044. 

3 Niebur, S. (2009, 22 March). Personal interview with S. Solomon. Located in “MESSENGER” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
Chapter 5: Breaking the Bank

173

who was the head of development for the Space Department at APL, approached 

Solomon, saying: “We are looking to put together a team of scientists for a Discovery 

proposal, a Mercury orbiter. Would you be interested?”4

Solomon had written papers previously on Mercury and was one of the two authors 

of the Mercury chapter in the 1978 COMPLEX report on exploration of the inner 

planets. The organizing question was: “What are the strategic goals for the exploration 

of Mercury after Mariner 10?” Nobody at APL knew the answer.

Solomon thought it sounded like fun. “I hadn’t given a great deal of thought to 

Mercury for almost 20 years.... But it was something I had wanted to do for 20 years. 

It was a chance.” He didn’t know that much about APL or the team that would compose MESSENGER, though. Later, Tom Krimigis, the head of the Space Department 

at APL, called and asked Solomon to visit APL. Solomon agreed to do so. “I had never 

been to APL,” Solomon recalled. “And I come into this room with 10 people waiting 

for me. And the gist of it was... ‘You already said you would be on the science team 

for the mission, how about being PI?’”5 Part of the motivation for recruiting a scientist 

outside of APL was feedback from the previous Discovery round. Headquarters had 

told Krimigis that an external PI would broaden the menu of expertise that could be 

called upon to lead a science team.6 Though much of the science team had already 

been built—most from NEAR—Solomon agreed to be PI on the condition that he 

could add to the team.7 APL management acceded.

APL had great success in the 1996 Discovery round, winning not one but three concept studies for CONTOUR, MESSENGER, and Aladdin. It was almost a catastrophic 

victory. As Ralph McNutt, the project scientist for MESSENGER, remembers: “One 

of the guys here came to me and had this look of horror on his face. I said, ‘We didn’t 

get any of them?’ And he said, ‘No, we got all three of them.’ And so, it was like, ‘Oh, 

my God,’ because now we had to field three teams.”8

Solomon said his inexperience and naivete worked against the Mercury proposal 

after the first-round selection, however. “I put a lot of effort into the science rationale, 

which was the first 25 pages of the proposal,” he said, adding that he lacked the technical experience to critically evaluate engineering solutions to technical challenges. “I 

didn’t know that much then about risk management.... Nor did I know how to evalu4 Niebur, S. (2009, 22 March). Personal interview with S. Solomon. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid. 

7 Ibid.

8 Niebur, S. (2009, 31 July). Personal interview with R. McNutt. Located in the “MESSENGER” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
NASA′s Discovery Program

174

ate project managers, the first time around.”9 The science component of the proposal 

was strong, particularly because there had never been a spacecraft in Mercury’s orbit 

before. But the second selection round was driven by a review of the proposal’s technical, management, cost, and other factors.

“At the time of our site visit, we had a development path for the solar arrays, which 

was worked out. But in the questions and answers, it was clear we didn’t have a sufficient contingency plan. If any of the testing proved that our assumptions were not 

appropriate,” he said, “we didn’t have a deep plan to what to do next.”10 Specifically, 

NASA had concerns about the solar arrays so close to the Sun and how the adhesives 

connecting solar cell to solar panel might endure. Moreover, the budget did not come 

together by the site visit. The numbers had only been compiled the night before the 

presentation, and some of the information that had gone out to the site review team 

didn’t add up. The project manager, recalls Solomon, was in front of the room and getting questioned on budgets and couldn’t answer the questions. And there was nobody 

there who could help him because nobody had seen it.11

Reproposal

The team was determined to propose MESSENGER again, this time to the 1998 

Announcement of Opportunity. Solomon’s condition for again being Principal 

Investigator was to choose the next project manager. “I knew what skills I wanted, 

including communication,” said Solomon. “That we had to have a rapport, someone 

who could work well with his own engineers. Somebody whose budgets I believed. 

Somebody who knew about risk.”12

APL had just the person: Max Peterson, a long-time lab engineer with multiple 

missions under his belt. Peterson and Solomon hit it off from the start. With that 

problem solved, they got to work on the solar array issue. The lab used its own money 

to develop a testing protocol and to do the actual testing at NASA’s Glenn Research 

Center. “By the time we wrote our second proposal,” said Solomon, “and particularly 

by the time of the second site study we could say, ‘Not only do we have a solution for 

the solar arrays; here are all the tests that validate our models.’ Yes, they loved it. So, 

the first time we proposed we were Low Risk in round one and High Risk after the 

site visit. High risk being the solar arrays and not having a good project manager. But 

we were Low Risk both times the second time through.”13

9 Niebur, S. (2009, 22 March). Personal interview with S. Solomon. Located in “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.
Chapter 5: Breaking the Bank

175

The 2001 selection of MESSENGER for flight promised to advance Mercury science immeasurably. NASA had not sent a spacecraft to Mercury since Mariner 10 in 

1974.14 Robert Strom, a professor emeritus at the University of Arizona Lunar and 

Planetary Laboratory, had been lobbying for a return to Mercury since NASA’s last 

foray there.15 He became a co-investigator on MESSENGER. Much earlier, he in fact 

served on Mariner 10 as deputy team leader for the imaging experiment. “Mariner 10 

was a mission that was designed as a reconnaissance of Mercury in order to characterize 

it to plan a Mercury orbiter,” he said. “That orbiter was supposed to be planned and 

launched by about 1980. Well, it’s been 30 years.”16

As Sean Solomon, the MESSENGER PI, said, “For nearly 30 years, we’ve had questions that couldn’t be answered until technology and mission designs caught up with 

our desire to go back to Mercury.... Now we are ready.”17 A mission to Mercury had been 

studied by both the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Goddard Space Flight Center, but 

the costs in every case precluded its execution. The Mercury Dual Orbiter, a Goddard 

concept and the last studied by the planetary program, came in at around $700 million. (MESSENGER was less than half that price.) The price tag, coupled with the 

relatively low priority of Mercury exploration at NASA, meant it would never get the 

traction necessary for flight. Discovery was a paradigm shift, though. The New Frontier 

program did not yet exist; Discovery was the only way such a mission would ever fly.

Scientific Questions

MESSENGER sought to answer six fundamental questions, which trace their heritage 

back to the 1978 COMPLEX report coauthored by Solomon.

1. What planetary formational processes led to Mercury’s high ratio of metal to 

silicate?

2. What is the geological history of Mercury?

3. What are the nature and origin of Mercury’s magnetic field?

4. What are the structure and state of Mercury’s core?

5. What are the radar-reflective materials at Mercury’s poles?

6. What are the important volatile species and their sources and sinks near 

Mercury?18

14 Ibid.

15 Stauffer, T. (2004, 31 July). “His 30-year wait to end with launch to Mercury.” Arizona Daily Star. B2.

16 Harwood, W. (2004, 3 August). “Probe roars away from Earth on voyage to orbit Mercury.” 

Spaceflight Now.

17 Perlman, D. (2004, 1 August). “MESSENGER ready to deliver.” San Francisco Chronicle.

18 Solomon, S. C., McNutt, R. L., Gold, R. E., & Domingue, D. L. (2007). “MESSENGER Mission 

Overview.” Space Science Reviews, 131(1–4), 3–39. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-007-9247-6.
NASA′s Discovery Program

176

Each of these questions drove a science objective for the mission, and each of the 

science objectives was addressed by a well-defined set of measurement objectives that 

could be reached by two or more instruments in the suite of seven that made up the 

payload.19 The answers to those questions had great generality for understanding each 

of the inner planets—not just Mercury.

The direct tracing of objectives to measurements to instruments, and ultimately to 

spacecraft and mission design, contributed significantly to the ability of the mission to 

be “ambitious in its scientific scope for a Discovery mission, a tribute to the fact that 

scientific requirements guided the development of spacecraft and mission design at 

every stage in the project, from initial concept through all design trades and testing,” 

and mission operations.20

The seven instruments were designed to measure a wealth of data about the surface, 

atmosphere, and magnetosphere of this largely unknown planet. Not only would the 

mission bring back global maps of Mercury, but also a wealth of information about its 

geochemistry, geology, geophysics, thin atmosphere, and active magnetosphere. The 

team wanted to cover as many bases as an orbiter would permit.21

Solomon explained that, at the time, the most fundamental question the team was 

most interested in answering is how Mercury got put together and what the processes 

were that contributed to the inner planets turning out so differently from the outer 

planets. “They formed by common processes,” he said. “The inner planets are all litter mates, if you will, products of a single early stage in the evolution of a star and a 

planetary system.” To understand what processes most affected the outcomes, it was 

useful to study Mercury, the most extreme of those outcomes.22

“Mercury is an unusual planet even by the standards of the inner solar system,” 

elaborated Solomon, with “an unusual rotation rate such that the solar day on Mercury 

19 Ibid.

20 McAdams, J., Farquhar, R., Taylor, A., & Williams, B. (2007). “MESSENGER mission design and 

navigation.” Space Sci Rev, 131, 219–246. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-007-9162-x; Leary, J. C., 

Conde, R. F., Dakermanji, G., Engelbrecht, C. S., Ercol, C. J., Fielhauer, K. B., Grant, D. G., Hartka, 

T. J., Hill, T. A., Jaskulek, S. E., Mirantes, M. A., Mosher, L. E., Paul, M. V., Persons, D. F., Rodberg, 

E. H., Srinivasan, D. K., Vaughan, R. M., & Wiley, S. R. (2007). “The MESSENGER Spacecraft.” 

Space Science Reviews, 131(1–4), 187–217. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-007-9269-0; Solomon, 

S. C., McNutt, R. L., Gold, R. E., & Domingue, D. L. (2007). “MESSENGER Mission Overview.” 

Space Science Reviews, 131(1–4), 3–39. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-007-9247-6; Holdridge, M. E., 

& Calloway, A. B. (2007). “Launch and Early Operation of the MESSENGER Mission.” In D. L. 

Domingue & C. T. Russell (Eds.), The Messenger Mission to Mercury (pp. 573–600). Springer: 

New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-77214-1_17.

21 Harwood, W. (2004, 30 July). “MESSENGER awaits launch on marathon trek to Mercury.” 

Spaceflight Now.

22 Ibid.
Chapter 5: Breaking the Bank

177

lasts two Mercury years. It has the highest intrinsic density of any planet; the density is 

so high that two-thirds of the planet must be iron metal.”23 A mission to Mercury, ultimately, is a mission to the innermost part of the nebula out of which the planets formed.24

Before MESSENGER, not much was known about Mercury. Its density and magnetic field were comparable to Earth’s, but the planet is much smaller and made mostly 

of metal. All this was so, perhaps, because the interior region of the solar nebula was 

enriched in metals. Or maybe the planet was originally covered with a rocky surface 

that baked off in the intense heat caused by its proximity to the Sun. Or it could be 

that the crust broke off in an early impact. MESSENGER’s instruments, by measuring 

the composition of the crust, would likely be able to distinguish between the three 

hypotheses and determine the planet’s original composition and its evolution. Moreover, 

there was evidence that an unexpected material might be found in Mercury’s craters 

at the poles that are never exposed to sunlight. This material might have been frozen 

water ice, comet-delivered sulfur, or silicates, hidden in the dark crevices that stay very 

cold, hundreds of degrees below zero.

Its oddly strong magnetic field and unknown core size and composition were also 

unexplained. Did it possess a spinning liquid outer core?25 Its geology was curious as 

well, including its giant escarpments sometimes a mile high and hundreds of miles 

across, formed most likely when the planet cooled.26

To answer those and other questions, MESSENGER’s instrument payload consisted 

of the Mercury Dual Imaging System, a Gamma Ray and Neutron Spectrometer, an 

X-Ray Spectrometer (XRS), a magnetometer, the Mercury Laser Altimeter, the Mercury 

Atmospheric and Surface Composition Spectrometer (MASCS), and an Energetic 

Particle and Plasma Spectrometer (EPPS), as well as a radio science investigation.27

23 Ibid.

24 Spotts, P. N. (2004, 29 July). “The long and winding road to a hot planet.” The Christian 

Science Monitor.

25 Coledan, S. (2004, 3 August). “NASA’s MESSENGER probe departs for Mercury.” The 

New York Times.

26 Hill, R. L. (2004, 28 July). “Earth sends MESSENGER to Mercury.” The Portland Oregonian.

27 Hawkins, S., Boldt, J., Darlington, E., Espiritu, R., Gold, R., Gotwols, B., Grey, M., Hash, C., 

Hayes, J., Jaskulek, S., Kardian, C., Keller, M., Malaret, E., Murchie, S., Murphy, P., Peacock, K., 

Prockter, L., Reiter, R., Robinson, M., & Williams, B. (2007). “The mercury dual imaging system 

on the MESSENGER spacecraft.” Space Science Reviews, 131, 247–338. https://doi.org/10.1007/

s11214-007-9266-3; Goldsten, J. O., Rhodes, E. A., Boynton, W. V., Feldman, W. C., Lawrence, 

D. J., Trombka, J. I., Smith, D. M., Evans, L. G., White, J., Madden, N. W., Berg, P. C., Murphy, 

G. A., Gurnee, R. S., Strohbehn, K., Williams, B. D., Schaefer, E. D., Monaco, C. A., Cork, C. P., 

Del Eckels, J., Miller, W. O., Burks, M. T., Hagler, L. B., DeTeresa, S. J., & Witte, M. C. (2007). “The 

MESSENGER Gamma-Ray and Neutron Spectrometer.” Space Science Reviews, 131(1–4), 339–391. 

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-007-9262-7; Schlemm, C. E., Starr, R. D., Ho, G. C., Bechtold, K. E., 

Hamilton, S. A., Boldt, J. D., Boynton, W. V., Bradley, W., Fraeman, M. E., Gold, R. E., Goldsten, 

J. O., Hayes, J. R., Jaskulek, S. E., Rossano, E., Rumpf, R. A., Schaefer, E. D., Strohbehn, K., Shelton, 

R. G., Thompson, R. E., Trombka, J. I., & Williams, B. D. (2007). “The X-Ray Spectrometer on 
NASA′s Discovery Program

178

“To go to a planet that had never had an orbiter and to study the core and the 

geology and the topography and the composition of the surface materials and the 

exosphere, the magnetosphere, and the charged particle distribution...you need a pretty 

broad science team,” said Sean Solomon, who led the mission science as its Principal 

Investigator. “Early on, because it had to be fairly big to have the scientific breadth, 

we imposed a structure to the team to give it a better ability to internally manage. So, 

from the beginning we divided the team into four discipline groups and put people 

in charge of the discipline groups.”28

The spacecraft had several spatial constraints that might otherwise have impeded 

the collection of science data, including a giant, 2.5-meter by 2-meter sunshade protecting the instruments. Because the spacecraft would be so close to Mercury, it would 

have to endure a Sun whose rays are 11 times as concentrated as they are on Earth. 

To compensate for the protective ceramic-fabric sunshade, and because of the highly 

elliptical orbit of the spacecraft, the camera was mounted on a pivot.

According to Louise Prockter, the deputy project scientist of MESSENGER and 

Instrument Scientist for the Mercury Dual Imaging System, “Our pivot goes 40 degrees 

toward the Sun shield and 50 degrees away from the Sun shield. It covers 90 degrees. 

Doesn’t sound like much, but believe me, it makes a difference. And when we’re in 

orbit or doing a flyby, we’re moving it in tiny increments all the time back and forth 

as we’re tracking across the surface.”29

the MESSENGER Spacecraft.” Space Science Reviews, 131(1–4), 393–415. https://doi.org/10.1007/

s11214-007-9248-5; Anderson, B. J., Acuña, M. H., Lohr, D. A., Scheifele, J., Raval, A., Korth, H., 

& Slavin, J. A. (2007). “The Magnetometer Instrument on MESSENGER.” Space Science Reviews, 

131(1–4), 417–450. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-007-9246-7; Cavanaugh, J. F., Smith, J. C., Sun, X., 

Bartels, A. E., Ramos-Izquierdo, L., Krebs, D. J., McGarry, J. F., Trunzo, R., Novo-Gradac, A. M., 

Britt, J. L., Karsh, J., Katz, R. B., Lukemire, A. T., Szymkiewicz, R., Berry, D. L., Swinski, J. P., 

Neumann, G. A., Zuber, M. T., & Smith, D. E. (2007). “The Mercury Laser Altimeter Instrument 

for the MESSENGER Mission.” Space Science Reviews, 131(1–4), 451–479. https://doi.org/10.1007/

s11214-007-9273-4; McClintock, W. E., & Lankton, M. R. (2007). “The Mercury Atmospheric and 

Surface Composition Spectrometer for the MESSENGER Mission.” Space Science Reviews, 131(1–4), 

481–521. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-007-9264-5; Andrews, G. B., Zurbuchen, T. H., Mauk, B. H., 

Malcom, H., Fisk, L. A., Gloeckler, G., Ho, G. C., Kelley, J. S., Koehn, P. L., LeFevere, T. W., Livi, 

S. S., Lundgren, R. A., & Raines, J. M. (2007). “The Energetic Particle and Plasma Spectrometer 

Instrument on the MESSENGER Spacecraft.” Space Science Reviews, 131(1–4), 523–556. https://

doi.org/10.1007/s11214-007-9272-5; Srinivasan, D. K., Perry, M. E., Fielhauer, K. B., Smith, D. E., 

& Zuber, M. T. (2007). “The Radio Frequency Subsystem and Radio Science on the MESSENGER 

Mission.” Space Science Reviews, 131(1–4), 557–571. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-007-9270-7.

28 Niebur, S. (2009, 22 March). Personal interview with S. Solomon. Located in “MESSENGER” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

29 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 December). Personal interview with L. Prockter. Located in the 

“MESSENGER” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.
Chapter 5: Breaking the Bank

179

As far back as 2002, the camera team had put thought into their orbital strategy, 

data collection, polar data acquisition, how they were going to fill in the base map, 

what colors were needed, and the minimum number of filters necessary to answer 

their science questions about composition.30

The role of an Instrument Scientist, according to Prockter, is “to take the science 

goals from the proposal, the high-level science traceability matrix, and make sure 

that that instrument can do that science.” That’s not just making sure, on a camera, 

for instance, that you’ve got the right focal length on the instrument, she explains. 

It’s much more nuanced than that, involving things like the correct planes and filters 

to do color imaging. “It’s also making sure that once you’re in orbit around Mercury, 

you’re in the right orbit that your camera’s going to work, you’ve got the right amounts 

of time to do that.” She explains that calibrations done in flight validated the camera’s 

functionality and ironed out many of the quirks in the system and bugs in the software.31

Most instrument scientists on MESSENGER worked for the Applied Physics 

Laboratory, and most of the spacecraft’s instruments were built there as well. The 

laser altimeter and atmospheric and surface composition spectrometer were built at 

Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of Colorado, respectively. By the time 

the mission launched, the set of people who had put in at least two months of work on 

the mission numbered nearly a thousand, over half at the Applied Physics Laboratory.32

The instruments carried, spacecraft design, and overall mission were driven by 

several factors, including mass. MESSENGER was limited by the heaviest Delta II 

rocket, the 7925H, which had a lift mass of a little over 1,100 kilograms. Propellant 

took 54 percent of the launch mass, leaving only 508 kilograms of dry mass for its 

payload. To retain the dry mass needed for launch, MESSENGER engineers thoroughly 

integrated the structure and the propulsion system.33

Ralph McNutt, the MESSENGER project scientist, explained that mass issues came 

in unexpected places, including the wiring harness. Early on, engineers decided to 

use a smaller wire gauge for the harness, which meant smaller connectors. That led to 

issues because those connectors were not as sturdy and would break.34

There were delays in the delivery of key subsystems by subcontractors. A small 

company called Composite Optics, which was responsible for the spacecraft structure, 

ran late on the project in line before MESSENGER: the Mars Exploration Rovers. That 

delay set back the Mercury mission from the start. Another company, responsible for 

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid.

32 Niebur, S. (2009, 31 July). Personal interview with R. McNutt. Located in the “MESSENGER” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

33 Solomon, S. (2007, 19 September). Presentation at the Discovery@15 workshop, Huntsville, AL.

34 Niebur, S. (2009, 31 July). Personal interview with R. McNutt. Located in the “MESSENGER” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
NASA′s Discovery Program

180

the inertial measurement unit, was acquired by Northrop Grumman, which proceeded 

to close the Santa Barbara–based factory. Because an insufficient number of engineers 

at the closed plant wished to move to Los Angeles, where the new owners were located, 

Northrop Grumman had to reproduce the expertise necessary to build very complicated 

gyroscopes.35 As if those problems weren’t enough, the electromagnetic interference 

filters on most of the payload instruments had manufacturing flaws that could lead to 

critical failures, necessitating the remanufacture of electronics boards.36 Every delay 

compounded. Moreover, MESSENGER would be a very long mission with a six-anda-half-year cruise phase. Combined with the hazardous thermal environment, this 

necessitated fully redundant systems.

During development, instruments saw redesigns that enabled the spacecraft to 

stay in mass and on budget. The camera was altered to handle optical navigation. The 

gamma ray spectrometer, meanwhile, was, initially, very similar to the one used on 

NEAR. As the team would learn, the instrument only worked best when the spacecraft 

landed on the asteroid. In flight, it had high background noise and low signals. To 

compensate, the instrument team had to change from using scintillator crystals in the 

spectrometer to using high-purity germanium crystal—a great engineering challenge.37

The failure of the Mars probes in 1999 and the subsequent NASA Integrated Action 

Team report, and the recommendations therein, grossly complicated spacecraft development. Like all other Discovery missions, MESSENGER had to pass through numerous institutional and agency-level reviews before confirmation and the beginning of 

Phase C/D. The team endured 33 formal, external independent reviews with around 

100 reviewers at the subsystem and system level.38 Preliminary and critical design 

reviews for instruments added an additional 29 formal reviews and 226 reviewers.39

The excessive reviews were overly burdensome for the project team. “I complained 

[to NASA Headquarters] at one time that we had a third of the staff acting on the 

recommendations from the previous review; another third preparing for the next 

review; and the final third was actually doing work,” said Krimigis.40

35 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with S. Solomon. Located in “MESSENGER” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

36 McNutt, R. L., Solomon, S. C., Gold, R. E., & Leary, J. C. (2006). “The MESSENGER mission 

to Mercury: Development history and early mission status.” Mercury, Mars and Saturn, 38(4), 

564–571. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asr.2005.05.044.

37 Niebur, S. (2009, 31 July). Personal interview with R. McNutt. Located in the “MESSENGER” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

38 McNutt, R. L., Solomon, S. C., Gold, R. E., & Leary, J. C. (2006). “The MESSENGER mission 

to Mercury: Development history and early mission status.” Mercury, Mars and Saturn, 38(4), 

564–571. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asr.2005.05.044.

39 Ibid.

40 Niebur, S. (2009, 27 August). Personal interview with T. Krimigis. Located in the “Discovery Program” 

file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
Chapter 5: Breaking the Bank

181

Such obstacles raised the cost of the mission by about $40 million and ultimately 

delayed its launch. As McNutt added: “You can’t test for everything. Now, I’m not 

supposed to say that, because you’re supposed to test for everything, but it’s not going 

to happen.” During testing, McNutt was confident in the engineering. “Some of the 

other people in the process”—NASA Headquarters among them—“didn’t think we 

were okay. And we actually slipped the launch window twice.”41

Even the definition of “NASA Headquarters” for the team was a moving target. 

From Phases B to D, NASA’s Solar System Exploration Division had four directors. 

The Discovery Program had three program managers and added a new position—

program director—in 2004. Consequently, there were five successive Discovery 

management organizations.

In any event, NASA’s newfound conservatism felt punitive. “They were imposed 

on the system, and at the same time not paid for, and also not relaxing the schedule 

in any way, because we had a specific deadline to launch and so on,” said Krimigis.42

The twin losses of the Mars spacecraft were not the only failed missions to give 

MESSENGER fiscal heartburn and burdensome oversight. One cost savings maneuver 

employed by MESSENGER was to time-share with CONTOUR’s mission operations 

staff. Both were APL missions. Once CONTOUR encountered one comet and was en 

route to another, it would enter hibernation mode. Its people and ground systems, 

already paid for from the CONTOUR budget, would have nothing to do. MESSENGER 

would thus use them for its mission, free of charge. It was a brilliant bit of accounting, 

unless CONTOUR was destroyed, which it was in 2002. Though MESSENGER would 

not launch until 2004, it still had to account for the team it would eventually have to 

hire.43 Moreover, reviews subsequent to the CONTOUR fiasco gave MESSENGER a 

closer look. Again, both were APL missions. Did they share the same spacecraft faults? 

(They did not, but review boards were going to review things all the same.)44

41 Niebur, S. (2009, 31 July). Personal interview with R. McNutt. Located in the “MESSENGER” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

42 Niebur, S. (2009, 27 August). Personal interview with T. Krimigis. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

43 Niebur, S. (2009, 14 May). Personal interview with D. Jarrett and Kate Wolf. Located in “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

44 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with S. Solomon. Located in “MESSENGER” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
NASA′s Discovery Program

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Sean Solomon, the mission PI, said: “To be honest, many of the reviews are a blur.” 

The most valuable reviews by far, he said, were informal tabletop subsystem-level 

reviews, where the project brought in subject matter experts who really understood 

such issues as thermal design.45

“Surge capability”—that is, finding people within the Applied Physics Laboratory 

who could solve problems that emerged (or were created by NASA Headquarters 

mandates)—was an institutional strength. The Space Department, responsible for 

MESSENGER, was but one division of APL. When problems emerged, Krimigis might 

go through the head of the lab’s Technical Services Department, or another department, 

and ask for someone they might spare. For budgets, the issue was largely uncomplicated; everyone’s paycheck came from the same place; it was just a matter of charging 

certain time to certain budgets. Negotiations for time would ensue and were trickier. 

Because of the urgency and national profile of MESSENGER, it sometimes involved 

asking for priority when conflicting projects tied up necessary engineers.

One such surge was required when the mission’s project manager, Max Peterson, 

retired in 2002 for health reasons. Just before his retirement, his deputy—who had been 

groomed to take the project manager position—disappeared, figuratively, never showing 

up for work at the Applied Physics Laboratory again, as Solomon remembers. “Max, 

who treated this guy like a son, drove out to his house. He would barely talk to him.”46

APL management persuaded Dave Grant, the project manager on a NASA project 

called the Thermosphere Ionosphere Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics mission 

(TIMED) to take over the project manager position for MESSENGER as well.47 When 

Grant arrived, he quickly identified MESSENGER as a mission in trouble.

“Everywhere I looked there were cost and schedule problems,” he said. “Now you 

have to understand: MESSENGER is a very tough mission. You have to keep your eye 

on the spacecraft weight, on the propulsion, and on the thermal.... It was clear to me, 

very clear, that we had blown the cost cap.”48

Grant served as MESSENGER’s project manager for just under five years, getting the 

spacecraft through the launch phase. He was then replaced by his deputy, Peter Bedini.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid.

47 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 September). Personal interview with T. Krimigis. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

48 Niebur, S. (2009, 27 July). Personal interview with D. Grant. Located in the “MESSENGER” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
Chapter 5: Breaking the Bank

183

ORBITING HELL

Developmental headaches were perhaps a good preview of the hellish environment 

that the spacecraft was headed to. Getting MESSENGER into Mercury’s orbit was no 

small task. NASA could launch directly there, as Mariner 10 did, but that would not get 

it into orbit. (Robert Farquhar, the mission manager and orbital dynamicist, explained 

that a direct orbital insertion would require a braking rocket as big and expensive 

as the Delta II that launched MESSENGER from Earth). In fact, when Mariner 10 

launched, engineers at the time thought a Mercury orbit was physically impossible 

to achieve—that any spacecraft would fall prey to the Sun’s pull. In the 1980s, a flight 

engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory named Chen-Wan Yen discovered several 

complex flight paths that would slow a spacecraft down sufficiently to enter Mercury’s 

orbit.49 (She had previously discovered a way for the Stardust mission to get to Comet 

Wild 2.) Her plan used the gravity from three planets to slow the spacecraft down, passing by Earth once, Venus twice, and Mercury three times.50 MESSENGER ultimately 

flew five billion miles to reach a planet an average of 125 million miles from Earth.51

Once there, Mercury was no pleasant place to visit. The spacecraft would have to 

endure an 840°F environment that posed great challenges to onboard instrumentation. Not only did it have to survive the Sun’s heat, but Mercury’s as well, which was 

hot enough to melt lead.52 “We are orbiting hell, but in this case, hell is very interesting,” said Robert G. Strom, a co-investigator and planetary geologist at the University 

of Arizona.53

Mercury is a planet of extremes. At its equator, the temperature rises to 1,100°F. 

In its shaded polar craters, it is 270°F below zero. MESSENGER’s components were 

tested to 800°F.54 The spacecraft’s body was made of a lightweight heat-tolerant graphite composite, covered with layers of insulation, radiators, and pipes to move away 

the heat. The large, reflective, heat-resistant sunshade carried by MESSENGER was 

8 feet (2.4 meters) tall and 6 feet (1.8 meters) across, with quarter-inch layers of Nextel 

ceramic cloth, front and back, surrounding Kapton plastic insulation. Because of all 

this, the spacecraft would operate at a comfortable 68°F, surprisingly.55 Temperatures 

on the shielding, meanwhile, would reach 600°F.

49 Ibid.; Yen, C.-W. L. (1989). “Ballistic Mercury orbiter mission via Venus and Mercury gravity 

assists.” Journal of the Astronautical Sciences, 37, 417–432.

50 Tytell, E. (2004, 31 July). “For Mercury probe, the future looks very, very bright.” Los Angeles Times.

51 Asaravala, A. (2004, 27 July). “Mercury mission set to launch.” Wired News.

52 Perlman, D. (2004, 1 August). “MESSENGER ready to deliver.” San Francisco Chronicle.

53 Gugliotta, G. (2004, 2 August). “Mission to Mercury is the stuff of mystery.” The 

Washington Post. A10.

54 Sine, R. (2004, 29 July). “2004: A Mercury Odyssey.” The Washington Post. Prince George’s Extra, 12.

55 Leary, W. E. (2004, 27 July). “Mercury will become the next planet to get its close-up.” The 

New York Times.
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Cleverly, the solar panels were made of alternating solar cells and mirrors to reflect 

a good bit of sunlight so that the arrays wouldn’t overheat. Two-thirds of the panels 

were mirrors, and one-third were solar cells.

Science operations in such an environment would be a challenge. The Applied Physics 

Laboratory provided the hardware and infrastructure for science team members to 

access their data. Data arrived at the Science Operations Center (SOC) from mission 

operations. Before launch, Deborah Domingue, who was responsible for science operations within both the science team and mission operations, said she and a handful of 

others had to figure out the requirements for the SOC: What it was supposed to do, 

and how it would do it? “Each instrument needs somebody who’s dedicated to doing 

the sequencing, putting together the command load,” she said. “Then, each instrument 

needs an Instrument Scientist to make sure that that command load meets the science 

goals, what we’re trying to accomplish.”56 Instruments would also need an Instrument 

Engineer to make sure the commands didn’t blow up the experiment or fry its optics. 

All instruments were coordinated under a payload operations manager.

The spectrometer and the imager were perhaps the most complex instruments on 

the mission. The former, because it had to map the surface, and coverage was always 

an issue. The latter had independent pointing capabilities. Made up of two cameras—a 

narrow-angle and a wide-angle (the latter having color capability)—operations were 

time-consuming, with a very complex command load.57

Before the MESSENGER science operations team could get to work, however, the 

MESSENGER spacecraft had to launch. In 2003, the launch was delayed until August 

2003. The cost of the mission would break the $299 million Discovery cost cap by 

$12 million—the first mission ever to do so.

That it even got the reprieve of a delay was a stroke of fortune. When it became clear 

that it would break its budget, Ed Weiler, the Associate Administrator of the Science 

Mission Directorate, went to the scientific community to ask whether this was a road 

they wanted to go down. “I did not want to make the decision on my own to allow the 

first mission ever to break the Discovery cost cap,” he said.58

After receiving community input, NASA delayed the next Announcement of 

Opportunity for a new Discovery mission. It also implemented a new rule requiring 

the eventually selected mission to hold a full quarter of its budget in reserve to deal 

with technical, management, and schedule challenges that might be encountered.59

56 Niebur, S. (2010, 11 January). Personal interview with D. Domingue. Located in “MESSENGER” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

57 Ibid.

58 Berger, B. (2003, 22 September). “Messenger Busts Cost Cap, Prompting Changes to NASA’s 

Discovery Program.” SpaceNews. 1–3.

59 Ibid.
Chapter 5: Breaking the Bank

185

The MESSENGER team was going to miss its first launch window of March 2004. 

On 24 October, Orlando Figueroa at NASA Headquarters formally accepted the slip. 

The team really started solving outstanding issues at that point. Rumors circulated 

that the team at the Applied Physics Laboratory was cutting corners on testing—a rumor 

that Grant found outrageous. “This was totally unfounded.... I was especially angry 

over this since the source of the rumors was a couple of malcontents who eventually 

left the program. I let APL management know it and NASA management as well.”60

After shipping the completed spacecraft to Cape Canaveral for a May launch, Grant 

got a call from the Administrator of NASA, Mike Griffin. “There’s concern that we 

haven’t done enough testing of the autonomy system,” he recalled Griffin saying. “They 

want you to do more testing in several areas.” Grant replied that if NASA wanted the 

team to do extra testing, they would do extra testing. “They have to understand the 

consequences,” he said. The next possible launch date was in August. “If we go from 

May to August there’s a development cost.... We have an Earth flyby, two Venus flybys 

and three Mercury flybys before we get into orbit. Also, five major propulsive burns.” It 

was a much higher-risk trajectory, with tighter power and thermal margins, and the cost 

impact could have been as much as $30 million. “NASA’s got to decide if the additional 

testing is worth it,” said Grant.61 He recalled Griffin’s response: “It’s nonnegotiable.”

The MESSENGER team had to do all of the testing at the Cape remotely from 

APL, where the testing apparatuses were located. After the extended testing phase 

was complete, NASA held a Launch Readiness Review on 31 July 2004. The $429 million spacecraft was ready for launch.62 It left Earth on 3 August 2004, on a Delta II 

7925H-9.5 rocket at 2:16 a.m.—just dodging Hurricane Alex in the Atlantic Ocean.

The mission operations team quickly had to find its space legs. Because of the 

twice-delayed liftoff—the second so late in the process—the team had to start over, 

essentially, on mission planning. The analyses, science planning, and mission design 

done before launch needed to be rebuilt. Meanwhile, the team had to learn how to fly 

the spacecraft, which involved a level of trial and error.

“Initially, the spacecraft was difficult to operate,” said Grant. “When we did little 

thruster burns, for trajectory correction, there were errors, and they were significant 

enough that they had to be corrected.... We had plume impingement—that wasn’t 

anticipated prior to launch.... In the meantime, there are literally thousands of different parameters onboard. There were a few that needed adjustment.... The first time 

60 Niebur, S. (2009, 27 July). Personal interview with D. Grant. Located in the “MESSENGER” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

61 Ibid.

62 Harwood, W. (2004, 3 August). “Probe roars away from Earth on voyage to orbit Mercury.” 

Spaceflight Now.
NASA′s Discovery Program

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we tried something, it didn’t work exactly the way we had hoped it would, so we had 

to go back and correct it.... The shakedown cruise for MESSENGER was much more 

difficult than I thought it was going to be.”63

Such was the fate of complex new technology being flown for the first time. Grant 

explained, “The engineering team stayed with it. They ran every problem to ground.... 

And finally, one day, we all realized all the problems were pretty much fixed and that 

MESSENGER was an excellent spacecraft.”64

On 2 August 2005, MESSENGER executed its Earth gravity assist—a flyby of Earth 

whereby it used our planet’s gravity to adjust its velocity and course. The spacecraft’s 

closest approach was 1,458 miles over central Mongolia, and it experienced a significant 

trajectory change as it was sent hurtling toward Venus. Science instruments, including 

the camera, were powered on and tested as if Earth were an alien planet.65 The camera 

team later released a video using the images collected during the encounter.

“That movie is so beautiful,” said Louise Prockter, the Instrument Scientist on the 

camera and later deputy Principal Investigator of the mission. “You can just watch 

the Earth going around. You can see the specular reflection on the oceans. You know 

there’s water down there just from our movie of the Earth as we flew by it.”66

Later, during the first Venus flyby on 24 October 2006, the spacecraft was out of 

radio contact; its position on the opposite side of the Sun made radio contact impossible for two weeks. The science team decided against turning on the instruments and 

flew at a high altitude of 3,000 kilometers above the Venusian surface.67

In January 2007, Peter Bedini was promoted from deputy project manager to project 

manager, assuming the role from Dave Grant. Five months later—on 5 June 2007—

MESSENGER flew by Venus again at just 209 miles above the surface. The team coordinated with the team running the European Space Agency’s Venus Express, which began 

orbiting the planet in April 2006.68 It was a rare opportunity to do synergistic science.

“This is the first time that we are able to take observations [at Venus] from two 

different vantage points,” said Sean Solomon, the MESSENGER Principal Investigator. 

63 Niebur, S. (2009, 27 July). Personal interview with D. Grant. Located in the “MESSENGER” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

64 Ibid.

65 Buckley, M. (2005, 9 August). “MESSENGER spacecraft completes Earth swingby en route to 

Mercury.” JHU Gazette; Solomon, S. C., McNutt, R. L., Gold, R. E., & Domingue, D. L. (2007). 

“MESSENGER Mission Overview.” Space Science Reviews, 131(1–4), 3–39. https://doi.org/10.1007/

s11214-007-9247-6.

66 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 December). Personal interview with L. Prockter. Located in the 

“MESSENGER” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

67 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with S. Solomon. Located in “MESSENGER” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

68 “Venus probe makes science orbit.” (2006, 10 May). BBC News.
Chapter 5: Breaking the Bank

187

Although many space missions include planetary encounters in order to boost the 

velocity of the spacecraft, the Venus encounter was planned to slow the spacecraft 

down—from 22.7 to 17.3 miles per second—so that an orbital insertion around Mercury 

would later be possible upon arrival.69 It was the largest velocity change of the mission, 

and it was risky in the sense that instrument exposure to the Sun for any appreciable 

length of time would be hazardous to the instruments.70

“Typically, spacecraft have used planetary flybys to speed toward the outer solar 

system,” said Andy Calloway, MESSENGER mission operations manager. “MESSENGER, 

headed in the opposite direction, needs to slow down enough to slip into orbit 

around Mercury.”71

In addition to changing the spacecraft’s speed, it would also change its orbit. “The 

second Venus flyby was June of 2007, and that was a much closer approach,” recalled 

Solomon. “We needed that close approach because we not only slowed the spacecraft 

down but we changed the plane of the orbit. Venus is almost in the same orbital plane 

as the Earth. Mercury’s orbital plane is inclined a little more than 7 degrees to the 

ecliptic. So it was that Venus flyby that put us in Mercury’s orbital plane instead of 

Earth/Venus plane.” The team turned on every science instrument on the spacecraft. 

“All of them,” said Solomon. “We wanted to practice the Mercury flybys.”72

It turned out “beautifully,” Solomon remembered. “Virtually everything that we 

had programmed in, worked. We learned a few things about some of the sequencing 

on the imaging system that we put to good use on Mercury. But all the instruments 

worked well. We actually got some science out of the flyby because we worked with 

the Venus Express guys who of course were in orbit around Venus at the time we flew 

by.” The combination of measurements the two spacecraft made would later appear 

in papers that the two teams collaborated on.73

The First Mercury Flyby 

MESSENGER finally reached Mercury on 14 January 2008, passing just 125 miles above 

the surface of the nearest planet to the Sun at 2:04 p.m. Eastern time.74 The encounter 

69 Dominguez, A. (2007, 5 June). “Probe passing Venus on way to Mercury.” Associated Press.

70 Stauffer, T. (2004, 31 July). “His 30-year wait to end with launch to Mercury.” Arizona Daily Star. B2.

71 “NASA Spacecraft Ready for Science-Rich Encounter With Venus.” (2007, 4 June). NASA News 

Release 07-129.

72 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with S. Solomon. Located in “MESSENGER” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

73 Ibid.

74 Solomon, S. C., McNutt, R. L., Watters, T. R., Lawrence, D. J., Feldman, W. C., Head, J. W., Krimigis, 

S. M., Murchie, S. L., Phillips, R. J., Slavin, J. A., & Zuber, M. T. (2008). “Return to Mercury: A 

Global Perspective on MESSENGER’s First Mercury Flyby.” Science, 321(5885), 59–62. https://

doi.org/10.1126/science.1159706.
NASA′s Discovery Program

188

would be close enough for the instruments to take their initial data measurements 

and collect 1,200 images, filling the flight recorder with more than 700 megabytes of 

data during the 55 hours of flyby operations.75

All seven instruments worked perfectly, and among the images collected by the 

spacecraft were many of parts of Mercury never before seen.76 Where Mariner 10 mapped 

45 percent of the surface of Mercury, MESSENGER in its very first flyby uncovered 

an additional 21 percent.77 Scott Murchie, a co-investigator on MESSENGER, noted 

that being inundated with data was terrific. 

Robert Strom, who was a co-investigator on both Mariner 10 and MESSENGER, 

said: “I couldn’t sleep on the eve of the encounter.... I’ve waited 30 years for this. Every 

part of the planet seen or unseen is new. This is a whole new planet.”78

He was not exaggerating. MESSENGER had not even entered orbit and was already 

set to fundamentally transform the scientific understanding of Mercury. Its next flyby 

of the planet, on 6 October 2008, would uncover an additional 30 percent of its surface, 

leaving just 4 percent unknown.79 Among those initial surprises captured was a very 

unusual spider feature, never before observed on Mercury or the Moon. It was an 

impact crater, the name derived from its appearance: a big black circle with long legs 

extending from it—a central depression with over a hundred narrow flat-footed troughs 

called grabens radiating out from it. The feature would later be named Apollodorus. 

Other initial surprises included evidence of ancient volcanoes on many parts of the 

planet’s surface, huge cliffs, and formations snaking hundreds of miles, indicating 

patterns of fault activity from Mercury’s formation more than four billion years ago.80

The initial results from the first Mercury flyby were published on 3 July 2008 in 11 

articles in the journal Science. Among the findings were the following:

• Water, whether from ice in permanently shaded regions, impacts from comet 

and meteorite strikes, or from the interaction of the soil with the solar wind.81

75 Kaufman, M. (2008, 14 January). “Today’s Mercury flyby to be the first since 1974.” The 

Washington Post.

76 “Surprises stream back from Mercury’s MESSENGER.” (2008, January 30). APL News Release. 

77 Solomon, S. C., McNutt, R. L., Watters, T. R., Lawrence, D. J., Feldman, W. C., Head, J. W., Krimigis, 

S. M., Murchie, S. L., Phillips, R. J., Slavin, J. A., & Zuber, M. T. (2008). “Return to Mercury: A 

Global Perspective on MESSENGER’s First Mercury Flyby.” Science, 321(5885), 59–62. https://

doi.org/10.1126/science.1159706.

78 Spotts, P. N. (2008, 31 January). “MESSENGER images show hidden face of Mercury.” The Christian 

Science Monitor.

79 “Message from Mercury safely down to Earth.” (2008, 19 January). Space Daily.

80 Minard, A. (2008, 31 January). “Weird Spider Volcanism Discovered on Mercury.” 

National Geographic.

81 Carreau, M. (2008, 3 July). “MESSENGER’s f light reveals water source on Mercury.” 

Houston Chronicle.
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189

• An active magnetic field, suggesting a solid iron core and an enormous outer 

core of molten iron. Motion in the outer core would likely generate an active 

magnetic field around the planet. This was similar to Earth, though dissimilar 

to Venus or Mars.82

• Volcanic vents, previously unseen by Mariner, that showed ancient lava flows 

that contributed to surfacing. Bright smooth plains on the planet’s surface, it 

was hypothesized, might be lava flows instead of material ejected from meteor 

impact craters as previously thought.83

• Surface contraction, a result of the cooling core and the condensing of molten 

iron. The planet, in other words, is shrinking like a dried apple—the reason 

for its titanic cliffs called “lobate scarps.”84 The magnitude of the contraction is 

about one mile of the planet’s 1,400-mile radius.

MESSENGER had yet to enter orbit around Mercury. On the third and final flyby 

of Mercury, at about 5:55 p.m. EDT on 29 September 2009, it sped by at about 12,000 

miles per hour, imaging some of the same terrain as it did in its second flyby, but 

this time with slightly different lighting conditions. New angles of sunlight helped 

better show the planet’s topography. The probe briefly lost contact with Earth, losing some science data.85 Still, the encounter not only completed the planet’s surface 

map to 98 percent but also revealed high amounts of heavy metals like titanium and 

iron, calling into question the prevailing hypotheses about how Mercury evolved. It 

also revealed more about how seasons on Mercury manifest, in the form of chemical 

compositions in its wispy atmosphere.86

The primary purpose of the flyby was always to use Mercury’s gravity to adjust 

its trajectory and velocity until it could enter into formation with the planet. “The 

spacecraft after being lapped by Mercury many times in its race around the Sun will 

eventually match the 88-day orbital period of the innermost planet,” explained Eric 

Finnegan, MESSENGER’s mission system engineer, at the time.87

Once in orbit, scientists would get the equivalent of two Mercury flybys every single 

day.88 Before entering orbit, Bedini explained, the team worked to plan all observations, 

82 Roylance, F. D. (2008, 4 July). “Water traces on Mercury.” Baltimore Sun; Scanlon, B. (2008, 

7 July). “Sun’s role in Mercury’s tail surprises scientists.” Rocky Mountain News.

83 “Volcanic eruptions helped shape planet Mercury.” (2008, 7 July). AFP.

84 “MESSENGER spacecraft reveals Mercury secrets.” (2008, 7 July). InTheNews.co.uk.

85 Thompson, A. (2009, 2 October). “Mercury’s mysterious bright spot photographed up 

close.” Space.com.

86 Hsu, J. (2009, 29 December). “Astronomy Milestones in 2009.” Space.com. 

87 Amos, J. (2008, 14 January). “MESSENGER primed for Mercury pass.” BBC News.

88 Niebur, S. (2009, 9 July). Personal interview with P. Bedini. Located in “MESSENGER” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
NASA′s Discovery Program

190

by all elements of the science payload, for an entire year. The team planned also for 

command errors or missed observations with ongoing, week-long command loads. 

Every month, the team would validate that the data on the ground was what they 

wanted to achieve their science goals. If not, they would run the baseline plan from 

that point to the end of the mission to fill in the missing observations—things that 

they knew they would want to observe again but weren’t yet sure what those things 

were. To do such planning, they used a tool called SciBox developed at the Applied 

Physics Laboratory and used on the Cassini orbiter at Saturn, the Mars Reconnaissance 

Orbiter, and other missions. It was the first time the software was ever used to coordinate the measurements of a full payload of seven instruments.89 (They did not use 

SciBox for any of the flybys because there was still ample time to do it by hand and 

because SciBox was still in development.)

MESSENGER entered Mercury’s orbit on 18 March 2011, kicking off its first year of 

observations.90 During orbital insertion, four hundred members of the MESSENGER 

team, and friends, met at the Kossiakoff Auditorium at APL for the milestone event 

in space exploration. Addressing the crowd, Ed Weiler said: “I remember the day 

we selected this mission.... That was 12 years ago.... It’s 12 years from PowerPoint 

to Mercury.”91

At 9:10 p.m., the Mission Operations Control Center received word from the 

spacecraft that the maneuver was a success.92 Sean Solomon, the mission Principal 

Investigator, rejoiced at the time: “This is when the real mission begins.”93

THE 2000 AO: BE BOLD, TAKE RISKS

On 19 May 2000, NASA released the fourth Discovery Announcement of Opportunity 

with a cost cap of $299 million. The AO expanded the program and added new requirements. Mission concepts intended to achieve science goals of missions already in the 

NASA strategic plan were no longer excluded. Participating scientist programs and 

data analysis programs were strongly encouraged, and costs related to said programs 

would not count against the mission cap. Missions of opportunity proposals could 

be part of missions sponsored by other NASA organizations outside of the Office of 

Space Science, extensions of current missions, or data buys. Moreover, the cost cap was 

increased. Proposed education and public outreach programs were now mandatory in 

89 Ibid.

90 Solomon, S. C., McNutt, R. L., Gold, R. E., & Domingue, D. L. (2007). “MESSENGER Mission 

Overview.” Space Science Reviews, 131(1–4), 3–39. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-007-9247-6.

91 Weiler, E. (2011, 18 March). Public comments at Mercury orbit insertion event at APL. 

92 “NASA spacecraft now circling Mercury—a first.” (2011, 18 March). USA Today.

93 Ibid.
Chapter 5: Breaking the Bank

191

the electronic proposal. Moreover, co-investigators were required have well-defined roles 

on the mission. Concepts with international participation would be under additional 

requirements, as would those that were affected by U.S. export laws and regulations. 

A risk management plan would be required. Funding for the Phase A concept study 

was increased from $375,000 to $450,000, but the number of investigations to be 

selected was reduced from four-to-six to three-to-five.94 At a preproposal conference 

by the Langley Science Support Office, proposers were shown clear and unambiguous 

definitions of the technical-management-cost risk envelope definitions.95

When the window closed three months later, on 18 August 2000, NASA had received 

26 proposals. This was the first Discovery Announcement of Opportunity review after 

the Mars failures of 1999, and the ensuing reports and changes. As Gregg Vane, who 

managed Discovery proposals at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, remembered: “Dan Goldin 

had told everyone: be bold, take risks. An occasional failure is okay. The Mars failures 

occurred. He got up on the stage of Von Kármán [auditorium, at JPL] and said, ‘I take 

the blame for this. I pushed you guys too far. Now let’s back off and see what’s the right 

approach.’ We started doing that immediately, of course, through all of our programs 

at JPL, including Discovery.”96

While the lab was already independently starting to tighten the stringency of its 

mission proposals and requirements, there were still several projects in the pipeline 

that had been formulated and were being implemented in the now-moribund faster, 

better, cheaper era. “So,” said Vane, “the failures, or the cost overruns, or whatever, 

kept coming.” This led to a sort of accordion effect, where management at the lab and 

across the agency, not realizing that new protections were already being implemented 

to forestall future Mars-like disasters, added even more onerous requirements yet. 

“By the time things finally caught up,” Vane explained, “we had a very, very complex, 

burdensome system, in terms of the level of the proposal that had to be prepared, the 

level of scrutiny that it was being given.”97

Many of the questions and comments coming back from the technical-managementcost reviews were, in the eyes of some, verging on the more advanced Preliminary 

Design Review level. “The nature of expectations from NASA changed quite a lot from 

the beginning,” said Vane. “It took a while really for the science community to really 

internalize that. I can’t tell you how many painful conversations I had over those years 

with my scientific colleagues who wanted to propose something that was just totally 

94 NASA. (2008). Discovery Announcement of Opportunity. 

95 Niebur, S. (2009, 27 April). Personal interview with B. Perry. Located in “Discovery Program” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

96 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with S. Solomon. Located in “MESSENGER” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

97 Niebur, S. (2009, 22 March). Personal interview with G. Vane. Located in “Discovery Program” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
NASA′s Discovery Program

192

off in the blue. Being out of scope, impossible to do. The technologies didn’t even exist, 

let alone being mature. For innovative new management roles and models that no one 

in their right mind who knows project management would have ever done. They were 

insistent that we had to try it this way because it was Faster, Better, Cheaper—that’s 

what Dan Goldin said—and they were still living in an old paradigm.”98

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory submitted 13 proposals in 2000, down from 16 in 

1998 and 20 in 1996. On 4 January 2001, three missions were selected for concept study.

The Dawn mission was designed to look back at the conditions and processes active 

at the dawn of the solar system by orbiting the asteroids Vesta and Ceres and measuring 

their geophysical and geochemical properties. These two large asteroids were expected 

to be very different due to their locations in the asteroid belt; by sending the same 

instruments to each unevolved body, scientists could discover the conditions at these 

two distances from the Sun during planetary formation, which would unlock not just 

secrets of the asteroids but how the planets themselves formed at different distances 

from the Sun. Dawn, led by Principal Investigator Chris Russell of UCLA and managed 

by Sarah Gavit at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, would launch in July 2005 and arrive 

at Vesta in June 2008 and Ceres in May 2013. The spacecraft would be built at Orbital 

Sciences; the overall cost of the mission was proposed at $271 million.99

Kepler was a space telescope designed to detect Earth-size exoplanets—that is, 

planets orbiting other stars in the galaxy. It would monitor 100,000 stars over a fouryear mission for a total cost of $286 million. Kepler had received funding previously, 

in 1999, to perform a technology demonstration.

Edward Smith, former project scientist of the Ulysses solar mission, would lead 

the concept study for a Jupiter orbiter, a daring mission under the Discovery cap. It 

was called the Interior Structure and Internal Dynamical Evolution of Jupiter (INSIDE 

Jupiter). The mission would determine the internal structure of the largest planet in 

the solar system, observing and measuring processes within the Jovian magnetosphere 

and atmosphere, and obtaining high-resolution maps of magnetic and gravity fields, 

determining “if Jupiter’s dynamic atmosphere is a visible response to flows in the deep 

interior of the planet.” The mission would cost $296 million and be managed by Smith’s 

institution, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Ball would build the spacecraft, to launch 

in November 2005 and arrive at Jupiter in September 2011.100

Meanwhile, NASA Headquarters also selected for concept study a suite of instruments to be built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and incorporated into the larger 

instrument suites on the French-led NetLander mission to Mars. Bruce Banerdt of 

JPL would lead American participation in seismology, meteorology, and geodesy (i.e., 

98 Ibid.

99 Whalen, M. (2001, 19 January). “JPL-led Discovery proposals move forward.” JPL Universe. 31(2).

100 Ibid.
Chapter 5: Breaking the Bank

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using radio tracking to measure rotational irregularities) experiments, for a total cost 

of $35 million. As there was ample time before the NetLander spacecraft launch in 

2007, the team was given $250,000 to demonstrate the project readiness through a 

feasibility study.101

NetLander aside, each of the mission concepts received $450,000 to conduct a fourmonth implementation feasibility study, which would be due 24 July 2001.

Selection

After review of the concept study reports and, later, site visits in early to mid-September 

2001, the Dawn and Kepler mission concepts were selected for formulation that year 

on 21 December.

“Kepler and Dawn are exactly the kind of missions NASA should be launching, 

missions that tackle some of the most important questions in science yet do it for a very 

modest cost,” said Associate Administrator Ed Weiler.102 PI Bill Borucki believed that 

the Kepler mission could help answer the age-old question, are we alone in the universe? 

Meanwhile, on 20 December 2000, NASA released an unprecedented Announcement 

of Opportunity to replace the canceled Pluto/Kuiper Express mission to the farthest 

planet in the solar system. This was highly unusual, as large outer planet missions were 

typically directed without competition to various NASA centers. Large cost increases 

for Pluto/Kuiper Express, deemed unacceptable by NASA Headquarters, had led to 

a stop-work order three months earlier, on 12 September 2000. In issuing the AO, 

NASA cited the great success of competitively selected Discovery missions and other 

PI-led mission lines.

The competition would be structured similarly to Discovery, with a three-month 

proposal opportunity for complete mission investigations to the Pluto-Charon system and the Kuiper belt, peer review, two-phase selection, and a down-select set for 

August 2001. Weiler was searching for innovation, new partners, and competitive 

mission designs.103

The next year would bring more praise yet with the establishment of the New 

Frontiers mission line, which was described as “Discovery Plus.”104 In May, Weiler 

introduced the program in congressional testimony on NASA’s science priorities by 

101 Ibid.

102 “NASA selects missions to explore two large asteroids and search for Earth-like planets.” (2001, 

21 December). NASA news release 01-254. See also “Dawn of a new mission begins ’02.” (2002, 

4 January). JPL Universe. 32(1). 1.

103 “NASA seeks proposals for Pluto mission; plans to restructure outer planet program.” (2000, 20 

December). NASA news release 00-201.

104 Niebur, S. quoted in slides presented by Colleen Hartman in various venues. Unable to locate 

this citation.
NASA′s Discovery Program

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saying, “The New Frontiers Planetary Program will be structured and managed along 

with the lines of a highly successful Discovery Program.... All New Frontiers missions 

will be selected through a fully open, competitive, and peer-reviewed process.”105

Brad Perry, who was later the Director of the Science Office for Mission Assessments 

at the Science Mission Directorate, later explained what had happened. He said: “New 

Frontiers grew out of the success of Discovery. Discovery was the beginning: the 

opportunity to do significant science on a relatively modest budget.”106

Discovery Program Office Dissolved

In late 2003, NASA Headquarters dissolved the Discovery Program Office at the NASA 

Management Office in Washington, DC. It had been led for years by Dave Jarrett and 

staffed by Kate Wolf, who was badged by NASA Headquarters, with education and 

public outreach leadership by Shari Asplund, who was badged by JPL. NASA asked 

JPL to undertake management of a new office that would report up through the JPL 

management chain, hoping that it would give the lab more ownership of, and cooperation between, the projects and the project office. JPL had experience with such an 

arrangement through its Mars Program Office, headed by Firouz Naderi since 2000.107

On 7 January 2004, Charles Elachi, Director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 

announced the formation of the Discovery and New Frontiers Program Office at JPL.

Meanwhile, cost overruns from two Discovery missions—MESSENGER and Deep 

Impact—severely delayed the release of what would have been the 2002, and then 2003, 

but what was finally the 2004 Announcement of Opportunity for a new Discovery 

mission. In October 2002, Deep Impact needed $7.4 million, so the AO was pushed to 

January 2003. But then MESSENGER needed $3.2 million. This pushed the AO until 

April. But Deep Impact needed an additional $14.4 million, which pushed the release 

to August. Then MESSENGER needed $9.5 million for its Phase E, which delayed the 

AO until October. Lastly, the Mercury mission needed another $11.9 million, pushing 

the AO to 2004, when it was finally released.108

105 Weiler, E. (2002, 9 May). “NASA’s Science Priorities”: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Space 

and Aeronautics, Committee on Science, House of Representatives. S. 2, 107th Congress. Serial 

number 107-64.

106 Niebur, S. (2009, 27 April). Personal interview with B. Perry. Located in “Discovery Program” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

107 “JPL names Naderi as new head of Mars Program Office.” (2000, 7 April). Press release. Downloaded 

from http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98/news/news73.html on 18 August 2009.

108 Niebur, S. (2003, 23 October). “Discovery Program Update.” Presentation for the Solar System 

Exploration Subcommittee.
Chapter 5: Breaking the Bank

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Figure 5-1: MESSENGER spacecraft 

The MESSENGER spacecraft is lowered onto a test stand using an overhead crane. Members of the 

Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory then began final processing for launch, including 

checkouts of the power systems, communications systems, and control systems. (Image credit: NASA, 

image no. KSC-04pd0595)
NASA′s Discovery Program

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Figure 5-2: Mercury as seen by MESSENGER 

This color mosaic shows the eastern limb of Mercury as seen by the MESSENGER spacecraft following its first flyby of the planet in January 2008. (Image credit: NASA/JHUAPL/Carnegie Institution of 

Washington, image no. PIA12842)
197

Dawn and Kepler, selected on 21 December 2001 (in response to the 2000 

Announcement of Opportunity) had to pay, in some respects, for the mistakes and 

overruns committed by previous missions. Dawn, a high-heritage mission to study the 

asteroids Ceres and Vesta; and Kepler, a planet-finding mission to be launched into 

Earth’s orbit, were initially seen as more achievable missions than the previous two.1

Although NASA management professed to judge each mission on its own merits, it 

was impossible for the various mission and review teams to conduct business as usual 

without regard for the problems that had come before. There was increased vigilance, 

along with additional reviews at earlier and earlier times, but with that came a team 

determination to not make the same mistakes as earlier mission leaders had and to 

1 Russell, C. T., Coradini, A., Christensen, U., De Sanctis, M. C., Feldman, W. C., Jaumann, R., 

Keller, H. U., Konopliv, A. S., McCord, T. B., McFadden, L. A., McSween, H. Y., Mottola, S., 

Neukum, G., Pieters, C. M., Prettyman, T. H., Raymond, C. A., Smith, D. E., Sykes, M. V., 

Williams, B. G., Wise, J., & Zuber, M. T. (2004). “Dawn: A journey in space and time.” Planetary 

and Space Science, 52(5–6), 465–489. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pss.2003.06.013; Basri, G., Borucki, 

W. J., & Koch, D. (2005). “The Kepler Mission: A wide-field transit search for terrestrial planets.” 

New Astronomy Reviews, 49(7–9), 478–485. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newar.2005.08.026.

CHAPTER 6

Renewed Commitment:

Dawn
NASA′s Discovery Program

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prove that their missions would be delivered successfully, on time, and on budget, 

unlike Deep Impact and MESSENGER, and technically perfect, unlike CONTOUR 

and Genesis. This was easier said than done.

DAWN AND KEPLER

The two missions faced challenges early on. Dawn suffered financial threats and challenges, identified in pre-confirmation reviews and by the mission team. Kepler fought 

scope creep by the scientists on the mission. Technical problems abounded. Dawn 

responded responsibly, by descoping two of their five instruments and presenting a 

shortened mission at their confirmation review. Shockingly (to mission leadership), 

this was not enough to convince NASA management that the problems had been 

solved. After a bit of deal-making behind the scenes, the team was allowed to continue. 

Dawn’s problems, however, had only just begun, and technical problems proliferated.

The Dawn mission would be the first mission to orbit multiple asteroids and perform comparative planetology: studying each with the same suite of instruments to 

determine differences in their origin and evolution. As the first asteroid, Vesta, was dry 

and the second, Ceres, was likely to be partially composed of water, this investigation 

would help determine differences in the initial composition of the inner and outer 

planets, composed of similar building blocks at the origin of the solar system. The 

mission was boldly, if simply, scoped, with sequential orbital distances and significant 

travel time between the asteroids. The trouble was that the mission’s designers did not 

adequately define the mission’s science requirements at proposal. When funding for 

both Phases A and B was delayed, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory changed its internal 

commitments, and the mission had trouble adapting to the changing environment.

Without a narrowly focused set of requirements, it was impossible for Dawn’s 

team to clearly prioritize measurements, instruments, and orbital stay times in the 

face of declining available budgets. The mission thus failed its confirmation review. Its 

major industry partner, Orbital Sciences, was a new player in the planetary missions 

game, and the mission management structure at proposal did not include adequate 

insight into their progress. Without “boots on the ground” oversight by NASA and 

JPL, contractors struggled to deliver subsystems on time and within budget. The mission continued to be beset by a string of technical challenges, the visibility of which 

did not inspire confidence in the continuation of the mission. Without a clear plan to 

address and minimize the effect of technical failures, the mission stumbled toward a 

standdown and eventually project termination.

Ultimately, the mission was both threatened and saved by its use of ion engines, 

which could swap mass margin for power and make up transit time in flight. The mis-
Chapter 6: Renewed Commitment: Dawn

199

sion’s troubled development required different project managers to lead each phase: 

formulation, development, integration and test, and mission operations.

The First Real Interplanetary Spaceship

Like nearly every Discovery mission so far selected, Dawn traced its origins to the 

1992 Discovery Workshop at San Juan Capistrano, where Chris Russell outlined the 

potential of a different mission: the Venus CLOUD concept. NASA Headquarters did 

not select that concept for study, but a chance meeting at that workshop led directly 

to the development of Dawn, which would see selection nine years later. It was there 

that Russell, a space physicist at the University of California, Los Angeles, met J. Mark 

Hickman from the Lewis Research Center (now Glenn Research Center) in Cleveland. 

Hickman was proposing a concept that used solar-electric propulsion to power a spacecraft designed to measure Earth’s magnetosphere. The mission concept, inelegantly 

called the Magnetospheric Mapping and Current Collection in the Region from LEO to 

GEO, was inappropriate for the new solar system program, and Russell told Hickman 

so.2 However, he said, the concept’s ion propulsion engines were an idea that could do 

wonders for planetary exploration.

Hickman and his management were as intrigued by the propulsion’s potential 

as Russell, and they asked Russell to gather a group of scientists who might advise 

them on planetary mission concepts. As these ideas grew into a real proposal, the Jet 

Propulsion Laboratory asked to join, creating an unusual collaboration for the time. 

Lewis Research Center agreed, and this partnership led to Russell’s 1994 proposal of 

Diana, a six-thruster solar-electric propulsion mission to the Moon that would then 

spiral away from the Moon and encounter a near-Earth asteroid: the dormant Comet 

Wilson–Harrington. The mission even included a subsatellite to measure the backside 

gravity of the Moon. The proposal did not review well in the faster, better, cheaper 

environment of the new Discovery Program, however. As Russell put it, “It was a little 

bit too ambitious for the time.”3

The well-studied, low-cost Lunar Prospector mission was selected instead. Since the 

solar system exploration community and its management were charged with exploring a broad swath of the solar system through the Discovery Program, missions to 

the Moon were less likely to be selected in the next round. Savvy scientists knew this, 

2 Russell, C. T., Capaccioni, F., Coradini, A., De Sanctis, M. C., Feldman, W. C., Jaumann, R., 

Keller, H. U., McCord, T. B., McFadden, L. A., Mottola, S., Pieters, C. M., Prettyman, T. H., 

Raymond, C. A., Sykes, M. V., Smith, D. E., & Zuber, M. T. (2007). “Dawn Mission to Vesta and 

Ceres: Symbiosis Between Terrestrial Observations and Robotic Exploration.” Earth, Moon, 

and Planets, 101(1–2), 65–91. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11038-007-9151-9.

3 Niebur, S. (2009, March 24). Personal interview with C. Russell. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
NASA′s Discovery Program

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and the Moon was discarded as a viable target for the 1996 proposal opportunity. JPL 

abandoned plans for Diana.

After receiving feedback from science and technical reviewers via a NASA 

Headquarters debriefing, the no-longer-Diana team took their list of weaknesses and 

began to solve the perceived risks while meanwhile considering their next target. Russell 

turned to planetary science colleague Tom McCord of the University of Hawaiʻi and 

asked his opinion on the next-most-important body after the Moon. As it happened, 

McCord had observed Vesta as a young scientist and had concluded in 1970 that the 

reflected spectra of Vesta were very similar to certain basaltic achondrites (those with 

pigeonite predominant).4 The Howardite–Eucrite–Diogenite meteorites, as they were 

later known, could be used as “ground truth” for their presumed parent body, Vesta. 

Later, McCord used characteristics of the asteroid’s reflectivity and laboratory measurements of the Howardite–Eucrite–Diogenite meteorites to develop a thermal evolution 

model for Vesta that showed that the asteroid had melted and differentiated, with a 

basaltic surface like the Moon or Hawaiʻian volcanoes and (probably) an iron core, 

with remnant magnetism. The asteroid, in other words, had experienced volcanism. 

This was a very interesting target indeed!

This mission that emerged from their discussions was the Main Belt Asteroid 

Rendezvous (MBAR), which would orbit Vesta, 857 Glasenappia, and 21 Lutetia, the 

latter two asteroids conveniently located at the time MBAR would depart from Vesta.

The team also submitted a proposal for the Comet Nucleus Rendezvous that would 

match orbits with Comet Tempel 2. Both proposals were led by Russell, managed by the 

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and designed around NASA Lewis’s ion engines. Proposing 

competing missions was a gutsy move on Russell’s part, but one that did not bring 

success, possibly in part because they were reviewed by the same peer review panel. 

Neither was selected, but, as Russell put it, “We got twice as many good comments 

from NASA that time.”5

Two years later, the team proposed MBAR again. During that interval, however, 

the asteroids had moved farther apart, making MBAR a two-asteroid mission instead 

of three. Vesta and 21 Lutetia were still within reach, but 857 Glasenappia, a small 

asteroid 2.24 AU from the Sun, had moved away in its trajectory and was no longer 

reachable within the mission parameters. In the meantime, Rosetta had been selected 

by ESA, so Russell’s team assumed, incorrectly, that a comet mission would not be 

among NASA’s top priorities. The team put all their energies behind the asteroid pro4 McCord, T. B., Adams, J. B., & Johnson, T. V. (1970). “Asteroid Vesta: Spectral Reflectivity 

and Compositional Implications.” Science, 168(3938), 1445–1447. https://doi.org/10.1126/

science.168.3938.1445.

5 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with C. Russell. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
Chapter 6: Renewed Commitment: Dawn

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posal. Not coincidentally, the first deep space solar-electric propulsion mission (and 

the first technology demonstration mission in the New Millennium line), Deep Space 1, 

was also near launch. “Just when the proposals went to the selection committees,” 

Russell recalled, “Deep Space 1 was launched and its engines didn’t start right away. 

So I figured that what happened was, let’s wait and see how Deep Space 1 really goes 

before we commit to this. So I didn’t pass the 1998 review, either.”6

As the team reviewed the possible asteroid targets for a mission proposal in 2000, 

they noticed that large asteroid Ceres would be closer to Vesta by the time their wouldbe spacecraft reached the asteroid belt. Instead of a small main-belt asteroid such 

as Lutetia (not visited until Rosetta’s approach on 13 July 2010), the mission could 

now visit the largest and most-well-known asteroid of them all.7 The proposal clearly 

demonstrated that the mission to orbit Vesta and then Ceres could be accomplished 

only once every 17 years because of the synodic period between the two bodies; this 

time-critical element may have added to the desirability of the mission. By the time 

the proposal was reviewed following the 2000 Announcement of Opportunity, the ion 

engines had been space-qualified on Deep Space 1. That, plus an extended life test of 

the NASA Solar Technology Application Readiness (NSTAR) ion propulsion system 

technology, which took place during Dawn’s Phase A and B, provided additional confidence in the engine lifetime. Engineers on the team were enthusiastic about the use 

of ion engines.8 The mission, now named Dawn, was selected by NASA Headquarters 

for a Phase A study and then implementation.

The Dawn science team went “right back to 1992 when I put together the team for 

developing ion propulsion missions for Lewis,” said Russell, the Principal Investigator 

of Dawn. The team was compact by design, as Jay Bergstralh, then–program scientist 

of Discovery, was insistent on the point. Further, the team was assembled with an eye 

toward succession planning since the mission would have extended cruise phases 

before and between the asteroid encounters. “I made sure that with each of the teams 

there was a younger person to take over,” said Russell.9

Russell’s words were backed up by his actions. The Dawn Deputy PI was Carol 

Raymond, 18 years his junior, to whom he gave great responsibility. Explained Raymond: 

“We had an understanding, which still holds to this day, that this wasn’t going to be a 

project scientist role.” Instead, Russell described her role as the equivalent of a PI. “He 

basically gave me authority of the PI’s voice in my interactions.”10

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid.

8 “Dawn of a new mission begins ’02.” (2002, 4 January). JPL Universe. 32(1). 1.

9 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with C. Russell. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

10 Niebur, S. (2009, 11 August). Personal interview with C. Raymond. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
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The Dawn mission was designed to fit within the acknowledged constraints of 

the Discovery Program. All missions professed this goal, but Dawn was overt about 

it, being designed by scientists who already bore battle scars from previous missions 

and continued to keep their lessons in mind. As he frequently reminded the team at 

milestone reviews, Russell had served on the Independent Assessment Team for Deep 

Impact, and he had seen just how important proper planning could be. He incorporated 

lessons learned into the planning of his own mission. These lessons drove decisions 

as late as the Preliminary Mission & Systems Review, where Russell was determined 

not to repeat the mistakes of Deep Impact.

Foreign partners would be key to the successful implementation of the Dawn 

mission. In addition to providing members of the science team, two-thirds of the 

instrument payload were developed by international partners. The Deutsches Zentrum 

für Luft- und Raumfahrt in Germany sponsored work on the framing camera. The 

Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI, the Italian Space Agency) funded work on the mapping 

spectrometer. The third instrument was developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory 

and paid for by NASA out of the funded proposal for Dawn.

The only major change for Dawn during the concept study was that the plan for 

a combined framing camera/spectrometer was discarded. Instead of the Italians providing just the focal plane for the spectrometer, they would now provide the mass 

spectrometer as a complete and separate instrument. The science team also added 

detail to the project implementation plan, the initial level one requirements, and the 

mission roles and responsibilities.11

Asteroid 4 Vesta is about 578 kilometers by 560 kilometers by 458 kilometers, dry 

and with an iron core. It was discovered by Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers on 29 March 

1807 during a search for additional objects in the area between Mars and Jupiter. 

Mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss calculated the first orbit for the asteroid in only 

10 hours, and Olbers allowed Gauss to name it after the Roman goddess.12 Vesta has 

been shown to be the origin of 20 percent of the meteorites that strike Earth. Its shape 

is nearly spheroid, with a massive chunk—a crater 460 kilometers across and 13 kilometers deep—missing from the South Pole. This crater provides an intriguing peek 

into the mantle of this differentiated asteroid. It rotates once every 5 hours, 20 minutes, 

and orbits the Sun at 2.34 AU.

Ceres, the largest and first-discovered asteroid, is 975 kilometers by 909 kilometers 

and nearly spherical. This low-density planetoid rotates once every 9 hours, 5 minutes, 

and orbits the Sun at 2.77 AU. For many years, including the early years of Dawn 

mission development, planetary scientists presumed that Ceres was homogenous, in 

11 Ibid.

12 Schmadel, Lutz D. (2003). Dictionary of Minor Planet Names: Prepared on Behalf of Commission 

20 Under the Auspices of the International Astronomical Union. New York City: Springer. 15.
Chapter 6: Renewed Commitment: Dawn

203

part because its measured reflectance spectrum was relatively featureless, similar to 

carbonaceous meteorites that do not show evidence of significant thermal processing. However, new observations by the Dawn team using the Hubble Space Telescope 

indicated that Ceres might have either a frozen water interior and a mantle of ice, a 

rock and ice core covered by a global ocean, a layer of convecting ice and a very hard 

crust of ice supporting surface dust, or a rocky core with 400 kilometers of silicate and 

then 90 to 100 kilometers of surface ice.13

“We think that Ceres might be the best place to go to tank up with water when 

you’re cruising through that part of space—a lot easier to get to than Europa,” said 

Chris Russell, the mission PI, shortly before launch. When the water observations 

reached NASA Headquarters near the time of the mission’s confirmation, this caused 

slight panic, because where there is water, there might be life. Although the NASA 

Planetary Protection Officer, John Rummel, declined to make it an issue at confirmation, the mission was later directed to conserve sufficient propellant in order to pull 

the spacecraft back up to a high enough orbit that would not quickly decay onto the 

asteroid’s surface. Landing at the eventual end of mission was thus prohibited.14

Ceres’s rise to prominence during mission formulation was enhanced by the Great 

Planet Debate during the first decade of the 21st century. Called a planet at its discovery in 1801, Ceres was then redefined as an asteroid as more and more asteroids were 

discovered. Two hundred years later, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) 

promoted Ceres to “dwarf planet” status, which raised its profile as scientists and the 

public debated the status of Pluto. Mark Sykes, a Dawn co-investigator and head of the 

Planetary Science Institute, engaged publicly in the debate, talking frequently about 

Dawn’s mission to the largest asteroid—and the smallest planet—over the next few years.

“I think [the IAU’s definition] is going to collapse by 2015 when the Dawn mission 

gets to Ceres and the New Horizons mission gets to Pluto because we’re not going to 

see irregular-shaped, impact crater-filled, boring surfaces. We’re going to see dynamic 

worlds,” Sykes said.15

To further understand the significance of the Dawn mission, consider the protosolar nebula. As the dust and gas that would become our solar system swirled around 

the young protostar that would become our Sun, particles of dust and rock in similar 

orbits began to join, or accrete, into rocks and then planets, sweeping large areas of 

the solar system clear with their own gravity. In the area that is now the asteroid belt, 

13 Thomas, P. C., Parker, J. Wm., McFadden, L. A., Russell, C. T., Stern, S. A., Sykes, M. V., & Young, 

E. F. (2005). “Differentiation of the asteroid Ceres as revealed by its shape.” Nature, 437(7056), 

224–226. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature03938; Russell, C. (2007, 19 September). Presentation at 

the Discovery@15 workshop in Huntsville, Alabama.

14 Ibid.

15 Pawlowski, A. (2009, 25 August). “What’s a Planet? Debate over Pluto Rages On.” CNN.
NASA′s Discovery Program

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Jupiter’s gravity prevented large accretions of rock from forming an even larger body, 

called a planet. The assemblages never gained enough mass to sweep the area clear. As 

a result, the asteroid belt is a collection of large numbers of planetoids at every size that 

preserve a record of the conditions at their orbital distance in the early solar system.

The planetoids are not all the same. Only the rocks closer to the Sun were affected 

by its warmth; any liquid water on these rocks quickly boiled off. Rocks further away 

retained water and became icy. (Before Dawn reached Ceres, hypotheses about the 

dwarf planet suggested that any retained water ice might be hiding under a thin residual 

layer of clay and dark carbonaceous material; the water ice at the surface would be 

unstable in the relative warmth of the Sun’s light, as compared to the darker, colder 

outer solar system.)16

The solar system continued to evolve over the next 4.5 billion years. The planets and some of the larger protoplanets (asteroids) between Mars and Jupiter began 

to differentiate. Only the larger protoplanets had accumulated sufficient amounts of 

radioactive material, such as 26Aluminum, to power thermal evolution; the decay of 

this radioactive material heated the interior of the planetoids to the melting point. 

Heavy metals like iron fell into the core of the rocky asteroids, and lighter elements like 

magnesium moved to the surface. Vesta showed direct evidence of differentiation into 

a crust, mantle, and core, with likely resurfacing as liquid lava oozed out of the planet’s 

interior, forming the basaltic rock surface suspected by reflectance spectra that match 

the laboratory measurements of the Howardite–Eucrite–Diogenite meteorites, while 

concentrating the heavy elements in the core.17 These layers are exposed in the crater 

created at Vesta’s South Pole. Debris from that impact crater spiraled inward toward 

Earth, survived the tumultuous entry through the atmosphere, and were discovered 

and called meteorites. The ones that match Vesta’s reflectance spectrum “provide us 

with detailed information on geochemical processes that have occurred within specific 

sites on Vesta from the time of its formation at the beginning of the solar system,” said 

Dawn co-investigator Sykes.18

Ceres also differentiated, with heavy elements in the core and lighter minerals near 

the surface. Astronomers found that the surface dust included water-bearing minerals, indicating the possible presence of water ice underneath the crust. The Dawn 

16 Thomas, P. C., Parker, J. Wm., McFadden, L. A., Russell, C. T., Stern, S. A., Sykes, M. V., & 

Young, E. F. (2005). “Differentiation of the asteroid Ceres as revealed by its shape.” Nature, 

437(7056), 224–226. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature03938.

17 McCord, T. B., Adams, J. B., & Johnson, T. V. (1970). “Asteroid Vesta: Spectral Reflectivity 

and Compositional Implications.” Science, 168(3938), 1445–1447. https://doi.org/10.1126/

science.168.3938.1445.

18 Stiles, L. (2001, 19 January). “UA Astronomer Is Scientist for Proposed ‘Dawn’ Discovery 

Mission.” UA News. https://news.arizona.edu/story/ua-astronomer-scientist-proposed-dawndiscovery-mission, accessed 10 May 2023.
Chapter 6: Renewed Commitment: Dawn

205

spacecraft would be able to answer this question. Ceres, as the largest of the asteroids 

(accounting for about one-third of the total mass of the asteroid belt), may even have 

retained a weak atmosphere.

Because it is much farther away from the Sun than Vesta, Ceres is much more like 

the icy moons of the outer solar system. “The differences between Ceres and Vesta 

are a real puzzle,” said Tom McCord, a co-investigator on Dawn, before arrival. “It’s 

fair to speculate,” he said, “that if you have liquid water over a warm core, you might 

have hydrothermal vents.”19

By comparing rocky Vesta with icy Ceres, the Dawn scientists could study two 

very different primordial bodies using the same spacecraft and the same instruments. 

The chance to do comparative planetology at or near the place in the solar system that 

divided the inner rocky planets from the outer icy planets was unprecedented in the 

Discovery Program, and the mission was eagerly anticipated.

“I think of Dawn as two journeys,” Russell said. “One is a journey into space.... 

We’re going to explore a region for the first time to find out what the conditions are 

today. Dawn is also a journey back in time. Ceres and Vesta have been altered much 

less than other bodies. The Earth is changing all the time; the Earth hides its history, 

but we believe that Ceres and Vesta, formed more than 4.6 billion years ago, have 

preserved their early record.”20 The Dawn mission would also be compared, in the 

span of a few hours around launch, to an archaeological expedition, a time machine, 

a commuter tour bus, the Prius of space, and “the first real interplanetary spaceship,” 

in Marc Rayman’s words.21

Assume That It May Not Work

Dawn would carry three instruments. A pair of framing cameras to be used for 

imaging and navigation were designed, built, and contributed by the Max Planck 

Institut für Sonnensystemforschung in Germany, with assistance from the Institut für 

Planetenforschung of the DLR in Berlin and with a data-processing unit built by the 

Institut für Datentechnik und Kommunikationsnetze of the Technische Universität 

Braunschweig. The cameras were identical and redundant. Each had a frame transfer 

CCD with 1024 × 1024 sensitive pixels, sampling the surface of a body 200 kilometers 

below with a resolution of 18.6 meters per pixel. Each had a filter wheel with one clear 

19 Spotts, P. N. (2007, 26 September). “NASA spacecraft set to probe two planet wannabes.” The 

Christian Science Monitor.

20 Ray, J. (2007, 7 July). “Dawn Asteroid Probe Won’t Launch Until September.” Spaceflight Now.

21 Ibid.; Perlman, D. (2007, 7 July). “Craft to seek Dawn of solar system.” San Francisco Chronicle; 

Johnson, J. (2007, 28 September). “NASA’s ‘time machine’ lifts off.” The Los Angeles Times; 

Mclean, D. (2007, 28 September). “NASA probe launches to asteroids in hunt for clues.” 

Bloomberg; Dunn, M. (2007, 28 September). “NASA launches mission to asteroid.” AP.
NASA′s Discovery Program

206

filter and seven color filters, which could be used to get stereo imagery for topography 

on the order of tens of meters. The camera had heritage from the cameras on Venus 

Express and Rosetta. The team was led by co-investigator Holger Sierks.22

A Mapping Spectrometer to measure the asteroids’ surface composition was a 

modification of the VIRTIS mapping spectrometer on Rosetta, which had significant 

heritage from Cassini’s VIMS.23 The instrument combined a visible channel from 0.25 

to 1.0 micron and an infrared channel from 1 to 5 microns to cover the spectral range 

from the near ultraviolet (UV; 0.25 micron) through the near IR (5 microns). Spectral 

resolution at 200 kilometers was 500 meters per pixel, a moderate to high spectral 

resolution. The spectrometer was designed, built, and tested at Galileo Avionica and 

provided to Dawn by ASI under the direction of Angioletta Coradini of the Instituto 

Nazionale Di Astrofisica.24

The Gamma Ray and Neutron Detector (GRaND) would map the abundances of 

major elements in rock-forming minerals (oxygen, silicon, iron, titanium, magnesium, 

aluminum, and calcium), major elements found in ices (hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen), 

as well as trace element (uranium, thorium, potassium, galodinium, and samarium) 

composition. In addition, it would detect neutrons on surface, an indicator of nearsurface water. GRaND was built by Bill Feldman, Tom Prettyman, and colleagues at 

the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), who brought strong technical heritage 

from the Gamma Ray and Neutron Spectrometer on Lunar Prospector and the neutron 

spectrometer on Mars Odyssey. GRaND began as a copy of the Lunar Prospector sensor head, two bismuth germanate scintillator detectors for gamma rays, surrounded 

by boron-loaded plastic as an anti-coincidence shield, bolted to the Dawn spacecraft. 

Designing a magnetometer without a boom made some things simpler but made 

some measurements, such as determining the gamma ray and neutron background 

counts created by the attached spacecraft and its xenon tanks, more complicated. A 

segmented design and a variety of coincidence signatures enabled separate detection of background radiation. A new detector of layers of boron-loaded plastic and 

22 Russell, C. T. (2005). “Dawn Discovery Mission: Status Report.” Proceedings of 6th IAA 

International Conference on Low-Cost Planetary Missions, 6, 283–289. Retrieved from https://

escholarship.org/uc/item/2xr140qr.

23 Russell, C. T., Coradini, A., Christensen, U., De Sanctis, M. C., Feldman, W. C., Jaumann, 

R., Keller, H. U., Konopliv, A. S., McCord, T. B., McFadden, L. A., McSween, H. Y., Mottola, 

S., Neukum, G., Pieters, C. M., Prettyman, T. H., Raymond, C. A., Smith, D. E., Sykes, M. V., 

Williams, B. G., Wise, J., & Zuber, M. T. (2004). “Dawn: A journey in space and time.” Planetary 

and Space Science, 52(5–6), 465–489. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pss.2003.06.013.

24 Russell, C. T., Coradini, A., Christensen, U., De Sanctis, M. C., Feldman, W. C., Jaumann, R., 

Keller, H. U., Konopliv, A. S., McCord, T. B., McFadden, L. A., McSween, H. Y., Mottola, S., 

Neukum, G., Pieters, C. M., Prettyman, T. H., Raymond, C. A., Smith, D. E., Sykes, M. V., 

Williams, B. G., Wise, J., & Zuber, M. T. (2004). “Dawn: A journey in space and time.” Planetary 

and Space Science, 52(5–6), 465–489. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pss.2003.06.013.
Chapter 6: Renewed Commitment: Dawn

207

lithium-loaded glass, termed a “phosphor sandwich,” added the capability to detect 

both thermal and epithermal neutrons.

The modified Lunar Prospector detector still could not detect gamma rays below 

about three megaelectronvolts (MeV). The cutting-edge technology was high-purity 

germanium, which would add resolution, but at significant cost, and an additional 

requirement for cryocooling, which would add mass and complexity. Instead, as early 

as the concept study review, the team began to investigate adding a promising new 

type of detector, cadmium-zinc telluride (CZT). CZT was not ideal, as the sensors are 

damaged by radiation and the high-energy particles from the space environment, but 

the engineers built into GRaND the capability to remove the damage by annealing the 

sensors at high temperature, a change that eventually required an increase in photomultiplier tubes for readout from two to 21. The CZT did not have the high degree of 

heritage that the main unit did, so primary operations planning was performed using 

the other detectors alone, with the CZT as bonus. Since the technology was so new, 

Prettyman said, “You have to assume that it may not work.”25

The tight budget meant that the team could only afford to build a flight unit, forgoing a flight spare, in sharp contrast to NASA’s earlier, larger missions. For instance, 

engineers built so many flight spares for Voyager that a modified tenth and final spare 

flew on Stardust, over 21 years later.26

As proposed, Dawn also had two additional instruments: the magnetometer and 

a laser altimeter. The magnetometer was to be built by Russell at UCLA. The magnetometer had heritage from “a long line of missions including OGO5 (launched in 

1968), ISEE 1 and 2 (1977), Pioneer Venus (1978), Galileo (1989), Polar (1996), and 

ST5 (in fabrication).”27 The Laser Altimeter, led by David Smith and Maria Zuber, was 

designed as a follow-on to the MESSENGER laser altimeter, built by Smith and Andy 

25 Russell, C. T. (2005). “Dawn Discovery Mission: Status Report.” Proceedings of 6th IAA 

International Conference on Low-Cost Planetary Missions, 6, 283–289. Retrieved from https://

escholarship.org/uc/item/2xr140qr. See also Prettyman, T. H., Feldman, W. C., Ameduri, F. P., 

Barraclough, B. L., Cascio, E. W., Fuller, K. R., Funsten, H. O., Lawrence, D. J., McKinney, 

G. W., Russell, C. T., Soldner, S. A., Storms, S. A., Szeles, C., & Tokar, R. L. (2003). “Gamma-ray 

and neutron spectrometer for the Dawn mission to 1 Ceres and 4 Vesta.” IEEE Transactions on 

Nuclear Science, 50(4), 1190–1197. https://doi.org/10.1109/TNS.2003.815156.

26 Niebur, S. (2009, 12 August). Personal interview with P. Tsou. Located in “Stardust” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC. See 

also Whalen, A. (2003, 26 November). “Stardust Navigation Camera.” Downloaded from http://

stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/camera.html.

27 Russell, C. T., Coradini, A., Christensen, U., De Sanctis, M. C., Feldman, W. C., Jaumann, R., 

Keller, H. U., Konopliv, A. S., McCord, T. B., McFadden, L. A., McSween, H. Y., Mottola, S., 

Neukum, G., Pieters, C. M., Prettyman, T. H., Raymond, C. A., Smith, D. E., Sykes, M. V., 

Williams, B. G., Wise, J., & Zuber, M. T. (2004). “Dawn: A journey in space and time.” Planetary 

and Space Science, 52(5–6), 465–489.
NASA′s Discovery Program

208

Cheng, the project scientist on NEAR. Cost and schedule issues eventually pushed 

the design to a build-to-print copy of the earlier instrument.

Dawn scientists would also perform a radio science investigation to determine the 

gravity fields, mass, principal axes, rotational axes, and moments of inertia of each 

asteroid. A mass and the shape model could be used to determine the bulk density of 

the asteroid. The shape model and gravity model could be used to characterize density 

variations in the crust and mantle. If a rotational wobble was detected, that, combined 

with shape and gravity models, could show the possible differentiation and formation 

of a metallic core.28

THE SPACECRAFT

The Dawn spacecraft itself would be 1.64 meters long, 1.27 meters wide, and 1.77 

meters high, with a 1.52-meter high-gain antenna, dwarfed by the two 63-kilogram, 

8.3- × 2.3-meter solar panels, together capable providing more than 10 kilowatts that 

could be stored in the onboard 35-amp-hour rechargeable nickel-hydrogen battery. 

When the solar panels were deployed, the spacecraft measured 19.7 meters tip to 

tip. The spacecraft bus, like many others built by Orbital at the time, was a graphite 

composite cylinder, surrounded by aluminum panels. Inside the central tube were 

two large tanks: one for the hydrazine needed for the reaction control system, and a 

much larger xenon tank that would hold nearly 500 kilograms of propellant. Onboard 

temperatures would be controlled by blankets, surface radiators, finishes, and heaters. The spacecraft weighed 1,217.7 kilograms at launch: 747.1 kilograms spacecraft, 

425 kilograms xenon propellant, and 45.6 kilograms hydrazine propellant.29

To reach the asteroids in a reasonable amount of time at low cost, the team chose to 

incorporate three ion engines into the design. The mission would incorporate chemical 

propulsion at launch and then be powered entirely by solar-electric propulsion. The 

ion engines used electricity generated by the solar panels to accelerate ions from the 

xenon fuel to a speed of up to 10 times that of chemical engines. They used only 3.25 

milligrams of xenon per second at maximum thrust, enabling two thousand days of 

operation over the mission’s lifetime using only 425 kilograms of xenon propellant. 

Although 3.25 milligrams of xenon per second produced only 91 millinewtons of 

force, the near-constant operation of the engines over the duration of cruise between 

Earth and Vesta added up to a total change in velocity from ion propulsion similar to 

28 Ibid.

29 NASA. (2007, September). “Dawn Launch: Mission to Vesta and Ceres” [press kit].
Chapter 6: Renewed Commitment: Dawn

209

that produced by Dawn’s Delta II rocket launch, including its first, second, and third 

stages, and the nine solid-fuel boosters.30

Marc Rayman, Dawn project systems engineer and project manager of DS-1, recalled 

that, like many of his generation, his first encounter with ion propulsion was while 

viewing a 1968 Star Trek episode, and, he quipped, with its three ion engines instead 

of two, “Dawn does the Star Wars TIE fighters one better.”31 The science fiction analogies were apt and helped explain the complicated process of solar-electric propulsion 

to the generations that grew up pretending to fly Star Wars spaceships.32 Rayman had 

a gift for explaining the complicated ion propulsion system, saying that it “works by 

ionizing, or giving an electric charge to, atoms of xenon gas and then it uses a high 

voltage to shoot these ions through this metal grid at very high speed, up to almost 

90,000 miles per hour. The action of the ions leaving the thruster causes a reaction 

that pushes the spacecraft in the other direction.... It really does emit this cool, blue 

glow like in the science fiction movies.” Holding up a piece of paper, he said “the 

thruster pushes on the spacecraft about as hard as this single piece of paper pushes 

on my hand (91 millinewtons, to be precise). But in space, the effect of this gentle, 

almost whisper-like thrust gradually builds up over time until we can achieve very 

high speeds.” Rayman concluded, “It’s what I like to call ‘acceleration with patience.’” 

It would take Dawn four days to accelerate from zero to 60 mph, but it would only use 

two pounds of fuel in the process.33

Of course, the ion propulsion units depended on adequate output of the large solar 

panels. The electricity generated from the solar panels charged a stream of xenon gas 

particles, firing the xenon ions of the onboard propellant out a nozzle to generate 

thrust, slowly building up speed. The Dawn engineering team tested the solar panels 

extensively because of issues related to the low intensity of sunlight to be expected at 

the spacecraft’s targets and the low temperatures found there.34

Ion propulsion missions have several distinct advantages over missions that rely 

on chemical propulsion alone, including the ability to restart propulsion after a period 

orbiting a solar system body. The propulsion system also makes trades much easier—or 

much more complicated. “Margin management on an ion propulsion mission is much 

30 “DS1’s ion propulsion engine keeps on firing.” (2001, 8 April). Jet Propulsion Laboratory Press 

Release. Downloaded from http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0104/08ds1/.

31 Shiga, D. (2007, 28 September). “Dawn spacecraft launches to study giant asteroids.” New 

Scientist; Dunn, M. (2007, 28 September). “NASA launches mission to asteroid.” AP.

32 Shiga, D. (2007, 28 September). “Dawn spacecraft launches to study giant asteroids.” New Scientist.

33 Harwood, W. (2007, 26 September). “Dawn Set For Exploration Of Largest Asteroids.” 

Spaceflight Now.

34 Niebur, S. (2009, 11 August). Personal interview with C. Raymond. Located in “Dawn” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, 

DC; Russell, C. (2007, 19 September). Presentation at the Discovery@15 workshop in 

Huntsville, Alabama.
NASA′s Discovery Program

210

different than on other missions because a lot of things are linked that you may not 

think are linked,” said Russell. “Power and mass, money and time and all those things 

are all linked through how you thrust.”35

Russell explained that without ion propulsion, its Delta II launch vehicle would 

have been insufficient to launch the spacecraft into the correct orbit to reach Vesta. 

Using chemical propulsion alone, the mission would have required a more powerful 

Atlas V, or even a Delta IV rocket, for a mission just to Vesta, or just to Ceres. Orbiting 

both asteroids “would require two launches, at a total cost perhaps $1.5 billion. I look 

at this and say we saved NASA $1 billion. NASA looks at that and says, ‘No, this mission costs us $0.5 billion.’”36

Unfunded Mandates and External Threats

In January 2001, NASA Headquarters selected Dawn, Kepler, and INSIDE Jupiter to 

perform competitive Phase A concept studies. However, funding from the agency was 

not immediately available, so the projects began work several months late. Although 

NASA Headquarters released the AO with the intent to possibly select two missions, 

with the text on page one clearly stating, “This AO invites proposals for investigations 

for the ninth Discovery mission (and possibly the tenth),” there was insufficient funding 

for two missions to start Phase B.37 To accommodate the dual selection, NASA delayed 

the start of Phase B for Dawn by almost a year, to late 2002.38 The teams understood 

the rationale, but that it didn’t make it easy.

Dawn could accommodate a two-year launch window because of the inherent 

flexibility of ion propulsion. The funding delays affected the science, as a delayed 

launch meant delayed arrival at Vesta and then Ceres. Since the asteroids continued 

in motion, a different surface would be illuminated by the Sun at the spacecraft’s 

arrival. Vesta’s new lit area would include the South Pole, an area of intense interest 

to planetary scientists. Russell reflected, “I don’t think the delay between selection 

and Phase A was a problem; I think we were able to get around that. When you 

go into a Phase A study, it is a staffing-up problem because there are more people 

35 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with C. Russell. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

36 Russell, C. (2007, 19 September). Presentation at the Discovery@15 workshop in 

Huntsville, Alabama.

37 NASA. (2000, 19 May). Announcement of Opportunity: Discovery 2000. 

38 Russell, C. T., Capaccioni, F., Coradini, A., Christensen, U., De Sanctis, M. C., Feldman, W. C., 

Jaumann, R., Keller, H. U., Konopliv, A., McCord, T. B., McFadden, L. A., McSween, H. Y., 

Mottola, S., Neukum, G., Pieters, C. M., Prettyman, T. H., Raymond, C. A., Smith, D. E., Sykes, 

M. V., Williams, B., & Zuber, M. T. (2006). “Dawn Discovery mission to Vesta and Ceres: Present 

status.” Advances in Space Research, 38(9), 2043–2048. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asr.2004.12.041.
Chapter 6: Renewed Commitment: Dawn

211

needed for Phase A than for writing the proposal, the initial proposal. Those people 

were available when we needed them.”39

While the Dawn team was in the study phase, the NASA Integrated Action Team 

(NIAT) issued reports on the Mars mission failures. The Dawn team was encouraged 

by NASA Headquarters to identify NIAT-type risks and to ask for additional funding where necessary. This additional funding would also include costs for additional 

reviews and the additional oversight that were sure to come. Whereas earlier missions 

such as MESSENGER complained about the additional oversight, the Dawn team was 

affected so early on that they simply responded.40

The day before the mission’s site visit, as the team gathered at Orbital Sciences in 

the Washington, DC, suburbs for a dry run, news broke that terrorists had attacked 

the Pentagon, just across the river from NASA Headquarters, and the World Trade 

Center in New York City, as part of a coordinated airplane hijacking plot. The date 

was 11 September 2001. The site visit was canceled that day, the evaluation materials 

taken to a secure area at Langley Research Center, and the review was postponed until 

normalcy could be restored later in the year.41 The nation adjusted to a new normal, 

and NASA selected Dawn for flight on 21 December 2001, with a launch date of 27 May 

2006—nearly a year later than the proposed launch date.

Once the Phase A work had been delayed, the postponement of the launches of 

both Dawn and Kepler were inevitable. Costs (including overhead rates) went up, commitments weakened, and management changed.42 Internal burden rates had increased 

during the delays, causing an unexpected financial hit to the project as it prepared to 

start work again in August 2002. Russell appealed this increase to the Jet Propulsion 

Laboratory Center Director, but Charles Elachi was also being squeezed by the changing 

times. As the lab suffered the loss of the anticipated Europa mission, all projects had 

to bear the collective burden of the cost of management and facilities. Dawn’s share 

was nearly $5 million, a number that challenged this small mission before the work 

of development even began.

39 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with C. Russell. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

40 Ibid.

41 Russell, C. T., Capaccioni, F., Coradini, A., De Sanctis, M. C., Feldman, W. C., Jaumann, R., 

Keller, H. U., McCord, T. B., McFadden, L. A., Mottola, S., Pieters, C. M., Prettyman, T. H., 

Raymond, C. A., Sykes, M. V., Smith, D. E., & Zuber, M. T. (2007). “Dawn Mission to Vesta and 

Ceres: Symbiosis Between Terrestrial Observations and Robotic Exploration.” Earth, Moon, 

and Planets, 101(1–2), 65–91. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11038-007-9151-9.

42 Russell, C. T., Capaccioni, F., Coradini, A., De Sanctis, M. C., Feldman, W. C., Jaumann, R., 

Keller, H. U., McCord, T. B., McFadden, L. A., Mottola, S., Pieters, C. M., Prettyman, T. H., 

Raymond, C. A., Sykes, M. V., Smith, D. E., & Zuber, M. T. (2007). “Dawn Mission to Vesta and 

Ceres: Symbiosis Between Terrestrial Observations and Robotic Exploration.” Earth, Moon, 

and Planets, 101(1–2), 65–91. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11038-007-9151-9.
NASA′s Discovery Program

212

Other changes were afoot, with the addition of an official business manager to the 

project in August. Elachi also mandated that a deputy project manager with experience 

in large contracts be added to the project to assist Sarah Gavit, the project manager. 

Gavit pushed back and, with the assistance of others at JPL, was successful in stopping 

this $1 million addition to the project, as Dawn had committed in the concept study 

report to having Mark Rayman, the payload manager, act in the deputy role. As time 

passed, the laws of celestial mechanics added to the difficulty, as a properly illuminated 

Vesta became even more difficult to reach.

As the Discovery Program restored its reserves and NASA moved into the 2003 

fiscal year, Dawn’s mission development started to spin up. Work began in earnest in 

September 2002, with science and engineering teams largely on contract by January 

2003. The first review milestones were set for April and August. By March, however, 

the team had already encountered their first technical failure, and they abandoned 

their plan to use a lightweight composite xenon propellant tank in favor of a heavier 

titanium tank with composite overwrap.43

Meanwhile, the massive overruns of the Deep Impact and MESSENGER projects necessitated increased attention to the financial reserve posture of subsequent 

missions. Amid a particularly contentious monthly review with the relevant NASA 

Center Directors and Division Directors at NASA Headquarters, Ed Weiler upped the 

mandatory reserve posture to 25 percent for all missions in development as well as 

those selected through future Announcements of Opportunity. Missions would have 

to meet this requirement at major mission milestones. Unsure of the applicability 

to Dawn and Kepler, missions already selected but not confirmed, Dawn’s program 

scientist immediately asked for clarification. Weiler confirmed that both Dawn and 

Kepler would have to meet the 25 percent reserve requirement in order to be confirmed. 

Later negotiations clarified that the 25 percent would be on Phases B/C/D, excluding 

launch costs, but the new mandate could not be waived.

This put Dawn in a difficult situation, as Dawn’s reserve posture at selection was 

17 percent.44 In addition, Dawn’s reserves had dropped sharply as they entered Phase B 

due to Jet Propulsion Laboratory rate changes, which had increased during the delay, 

and a failure in the xenon propellant tank design.

“It was an ambitious mission, very low cost. We had very little place to try to 

reengineer the mission and get back funds. So, I’d say the project just started off in a 

crisis,” said Raymond. “The project was starting to staff up and starting to get a hold 

of what had to be done.... There was the PMSR [Preliminary Mission and Systems 

Review], the project mission System Requirements Review.” While focusing on that, 

43 Raymond, C. (2003, March). “Dawn news.” Dawn’s Early Light, 2(1). 1. 

44 Niebur, S. (2009, 11 August). Personal interview with C. Raymond. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
Chapter 6: Renewed Commitment: Dawn

213

“we realized that we’ve got to start finding ways to lower the cost.” Early descopes 

included removing the solid-state data recorder and, with it, all capability for significant nonvolatile data storage.45

Although the new reserve posture was designed to increase the possibility of recovery from implementation failures, the increase in reserves did not increase confidence 

in the mission’s cost containment from the team’s perspective. In fact, the mission 

management team would later claim the opposite as a “lessons learned,” explaining: 

“Ultimately, increasing reserves simply leads to increased costs.”46 In 2009, Russell 

remained focused on reserves, stating that project reserves were clearly important, 

but other reserves were also necessary: “hidden reserves” from everyone, including 

staff; “items you can get rid of without affecting the program,” perhaps “30 percent, 

maybe 50 percent”; “robust reserves that nobody can raid, whether it’s your people or 

some other project”; the ability to refuse to lend other projects money; and the ability 

to continue to function when NASA Headquarters hits a “dry period” and “they just 

don’t give you the money.”47

The Meeting Did Not Go Well

Four months later, the project held its PMSR at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The 

team had continued to push back on JPL’s rate changes and increased management 

requirements. They increased reserves where they could and presented what they 

believed to be a credible plan to get to the Preliminary Design Review.

The meeting did not go well. There was widespread agreement among the reviewers 

that the mission’s requirements were not adequately defined—particularly for a review 

that would evaluate them. There were also concerns that the project was immature 

for its expected stage.

“It was clear that the project wasn’t together at that point. They hadn’t done the 

work that was necessary to successfully complete the [System Requirements Review] 

and there were several iterations of that. It wasn’t clear that the initial project manager really understood what needed to get done,” recalled Kurt Lindstrom, Dawn 

Program Executive.48

Russell also blamed Sarah Gavit, the project manager. “Experience is important,” 

he said. “That is a lesson I’ve had, and I beat into people. I said my problem with Sarah 

45 Ibid.

46 Fraschetti, T. C., M. D. Rayman, C. T. Russell, and C. A. Raymond. (2005). “Dawn Discovery 

mission: Lessons learned.” Proceedings of 6th IAA International Conference on Low-Cost 

Planetary Missions, Kyoto, Japan.

47 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with C. Russell. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

48 Niebur, S. (2009, 31 July). Personal interview with K. Lindstrom. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
NASA′s Discovery Program

214

[Gavit] was she really was not experienced.”49 Russell asked that Gavit be replaced 

as project manager. JPL agreed to consider the request but asked him to wait for a 

replacement project manager until after the launch of the Mars Exploration Rovers 

in June and July 2003.

Meanwhile, the laser altimeter was having cost troubles independently of the mission cost issues. The instrument employed 47 people on the project, many of them civil 

servants. Every lead engineer was a civil servant. NASA was undergoing a transition to 

full-cost accounting, whereby each civil servant’s salary must now “cost” the project its 

full amount, plus burden, which can often double the salary. This caused the cost for 

the laser altimeter, previously estimated using the cost from the MESSENGER laser 

altimeter (not under full-cost accounting), to increase dramatically. Gavit pushed to 

descope the instrument, but Goddard Space Flight Center Director Al Diaz acted to 

protect his center’s role in the mission, agreeing to cover the cost and burden of more 

than 32 full-time employees over the four years of development at no cost whatsoever 

to the project. In addition, Diaz agreed to cover any overrun of the instrument, and 

he provided a letter of commitment to that effect, with a clear bottom line: “GSFC 

will commit to building the Dawn Laser Altimeter within your budget of $8.06M.”50

This was an excellent deal for Dawn, which would be protected from future overruns 

and personnel cost increases, and yet the instrument’s presence was still not assured. 

The instrument would have to be delivered not only on budget, but on time—and this 

was now in question due to delays of the delivery of the MESSENGER laser altimeter, 

built by the same team in the same labs. The instrument was on the critical path for 

Dawn and needed to be delivered with the other instruments by 29 April 2005. Russell 

was adamant that the laser altimeter not be thrown off, saying in the 6 May meeting 

that he would rather the mission not be confirmed than lose the laser altimeter.51 The 

team then proceeded with other reviews, including a Project Cost Review in June, the 

first major reporting of the implementation of Earned Value Management.

Russell made it clear to NASA Headquarters that he would not descope the laser 

altimeter, taking his chances at Preliminary Design Review and confirmation against 

the advice of Dawn’s program scientist at NASA Headquarters, who reminded him that 

doing so without making other significant descopes would not comply with the JPL 

or NASA Headquarters policy requiring 25 percent reserves.52 Russell and Raymond 

appealed directly to Division Director Colleen Hartman for relief from the requirement 

in a closed meeting in July 2003. Said Raymond, “I think we expected to get some 

49 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with C. Russell. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

50 Niebur, S. (2003, 6 May). Program scientist’s notes. Susan Niebur’s personal collection.

51 Ibid.

52 Ibid.
Chapter 6: Renewed Commitment: Dawn

215

sympathy or some relief because, for instance, Kepler had just completely been allowed 

to re-plan their budget to accommodate JPL management.... We were asking for a 

much smaller amount to comply with a rule that hadn’t been part of the deal initially.”53

Hartman was not reassuring, Raymond remembers. “I could not have predicted 

the hostility on the part of Colleen that we received in bringing this up. And it was 

basically, this: You were given a directive. This is the rule, and your job is to go off and 

figure out how you’re going to do it.... I was pretty surprised. So, off we went. This 

put this huge stress on the project, and so, as I said, Sarah didn’t have a lot of places 

to go to fix this problem...and then we ended up getting a new project manager...

after the review board came back and said things like you’ve got to start throwing 

stuff overboard.... Chris is nothing if not confident and unswayable when he believes 

something very strongly.... He said, ‘No way.’”54

The team needed a fresh direction from a project manager who could lead them 

successfully to the launch pad. Russell was “looking for somebody who was experienced, who really knew how space systems worked,” he said.55 The Jet Propulsion 

Laboratory tapped Tom Fraschetti, who had spent 15 years in the aerospace industry 

working on defense projects before coming to JPL and filling a series of progressively 

more responsible roles, from small tasks for the Defense Department to writing proposals and building spaceflight instruments including the Cassini imager, when he 

was promoted into management as division manager. After 20 years at JPL, Fraschetti 

was working as Deputy Director for the Engineering and Science Directorate when 

he was tapped to be Dawn’s second project manager.

Fraschetti brought more than experience to the project; he brought a fresh look at 

the engineering and at the relationship between scientists and engineers. “I worked 

a lot with scientists and I appreciated science, which made me a little different than 

a lot of other project managers, at least at JPL. They tended to come up through the 

spacecraft ranks, and their concern was getting a spacecraft someplace, and a secondary concern was the science. My concern was let’s do some great science, and, by the 

way, we got to have a spacecraft that gets us there,” he explained.56

53 Niebur, S. (2009, 11 August). Personal interview with C. Raymond. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

54 Ibid.

55 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with C. Russell. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

56 Niebur, S. (2009, 12 August). Personal interview with T. Fraschetti. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
NASA′s Discovery Program

216

Russell saw Fraschetti as “a real leader in that the engineers who were working with 

him respected him and listened to him and went to him for guidance.”57 Russell was 

reassured by this and began to trust Fraschetti to deliver the spacecraft.58

Concurrently, the PI agreed to spend more days away from the JPL campus, in 

response to Sarah Gavit’s complaints of interference. Russell later explained: “I try not 

to micromanage. It may sound like I was micromanaging.... All I was doing is to try 

to take a top-level look and make sure that mission risk was minimized.”59

As things stood after Dawn’s Preliminary Mission and Systems Review, the team 

had insufficient power, mass, and cost margins to send the spacecraft to Vesta and 

Ceres. Although the team had new management, the technical and cost challenges 

remained, as the next few months brought more challenges and more changes. “When 

I came onboard,” said Fraschetti, “they had looked at everything where they could 

cut. And basically, it was spending a lot of money and we weren’t making any forward 

progress.” A decision had to be made, or the mission may as well have folded before 

confirmation.60 The team added a fifth solar panel to the spacecraft design, increasing 

available power margin at Ceres, but the cost issues remained.

In August, the team announced that they had decided to launch on a lighter launch 

vehicle, a standard Delta 2925, adding a Mars gravity assist to the trajectory, and to 

delete the laser altimeter from the mission in order to save reserves and avoid cost 

overruns.61 Potential solutions to noted problems with power margin and cost reserves 

were iterated, with a replan requested by 15 August and delivered on 22 August.62

Throughout the summer and fall, the team moved forward with a plan to descope 

their greatest strength: the visit to icy Ceres, which provided a contrast to dry, rocky 

Vesta. NASA Headquarters warned the team that this descope did not preserve the 

proposed science of the mission and would not be accepted, but they moved forward 

anyway, fighting to preserve science in other ways. This included resistance to any 

further descoping of instruments. Dawn was built to be a lean mission, with only five 

instruments and flight-tested technology. All the instruments were essentially rebuilds 

or slight modifications of instruments previously flown on other missions. Therefore, 

57 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with C. Russell. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

58 Niebur, S. (2009, 12 August). Personal interview with T. Fraschetti. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

59 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with C. Russell. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

60 Niebur, S. (2009, 12 August). Personal interview with T. Fraschetti. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

61 Russell, C. (2003, August). “Dawn status.” Dawn’s Early Light, 2(2). 1–2.

62 Niebur, S. (2003). Presentation to the American Astronomical Society Division of Planetary 

Science Fall Conference.
Chapter 6: Renewed Commitment: Dawn

217

there was not a lot of margin built into the proposed costs for any of the instruments 

or subsystems that could be used to cut the costs directly.63

Saving money on the launch vehicle did come at a cost to science, however. The 

lighter launch vehicle did not have as much delta-v to offer, so the addition of a Mars 

gravity assist, necessary to boost the spacecraft into a trajectory that would reach the 

asteroid belt, reduced the possible stay time at Vesta from 11 down to 8 months, and 

the stay time at Ceres from 11 down to 7 months. The team was disappointed by this 

reduction but hoped that this decision could be reversed when the final margins became 

clear, noting that the gravity assist could be skipped and the stay times increased at 

the last minute because of the flexibility granted by the ion engines.64

Meanwhile, as on every mission, opportunities to improve the science return arose, 

the scientists lobbied for additions, and the PI was faced with decisions. Augmenting 

the science return would be tempting for any scientist, but Russell held the line. 

Fraschetti and the engineers appreciated this resistance to scope creep. “I had a great 

PI,” said Fraschetti. “He did not let requirements creep.” Russell did allow that there 

was potential for an improved mission if margins allowed, but he did not change the 

system requirements, such as to enable longer stay times. Once the requirements were 

finally set at PDR, they stayed set. JPL and NASA Headquarters were watching the 

mission’s margins closely, and the team continued to make trade after trade to meet 

the requirements as proposed.65

The Dawn mission team had been praised early on for bringing in Orbital Sciences, 

a new player in deep space missions. Orbital had extensive experience in building 

Earth-orbiting spacecraft and integrating the instruments with the bus; they proposed 

similar roles for their work with the Dawn mission. This was widely seen as a smart 

move on Dawn’s part and an asset for the community, as even the more experienced 

industry partners were beginning to overrun their costs on other missions in the early 

days of Dawn. Orbital’s experience in Earth-orbiting missions made them look like a 

new player, but a reliable new player, which appealed to NASA management. Orbital 

introduced both a new East Coast location and company culture into the planetary 

mission community. The assumptions that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory held because 

of their experience with Lockheed Martin, TRW, and Ball did not necessarily hold with 

Orbital. Orbital’s expectations of NASA due to their work with GSFC did not neces63 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with C. Russell. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

64 Russell, C. T. (2005). “Dawn Discovery Mission: Status Report.” Proceedings of 6th IAA 

International Conference on Low-Cost Planetary Missions, 6, 283–289. Retrieved from https://

escholarship.org/uc/item/2xr140qr.

65 Niebur, S. (2009, 12 August). Personal interview with T. Fraschetti. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
NASA′s Discovery Program

218

sarily hold as they began to work with JPL. The agreements signed between the two 

companies began to collapse as the two began discussing details of mission operations.

Orbital had based their proposal on their experience launching spacecraft for NASA. 

JPL assumed a certain level of familiarity with deep space operations that Orbital did 

not have. As the details were hammered out over conference calls and in-person meetings, the discrepancies began to show. Orbital’s experience operating Earth-orbiting 

systems had led them to believe that they needed one, or very few, operators for Dawn. 

JPL, however, knew that this deep space mission with several instruments would take 

more work. Orbital was accustomed to launching a spacecraft and then turning it 

over to its customer to operate. JPL typically operated its own missions, over years 

or decades. Orbital would need to create a long-term mission operations center. JPL 

already had a multi-mission operations center that could be used for encounters and 

routine housekeeping during cruise. Orbital would need to create, purchase, borrow, 

and install new software to control missions over time. JPL already had the expertise 

and the trained personnel—not a minor cost. Orbital did not budget for extensive 

operations, as JPL had assumed. As JPL began to teach Orbital the depth of effort that 

was required, Orbital’s cost and possible risk went up, negating any original savings 

recognized by the proposal to do mission operations at the new facility at Orbital. To 

save money on training, software, facilities, personnel, and the additional oversight 

required, JPL brought the mission operations center back to JPL before confirmation. Even with the costs of change, this effort would result in significant savings 

and decrease in risk in operations by a new partner. The project began to replan the 

operations phase. Since JPL had decades of experience operating deep space mission 

operations, its cost increase would be much less than the startup plus operations cost 

at Orbital, a new player. JPL could fold it into the mission with a smaller delta cost, use 

existing tools and its own multi-mission systems, make any necessary modifications, 

and pull the appropriate people from other projects on lab. The project benefited from 

flexibility not just in the mission parameters related to ion propulsion, but also in the 

resources available at JPL. Training would not be an issue at JPL, the premier place 

in the United States for planetary science missions and operations. “We value people 

that can fly missions,” said Fraschetti.66

The mission passed the 14–16 October Preliminary Design Review of technical 

merit, entering confirmation with a mission plan that, in the view of several at NASA 

Headquarters, did not meet the minimum science mission outlined in the 2000 proposal.67 The team had chosen to delete the Ceres encounter from the mission, reducing 

a mission whose greatest asset was that of comparative planetology to a mission that 

66 Ibid.

67 Niebur, S. (2003, 23 October). “Discovery Program Update.” Presentation for the Solar System 

Exploration Subcommittee.
Chapter 6: Renewed Commitment: Dawn

219

would only orbit one asteroid. Although the spacecraft would now fly by an additional 

asteroid on the way to Vesta, the GRaND spectrometer, one of only two remaining 

American instruments, would be useless in a flyby. The engineering specs had not been 

changed (and no money had been thereby saved in development), in accordance with 

the team’s proposal to add the Ceres encounter to an extended mission, a clear attempt 

to solve the present financial crisis by postponing the need for those funds to a future 

request. This plan passed the technical merit Preliminary Design Review held by the 

managing institution, but the Program Scientist warned—as she had since May—that 

such a gambit would not pass NASA Headquarters scrutiny, which would include a 

value judgment of the science investigation that remained.

You’re Not Confirmed

In December, it was NASA Headquarters’ turn. The Dawn team arrived at the confirmation review with a mission in which the most compelling science investigation, 

comparative planetology using Vesta and Ceres as endmembers of the evolutionary 

process, had been removed. No option was presented that preserved the comparative 

planetology—which sold the mission itself in 2000—in the baseline mission, leaving 

NASA Headquarters with the single decision of whether to continue buying a very 

expensive mission to a single asteroid with a single U.S. instrument, a German camera, and an Italian mass spectrometer, or to reject the replan and “non-confirm” the 

mission. There was precedent for the latter case, and, after a difficult session behind 

closed doors, NASA Headquarters rejected the proposed descope of the Ceres orbit. 

This left the mission over budget and with insufficient mass margin: an unacceptable 

situation for a mission that had not yet been confirmed.

Just days after the Letter of Agreement between Agenzia Spaziale Italiana and NASA 

was finally signed, the mission failed confirmation.68 The mission was canceled, and 

the team notified, on Christmas Eve 2003.69 Russell called it “a surprise,” noting that 

the team did not understand the decision, and “don’t understand to this day.”70 Carol 

Raymond, the deputy Principal Investigator, however, said the opposite. “Ed [Weiler] 

said that he didn’t select the mission to go only to Vesta. He could have selected another 

mission to go to Vesta. I can absolutely understand why he would say that. What I 

68 Agenzia Spaziale Italiana. (N.d.). “Minor Bodies of the Solar System.” Downloaded from http://

www.asi.it/en/activity/solar_system/dawn.

69 Niebur, S. (2009, 12 August). Personal interview with T. Fraschetti. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

70 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with C. Russell. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
NASA′s Discovery Program

220

don’t understand is why it wasn’t recognized when we went in there [a year earlier] 

and said, this is an impossible job, why are you changing the rules?”71

Dawn was an ambitious, lean, low-cost mission placed in the context of more mature 

missions suffering serious overruns, in an environment of rapidly decreasing risk tolerance. This situation was not unique to Dawn, but this team did not acknowledge the 

need for the mission to compensate for others’ mistakes, continuing to pursue their 

original mission design despite increasingly conservative rules for allowable margins 

of all kinds by both JPL and NASA Headquarters.

This point was illustrated very clearly when Dawn came to its confirmation review 

with a proposal to preserve the technical capabilities (power, mass, propellant) required 

to do the orbits at Vesta and Ceres but not the technical margins required to include 

Ceres in the baseline mission.72 This calculated approach put mission, project, and 

NASA Headquarters management in a difficult position. No matter how much the 

players wanted to preserve the science mission and execute the spacecraft, the Jet 

Propulsion Laboratory could not approve a mission that violated their Design Principles, 

which included sufficient margins on spacecraft and dry mass, power, and budget for 

the mission design. So the team reacted to those requirements by moving the Ceres 

encounter to a possible “extended mission,” a move that would allow JPL to pass Dawn 

at its Preliminary Design Review, where science is not considered. Following standard 

practice, however, the NASA Headquarters review did consider the science. Since the 

mission science without Ceres was not consistent with the originally proposed and 

accepted comparative planetology goals, Headquarters could not approve it, and the 

mission failed confirmation.

Ultimately, without sufficient mission reserves, Dawn could not be approved for 

its mission as conceived. Without available program reserves (which existed for a few 

years but had been more than spent by Deep Impact and MESSENGER), the Discovery 

Program could not confirm a mission that stood a high risk of needing additional 

cash infusions. Without generous NASA-wide reserves, an impossibility due to the 

congressional budget cycle, even NASA could not bail out a mission at its margins 

and sure to grow. The whole program was in a tight situation, just as the project was, 

with no solution apparent within NASA.

The team had pulled out all the stops, too. The Principal Investigator and science 

team had given up the laser altimeter. The engineering team had eliminated all but one 

test bench. The team had cut the dwell time at Vesta and Ceres to the bare minimum. 

The project was nonconfirmed, with no hope of restart or reconsideration. Then, the 

71 Niebur, S. (2009, 11 August). Personal interview with C. Raymond. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

72 Ibid.
Chapter 6: Renewed Commitment: Dawn

221

day after Christmas, “This big bag of money fell out of the sky,” said Raymond, “in 

the form of Orbital’s fee.”73

Dave Thompson, Orbital CEO, called Orlando Figueroa at NASA Headquarters 

and reminded him that Orbital was very interested in continuing with the mission 

and breaking into the planetary mission field. He then did the unthinkable and told 

Figueroa that Orbital would commit to doing the job for cost only, returning the 

for-profit company’s $15 million fee to NASA. Figueroa was impressed by Orbital’s 

dedication to getting the job done, and he agreed. The program scientist was skeptical, 

wondering what the motivation of Orbital would then be to complete the job on time 

and for the originally proposed cost, but the program executive and division director, who had more experience, were incredibly impressed. The team agreed to move 

forward and give the Dawn team another chance. The Dawn team would have two 

weeks to look at the budget, mass, and power problems with this additional $15 million 

to work with and see if a mission could be done within the design principle margins 

and the science expectations.74

What happened next was unexpected in the context of the Discovery Program, 

which had put cost caps on the missions to control growth during formulation and 

development but had become accustomed to the cost caps also controlling the habitual 

raiding of the mission operations period where the science measurements were actually 

taken at faraway planets, comets, and asteroids. Having scrubbed the spacecraft costs 

repeatedly, the team did the unthinkable: they scrubbed Phase E.

“We scrubbed the operations phase because this was a mission cost cap, not a 

spacecraft cost cap,” reasoned Raymond, “we chopped the length of time we were at 

each asteroid down to the bone.” They shortened the mission substantially and accepted 

impacts to the science. “We shortened the low altitude mapping orbit and accepted 

that we were going to do topography with imaging with very little analysis of what 

that entailed, either in terms of the observing strategy, in terms of the analysis of the 

lighting conditions, of what methods would be expected to yield what accuracy,” said 

Raymond. The team was throwing a Hail Mary pass in an attempt to save the mission, 

cutting anything that looked promising—and it worked.75

After a few days of frantic phone calls, replanning meetings, and pleas to reconsider, the mission was once again on its way to confirmation, having reduced costs to 

73 Ibid.

74 Ibid.

75 Ibid.
NASA′s Discovery Program

222

a level comparable to that at the submission of the Concept Study Report in 2001.76

Orbital continued to perform on the mission, with Fraschetti, the project manager, 

emphasizing, “Orbital gave us their very best team.” It wouldn’t be an easy path to 

launch, particularly as Dawn would be Orbital’s first deep space mission, but “they 

made a commitment and they stood by that commitment.” They wanted to expand 

their business to deep space missions in addition to the Earth-orbiting ones they had 

launched in the past, and that commitment was clear from the top down. Orbital 

worked hard to make Dawn a success.77

Chris Russell, the Dawn Principal Investigator, also credited the successful landing 

of the Mars rovers in January 2004, which “relieved a lot of pressure from the system 

as far as we’re concerned. JPL felt better, maybe even NASA Headquarters felt better. 

So we were resurrected.”78

However, the drastic cuts to the mapping orbits and the spacecraft instrumentation 

would affect the science return of the mission. Russell said when you cut instruments, 

you have to have a very solid plan, or you’re going to end up paying for it, and more, 

in operations.79

The replan was not easy. In addition to the financial replan to reconstitute the 

reserves, the mission needed more power margin, and the purchase of an additional 

solar panel would add another million dollars to the project’s deficit. Recalled Raymond, 

“Ed Miller, who was one of the key people on the project, came into a meeting one day 

in his typical laid back way and said, ‘Rosetta’s flying a solar array that’s very similar 

to Dawn’s. Has anybody checked what they paid?’” Orbital asked Dutch Space for a 

quote, and the project immediately changed suppliers.

“The clouds opened, the Sun came out,” said Raymond. “That broke the logjam.”80

The Dutch Space solar array was obtainable at a lower cost, lower mass, and with 

promises of a power output that was much higher than the original arrays. This new 

solar array was a game-changer. The extra power helped solve the power problem and 

the mass problem as well, since on an ion propulsion mission, extra power margin 

76 Russell, C. T., Capaccioni, F., Coradini, A., De Sanctis, M. C., Feldman, W. C., Jaumann, R., 

Keller, H. U., McCord, T. B., McFadden, L. A., Mottola, S., Pieters, C. M., Prettyman, T. H., 

Raymond, C. A., Sykes, M. V., Smith, D. E., & Zuber, M. T. (2007). “Dawn Mission to Vesta and 

Ceres: Symbiosis Between Terrestrial Observations and Robotic Exploration.” Earth, Moon, 

and Planets, 101(1–2), 65–91. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11038-007-9151-9.

77 Niebur, S. (2009, 12 August). Personal interview with T. Fraschetti. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

78 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with C. Russell. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

79 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with C. Russell. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

80 Niebur, S. (2009, 11 August). Personal interview with C. Raymond. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
Chapter 6: Renewed Commitment: Dawn

223

could compensate for some of the lost mass margin. The problems of mass and power 

were fixable, and the team proceeded to rework the mission timeline.

Raymond explained, “The day before we were leaving to go to NASA Headquarters 

we have a briefing with Charles [Elachi] to go over the final package, and we get a 

message from Orbital saying: We have a problem. Something fundamental about the 

spacecraft wasn’t adequate, and they needed more money to fix it.... Charles challenged 

us to show him why he should be confident that we could proceed. On the spot, Marc 

Rayman and I said, we still have margin. We’ll cut a few months out of the plan, and 

that’s what we did.”81 The team changed the mission plan and brought a new set of 

charts to the Delta Confirmation Review, surprising even their Program Scientist and 

program executive.

The team went into the Delta Confirmation Review with a new plan and came out 

with renewed approval for the mission—with one significant stipulation. “As we were 

getting back on track after that, Weiler took the magnetometer off,” said Russell. “Before 

we were allowed to go forward, I had to sacrifice my first born [the magnetometer] for 

the mission. That was a really big scientific mistake.”82 Raymond was terribly disappointed, revealing, “That was absolutely the lowest point for me, since my career had 

started by looking at the Earth’s magnetic field and then going on to Mars’ magnetic 

field, and here I was poised to expand the portfolio to protoplanets, but that chance 

had evaporated.”83 Even years later, the senior leadership of the mission continued to 

maintain “the magnetometer was demanifested by NASA’s selecting official for reasons 

that still are unclear but plainly invalid.”84

The mission was confirmed, with a modified instrument payload, trajectory, and 

operations plan, on 6 February 2004. The mission would continue with less science 

return and more reserves.85 The need for increased reserves was also driven by JPL’s 

insistence that the mission follow the institution’s well-known Design Principles. Changes 

were made so that Dawn would have 15 percent power margin at all mission stages, 

20 percent mass margin in Phase C, and 25 percent cost reserves at confirmation. The 

mission would spend less time observing both Vesta and Ceres as a result. The reductions 

were significant. Vesta’s time was now set for seven months and Ceres at five months 

rather than the 11 months at each body as originally planned. This change primarily 

81 Ibid.

82 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with C. Russell. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

83 Niebur, S. (2009, 11 August). Personal interview with C. Raymond. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

84 Russell, C. T. (2005). “Dawn Discovery Mission: Status Report.” Proceedings of 6th IAA 

International Conference on Low-Cost Planetary Missions, 6, 283–289. Retrieved from https://

escholarship.org/uc/item/2xr140qr.

85 Russell, C. T. (2004, February). “Dawn mission status.” Dawn’s Early Light, 3(1). 1.
NASA′s Discovery Program

224

affected data return from the GRaND instrument, which required long stay times for 

integration of the data at multiple distances from the surface. The engineering specs 

were not changed, still allowing the mission to add time observing each body if time, 

power, and cost profile would allow.86

The mission’s science objectives were now finalized:

1. Determine the bulk density of Vesta and Ceres to ≤1 percent.

2. Determine the spin axis orientation of Vesta and Ceres to ≤0.5°.

3a. Determine the gravity field of Vesta with a half-wavelength resolution ≤90 

kilometers.

3b. Determine the gravity field of Ceres with a half-wavelength resolution ≤300 

kilometers.

4a. Obtain images of ≥80 percent of the surface of Vesta with a sampling ≤100 

meters per pixel and a signal-to-noise ratio ≥50 in the clear filter and in 

≥3 color filters.

4b. Obtain images of ≥80 percent of the surface of Ceres with a sampling ≤200 

meters per pixel and a signal-to-noise ratio ≥50 in the clear filter and in 

≥3 color filters.

5a. Obtain a topographic map of ≥80 percent of the surface of Vesta, with a 

horizontal resolution ≤100 meters and a vertical resolution ≤10 meters.

5b. Obtain a topographic map of ≥80 percent of the surface of Ceres, with a 

horizontal resolution ≤200 meters and a vertical resolution ≤20 meters.

6a. Measure and map the abundances of major rock-forming elements to a precision ≤20 percent with a resolution ~1.5 times the mapping altitude over the 

upper ~1m of the entire surface of Vesta and Ceres.

6b. Measure and map the abundance of H over the upper ~1m of the entire 

surface of Vesta and Ceres.

6c. Measure and map the abundances of K, Th, and U over the upper ~1m of the 

entire surface of Vesta and Ceres.

7a. Obtain ≥10,000 spectral frames [a two-dimensional data structure with one 

axis representing space and the other representing spectral wavelength] of 

Vesta’s surface at wavelengths of 0.25–5 micrometers with a spectral resolution ≤10 nanometers. At least half of these spectral frames will be at a spatial 

resolution ≤200 meters per pixel, with the rest at a spatial resolution ≤800 

meters per pixel.

86 Ibid.
Chapter 6: Renewed Commitment: Dawn

225

7b. Obtain ≥8,000 spectral frames of Ceres’s surface at wavelengths of 

0.25–5 micrometers with a spectral resolution ≤10 nanometers. At least half 

of these spectral frames will be at a spatial resolution ≤400 meters per pixel, 

with the rest at spatial resolution ≤1,600 meters per pixel.87

The lack of solid requirements had been a problem since proposal. Two project 

managers struggled to manage a project without clear science drivers and definitions of success. The project necessarily had to execute replans several times without 

the road map that a clear set of requirements could provide. It was being managed 

by NASA Headquarters to its proposal—but with conflicting statements in the very 

purpose of the mission that caused disagreement for years. A mission that proposed 

comparative planetology but called the descope of the second planetoid acceptable 

was self-contradictory, and nobody at the time was happy with the result. 

A STRING OF TECHNICAL FAILURES

That spring, Dawn again requested restoration of the magnetometer to the mission, but 

NASA said no.88 Jim Robinson became Dawn Program Executive at NASA Headquarters, 

replacing Kurt Lindstrom, who needed additional time to shepherd the larger New 

Horizons mission through the National Environmental Policy Act process. Dawn 

continued to pass reviews throughout the year and passed its CDR in June of 2004.89

The ATLO Readiness Review followed on 14–15 December 2004. The project passed, 

officially entering Assembly, Test, and Launch Operations (ATLO), the assembly phase 

led by Orbital, on 19 January 2005.90

Xenon Tank

The spacecraft’s propellant was to be stored in a large tank, sized to carry nearly 500 

kilograms of xenon, with a titanium liner welded from two pieces around the belly of 

87 Rayman, M. D., Fraschetti, T. C., Raymond, C. A., & Russell, C. T. (2006). “Dawn: A mission in 

development for exploration of main belt asteroids Vesta and Ceres.” Acta Astronautica, 58(11), 

605–616. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actaastro.2006.01.014.

88 Russell, C. T., Capaccioni, F., Coradini, A., De Sanctis, M. C., Feldman, W. C., Jaumann, R., 

Keller, H. U., McCord, T. B., McFadden, L. A., Mottola, S., Pieters, C. M., Prettyman, T. H., 

Raymond, C. A., Sykes, M. V., Smith, D. E., & Zuber, M. T. (2007). “Dawn Mission to Vesta and 

Ceres: Symbiosis Between Terrestrial Observations and Robotic Exploration.” Earth, Moon, 

and Planets, 101(1–2), 65–91. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11038-007-9151-9.

89 Russell, C. T. (2004, August). “Dawn Successfully Passes Critical Design Review.” Dawn’s Early 

Light, 3(3). 1.

90 Russell, C. T. (2005, March). “Dawn Mission Status.” Dawn’s Early Light, 4(3). 1; Morris, J. 

(2005, June 13). “Discovery program to release revamped AO.” Aviation Week’s Aerospace Daily 

& Defense Report, 214(51).
NASA′s Discovery Program

226

the tank and covered with a composite overwrap. Construction of this xenon tank and 

a spare was complete. After a few tests were run on the flight tank, it was inserted into 

the cylindrical core of the spacecraft structure and screwed into place so that ATLO 

could proceed, taking the remaining xenon tank qualification tests off the critical 

path to regain much-needed schedule margin. Since the flight tank had passed its 

initial tests, this was considered a low-risk move. However, the tank failed a test after 

confirmation, bursting at a pressure lower than the nominal operating pressure and 

just below that at which the tank would qualify.91 Stunned, the team rallied quickly 

to determine what could be done and whether the flight tank already installed in the 

spacecraft could be trusted.92 Meanwhile, spacecraft integration continued. The team 

was stuck with the tank already installed inside the spacecraft, but the spacecraft could 

not proceed to launch without certainty that it would work.

The team was running out of options and out of time. One solution that remained 

viable throughout the six months of analysis and review, however, was one of the 

simplest. The team could simply lower the amount of fuel in the tank to a level that 

ensured that pressures would not rise to the critical level. Once the team had a better 

estimate of the amount of fuel required to reach and orbit Vesta and then Ceres, they 

would be able to load the tank more precisely and see if that changed the analysis. The 

calculations were done, reserve propellant was added, and the analysis was repeated. 

The mission did not require that the tank be filled to the tested level; at a reduced 

load—say, 425 kilograms rather than the planned 450 kilograms—the xenon had more 

room to expand, even in situations like a hot summer day on the launch pad in Florida, 

should the air conditioning cooling the spacecraft break down. The team’s own analysis 

supported this, but NASA required outside review.

The new Discovery and New Frontiers Program Office (D&NFPO) got involved. 

The office, explained program manager Todd May, knew that the team at JPL knew 

how to build and operate a planetary mission, but “the program office could make 

real contributions to problem solving and decision-making, and we could bring technical expertise to bear when needed. We would not impose [Marshall Space Flight 

Center’s] specific set of ‘how-to’ rules on them. Instead, we wanted to focus our energies almost entirely on enabling and supporting the success of these project teams. 

We strove for trust and mutual respect, not control.” This approach was put to the test 

on the xenon tank. Earlier, the program office had been able to help JPL engineers 

working on Dawn understand the behavior of the 454 kilograms of xenon because of 

their direct experience with superfluid helium slosh dynamics on another mission, 

Gravity Probe B. When the xenon tank failed just below the qualifying pressure, pro91 May, T. (2008, December). “Cooperation, Not Control.” Ask Magazine.

92 Niebur, S. (2009, 12 August). Personal interview with T. Fraschetti. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
Chapter 6: Renewed Commitment: Dawn

227

gram managers got involved again. “Focusing on the goal of mission success rather 

than the letter of the law of requirements,” reported May, “the Discovery Program 

Office grabbed pressure vessel experts and worked alongside the project to develop 

the recommendations and rationale to lower the operating pressure while maintaining 

mission performance requirements. This avoided the significant delay and expense 

that redesigning, rebuilding, and requalifying the tank—which was already installed 

on the vehicle—would have caused.”93

Initially worried, Tom Fraschetti was reassured by the interventions. To be sure 

that the somewhat inelegant solution of filling the tank only partway would provide 

acceptable margin, the team had to truly understand the failure—and prove that to 

outside review teams from the Discovery Program Office and elsewhere. Since the flight 

tank was tucked away inside the spacecraft at Orbital and not available for pressure 

testing, the team took the qualification tanks apart, examined the splits, and tested the 

materials in many ways to be sure that the failure was understood and that the flight 

tank at the 425-kilogram fill and predicted pressures would not burst. “That was very 

costly,” said Fraschetti. “I was paying for an army of experts doing this, and experts 

with varied opinions.”94

It didn’t happen quickly. “The solution was, now that we know where the break 

point is, to put in less xenon and that’s what we did. We could make that decision 

immediately. But people involved in this process had to investigate it to death,” said 

Chris Russell, the Principal Investigator, “and we had difficulty in getting the review 

committee to release the report so we could go forward.”95

The team was finally able to satisfy the review panels, reporting the results at a 

conference in 2005: “The root causes for the reduced pressure at rupture are now 

known and how to build stronger tanks understood.”96 The change in tank fill did not 

require other engineering trades for the mission lifetime or science return within the 

level-one requirements.97

93 May, T. (2008, December). “Cooperation, Not Control.” Ask Magazine.

94 Niebur, S. (2009, 12 August). Personal interview with T. Fraschetti. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

95 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with C. Russell. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

96 Russell, C. T. (2005). “Dawn Discovery Mission: Status Report.” Proceedings of 6th IAA 

International Conference on Low-Cost Planetary Missions, 6, 283–289. Retrieved from https://

escholarship.org/uc/item/2xr140qr.

97 Niebur, S. (2009, 12 August). Personal interview with T. Fraschetti. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
NASA′s Discovery Program

228

Ion Propulsion Development

It was not the only hardware issue to emerge. In January 2000, Hughes Space & 

Communications Company, which built the Deep Space-1 ion engine and which was 

going to rebuild it for Dawn, sold itself to The Boeing Company, which had less interest in the technology. Managers rotated rapidly through the ion engine unit, their top 

priority rarely the ion engine itself. Word was that Boeing intended to sell off the unit, 

which meant its managers were more determined to prove their worth outside of the 

division in order to preserve their position in the company. Meanwhile, technicians 

also rotated through the unit. The union shop meant that technicians who had greater 

seniority could replace more junior technicians, even if their specialties were not an 

exact match. Many technicians coming into the project had to be trained to work on 

the ion engines. In other words, the mission lost the heritage that they had thought 

they bought by contracting with the same company that had built Deep Space-1.

Management churn, with five general managers in three years, made it difficult to 

work with the company at the management level. Fraschetti talked to managers and 

even the president of the unit. They made agreements, but nothing seemed to stick. 

Eventually, even Charles Elachi, Director of Jet Propulsion Laboratory, intervened, 

making a trip to the company in person to secure new commitments to the completion 

of the project on time and on budget. Even that didn’t stick. “If you got a commitment 

from somebody, three months later he would be gone and you have to go get the commitment again,” remembered Fraschetti. “And then, ultimately in the middle of the 

project, they did sell it and another company took them over.”98

New management arrived. Some engineers stayed after the acquisition. Some left. 

The Dawn team had a terrible time during this churn. “It was bad,” said Fraschetti. 

“But, on the good side, once they were all in place, we did get a real management commitment out of them. They really were committed, which was the first time. Of course, 

we were already six or eight months late in delivering.”99 Worse, as Orbital lagged 

behind, they faulted the late delivery of the ion engines, pointing to that as a reason 

that they, too, could not live up to their contract. Orbital now had a good excuse for 

not meeting milestones, as the ion propulsion system delivery became later and later.

Although the ion propulsion power unit was designed to be exactly the same as the 

one flown on Deep Space-1, the actual implementation of the design surprised even 

the Dawn managers. Fraschetti said, “The problem was that while the actual electronic 

design was good, in fact, it was an excellent design, the packaging was a disaster.” 

Assembly and test of the units showed problem after problem, as parts failed, unsuit98 Niebur, S. (2009, 12 August). Personal interview with T. Fraschetti. Located in “MESSENGER” 

file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

99 Ibid.
Chapter 6: Renewed Commitment: Dawn

229

able parts were purchased, and incorrect parts were installed. “They were buying the 

wrong parts, or they’d buy the right parts and still put the wrong ones in.”100 When a 

simple bump of the soldering iron weakened a stack capacitor and caused it to explode, 

the project, JPL management, and NASA Headquarters considered that the last straw. 

“If you’d looked at the picture of the hardware incident, you would think the whole 

box was blown up,” said Keyur Patel, who was later the mission project manager. He 

explained that a blown capacitor created a cloud of black dust. “It looks like there is a 

lot of collateral damage when, in reality, it’s localized collateral damage with a lot of 

soot thrown all over the place.”101 The capacitor was replaced and the box put back 

together in three days, but the effects of this explosion would last much longer.

The project decided that the ion engine team needed JPL direction. Chuck Garner, 

the ion propulsion system engineer, began to work onsite at the company every day, 

directing the contractor team and enforcing proven procedures.102 But even this direction was not enough to rescue the unit. “We just had failure after failure after failure 

after failure with that thing until we finally actually, at some point, just brought it 

in-house,” said Tom Fraschetti.103

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory required the company to relinquish the unit, the 

spare parts, the boxes, the paperwork—everything—and brought it all back to the 

lab to finish. They looked for help and found the original designer of the unit, who 

was no longer working at the El Segundo plant. JPL hired him on as a consultant, 

and that helped the team move past their problems to complete the unit. Fraschetti 

also credited JPL’s expertise: “We got our best techs in there. They were careful. The 

inspection was so much more thorough here,” and reassembly went smoothly, without 

causing additional problems.104

ATLO Delays

While work on the West Coast was getting back on schedule, on the East Coast, all was 

not proceeding smoothly. At first, the JPL team was not aware of the delays because 

the Orbital manager was protective of his people and their work. As time went on, 

the project became worried, and the flight system manager began to spend more time 

onsite at the contractor. “What we needed at Orbital was the same thing we needed at 

100 Ibid.

101 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with K. Patel. Located in “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

102 Niebur, S. (2009, 11 August). Personal interview with C. Raymond. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

103 Niebur, S. (2009, 12 August). Personal interview with T. Fraschetti. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

104 Ibid.
NASA′s Discovery Program

230

Boeing,” said Carol Raymond. The spacecraft harness was a difficult build for Orbital 

and took significantly longer than expected. The flight harness was not ready at the 

start of ATLO, and the workarounds increased the cost. The project struggled with 

these three problems, but the team felt that they had solutions. The solutions, however, 

would require additional financial resources, as the team had used all their reserves. 

Fraschetti returned to NASA Headquarters to request additional funds for the project. 

It did not go easy.105

STANDDOWN

On 11 October 2005, NASA Headquarters, frustrated at the string of technical and cost 

problems on the mission, abruptly told the Dawn mission team to stand down pending 

the outcome of a review. At this point, the projected cost was as much as 11 percent 

to 20 percent over the approved $373 million budget, and the schedule was delayed 

by up to 14 months.106 All work except “that which was critical to maintaining the 

viability of the Dawn mission to launch on a delayed schedule, still achieving all of its 

scientific objectives” was halted.

Russell characterized the standdown as “in response to concerns about the availability of funding in [Fiscal Year 2006] to cover any problems that might arise during 

environmental and performance testing,” but agency officials remembered it as more 

than a Fiscal Year 2006 issue.107 Colleen Hartman, then–Deputy Associate Administrator 

for science, was quoted in the media as saying: “We had concerns about scientific issues 

and about cost containment,” citing a 20 percent increase in cost.108 “There was too 

much risk left on the table to go forward.”109

Although two-thirds of the JPL engineers and other project personnel were taken 

off the project during this phase, not all Dawn team members and contractors stood 

down in late 2005.110 A core set of the mission team continued to work on test procedures, doing dry runs on the testbed and identifying the problems that remained.111

105 Niebur, S. (2009, 11 August). Personal interview with C. Raymond. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

106 Berger, B. (2005, 21 November). “Technical, Management Problems Prompted Delay of Dawn 

Mission.” SpaceNews. 11; David, L. (2005, 7 November). “NASA Dawn asteroid mission told to 

‘stand down.’” Space.com.

107 Russell, C. T. (2005, November). “Dawn Mission Status.” Dawn’s Early Light, 4(2).

108 Cooper, C. (2005, 18 November). “Future of JPL’s Dawn mission is in doubt.” La 

Cañada Valley Sun.

109 Clark, S. (2006, 27 March). “NASA Restarts Once-dead Dawn Asteroid Mission.” Spaceflight Now.

110 Cooper, C. (2005, 18 November). “Future of JPL’s Dawn mission is in doubt.” La 

Cañada Valley Sun.

111 Raymond, C. (2006, April). “Dawn Spacecraft Nearing Final Integration.” Dawn’s Early 

Light, 5(1). 2.
Chapter 6: Renewed Commitment: Dawn

231

Solvable problems were addressed during the standdown; more difficult ones were 

put into the replan. “We had open issues,” said Patel. “The standdown period actually 

helped in getting some of those resolved.”112 Project spending decreased drastically 

during the three-month standdown, and the pace of mission readiness slowed to a 

crawl. Through it all, the team believed that they would be allowed to restart; education 

and public outreach activities continued, with Jacinta Behne of McRel, a knowledge 

and educational outreach company, still working to engage the public, inviting them 

to submit their names for the “Send Your Name to the Asteroid Belt” campaign, where 

eventually 365,000 names were etched on an 8- by 8-millimeter microchip and bolted 

to the spacecraft.113

That the mission was having failures during ATLO was not debatable. But among 

the team members, the need for a standdown was. The project team viewed the technical failures as simply part of the design process—typical for any project of this 

size.114 NASA Headquarters, meanwhile, already vigilant because of Dawn’s recurring 

problems with the xenon tanks and the ion propulsion units, was watching the project 

closely. Dawn was the first project in development after the very costly 2003 overruns 

by Deep Impact and MESSENGER, and the agency could not afford another mission 

with the same kinds of overruns. There was no reserve line in the Discovery Program 

capable of handling those issues again, and the operational environment was charged 

with caution. If NASA management missed signs of trouble on a mission now, it could 

make the whole program vulnerable.

There was a new dedication to catching technical problems early and intervening 

before a mission ran tens of millions of dollars over budget. Couple that vigilance with 

a program executive overseeing his first NASA project; a Discovery program manager 

and a division director, both of whom had arrived well after the overruns (and Dawn’s 

cancellation) in 2003; and the third Associate Administrator in as many years, and 

the system was not inclined to forgive failures. Subsystem after subsystem on Dawn 

had failures, and the program executive duly reported them to his management. With 

each failure, NASA Headquarters lost confidence in the ability of the Dawn team to 

execute the mission. Dawn failures became the talk of the halls, and there was a widespread perception that the team was not progressing as they should. When the ion 

propulsion power unit built by Boeing failed, the project told the program executive. 

112 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with K. Patel. Located in “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

113 Jones, K. C. (2005, 12 December). “More than 29,000 people signed up this week to have 

their names put on a microchip that will travel aboard a spaceship for the Dawn mission.” 

TechWeb.com.

114 Niebur, S. (2009, 12 August). Personal interview with T. Fraschetti. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
NASA′s Discovery Program

232

The program executive reported the failure to the division director. The Dawn project 

was told to stand down.

The shutdown came before the reviews, not after—a move that frustrated the Dawn 

leadership. NASA assembled no Integrated Action Team to review the project before 

shutdown. The Discovery and New Frontiers Program Office at Marshall Space Flight 

Center did not conduct a review. The NASA Engineering and Safety Center was not 

called on. Instead, NASA Headquarters told the team to stand down and then sent 

an Integrated Action Team to gauge progress on all the major subsystems, so that 

agency leadership could make an informed decision. The team showed the review 

board the spacecraft at Orbital and the status of the subsystems. Tom Fraschetti, the 

project manager, remembered that members of the review board were surprised to 

see the progress that had been made, saying, “I don’t know what kind of information 

was being passed by our program exec, but the board came onboard thinking that we 

only had a few subsystems done. When they came onboard, all the instruments were 

delivered, and 90 percent of the spacecraft was together and working.”115

NASA, however, had seen subsystem after subsystem and part after part fail during 

ATLO, to the point that it was almost an expected result, and the perception was that 

the existing team was not capable of making it to the launch pad unassisted. So, the 

team changed. During the nearly six-month standdown, NASA cut Dawn’s funding 

drastically. There was no longer any money to pay the salaries of all of the existing 

team members. For instance, the funding for the operations team was cut entirely. “So, 

they all went and got other jobs, which you would expect. And so, when we started 

up again, it was all new people,” said Fraschetti.116

NASA was cautious to keep funding critical positions at Orbital and some at the 

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, not including the project manager. “There is no way that 

standing down was going to save any money,” said Chris Russell. “All of that period 

of time was just an added cost to Dawn from the management side of the house.” 117

Fraschetti also later expressed frustration about the standdown, saying, “If they 

would have come in there and said, ‘You know, Tom, you ain’t cutting it. I’m going 

to put Keyur in your place,’ and let him just take over, they would have finished that 

job for no more than $35 million, launched it earlier than they did because we lost 

months of time in the standoff. It dragged on for months and months. It would have 

saved them a lot of time and a lot of money. It would have been a lot better. But they 

did it in a really odd way. And I have to blame the program exec, because I think he 

115 Ibid.

116 Ibid.

117 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with C. Russell. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
Chapter 6: Renewed Commitment: Dawn

233

just kept running up there. Of course, you know what happened to him.”118 (Shortly 

after reinstatement, Dawn’s program executive was arrested and imprisoned on an 

unrelated matter.)119

In a January 2006 interview, Russell explained that the team’s Earned Value 

Management system, recently implemented by many JPL projects in response to the 

Mars mission failures, had indicated a potential $7 million overrun. A subsequent 

grass roots estimate yielded an even higher cost, $17 million. Funded cost and schedule reserve brought the potential overrun to $40 million, which was enough to alarm 

NASA officials.120

Russell characterized the standdown as frustrating, saying, “We were going full 

bore toward launch, running as fast as we could. We saw the finish line in sight.” But 

Andy Dantzler, the division director, reported a picture not nearly as rosy, saying that 

Dawn was running behind schedule and the launch had already been expected to slip 

at least two months before the standdown.121

An independent review team, assembled by the D&NFPO, visited subcontractors, 

including L3, the manufacturer of troubled power processing units; the Dawn team at 

Orbital; and the Dawn team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.122 After this work, they 

recommended the program’s continuation but found a large number of outstanding 

major issues, cost growth of 20 percent, and a 14-month launch delay.123 In all, the 

review found 29 unresolved technical issues, worrying NASA managers, who were not 

convinced that the mission’s technical problems were close to resolution.124

The Principal Investigator complained about the large number of reviews to which 

his project was subjected. Russell later said, “Reviewers are most sensitive to the issues 

of the previous mission in the queue and trying to make sure your mission does not 

make the same mistake as the last one.” He added: “Perceived risk is almost as dangerous—or perhaps even more at times—than real risk.”125

118 Niebur, S. (2009, 12 August). Personal interview with T. Fraschetti. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

119 “NASA office searched in child-porn probe.” (2006, 31 March). NBC News. Downloaded from 

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna12102570 on 20 August 2021.

120 Clark, S. (2006, 3 March). “Probe built to visit asteroids killed in budget snarl.” Spaceflight Now.

121 Groshong, K. (2006, 3 March). “Dawn asteroid mission killed, says report.” New Scientist.

122 Russell, C. T. (2005, November). “Dawn Mission Status.” Dawn’s Early Light, 4(2).

123 David, L. (2006, 3 March). “NASA’s Dawn asteroid mission cancelled.” Space.com.

124 Chang, A. (2006, 6 March). “Scientists lament cancelled NASA mission.” AP; Groshong, K. 

(2005, 14 November). “NASA stall puzzles techies.” Pasadena Star News.

125 Russell, C. (2007, 19 September). Presentation at the Discovery@15 workshop in 

Huntsville, Alabama.
NASA′s Discovery Program

234

NO BUCKS, NO BUCK ROGERS: DAWN CANCELED

It was a difficult time to need money at NASA. The Fiscal Year 2007 budget request in 

February proposed cutting the Science Mission Directorate research and analysis budget 

by an additional 15 percent across the board (following unexpected cuts in 2006, with 

cuts as high as 50 percent for astrobiology), and NASA was beginning to take heat for 

this decision on Capitol Hill. Although Dantzler had announced in January that Dawn’s 

summer launch had been indefinitely postponed, the community was concerned most 

about the research and analysis cuts, and, following an Appropriations Committee 

hearing, planetary scientists were asked to appear before the House Science Committee 

and testify as to the impacts of the proposed budget.126 On 2 March 2006, a Nobel 

laureate, a Cassini co-investigator, and a former Associate Administrator testified as to 

the deleterious effects on current research, smaller missions, and future students. Fran 

Bagenal, professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a co-investigator on 

Cassini, noted the planned decrease in NASA science mission launches and highlighted 

data “that basically says NASA is going out of business.”127 Shortly after the hearing, 

Mary Cleave announced that the Dawn mission was canceled.128

NASA announced few details publicly. Dantzler characterized it as “the fiscally 

responsible thing to do,” saying, “I believe it’s the right one for the good of the Discovery 

Program” and indicating that the costs-to-go must have greatly exceeded the funds 

available, since the “sunk costs” already totaled $257 million.129 “When we looked at 

the standdown information at that time, we felt in the [Science Mission Directorate] 

that there was too much risk still left on the table to go forward.” Colleen Hartman, 

now Deputy Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, later characterized the increase in cost as “approximately 20 percent.”130

Scientists were disappointed, and vocal. Bruce Barraclaugh, a co-investigator and 

researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory, called the decision “heart wrenching.”131

Lucy McFadden, a co-investigator from the University of Maryland, said, “There are 

hundreds of people in this country and in Europe who have worked on the project 

for four years and had committed another decade to it.... What can I say? It makes 

me cry.”132 Bill Feldman, a co-investigator and lead of the GRaND instrument built 

126 Cheng, A. (2006, 24 January). “NASA postpones mission to visit asteroids.” Associated Press.

127 Morris, J. (2006, 3 March). “Scientists on Capitol Hill decry NASA’s science budget request.” 

Aviation Daily & Defense Report.

128 Groshong, K. (2006, 3 March). “Dawn asteroid mission killed, says report.” New Scientist.

129 David, L. (2006, 3 March). “NASA’s Dawn asteroid mission cancelled.” Space.com; The New 

York Times. (2006, 28 March).

130 Clark, S. (2006, 27 March). “NASA Restarts Once-dead Dawn Asteroid Mission.” Spaceflight Now.

131 Chang, A. (2006, 6 March). “Scientists lament cancelled NASA mission.” AP.

132 David, Leonard, “NASA’s Dawn asteroid mission cancelled,” Space.com, 3 March 2006.
Chapter 6: Renewed Commitment: Dawn

235

for Dawn at Los Alamos, admitted that he was stunned, but regrouped, saying, “We 

need to suck in our guts and rehabilitate this mission and fly it one way or another.”133

A few days later, Cleave addressed the topic with the National Research Council 

Space Studies Board, saying that the cost was high and unresolved technical and management issues threatened to push it even higher; project managers couldn’t get the 

project estimate back in the box, despite the mission’s maturity, having already spent 

$284 million of the $446 million estimate to complete.134 Rumors abounded, and 

articles were published stating that NASA was “cannibalizing its science missions to 

pay for the space shuttle and the space station and future plans to send astronauts 

back to the moon.”135

On 6 March 2006, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory officially appealed to the Office of 

the Administrator using a new institutional procedure, informally called the reclama 

process, widely seen as the first time in recent memory that a NASA center challenged 

a NASA Headquarters decision on a mission.136 Three days later, NASA announced 

that it would consider reinstating the mission. A team that included a newly promoted 

Associate Administrator Rex Geveden and NASA Chief Engineer Chris Scolese was 

assembled for a review that included presentations from JPL and the Dawn Integrated 

Action Team, including, reportedly, additional information from JPL not provided to 

the Science Mission Directorate earlier in the year.

The review proceeded quietly while, at the annual meeting of the Lunar and Planetary 

Science Conference the following week, co-investigators and other researchers harshly 

criticized the cancellation.137 Gerhard Neukum, a co-investigator and professor of 

planetary sciences at Germany’s Freie Universität Berlin, said, “It’s totally unacceptable what’s happening now. NASA has responsibility to their cooperation partners first 

and foremost before they go to the last resort of canceling a mission.” The community 

was alternately suspicious that the money had been repurposed and confused about 

procedure, a fact not improved when Dantzler would not address the specifics of the 

cancellation publicly, saying, “It would not be wise to go into technical detail.”138

Geveden’s team reviewed the information and agreed that partially filling the xenon 

tanks would likely prevent tank failure. After significant work to identify the root 

133 Chang, A. (2006, 6 March). “Scientists lament cancelled NASA mission.” AP.

134 Leonard, D. (2006, 24 April). “Additional Information Prompts NASA To Reconsider Decision 

to Cancel Dawn.” SpaceNews.

135 Chang, K., and W. Leary. (2006, 28 March). “Weeks After Killing It, NASA Resurrects Mission 

to Visit Asteroids.” The New York Times. A13.

136 Alexander, A. (2006, 27 March). “A new day for Dawn.” Planetary Society; Chang, A. (2006, 20 

March). “NASA scrutinizes cancelled mission.” Associated Press.

137 Malik, T. (2006, 3 April). “Researchers applaud NASA decision to revive asteroid mission.” SpaceNews.

138 David, L. (2006, 17 March). “NASA’s Dawn mission cancellation under review.” Space.com.
NASA′s Discovery Program

236

cause, the power processing unit failures were deemed “understood” and blamed on 

transient thermal conditions in the test configuration. The project had a new process 

in place for replacing damaged capacitors and a plan forward that satisfied all the players. Later questions would be dealt with in the same way; when the project reached a 

pivotal point on which the experts from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Discovery 

and New Frontiers Program Office, and the chief engineer’s office had not been able 

to agree, Keyur Patel, the incoming project manager, called the parties together for an 

additional review of the requirements versus the risks. Their advice proved valuable in 

stopping an environmental test early. Patel had not only earned their trust but repaid 

it by asking advice again as needed.

“We believe, fundamentally, that there is not a flight hardware issue with those 

units, but rather a test configuration issue,” said Geveden. “The technical resolution 

path seems pretty clear.... I think the risk posture on this mission is not atypical for 

this kind of mission. When you are doing deep planetary missions and dealing with 

the environments and the temperature regimes and the complication of integrating a 

suite of instruments, there are always pretty tall challenges.”139

On 27 March 2006, NASA announced that the Dawn mission would be reinstated.140 The originally approved mission, projected to launch in June 2006 at a cost of 

$373 million, was reinstated with a 13-month delay and an increase in the cost cap 

by $73 million, pushing the cost to $446 million. The reinstatement of the mission at 

this point was striking, leading reporters to ask whether the reversal was politically 

motivated, possibly by a NASA budget hearing before the House Appropriations panel, 

chaired by Rep. Frank Wolf, whose district included Orbital Space Sciences.141 Colleen 

Hartman, now Deputy Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, told 

reporters, “The information on the table at the time was insufficient for us to feel comfortable going forward. Since that time there was additional information provided.”142

Rex Geveden simply said, “This is an example of how our system works now.”143

Scientists, however, were relieved. “I’m astonished,” said Lucy McFadden, a coinvestigator, when the news dropped. “I’m excited. I’m ready to go.”144 Co-investigator 

Tom Prettyman of the GRaND instrument said, “Of course, we’re in shock. We were in 

139 Clark, S. (2006, 27 March). “NASA restarts once-dead asteroid mission.” Spaceflight Now.

140 “NASA Reinstates the Dawn Mission.” NASA Press Release 06-108.

141 Editorial. (2006, 10 April). SpaceNews. 18.

142 Clark, S. (2006, 27 March). “NASA restarts once-dead asteroid mission.” Spaceflight Now.

143 Kridler, C. (2006, 28 March). “NASA: Mission to Asteroid Back On.” Florida Today. See also 

David, L. (2005, 7 November). “NASA Dawn asteroid mission told to ‘stand down.’” Space.com.

144 Chang, K., and Warren Leary. (2006, 28 March). “Weeks after killing it, NASA resurrects mission to visit asteroids.” The New York Times.
Chapter 6: Renewed Commitment: Dawn

237

shock when it was canceled, and we were pleasantly surprised when it was reinstated.”145

The Planetary Society issued a statement supporting the decision.146 Geveden caveated the reinstatement, stating, “There is no sense in which it’s okay to overrun on 

budget.... But you do have to recognize that for...missions of this nature, cost overruns are pretty typical.”147

Discovery mission leadership in the early days would have disagreed, as there were 

minimal overruns in the Discovery Program prior to Deep Impact and MESSENGER 

in 2003. Deputy Associate Administrator Hartman, a key player in the earlier reviews, 

indicated the difficulty of determining Dawn’s fate, saying: “What we had here was a very 

gut-wrenching decision and significant management and technical hurdles to overcome, 

and we’re happy to be going forward.”148 This time, it did not go unnoticed that the 

unexpected increase to the program would affect future mission selection options.149

Chris Russell was unapologetic in his criticism of NASA Headquarters, saying at 

the time: “The stand down spent money but did not progress us meaningfully toward 

launch. Also, we now have to rehire folks and retrain to get to launch. So, this whole 

process has wasted money. It defies logic what they did.”150 Years later, he maintained 

this attitude, saying, “There was never any reason to cancel the mission technically,” 

and repeating his previous claim, “as far as we could tell the decisions were made 

totally on a desire to move money around.”151

The next issue of the project newsletter indicated the extent of the mission changes: 

an outstanding need for almost $54 million more and new project managers at both 

the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Orbital.152 Keyur Patel, former Deputy Project 

Manager on Deep Impact, replaced Tom Fraschetti at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory; 

Ann Grandfield, former Deputy Project Manager under John McCarthy, became 

Project Manager at Orbital.153 Coincidentally, the project management team at NASA 

Headquarters also changed at about this time, with Dave Lindstrom taking over the 

position of Program Scientist after Susan Niebur left NASA Headquarters in January, 

and with Kurt Lindstrom returning as program executive.

145 Arnold, J. (2006, 3 April). “NASA sends Dawn to space; asteroid program cancelled, reinstated.” 

Albuquerque Journal.

146 Alexander, A. (2006, 27 March). “A new day for Dawn.” The Planetary Society.

147 Carreau, M. (2006, 28 March). “NASA back on track with asteroids.” Houston Chronicle.

148 Kridler, C. (2006, 28 March). “NASA: Mission to Asteroid Back On.” Florida Today.

149 Malik, T. (2006, 27 March). “NASA reinstates cancelled asteroid mission.” Space.com.

150 Clark, S. (2006, 27 March). “NASA restarts once-dead asteroid mission.” Spaceflight Now. 

151 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with C. Russell. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

152 Russell, C. T. (2006, April). “Dawn Mission Status.” Dawn’s Early Light, 5(1). 1.

153 Raymond, C. (2006, April). “Dawn Status Report.” Dawn’s Early Light, 5(1). 1.
NASA′s Discovery Program

238

Despite these project management changes, which had proved so detrimental in 

the case of MESSENGER, the mission team continued its work, successfully passing 

the Environmental Test Readiness Review on 6–7 September 2006 and proceeding to 

acoustics, dynamics, and thermo-vac testing—the last at the Naval Research Lab, where 

the ion thrusters would be tested.154 Work continued to progress in advance of the 

Post-Environmental Test Review (19 March 2007) and Pre-Ship Review (20–21 March), 

the last official hurdles before the spacecraft could be shipped to Cape Canaveral.155

Leading from Fear

During the standdown in late 2005, John McNamee, the Deputy Director for Solar 

System Exploration at JPL, served as interim project manager. Keyur Patel and Mike 

Sierchio, both veterans of Deep Impact, were part of the Integrated Action Team 

reviewing Dawn.156 Their assessment was harsh toward project leadership, and as a 

result of the reviews, JPL dismissed the project manager and the mission flight system 

manager. Russell reportedly stood up and argued against the dismissal of the flight 

system manager, as he had great confidence in her work, but it wasn’t enough. The 

culture demanded her replacement with someone perceived as tougher—more “inyour-face”—who would “insist” that Orbital deliver parts on time. The payload manager 

was also blamed for his calm management style as management and the Integrated 

Action Team argued for a sterner, more aggressive replacement.157

Lab leadership naming Keyur Patel as project manager guaranteed a more aggressive style. Even Tom Fraschetti, his predecessor, recognized in an interview years later 

that Patel’s style worked. “When it came time to turn the project over to Keyur and 

his team, Keyur and his deputy just kind of cut right through.... And in fact, Dawn’s a 

success because of it. That’s not my style. I couldn’t work in that environment, so it was 

actually best for me to move on and for him to take over.”158 Russell sounded similar 

notes, saying, “Keyur was really a tough manager. He wasn’t trying to be liked. He was 

154 Raymond, C. (2006, 2 October). “Environmental Testing of Dawn Spacecraft Begins.” Dawn’s 

Early Light, 5(2). 6.

155 Raymond, C. (2007, April). “Dawn ready to ship to launch site.” Dawn’s Early Light. 6(1). 

156 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with K. Patel. Located in “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

157 Niebur, S. (2009, 11 August). Personal interview with C. Raymond. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

158 Niebur, S. (2009, 12 August). Personal interview with T. Fraschetti. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
Chapter 6: Renewed Commitment: Dawn

239

trying to get the job done.”159 The management style difference was stark. Patel was 

known to push the team hard and make clear when he was unhappy with their progress.

Patel explained to Orbital that their working relationship would change after the 

restart. Orbital’s inexperience in launch-window-limited, long-lifetime deep space 

missions had been blamed in part for the ATLO delays, particularly in the delivery of 

the harness that partially prompted the standdown.

Patel learned from his experience on Deep Impact that having senior management 

present onsite at Ball every week helped speed deliveries. So, too, he believed, would it 

work for Dawn. From restart to the end of ATLO, either Patel, his deputy, the project 

system engineer, the chief engineer, or the mission assurance manager was at Orbital 

every week, in addition to visiting technical personnel.

“We always wanted to have boots on the ground,” said Patel. “We’re going to be 

there. If we’re there, we’re going to be in every meeting you have, and we’re going to 

work with you to get this thing delivered on time as scheduled.”160 Dawn leadership 

at Orbital initially resisted.

“Orbital thought that they were way overboard, and maybe they were,” said Kurt 

Lindstrom, the program executive, but the new approach identified issues with the 

spacecraft software and planned testing program. “Orbital’s thought of testing was more 

commercial. You know, they test one to qual[ify], and then the rest of them are off an 

assembly line. But this spacecraft was not an assembly line. It had been modified” to 

operate well in deep space and over a long lifetime. Orbital’s assumptions were not 

valid for this application, and the course correction was difficult. Orbital management 

brought in Dave Shiderly as ATLO manager; Patel would call him “one of the best guys 

I’ve ever worked with.”161 Patel also had warm words for the flight system engineer, 

Joe Makowski, and credited key Orbital personnel with working to understand the 

different requirements of a deep space mission and leading the team there to success.

Patel’s aggressive style had served him well as he led Deep Impact to the launch 

pad, and he employed many of the same techniques for Dawn. He became known as 

a “closer” at JPL, capable of delivering troubled projects to space. Lab management 

praised his results, but key members of the Dawn team were not universally happy 

with the experience. “We had an Orbital manager quit because of him,” said Russell. 

159 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with C. Russell. Located in “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

160 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with K. Patel. Located in “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

161 Niebur, S. (2009, 31 July). Personal interview with K. Lindstrom. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.
NASA′s Discovery Program

240

“I don’t know if Orbital will ever work with JPL again.” 162 Some employees wondered 

whether JPL chose hostile project management to seem tough on subcontractors or 

overruns, or whether JPL considered it the only way to manage a troubled project.163

Kurt Lindstrom, Dawn’s program executive, favored a strong project manager—

one that was “willing to push back on both their customer and their people,”164 rather 

than being accommodating to everyone and taking action on each recommendation.

During the standdown, Tom Gavin, deputy director of the Space and Earth Science 

Programs Directorate at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, offered Patel the position of 

project manager, and Patel led the re-plan. “I did not inherit somebody else’s plan,” 

said Patel. “The plan that was put forth is a plan that I had fully vested interest and 

commitment to.” The largest constraint on the plan was schedule, as the project aimed 

for a June launch. A launch later than the fall would require unacceptable levels of 

change, as the ion propulsion system would have been insufficient to get the spacecraft 

to Vesta. When the project restarted, work moved into high gear. Just a year from 

launch, there was a lot of “open paper” on the project: waivers, requirements, and 

problem failure reports.165

The team completed the replan and included a punch list, a technique for finishing 

the work and moving personnel off the project. As they had on Deep Impact, Patel 

and Rick Grammier, director of Solar System Exploration at JPL, surveyed the status 

of all subsystems. As each subsystem neared completion, Patel checked again, just as 

a general contractor would on a home improvement project. The punch list created a 

common understanding of expectations, and as the items on the list were completed, 

people moved on to other work. The technique worked well and was repeated on 

other projects at JPL.166

The standdown review, and the others that followed, put additional pressure on 

the project. From the start, at the Preliminary Mission and Systems Review, the project was sensitive to being compared to previous projects. As members of the review 

board asked pointed questions about plans for development—digging in to understand 

where Dawn stood in relation to mistakes made on previous projects—the reviewers 

162 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with C. Russell. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

163 Niebur, S. (2009, 11 August). Personal interview with C. Raymond. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

164 Niebur, S. (2009, 31 July). Personal interview with K. Lindstrom. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

165 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with K. Patel. Located in “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

166 Ibid.
Chapter 6: Renewed Commitment: Dawn

241

would often slip, calling Dawn “Deep Impact.” There was laughter in the room the 

first few times. After that, slips provoked more intense emotions for members of the 

project—particularly those who had indeed studied issues and lessons learned on 

previous projects. Dawn had more reviews than they expected at proposal, as did all 

the missions at that time, and project leadership lamented this fact at workshops.167

Technical Issues

As the only U.S. instrument, issues with GRaND were of correspondingly high priority. 

Development went smoothly, with only “one near-catastrophic problem,” according 

to Tom Prettyman, a co-investigator. The instrument was put carefully into a vacuum 

chamber for a thermal test. After the first two cycles of extreme temperatures, several of the sensors did not work. Disassembly showed that the photomultiplier tube 

mechanical design itself was flawed, resulting in cracked tubes after thermal expansion and contraction. Prettyman convened a peer-review group to address the issue. 

When the Dawn team at large was told of the problem, Holger Sierks, the framing 

camera Principal Investigator, immediately offered to send the GRaND team additional 

photomultiplier tubes—the same ones used by his German high-energy physics colleagues. Mechanical engineer Steve Storms did an analysis to identify the root cause 

and redesigned the support brackets, getting quick feedback on the design from the 

committee. Prettyman gave credit to preflight testing, ample schedule, and budget built 

into the project for the project’s ability to recover quickly from the failure.

“It was a very quick turnaround,” he said. “You have to have the engineers right 

there working with you to do that. It was just amazing how they were able to come up 

with a new design and then implement it.” Sierk’s offer of help was also memorable. 

“We ended up not using the tubes, but it’s just a very gracious thing.” As for management, Chris Russell encouraged the team to keep working toward launch. Payload 

management Ed Miller and Betina Pavri, both of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, were 

worried as ever, but Prettyman added, “They trusted us, but they were there to help 

us if we needed it.... We had the A team for the project interface. It just worked out 

very well.”168

Meanwhile, the team ran into problems when it was time for thermal vacuum testing. Orbital fully supported the mission and would have supported a delay in using 

their facility, but the thermal chamber at Orbital was simply too small. The team had 

planned to use the thermal vacuum chamber at Goddard Space Flight Center, but 

the delay meant that the chamber was occupied with Space Shuttle materials, which 

167 Russell, C., et al. (2007, 19 September). “Dawn Discovery Mission to Vesta and Ceres.” Slides 

presented at Discovery@15 Conference. Susan Niebur’s personal collection.

168 Niebur, S. (2010, 1 March). Personal interview with T. Prettyman. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
NASA′s Discovery Program

242

could not be bumped. No other East Coast thermal vac chamber was large enough, 

available, and with sufficient specifications for use at that time. The team found one 

that might work at the nearby Naval Research Laboratory. However, the Dawn project 

had to modify the chamber to add additional pumping capacity and cold fingers to 

extract the xenon from the beam, augmenting the chamber out of their own funds. 

The spacecraft passed its full baseline test at Orbital and was thus shipped to the Naval 

Research Laboratory.

Then, the unthinkable happened. As Patel recalled: 

We had a test readiness review before we closed the key vac door. And at that point, every 

subsystem swears up and down that they’ve reviewed all the data, and everything is go, 

or these are the issues, and this is why it’s okay to proceed.... [We] closed the door, and 

the next day we discovered that one of the [power processing units] has a failure.... There 

was a set of senior people at Orbital who wanted to break chamber that day. And I said, 

“No, we’re not going to break chamber that day. We’re going to plow through.” The way I 

brought everybody around to that realization was the following: Thermal vac test is not a 

performance test. It is a test you do to validate the thermal model. So, if you have failure 

in one box, you can go to the other box, do the test, but you have to be, now, really diligent 

should another failure happen, how you control the stuff in there.... And in a way, I’m glad 

we discovered this inside the chamber, because, if we had discovered this outside the chamber, the June launch would have been jeopardized. In fact, it would not have happened.169

The project was now, once again, in a bad situation. Politically and financially, they 

really needed to make the June launch. They did not have enough reserves to make 

it to September, and either way, after September the planned trajectory would need 

modifications. The team worked the issues in parallel and ran the tests.

Dave Shiderly, the Assembly, Test, and Launch Operations manager, began to rework 

the ATLO schedule to make it happen. Once the thermal vac test was complete, the 

team broke chamber, dropped several panels, pulled the power processing unit box 

off, and sent it to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a special suitcase. After the fix, the 

team shipped it back, reinserted it into the spacecraft, and prepared to do the penalty 

tests before it was time to deliver it to the Cape. JPL and Orbital disagreed on the extent 

of penalty test required. Patel pushed for skipping any penalty tests, since the whole 

spacecraft had already completed the whole series of environmental tests, but Orbital 

leadership wanted to rerun the full suite. The team discussed options, and then Patel 

proposed a compromise: rerun just the acoustic test to validate the reassembly of the 

169 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 August). Personal interview with K. Patel. Located in “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.
Chapter 6: Renewed Commitment: Dawn

243

large panels on the spacecraft. They did so, at the Naval Research Lab, and it passed. 

Dawn went directly from there to the Cape. 

Orbital’s expertise in launching Earth-orbiting spacecraft had prepared them to 

work to a launch date. Working to an immovable launch date, such as those defined by 

planetary windows, presented greater difficulty. For his work leading up to an on-time 

delivery of the spacecraft to the launch pad, Patel called Shiderly “one of the heroes” 

of the Dawn mission.170

Even at the Cape, JPL management kept “boots on the ground” so that they were 

both aware of schedule and available for any concerns from the launch team. Several 

were in residence at KSC, and Patel flew in every week until launch.

As with many missions, the actual launch date slipped several times, from 20 June 

to 30 June because of launch vehicle readiness; from 30 June to 7 July after a crane pulley seized as they were loading the solids on the booster rocket as it sat on the launch 

pad; and after multiple difficulties with telemetry relay support.171 NASA’s requirement 

for telemetry during the ascent would not be waived as had been permitted on the 

lost CONTOUR spacecraft. The launch trajectory required support in the middle of 

the Atlantic, where there are no islands. The team booked a boat and an airplane. The 

U.S. Navy boat left its port on time, but as it traveled down the coast, it had engine 

trouble and missed its berth in the Panama Canal. A quick engine fix in Puerto Rico 

and the boat looked okay, but large waves slowed its arrival in the Atlantic.172 As for 

the airplane, the original plans for a P-3 Orion surveillance aircraft were scrapped as 

it wasn’t available during the new launch dates, and a second telemetry aircraft, Big 

Crow, lost pressurization in its cabin just before it was needed; it was grounded for 

repairs in Puerto Rico, unusable during the planned launch windows.173 Finally, summer thunderstorms delayed the launch a few days in early July, leading Marc Rayman, 

the payload manager, to quip, “Weather isn’t quite as predictable as many things in 

rocket science are.”174

On 9 July, Jim Green, Planetary Science Division Director in the Science Mission 

Directorate, announced an additional delay to 15 July, as high seas were keeping the 

tracking ship, OTTER (Ocean-going Transportable Test and Evaluation Resource), 

170 Ibid.

171 Raymond, C. (2007, April). “Dawn ready to ship to launch site.” Dawn’s Early Light, 6(1); 

Berger, B. (2007, 9 June). “NASA Confident of July Launch for Dawn Despite Issues.” SpaceNews.

172 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with C. Russell. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

173 May, T. (2008). “Cooperation Not Control.” ASK Magazine. 12–15.

174 Kleeman, E. (2007, 3 July). “Decision on Dawn spacecraft launch is postponed.” Los 

Angeles Daily News.
NASA′s Discovery Program

244

from moving into position off the coast of Africa.175 Dawn’s launch window would 

last only until 19 July. With only a few days left, the team faced a dilemma: fuel the 

second stage and commit to launching (once the second stage is fueled, it cannot be 

unfueled), or scrap the plans for a July launch and try again in September. For seven 

days, the thunderstorms continued, with small windows of opportunity presenting 

themselves in the Florida late afternoons. 

Dawn had another problem: competition. The Mars Phoenix launch window, soon 

to open, would be the only Mars opportunity for two years. The Discovery Program 

was up against the Mars Program, and, as Todd May, who ran the Discovery and New 

Frontiers Program out of Marshall, recounted, “the odds were increasingly against successfully launching both Dawn and Phoenix within their windows. Discussions were 

elevated to the highest levels in the agency, and our governance model was once again 

tested when there was disagreement” about whether the requirements for telemetry, 

which were so vital for understanding failures, could be waived.176

All this put Alan Stern, the Associate Administrator of the Science Mission 

Directorate, in a difficult position. If NASA fueled the rocket and pushed for Dawn’s 

launch, a delay would mean missing the Mars Phoenix window, effectively canceling 

the 2007 launch opportunity in a program that had launched a Mars mission every 

two years since Pathfinder. 

On the other hand, the cost of missing the Dawn launch window was estimated at 

$25 million. 177To complicate matters, Space Shuttle Endeavour was preparing for a 

launch to the International Space Station as well, further limiting launch opportunities 

after the end of the original window. 

On 10 July, he decided to delay the Dawn launch to the next opportunity, which 

opened 7 September. Engineers destacked the spacecraft, and the rocket was removed 

from the launch pad. The team now had to determine a new trajectory necessitated 

by a later launch.178

Ultimately, the delay worked in the mission’s favor, however. “September presented 

a much better opportunity,” said Russell, as Mars was in the proper position to offer 

a greater gravity assist.179

175 ASI. (N.d.). “Dawn: Minor Bodies of the Solar System.” Downloaded from http://www.asi.it/

en/activity/solar_system/dawn; Berger, B. (2007, 23 July). “Despite delay, Dawn still on track to 

rendezvous with asteroids.” SpaceNews.

176 May, T. (2008). “Cooperation Not Control.” ASK Magazine. 12–15.

177 Berger, B. (2007, 23 July). “Despite delay, Dawn still on track to rendezvous with asteroids.” 

SpaceNews. See also Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with C. Russell. Located 

in “Dawn” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

178 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with C. Russell. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

179 Ibid.
Chapter 6: Renewed Commitment: Dawn

245

It looked like Dawn would at last leave Earth on 26 September. But, no, the launch 

was then scrubbed due to lightning within five miles of Dawn’s pad, 17B. The next 

day, the planned 7:20 a.m. launch was delayed because a ship was downrange in the 

area where the rocket solid motors would fall. Then, the International Space Station 

passed overhead, delaying things further.180 Once the ISS passed out of range, however, halfway through the 29-minute launch window, the countdown could conclude. 

“We had a perfect day for a launch,” said Russell. “I was in the control center. I didn’t 

even run outside. I have seen lots of launches.”181 Dawn launched at 7:34 a.m. EDT 

on 27 September 2007.

On 17 December 2007, after a successful checkout of all three ion engines, Dawn 

began the interplanetary cruise phase of its three-billion-mile journey to Vesta and 

Ceres.182 The thrusters burned just 0.26 kilogram of xenon each day. To get to Vesta on 

time, the spacecraft passed just 549 kilometers from Mars on 18 February 2009. The 

Red Planet accelerated Dawn’s speed by more than 9,330 kilometers per hour—a power 

boost equivalent to expending 104 kilograms of xenon fuel. “Without the gravity assist, 

our mission would not have been affordable, even with the extraordinary capability of 

the ion propulsion system,” said Rayman.183 The Mars flyby also provided an opportunity to calibrate the instruments in deep space, well before the spacecraft reached 

Vesta in 2011. The team coordinated with Mars Express, just as MESSENGER had 

coordinated with Venus Express, to provide additional science return during flight.184

After launch, and twice a year during cruise, the team checked out the instruments. 

The U.S.-built GRaND instrument performed very well.185 During the cruise phase, 

Russell supported the addition of a Participating Scientist Program in 2010, saying, 

“During such a long mission, people age.... I have counted on that program all along 

to bring in new blood to the system.”186

There was just one outstanding issue after the successful launch and instrument 

checkout: the effect of the development delays on the intended science. Since the aster180 Sorenson, D. (2007, 28 September). “Dawn leaves Earth on mission to asteroids.” 

Arizona Daily Star.

181 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with C. Russell. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

182 Peterson, P. (2008, 2 January). “Dawn slowly picks up the pace.” Florida Today.

183 Malik, T. (2009, 18 February). “Asteroid-bound probe zooms past Mars.” Space.com.

184 DLR. (200913 February). “Asteroid spacecraft Dawn: A change in course near our neighbor, Mars.” Press release. http://www.dlr.de/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-1/86_read-15853//

usetemplate-print/, accessed 15 May 2009.

185 Niebur, S. (2010, 1 March). Personal interview with T. Prettyman. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

186 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with C. Russell. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
NASA′s Discovery Program

246

oids had continued in motion while the spacecraft had remained delayed on Earth, 

when the spacecraft arrived, a different surface would be illuminated by the Sun. This 

was not necessarily bad news. Vesta’s new lit area would include the South Pole, an 

area of intense interest to planetary scientists.187 “The higher the Sun goes, the more 

spectra we can get, the more topographic information we can get,” said Russell.188

Dawn entered the asteroid belt on 13 November 2009. After traveling 2.8 billion 

kilometers from Earth, the spacecraft arrived at Vesta, with orbital insertion on 16 July 

2011. The plan at the time called for Dawn to enter orbit around Ceres on 6 March 

2015. At each body, the spacecraft would spend time at three distinct distances from 

the planetoid. According to the plan, during the first orbit of Vesta, 2,700 kilometers 

planetocentric, data would be taken so that the team could generate a preliminary shape 

model. During the second set of orbits, much closer at 950 kilometers, the instruments 

would perform high-spatial-resolution imaging topography and spectrometry. In the 

closest orbit, 460 kilometers planetocentric, about 200 kilometers from the surface, 

GRaND would take its measurements of surface neutrons and any associated signs 

of water. The team planned for those sets of measurements to be repeated at Ceres, at 

6,400 kilometers, 1,800 kilometers, and 1,180 kilometers planetocentric. The GRaND 

measurements would be taken in the lowest orbit, about 700 kilometers above the 

surface.189 After years of work, if all went well, the Dawn mission would reveal just 

how different the asteroids are and what that says about the earliest building blocks of 

our solar system. Meanwhile, the Discovery Program moved forward.

187 Russell, C. (2007, 19 September). Presentation at the Discovery@15 workshop in 

Huntsville, Alabama.

188 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with C. Russell. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

189 Russell, C. T., Capaccioni, F., Coradini, A., Christensen, U., De Sanctis, M. C., Feldman, W. C., 

Jaumann, R., Keller, H. U., Konopliv, A., McCord, T. B., McFadden, L. A., McSween, H.  Y., 

Mottola, S., Neukum, G., Pieters, C. M., Prettyman, T. H., Raymond, C. A., Smith, D. E., Sykes, 

M. V., Williams, B., & Zuber, M. T. (2006). “Dawn Discovery mission to Vesta and Ceres: Present 

status.” Advances in Space Research, 38(9), 2043–2048. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asr.2004.12.041.
Chapter 6: Renewed Commitment: Dawn

247

Figure 6-1: Dawn spacecraft

The Dawn spacecraft solar array wings are folded up in preparation for payload fairing installation. (Image 

credit: NASA/JPL, image no. PIA12018)
NASA′s Discovery Program

248

Figure 6-2: Dawn image of Vesta

Dawn obtained this image of the giant asteroid Vesta with its framing camera on 24 July 2011. Dawn 

entered orbit around Vesta on 15 July and spent a year orbiting the body. (Image credit: NASA/JPLCaltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA, image no. PIA14317)
249

William Borucki worked for 14 years to fly a photometer—a detector that returns a light 

curve as a function of time—in order to search for extrasolar planets. He persevered 

and ultimately submitted proposals for five Discovery opportunities, and he gave supporting talks regularly to the American Astronomical Society and other international 

meetings to gain support from the astrophysical and planetary science communities.1

His interest in other planets that might harbor life extended back to his teenage years 

in the 1950s. He was a small-town kid in Wisconsin; read science fiction; launched 

homemade rockets; and, as president of his high school science club, worked with 

friends to build a magnetometer coupled with ultraviolet and infrared transmitters.2

1 Lawler, A. (2003, 1 May). “Bill Borucki’s Planet Search.” Air and Space Magazine.

2 Ward, L. (2009, 1 December). “10 most brilliant innovators of 2009: Kepler Space Telescope.” 

Popular Mechanics. See also Perlman, D. (2009, 13 July). “Scientist scans galaxy seeking other 

earths.” San Francisco Chronicle.

CHAPTER 7

Renewed Commitment:

Kepler
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After obtaining his B.S. and M.S. degrees in physics at the University of Wisconsin, 

Madison, Borucki went to Ames Research Center in 1962 to work on the heat shield 

for the Apollo capsule.3

While Borucki was still in high school, Otto Struve published a paper positing the 

possibility of detecting extrasolar planets by observing very small oscillations in radial 

velocity with the most powerful ground-based Coude spectrographs in existence.4 Two 

decades later, Frank Rosenblatt suggested that high-precision wide-field photometers 

be employed at three geographically separated sites to search for unusual transients. 

This transient detection method, Rosenblatt asserted, could yield a planet’s size and 

orbital period.5 Borucki became intensely interested in the problem of detection in 

the summer of 1982, after dropping by an Ames conference on extrasolar planets.6

Borucki and Audrey Summers of Ames did calculations to correct Rosenblatt’s earlier 

detection probability, suggesting in the journal Icarus an idea eerily like the mission 

that would become Kepler:

Although the precision required to detect major planets is already available with state-ofthe-art photometers, the detection of terrestrial-size planets would require a precision substantially greater than the state-of-the-art and a spaceborne platform to avoid the effects 

of variations in sky transparency and scintillation.... Because the probability is so small 

of observing a planetary transit during a single observation of a randomly chosen star, the 

search program must be designed to continuously monitor hundreds or thousands of stars.7

Despite this early start, significant work remained. At Borucki’s urging, Ames 

Research Center sponsored technology workshops on high-precision photometry. The 

20 astronomers at the 1984 workshops agreed that it would be theoretically possible to 

build suitable detectors, and colleagues at the National Bureau of Standards suggested 

the use of very precise—in fact, quantum-perfect—silicone diodes.8 The Ames Research 

Center Director continued to fund Borucki’s silicon diode detector development for 

several years, despite senior managers’ skepticism. Later, NASA Headquarters funded 

the development and testing of proof-of-concept multichannel photometers.

3 Swift, M. (2009. 2 March). “Mountain View scientists giddy over NASA’s Search for Faraway 

Planets.” San Jose Mercury News.

4 Struve, O. (1952). “Proposal for a project of high-precision stellar radial velocity work.” The 

Observatory, vol. 72. 199–200. 

5 Rosenblatt, F. (1971). “A Two-Color Photometric Method for Detection of Extra Solar Planetary 

Systems.” Icarus, vol. 14. 71–93.

6 Lawler, A. (2003, 1 May). “Bill Borucki’s Planet Search.” Air and Space Magazine.

7 Borucki, W. J., and A. L. Summers. (1984, April). “The photometric method of detecting other 

planetary systems.” Icarus, vol. 58. 121–134. 

8 Lawler, A. (2003, 1 May). “Bill Borucki’s Planet Search.” Air and Space Magazine.
Chapter 7: Renewed Commitment: Kepler

251

By the time NASA selected the Kepler proposal, a decade and a half later, engineers had been able to design a photometer with a very wide field of view, 105 square 

degrees. It would be the sole instrument in a 0.95-meter-aperture Schmidt telescope, 

enabling astronomers to observe 100,000 target stars continuously. These changes led 

Borucki to expect to observe perhaps 400 Earth-size planets per year. In fact, by the 

time Kepler launched nearly 20 years after the original papers on the subject, the term 

“extrasolar planet” had entered the vernacular, and new discoveries were announced 

routinely on the evening news.

Around the time of the first Discovery Program Workshop in San Juan Capistrano, 

Borucki began gathering colleagues together to discuss the concept of using a photometric approach for planet-finding. David Koch, who would one day be Kepler’s 

deputy Principal Investigator, remembered: “In 1992, Bill Borucki came to my office 

and asked if I’d help him with a concept of doing a transit search for planets. I said, 

‘Sure, Bill. I like building things.’”9

Koch soon encouraged Borucki to submit a proposal to Discovery, and he offered 

to collaborate. As Borucki recalled, “I thought, well, if I’ve got at least one person who’s 

willing to work with me, I will give it a try.”10

Borucki had photometer experience, but Koch had built telescopes too, including a 

gas-Cherenkov telescope to image gamma rays as a graduate student in the late 1960s. 

This early balloon experiment, under PI Ken Greisen, with 4.5 m2 collecting area, was 

the first to detect pulse gamma rays from the Crab nebula, 100 MeV-1 GeV.11 Koch 

went on to become the project scientist at American Science and Engineering on 

Uhuru, the first x-ray astronomy satellite, and HEAO-B (the Einstein Observatory), 

the first fully imaging, space-based x-ray telescope. Koch later served as project scientist at the Smithsonian on the Spacelab 2 infrared telescope (at the time, Ed Weiler 

was the program scientist at NASA Headquarters for Spacelab 2’s flight on STS-51F 

in August 1985) and mission operations manager for what would be the Spitzer Space 

Telescope at Ames. He also put together a teacher education program on the Kuiper 

Airborne Observatory, hiring Edna DeVore as possibly the first project teacher for 

NASA. Moreover, Koch convinced NASA Headquarters to allow NASA centers to 

issue education grants for the first time. He was, in other words, both technically and 

politically savvy. 12

9 “NASA’s Kepler Telescope Set to Launch in Search of Other Earths.” (2009, 26 February). Satnews 

Daily. Downloaded from http://www.satnews.com/cgi-bin/story.cgi?number=549171030.

10 Niebur, S. (2009, 16 December). Personal interview with W. Borucki. Located in “Kepler” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

11 Niebur, S. (2010, 6 January). Personal interview with D. Koch. Located in “Kepler” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

12 Ibid.
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252

Koch had a good relationship with Harold Reitsema at Ball Aerospace, with whom 

he had worked to build the Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite. Ball and American 

Science and Engineering, which was no longer in the business by this point, were known 

as good, solid, smaller companies that built “damn good instruments” for university 

PIs. The mission Koch and Borucki were proposing would be a way for Ball to establish itself as a capable contractor for an entire mission as well. The company would 

essentially be a “sole contractor” if the mission were selected, responsible end-to-end 

for building the spacecraft and instruments, and ultimately delivering the data that 

the scientists craved. This would put Ball in the same league as Martin Marietta as a 

NASA deep space mission provider. (The contracting paperwork would reflect this; 

a portion of the fee would be based on on-orbit performance.) This work was seen as 

an opportunity, and Ball was enthusiastic.13

Borucki invited other prominent scientists at Ames and at the SETI Institute to join 

the proposal team, including Kent Cullers, the first astronomer blind from birth, who 

would later be immortalized in the movie Contact. Carl Sagan was a member of the 

team for the first and all subsequent proposals until his death in late 1996. Experts in 

high-precision photometry and astrometry (stellar distances) were added. Astronomers 

with expertise in high-precision measurements, stellar variability, theoretical modeling, 

and other missions joined the team. Other co-investigators were added or promoted 

from the science working group one by one, to fill out the wide range of required 

expertise necessary for such a mission.

BASICALLY, IT WAS A MATTER OF PERSISTENCE

The first proposal for a mission of this sort, in 1992, was called FRESIP—the FRequency 

of Earth-Sized Inner Planets—and would fly an instrument with 42 charge-coupled 

device (CCD) detectors to convert the observed light into signals. Each star would be 

monitored simultaneously as a function of time. “This is a really simple experiment,” 

described Gibor Basri, co-investigator and professor of astronomy at the University 

of California, Berkeley. “You’re watching an eclipse, measuring the brightness of the 

star to two parts in 100,000 and noting every time it takes a dip.”14

Borucki, who would later be the Principal Investigator of Kepler, recalled that the 

idea was warmly received but that the scientific and engineering communities believed 

that no suitable detectors existed. “Nobody had ever built detectors like that.”15 Despite 

the scientific merit, the review team was unconvinced that the described techniques 

13 Ibid.

14 Watson, J. G. (2001, 23 January). “Other Earths: Are they out there.” Space.com.

15 Niebur, S. (2009, 16 December). Personal interview with W. Borucki. Located in “Kepler” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
Chapter 7: Renewed Commitment: Kepler

253

would work.16 “The review panel,” said Borucki, “found that the science value was very 

high and would have supported it had there been proof that detectors existed with 

sufficient precision and the requisite low noise to find Earth-size planets.”17

The idea would eventually capture the attention of additional members of the science community, however, and in 1994, Borucki held a workshop called Astrophysical 

Science with a Space Borne Photometric Telescope at the SETI Institute in Mountain 

View, CA. The goal was to determine the most promising astrophysical investigations 

for a telescope that measured the individual brightness of 5,000 stars for four years.18

Later that year, the FRESIP proposal was fleshed out and submitted to the first 

Discovery Announcement of Opportunity.19 Ames Research Center and Ball Aerospace 

led the proposal, with Borucki, Koch, and astronomers Ted Dunham and William 

“Bill” Cochran composing the core of the science team.20 The 1994 proposal would use 

a 0.95-meter-aperture Schmidt telescope to continuously and simultaneously monitor 5,000 solar-like stars in a 12-degree field of view, using a halo orbit around the 

Lagrange L2 Point, where it would have a clear view without the risk of an eclipse by 

the Sun, Earth, or the Moon.21 The FRESIP photometer would use charge-coupled 

devices (CCDs) instead of the originally considered silicon detectors.(CCDs may have 

sounded exotic then, but they would become a household technology, used in many 

digital cameras, camcorders, and smartphones.) Borucki had heard the skepticism of 

his own managers on the unknown performance of silicon diode detectors in space, 

and, at the behest of Ball, he agreed to change to CCDs. “I hate CCDs,” he said in a 

2003 interview, but he agreed to use them to reassure the community of reviewers, 

more accustomed to CCDs than silicon diodes.22 (Eventually he used this familiarity 

to explain the concept to the general public, saying, “Kepler is your camcorder with 

a really big lens.”)23

16 Niebur, S. (2010, 6 January). Personal interview with D. Koch. Located in “Kepler” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

17 Borucki, W. J. (2010, 22 May). “Brief History of the Kepler Mission.” NASA History. Downloaded 

10 May 2023 from https://www.nasa.gov/kepler/overview/historybyborucki. See also Borucki, 

W., et al. (2008). “Kepler: Search for Earth-size planets in the habitable zone.” Proceedings IAU 

Symposium No. IAUS253.

18 Borucki, W. (2010, 22 May). “Brief History of the Kepler Mission.” Downloaded 5 June 2010 

from http://kepler.nasa.gov/Mission/history/.

19 Borucki, W., et al. (1994, June). “FRESIP: A Discovery Mission Concept to Find Earth-Sized 

Planets Around Solar Like Stars.” American Astronomical Society, DPS Meeting 26, 08.01. 

See also Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society. (1994, June). Vol. 26. 1091.

20 Niebur, S. (2010, 6 January). Personal interview with D. Koch. Located in “Kepler” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

21 Borucki, W. J., et al. (1996). “FRESIP: A mission to determine the character and frequency of 

extra-solar planets around solar-like stars.” Astrophys. & Space Science, 241. 111–134.

22 Lawler, A. (2003, 1 May). “Bill Borucki’s Planet Search.” Air and Space Magazine.

23 Watson, J. (2001, 23 January). “Other Earths: Are they out there.” Space.com.
NASA′s Discovery Program

254

As part of the review of science, technical, management, and cost for the mission, 

a NASA review panel compared the photometer to space telescopes such as Hubble, 

determining that the cost would be similar (i.e., far beyond the budget limit). The 

proposal was thus rejected. The Hubble Space Telescope was built as one of the Great 

Observatories, a strategic mission with several sophisticated instruments. Kepler would 

be a single photometer—not a true telescope in the traditional sense of the word—

although that would prove to be a difficult message to communicate. In addition, the 

project’s mass had less margin than expected by the review panels, as so much propellant was necessary to take the telescope 1.5 million kilometers beyond Earth to the 

Lagrange L2 Point. The team believed that mass margin needs should not be applied 

to propellant, but the review panel did not agree. They deemed the cost high and the 

mass margin low. NASA thus did not select the proposal for study.24

The FRESIP team was not discouraged. They used small grants from NASA 

Headquarters and Ames Research Center to perform laboratory tests of the CCD 

detectors and demonstrated that they had sufficient precision and signal-to-noise ratios 

to detect the patterns of Earth-size transits.25 The mathematical identification and 

removal of systematic noise was the breakthrough step that helped NASA recognize 

the intrinsic precision of the detectors.26

In 1996, a 1-meter-aperture, 12-degree-field-of-view photometer was proposed 

again, this time under the name Kepler, in honor of Johannes Kepler, who discovered 

the laws of planetary motion so essential in the theory and practice of planet-finding.27

The photometer would be placed in a heliocentric, Earth-trailing orbit instead of a 

Lagrange point orbit, eliminating an upper-stage rocket and the station-keeping necessary to hold the spacecraft in orbit around the Lagrange point, which would reduce 

both mass and mission costs, while increasing margin. After that, mass margin was no 

longer an issue, as the telescope fit nicely on a launch vehicle.28 The team predicted the 

detection of 480 Earth-class planets (including 60 cases of two or more planets in the 

same system), 160 detections of inner-orbit giant planets, 24 detections of outer-orbit 

24 Niebur, S. (2010, 6 January). Personal interview with D. Koch. Located in “Kepler” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

25 Robinson, L., et al. (1995). “Test of CCD limits for differential photometry.” PASP, 107. 1094–1098.

26 Borucki, W. (2010, 22 May). “Brief History of the Kepler Mission.” Downloaded 5 June 2010 

from http://kepler.nasa.gov/Mission/history/.

27 Borucki, W., et al. (1997, January). “The Kepler Mission: A Mission To Determine the Frequency 

of Inner Planets Near the Habitable Zone for a Wide Range of Stars.” Planets Beyond the Solar 

System and the Next Generation of Space Missions. Proceedings of a workshop held at Space 

Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD, 16–18 October 1996. ASP Conference Series, vol. 

119. 153–173.

28 Niebur, S. (2010, 6 January). Personal interview with D. Koch. Located in “Kepler” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
Chapter 7: Renewed Commitment: Kepler

255

giant planets, and 1,400 detections of planets with periods of less than one week.29 To 

deliver this data to Earth, the team switched to the Ka-band with a high-gain antenna, 

allowing the observation of not just 5,000 stars, but 80,000. The new proposal manager 

was Larry Webster.

The new 1996 proposal used three different methods to show that mission costs 

were inside the Discovery cost envelope. This time, however, a review panel responded 

with specific weaknesses on the proposed CCD array, an ambitious undertaking that 

had not been proven in the laboratory.

Borucki and his team persisted, addressing the identified weaknesses, and making 

continuous improvements to the system. They tested CCDs and performed proof-ofconcept studies. They built small prototype photometers with the financial support 

of both NASA Ames and NASA Headquarters.30 They continued to meet, to write 

papers, and to present their concept at regular astronomy and planetary science meetings. The concept was so out-of-the-box, however, that Borucki vividly remembered 

being confronted at meetings after his presentations, with colleagues insisting that 

the methodology was folly.

“Everybody said my idea would never work,” said Borucki, “You’d never have detectors with enough sensitivity and precision.”31 The team continued to work, resolving 

technical issues, and to promote the concept at every opportunity. “The strategy was 

to convince the community,” said David Koch, Kepler’s deputy Principal Investigator.32

As the years went by, the team composition evolved as some astrophysicists returned 

to work on other projects and others joined the team to help address some particular 

weakness, or because they added science or technical capability.

Team membership was not a direct ticket to fame and fortune, however. In the early 

years, team members paid their own way to meetings and to do supporting research. 

There was no project fund to support people. In Borucki’s words, “We would write 

a proposal at every opportunity, and it would get rejected every time.”33 The steady 

stream of rejections was discouraging, but they pushed on, addressing weaknesses 

29 Borucki, W., et al. (1997, January). “The Kepler Mission: A Mission To Determine the Frequency 

of Inner Planets Near the Habitable Zone for a Wide Range of Stars. Planets Beyond the Solar 

System and the Next Generation of Space Missions. Proceedings of a workshop held at Space 

Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD, 16–18 October 1996. ASP Conference Series, vol. 

119. 153–173.

30 Niebur, S. (2009, 16 December). Personal interview with B. Borucki. Located in “Kepler” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

31 Perlman, D. (2009, 13 July). “Scientist scans galaxy seeking other Earths.” San Francisco Chronicle.

32 Niebur, S. (2010, 6 January). Personal interview with D. Koch. Located in “Kepler” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

33 Niebur, S. (2009, 16 December). Personal interview with W. Borucki. Located in “Kepler” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
NASA′s Discovery Program

256

and publicizing their efforts. As time went on, after three mission concept proposals, 

colleagues and astrophysicists Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, followed by Geoff 

Marcy and Paul Butler, announced the discovery of the first extrasolar planets.34

That discovery fueled interest in Borucki’s quest to discover Earth-size extrasolar 

planets, but as his methodology was still unproven, the burden of proof was on Borucki 

and the other scientists. The team installed a test photometer, nicknamed Vulcan, at 

Lick Observatory’s Crocker Dome, and a receiving station at NASA Ames. By the 

time of the 1998 Discovery Announcement of Opportunity release, the Kepler team 

was successfully receiving simultaneous observations of 6,000 stars in a single field of 

view.35 In the 1998 proposal, the Kepler team managed to successfully demonstrate the 

performance of their proposed CCDs, but the reviewers were still not yet convinced of 

adequate overall system performance—particularly regarding signal-to-noise on orbit.36

NASA Headquarters provided a half-million dollars (an amount matched by Ames 

Research Center) to Borucki and Koch to set up a numerical model and laboratory 

testbed to perform an end-to-end test of the approach and prove that the proposed 

CCD photometer could perform at the stated precision, reliably detect transits, and 

perform under various conditions required of the proposed spacecraft instrument. The 

testbed—including simulated star field; fast optics; a proven CCD detector; a computer 

to simulate onboard data processing; and a second computer to simulate ground data 

processing, construct light curves, and search for transits—was constructed in-house 

at NASA Ames in 88 days in 1998. Koch devised an elegant simulation of a 10-4 transit by placing a tiny wire in front of one of the 10-4-meter holes in the star plate and 

running a very small current through the wire, heating it so that it expanded by 10-8

meters (10 nanometers, measured with a very small weight on the wire), resulting in 

a 10-4 change in signal. Using 40 small wires and 40 small holes, Koch simulated the 

star density of the galactic plane, even distributing the brightness of the stars from 

the fourth to nineteenth magnitudes. Koch and Fred Witteborn simulated spacecraft 

jitter with piezoelectric transducers underneath the dewar.

The project team then measured the resulting signal—with noise—using the CCDs 

built with Koch’s previous instrument development grant, successfully demonstrating 

that the technique could be used to detect Earth-size planets, even in the presence of 

34 Mayor, M., and D. Queloz. (1995). “A Jupiter-mass companion to a solar-type star.” Nature, 

378. 355; Marcy, G. W., & Butler, R. P. (1996). “A planetary companion to 70 Virginis.” The 

Astrophysical Journal, 464(2). https://doi.org/10.1086/310096.

35 Borucki, W., et al. (1999, June). “Photometric observations of 6000 stars in the Cygnus field.” 

Proceedings of the NStars Workshop. See also: Borucki, W., et al. (2001). “The Vulcan Photometer: 

A dedicated photometer for extrasolar planet searches.” PASP . 113. 439–451.

36 Niebur, S. (2009, 16 December). Personal interview with W. Borucki. Located in “Kepler” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, 

DC. See also Borucki, W., et al. (2008). “Kepler: Search for Earth-size planets in the habitable 

zone.” Proceedings IAU Symposium No. IAUS253.
Chapter 7: Renewed Commitment: Kepler

257

the expected pointing jitter, sky noise, instrument noise, and other noise unavoidable in 

such an end-to-end system. This proof of concept was employed in the 2000 proposal, 

where the team once again made the case that this photometer could be successfully 

deployed to detect Earth-size planets orbiting other Sun-like stars.

With each proposal, the Kepler team put together a detailed case for selection, with 

an updated science plan based on what was learned in the rapidly changing field of 

extrasolar planet detection. They slowly developed an ever-strengthening case for their 

mission’s relevance, interest, and achievability. Meanwhile, Ball Aerospace provided 

intricate designs and supporting tests, as well as the personnel and finances necessary to support the proposals. When asked whether that indicated that they believed 

in the proposal, Borucki conceded, “Either that or they’re interesting gamblers.” He 

added, “It cost several hundred thousand dollars to put a proposal in like this. To do it 

time and time again takes a lot of guts.” Kepler would prove to be the most often proposed—and most often rejected—mission to fly in the first two decades of Discovery. 

But every time they were rejected, the team went back to work and returned with a 

more comprehensive proposal, and eventually, on the fifth try, NASA selected the 

Kepler photometer concept for flight.37

Selection

Selection came after a competitive Phase A study. Ball hosted the site review. At Koch’s 

direction, the team prepared displays of the existing Kepler technologies and set up 

demonstrations of the mirror and detectors. They also exhibited education and public outreach plans, as well as other key points. Team members stood by the exhibits 

during session breaks, and the reviewers were able not only to hear about the team’s 

achievements but see them as well. This maximized the usable time during the day 

of the site visit and encouraged reviewers to seek out technologies about which they 

were still uncertain, rather than holding their questions until a time that the Kepler 

team determined. It was a complete success (even though someone broke one of the 

lightweight honeycomb mirrors that day and sent it back to Ball in an envelope).

In late December 2001, Borucki got the phone call he had been waiting for since 

1992. The Kepler mission had been selected for implementation. “I was just overjoyed 

that we finally got to the point where we were going to build it instead of talk about 

it,” he said.38

37 Niebur, S. (2009, 16 December). Personal interview with W. Borucki. Located in “Kepler” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

38 Niebur, S. (2009, 16 December). Personal interview with W. Borucki. Located in “Kepler” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, 

DC; Erickson, J. (2001, 24 December). “Ball lands NASA space telescope project.” Rocky 

Mountain News. 4A.
NASA′s Discovery Program

258

NASA Headquarters selected both the Dawn and Kepler missions, knowing that 

the budget was not robust enough to support two missions in formulation, and, later, 

implementation, at the same time. Since Dawn was constrained by a 2006 planetary 

launch window and the alignment of Vesta and Ceres, the solution was to implement 

a delayed start for the Kepler mission. Although the Kepler team had proposed to 

launch in 2005 into an Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit, the delayed start and other 

changes meant that Kepler would not be scheduled for launch until 2007.39 Unlike 

other Discovery missions launched thus far, Kepler could be launched at just about 

any time of year, and in any year. This made it a great choice for such a double selection—but flexibility in start date and launch date did not make the mission immune 

to cost increases. Far from it, in fact, as a mission with no planetary launch window 

had no correspondingly urgent need to complete construction and testing, a factor 

that is often blamed for cost overruns.40

Much of this, however, was out of Kepler’s control. Between proposal and selection, 

a new Office of Space Science policy had been established that gave management of all 

planetary science missions to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Goddard Space Flight 

Center. Kepler had proposed management by Ames Research Center, in accordance 

with the policies in place for the 2000 Announcement of Opportunity, but the change 

in policies necessitated a change in management—and management structure—for 

this mission. As a condition of selection, Principal Investigator William Borucki and 

his team were thus forced to agree to the addition of a layer of management in which 

JPL or Goddard would oversee the work done by Ames. While Phase B work commenced in March 2002, Borucki’s team had to choose between the two NASA centers.41 They decided ultimately that JPL and Goddard should pitch the PI and his team 

at NASA Ames.

In the summer of 2002, Borucki selected JPL and project manager Chet Sasaki.42

Larry Webster, the Ames project manager, became the Deputy Project Manager. Sasaki 

would now oversee the JPL portion of the contract with Ball, managed onsite by Ball 

project manager Len Andreozzi.

39 Lawler, A. (2003, 1 May). “Bill Borucki’s Planet Search.” Air and Space Magazine.

40 Croft, J. (2008, 16 December). “NASA investigates effects of falsely certified titanium.” Flight 

International.

41 Borucki, W., et al. (2004, January). “The Kepler mission: A technical overview.” In “Second 

Eddington Workshop: Stellar structure and habitable planet finding,” 9–11 April 2003, 

Palermo, Italy.

42 Niebur, S. (2009, 16 December). Personal interview with M. Moore. Located in “Kepler” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, 

DC; Borucki et al. (2004, January). “The Kepler mission: a technical overview.” In “Second 

Eddington Workshop: Stellar structure and habitable planet finding,” 9–11 April 2003, Palermo, 

Italy. 177–182.
Chapter 7: Renewed Commitment: Kepler

259

The selection of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a management institution necessitated further changes to the management structure of the project. According to 

Michael Moore, Kepler Program Executive at NASA Headquarters, JPL “felt that they 

needed to have a serious piece of contracting activity in order to...make it real for their 

people.” The management style of JPL “brought Ball around to a different mode of 

operation.” Moore said: “I thought that this was a real learning opportunity for Ames 

as a center to have their people engaged with [JPL].... There seemed to be a lot of what 

I call institutional resistance.... Toward the end, I think that they were working well 

together, but I didn’t see the [Ames Research] Center perceiving this as a good opportunity to educate the workforce in the ways to execute these programs and projects.”43

The contract was thus split. Ball would still build the photometer, including the 

optics, detectors, detector-unique avionics, Sun shield, and the supporting structure, 

under contract to Ames. JPL became responsible for the build of the spacecraft and 

the integration of the photometer and said spacecraft. Since the photometer would 

have to be delivered for the integration of the spacecraft, Moore explained, “you can 

almost imagine that Ames became a subcontractor to some point to the JPL side of 

the contract.”44

Koch, the deputy Principal Investigator, credited Charlie Sobeck, engineer manager 

and Ames civil servant, with managing the contracting smoothly. “He is the fairest 

person that I know of, both in terms of handling the vendor and working within the 

federal system,” said Koch.45

Details of this revised management structure were negotiated, and the budgets 

redone, for full-cost accounting was now required—another major policy change since 

Kepler’s proposal. Delta II launch costs also increased, and Kepler’s approved budget 

increased accordingly, to $457 million.

The one-year start delay was “really devastating, in that we had contracts that we 

were ready to execute because we knew, if we were going to be successful, we had to 

order the detectors early,” said Borucki. In addition, he said, “We needed more detectors than any other mission had ever asked for, and they had to be excellent,” in order 

to find the small changes in signal amid the noise.46As with other missions, the needs 

of the people involved became a factor as well. Borucki worried that key members 

of the team, particularly Jon Jenkins, a “soft money” researcher at SETI with a PhD 

43 Niebur, S. (2009, 16 December). Personal interview with M. Moore. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

44 Ibid.

45 Niebur, S. (2010, 6 January). Personal interview with D. Koch. Located in “Kepler” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

46 Niebur, S. (2009, 16 December). Personal interview with W. Borucki. Located in “Kepler” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
NASA′s Discovery Program

260

in signal processing, who was building the algorithms to pull the statistics out of the 

noise, would accept other job offers if unpaid for a year or more. The new constraints 

made the mission implementation more difficult, but Borucki set about making the 

new schedule work, saying quietly to an interviewer a year later, “All I care about is 

the science.”47

The project made the case to NASA Headquarters that beginning long-lead procurements on the CCDs and the optics would reduce mission risk. NASA responded 

by giving permission for Kepler to begin said procurements, a technique that had 

proven useful in previous missions.48 NASA Headquarters provided $2 million and 

Ames provided $1 million in bridge funding to tide the mission team over until the 

official start of Phase B. Kepler put the money to good use, developing requirements 

for critical items and preparing to issue contracts.49 In fall 2002,Kepler selected e2v 

and STA for parallel contracts for 30 flight CCDs. Borucki explained publicly that the 

team was hedging their bets. “This ‘twin buy’ approach ensures that the large number 

of detectors required for the Kepler focal plane will be available even if one of the 

vendors runs into difficulties.”50

In parallel, Ball’s negotiations with Kodak and other suppliers resulted in a move to 

an in-house build for the optical system. “That really, in my mind, brought the optics 

up as a key issue,” said Moore.51

The science team, first furious at the delay and the many NASA-required changes,

began working to develop algorithms and perform supporting observations essential to 

the future operation of the photometer. This included classifying the stars that would be 

in the photometer’s field of view.52 The Kepler team was the largest ever proposed for a 

Discovery mission, consisting of co-investigators and science working group members, 

instrument builders, and theorists.53 Co-investigators, funded to do tasks essential to 

mission success, bore the brunt of the day-to-day work, while science working group 

members assembled at regular meetings, advising the team on implementation and the 

47 Lawler, A. (2003, 1 May). “Bill Borucki’s Planet Search.” Air and Space Magazine.

48 Borucki, W. (2007, 19 September). Presentation at the Discovery@15 workshop in 

Huntsville, Alabama.

49 Niebur, S. (2009, 16 December). Personal interview with W. Borucki. Located in “Kepler” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

50 Borucki et al. (2004, January). “The Kepler mission: A technical overview.” In “Second 

Eddington Workshop: Stellar structure and habitable planet finding,” 9–11 April 2003, Palermo, 

Italy. 177–182.

51 Niebur, S. (2009, 16 December). Personal interview with M. Moore. Located in “Kepler” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

52 Lawler, A. (2003, 1 May). “Bill Borucki’s Planet Search.” Air and Space Magazine.

53 Niebur, S. (2009, August). “Principal Investigators and Mission Leadership.” Space Policy.
Chapter 7: Renewed Commitment: Kepler

261

balancing of the scientific objectives detailed in the selected proposal. Such a working 

group structure was new to Discovery, but traditional in Astrophysics missions that 

many on the Kepler team had worked on before.

Tim Brown and Ron Gilliland, team members and experts in solar seismology, 

became co-investigators as their involvement became more essential to key work on 

the mission. Ron Gilliland had been the first to detect the atmosphere on another 

planet. John Geary, once a panel reviewer, impressed the science team with his questions so much that after the evaluation was complete, he was invited to join the science team. Geary’s experience building telescopes at the Smithsonian Astrophysical 

Observatory at Harvard (SAO) proved very useful as he collaborated with Ball. The 

project also invited astronomer Andrea Dupree, the first director who was a woman 

(and youngest director) at SAO’s Center for Astrophysics, where Koch worked for a 

time, to join the science team.54

The team resolved from the start to include additional members of the community 

as Guest Observers: funded researchers interested in pursuing science not already 

included in the Kepler mission.55

Unlike some early Discovery missions, Kepler also employed theorists. “The standard theorist line is never [to] believe in an observation unless it has been confirmed 

theoretically,” explained Jack Lissauer, a co-investigator from NASA Ames. “You have 

to be able to understand your observations theoretically and confirm your theories 

through observation.”56

Science

The Kepler mission had well-defined science objectives. Even after the first observation 

of large Jupiters in 1997 and smaller planets of all kinds in the 2000s, the mission objectives remained constant and focused on counting, in a fixed field of view, the number 

of Earth-size planets in the habitable zone of stars like the Sun. This never changed.

As written by William Borucki, the Kepler Principal Investigator:

The general scientific goal of the Kepler mission is to explore the structure and diversity 

of planetary systems with special emphasis on determining the frequency of Earth-size 

planets in the HZ of solarlike stars. This is achieved by surveying a large sample of stars to:

• Determine the frequency of terrestrial-size and larger planets in or near the habitable zone of a wide variety of spectral types of stars;

54 Niebur, S. (2010, 6 January). Personal interview with A. Dupree. Located in “Kepler” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

55 Basri, G., et al. (2005). “The Kepler mission: A wide-field transit search for terrestrial planets.” 

New Astronomy Reviews, 49. 478–485.

56 David, L. (2006, 5 February). “Finding New Worlds: Theoretical Conjecture Versus Hands-on 

Astronomy.” Space.com.
NASA′s Discovery Program

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• Determine the distributions of sizes and orbital semi-major axes of these planets;

• Estimate the frequency of planets orbiting multiple-star systems;

• Determine the distributions of semi-major axis, eccentricity, albedo, size, mass, 

and density of short period giant planets;

• Identify additional members of each photometrically-discovered planetary system 

using complementary techniques; and

• Determine the properties of those stars that harbor planetary systems.57

The habitable zone “is the area where things are just right,” explained Borucki. “The 

planets are not too hot, they’re not too cold, they’re just right.”58 For life as we know it 

to exist, the planet must be able to have liquid water at the surface. Too hot, and any 

surface water would boil off. Too cold, and surface water would freeze into ice. The 

planet must be at just the right distance from a star of just the right temperature. The 

mission would search for the planets in the habitable zone and determine just how 

many might be out there.59

While the Kepler mission goals remained constant throughout the decade between 

first proposal and selection for implementation, NASA’s plans for future astrophysical 

missions changed. Priorities shifted with budget availability, the development of new 

strategic planning roadmaps, and community pressure. The search for extrasolar planets 

from space, however, became more relevant rather than less, and by the time NASA 

selected Kepler, plans were in place for the flagship space telescope, Terrestrial Planet 

Finder, and precursors such as the Space Interferometry Mission. Kepler would provide 

the data needed for the capstone Terrestrial Planet Finder by performing a pathfinder 

exploration of a well-defined volume of space in the Summer Triangle, studying what 

kinds of stars were most likely to have planets around them, and identifying systems 

with terrestrial planets for further study by more advanced, and significantly more 

expensive, telescopes.

Mission Design

While Kepler was a very simple space telescope relative to those in NASA’s Astrophysics 

Division, it also was a new kind of mission for the Discovery Program. Instead of 

sending a spacecraft to a distant planet, comet, or asteroid, Kepler would be launched 

into orbit around the Sun, in an Earth-trailing orbit with a period of just over a year 

(372.5 days). Over the course of the mission, this larger period would mean that the 

57 Borucki, W. J. (2016). “Kepler Mission: Development and Overview.” Rep. Prog. Phys. 79, 

036901. Downloaded from https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0034-4885/79/3/036901

on 23 May 2023.

58 Malik, T. (2009, 6 March). “Pressure On for NASA’s Friday Launch of Planet-Hunting 

Kepler.” Space.com. 

59 Erickson, J. (2007, 1 February). “Man sees dream coming into focus.” The Casper Star Tribune.
Chapter 7: Renewed Commitment: Kepler

263

spacecraft would slowly drift away from Earth, finally ending up 0.5 AU behind our 

planet after four years. The mission instrument suite, unlike the large science payloads 

for missions like MESSENGER, was in this case a single instrument: a wide-field 

photometer with a Schmidt-type telescope and an array of charge-coupled devices.60

The instrument design was driven by requirements of photometric precision (to detect 

individual Earth-size transits of 6.5 hours), mission lifetime (sufficient to observe 

at least three transits), and number of stars to be observed to produce a statistically 

meaningful result (100,000 bright dwarf stars).61

The telescope itself was designed to continuously measure the relative brightness of 

all the stars in its field of view. This field of view was much larger than that of standard 

telescopes, which typically have approximately one square degree, and was necessary 

to enable it to simultaneously observe the brightness of the target stars of size comparable to our Sun’s. To permit the detection of small changes in stellar brightness, the 

modified Schmidt telescope was built with a 1.4-meter-diameter F/1 primary mirror 

and a corrector plate with an aperture of 0.95 meter. The focal plane was built using a 

square foot of charge-coupled devices, each a separate 1- by 2-inch silicon chip, with 

a combined array of over 95 million pixels. Each CCD had two readouts, for a total of 

84 output channels and thousands of wires to the processing electronics. Complicating 

matters, the focal plane had to be kept a cool 90 K (about 300°F below zero), separated 

from the 300 K electronics nearby.

After construction of the photometer, the instrument would be mounted to a 

spacecraft bus, launched, checked out, and set to observe the stars in a single area of 

the sky in Cygnus, the Summer Triangle, denoted by the first-magnitude stars Deneb, 

Vega, and Altair. These stars are familiar to many amateur astronomers, as they are 

bright (first magnitude) and visible in the northern hemisphere from spring into fall. 

The telescope would be set to view a star field slightly beyond the Milky Way and its 

high density of stars, and out of the plane of the solar system, away from our system’s 

asteroids and their dust. Millions of stars are visible in this patch of sky.62

The telescope had no moving parts. Instead, the photometer recorded the intensity 

of each star’s light at regular intervals, waiting for a minuscule dip in the brightness that 

would indicate that something nearby had passed directly in front of it, blocking part 

60 Basri, G., et al. (2005). “The Kepler mission: A wide-field transit search for terrestrial planets.” 

New Astronomy Reviews, 49. 478–485.

61 Borucki, W. J. (2016). “Kepler Mission: Development and Overview.” Rep. Prog. Phys. 79, 

036901. Downloaded from https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0034-4885/79/3/036901

on 23 May 2023.

62 DeVore, E. (2008, 15 August). “The Summer Triangle: Target of Kepler mission.” Space.com. See 

also DeVore et al., (2010) “Science Education and Outreach: Forging a Path to the Future.” ASP 

Conference Series, vol. 431, Jonathan Barnes, Denise A. Smith, Michael G. Gibbs, and James 

G. Manning, eds. Astronomical Society of the Pacific. A wide-ranging educational program 

and a program for planetariums were important parts of the mission.
NASA′s Discovery Program

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of the star’s light as seen by the photometer. If Kepler were to observe a planet the size 

of Earth, crossing directly in front of its Sun-size star, the dip in brightness would be 

less than one part in 10,000 (84 ppm). This tiny change would go undetected by most 

telescopes, but Kepler was built for high-precision photometry. The change would be 

noted as a potential planetary transit.63 The photometer was so sensitive that if Kepler 

“were to look down at a small town on Earth at night from space, it would be able to 

detect the dimming of a porch light as somebody passed in front,” according to Kepler 

project manager James Fanson.64

Planets in the habitable zone orbiting stars like the Sun complete their orbits in 

periods of a year to a few years, according to the laws of planetary motion. The time 

that each planet spends crossing the star (its transit) is comparably very short, lasting 

for 2 to 16 hours, depending on the exact sizes of the stars they orbit.65 After this transit 

time (known as transit duration), the brightness will return to its initial value. Several 

months or years later (the orbital period), the brightness will dip again and remain low 

for the same transit duration as the planet travels again across the star. If the pattern 

repeats three or more times, with the same change in brightness and transit duration, 

the change in brightness is likely caused by a planet. This is called the transit method 

of detecting extrasolar planets.

Because of the large number of stars that are monitored, dozens of transits occur 

every day. Since each transit lasts only a few hours, it would be nearly impossible to 

move the telescope to study individual stars. Kepler was designed to monitor a fixed 

field of view so that it would not miss more than a small number of transits. The 

charge-coupled devices had to be of high precision to detect such tiny changes in 

brightness. About four transits of a given planet across a star would be sufficient to 

conclude that the effect was real.

The transit method of detection, while having significant advantages over other 

methods of planet detection, does have a significant drawback that will depress the 

statistics. In essence, as the planet orbits its star, it must pass directly in front of it, not 

angled appreciably, as seen from our solar system. Otherwise, if the orbit is askew from 

our perspective, the planet will simply circle the star, never causing a dip in brightness, 

and therefore be undetectable using this method. Kepler scientists calculated that the 

probability for the orbit to be properly aligned was equal to the diameter of the star 

divided by the diameter of the orbit; approximately 0.5 percent for an Earth-like orbit 

around a Sun-like star.66

63 Koch, D., and A. Gould. (2006, 7 August). “Overview of the Kepler Mission.” NASA website.

64 Kluger, J. (2009, 6 March). “The Kepler Telescope: Taking a Census of the Galaxy.” Time.

65 Koch, D. ,and A. Gould. (2006, 7 August). “Overview of the Kepler Mission.” NASA website. 

66 Ibid.; Jaffe, M. (2009, 9 March). “CU, Ball Space Mission Blasts Off.” Denver Post.
Chapter 7: Renewed Commitment: Kepler

265

The team used statistical analyses to deduce the actual number of planets by adding 

the number of missed planets to the observed number of planets. This allowed the 

frequency of occurrence of planets in our galaxy to be estimated. For every 100,000 

good targets selected, the team predicted observation of 500 planets—more than the 

entire catalog of known extrasolar planets at launch and 500 more than had ever 

been observed when the mission was originally proposed in 1992, as well as in 1994, 

1996, and 1998.

Based on the observed data from both the Kepler photometer and other telescopes, 

the use of the laws of physics provides information on the size of the planet, its distance 

from its star, and whether the planet is in the habitable zone. For example, Kepler’s 

third law of motion allows astronomers to calculate the orbital size of the planet, given 

the period of the planet and the mass of the star deduced from its spectral classification. The size of the planet is found by considering the transit depth, the amount of 

light that the planet blocks as it crosses the star, and the size of the star. The planet’s 

characteristic temperature can also be calculated given the planet’s orbital size and the 

temperature and size of the star from its spectral classification and age. Questions of 

habitability could thus be considered.67

Finding the first rocky planets with liquid water on the surface and temperature 

conducive to life “will be the real breakthrough, when you find things that you’d actually 

like to own real estate on,” said David Latham, a co-investigator from the HarvardSmithsonian Center for Astrophysics, when the spacecraft was under development.68

As in all good experiments, the Kepler mission was designed such that a null result 

would be critically important to the determination of the rarity of such planets.69 “One 

of the most interesting things we could find is zero,” said Borucki. “That could mean 

we are alone in the universe.”70

Masquerading as Transiting Planets

There was also a need for ground-based observations to verify potential transits. “There 

are several astrophysical phenomena that will masquerade as transiting planets and we 

have to sort those out from the ground,” said project scientist Thomas “Nick” Gautier.71

For instance, an eclipsing binary star or a triple system could also produce dips in the 

signal that could be mistaken for a transit. (Other space-based telescopes like Hubble 

and Spitzer have worked well for confirmation of especially important planetary can67 Koch, D., and A. Gould. (2006, 7 August). “Overview of the Kepler Mission.” NASA website; 

Cowen, R. (2007, 14 July). “Passages: Revealing the nature of exoplanets.” Science News.

68 Britt, R. (2002, 24 June). “Astronomers on brink of watershed in planet discoveries.” Space.com.

69 Basri, G., et al. (2005). “The Kepler mission: A wide-field transit search for terrestrial planets.” 

New Astronomy Reviews, 49. 478–485.

70 Modine, A. (2007, 13 April). “Kepler telescope primed to search for earth-like planets.” Register. 

71 Klotz, I. (2009, 17 February). “UK ‘eyes’ to hunt for other earths.” BBC News.
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didates, but observing time on these telescopes is too precious to be allotted only to 

confirmation of Kepler mission results. The thousands of planetary system candidates 

made assigning observing time by Hubble and Spitzer for all of them impossible.) The 

observers would use active optics imaging such as Guide Star Adaptive Optics at the 

Multi-Mirror Telescope Observatory, yielding pixel sizes of 0.02 to 0.04 arcseconds 

on the sky. “It’s really powerful in the infrared, J, and K bands,” said Dupree, who also 

observed the stars and star clusters for her astronomical research, cross-calibrating 

Kepler’s photometry with the various spectroscopy from adaptive optics to try to 

calibrate the cluster ages, measure rotation, and image some of the clusters at high 

resolution.72 Such work was complementary to the extrasolar planet research of Kepler 

but of high interest to astronomers who had made it their life’s work.

Extrasolar Planets

The field of extrasolar planets—so new when William Borucki and colleagues prepared 

their initial proposal in 1992—had grown from a sample of zero to 300 giant planets 

by the time Kepler launched. The transit technique also had been demonstrated by 

several ground-based groups, including that of David Charbonneau, who would later 

become a Kepler participating scientist.73

Despite the field’s fast growth, Kepler remained relevant due to its characterization 

as a pathfinder, its attention to detail, and its instrument sensitivity, able to detect even 

an Earth-size planet—something generally elusive to ground-based astronomy even 

with large telescopes and advances in adaptive optics. “This is exactly why you need 

to go to space,” explained Dimitar Sasselov, co-investigator and astronomer at the 

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, at an annual meeting of the American 

Astronomical Society.74 Ground-based telescopes simply could not yet overcome the 

limitations of the atmosphere. In addition, the duty cycle of a space-based telescope 

was much greater than that of ground-based ones: observations could be done 24 hours 

a day instead of a few hours each night (weather permitting), eliminating the need for 

dark, clear skies during observations.75

72 Niebur, S. (2010, 6 January). Personal interview with A. Dupree. Located in “Kepler” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

73 Charbonneau, D., Brown, T. M., Latham, D. W., Mayor, M. (2000). “Detection of planetary 

transits across a sun-like star.” The Astrophysical Journal, 529(1). https://doi.org/10.1086/312457; 

Cowen, R. (2007, 14 July). “Passages: revealing the nature of exoplanets.” Science News.

74 Boyle, A. (2003, 6 January). “New technique finds farthest known planet.” MSNBC.

75 Basri, G., et al. (2005). “The Kepler mission: A wide-field transit search for terrestrial planets.” 

New Astronomy Reviews, 49. 478–485.
Chapter 7: Renewed Commitment: Kepler

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A Very Difficult Structure to Produce

The team knew from the start that one of the greatest technical challenges would be 

obtaining and installing the high-performance CCDs necessary for the implementation of this ambitious design. Kepler’s large focal plane, requiring 42 high-resolution 

CCDs, each measuring 1 by 2 inches, for a total area of about a foot square, would have 

to function accurately and efficiently in the harsh environment of space. The CCDs 

would have to integrate seamlessly with the readout mechanism, withstand various 

temperature extremes without warping, and be several orders of magnitude more 

sensitive than the human eye. The temperature gradient endured by the instrument 

would be challenging, as the front of the telescope reached –85°C, while the electronics just behind it raised the temperature to a warm 30°C. Kepler was “a very difficult 

structure to produce because you don’t want to warp it with temperature changes,” 

said John Troelzch, program manager at Ball.76

CCD procurement began early, as a long-lead item, and with a twist. The proposal 

had included a preliminary buy of 30 detectors from each of two separate suppliers, each 

with a contract ready to execute upon selection of the mission, and an option to procure 

a total of 60 CCDs from the contractor who provided top-quality CCDs on time.77

In May 2003, STA and e2v delivered evaluation-grade CCDs to the Kepler project.78

In late October, the project executed the contract option to obtain all 60 from e2v.79

“These devices were especially challenging, given what was wanted for the telescope 

and the time in which they wanted them,” David Morris, e2v’s lead engineer on the 

project, told BBC News.80 (CCDs were finally delivered in August 2007.) In October 

2003, the project passed its Systems Requirements Review, a major programmatic 

hurdle, and proceeded to award contracts to Ball to develop the optics and detectors, to 

Eastman Kodak for the optical subsystem, and to Corning for the primary mirror glass 

(they also manufactured materials for the Hubble Space Telescope).81 Ball contracted 

Brashear to design and build the 1.4-meter lightweight primary mirror and the 0.95-

meter fused-silica Schmidt corrector, with delivery expected two years later in 2005.82

76 Klotz, I. (2009, 17 February). “UK ‘eyes’ to hunt for other earths.” BBC News.

77 Niebur, S. (2009, 16 December). Personal interview with B. Borucki. Located in “Kepler” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

78 Borucki et al. (2004, January). “The Kepler mission: a technical overview.” In Second Eddington 

Workshop: Stellar structure and habitable planet finding, 9–11 April 2003, Palermo, Italy. 177–182.

79 Borucki, B. (2007, 19 September). Presentation at the Discovery@15 workshop in 

Huntsville, Alabama.

80 Klotz, I. (2009, 17 February). “UK ‘eyes’ to hunt for other earths.” BBC News.

81 “NASA awards contracts for Kepler planet-finder search.” (2002, October 29). Aerospace Daily. 

4; “Corning joins NASA mission.” (2003, 23 October). Rochester Business Journal.

82 Borucki et al. (2004, January). “The Kepler mission: a technical overview.” In Second Eddington 

Workshop: Stellar structure and habitable planet finding, 9–11 April 2003, Palermo, Italy. 177–182.
NASA′s Discovery Program

268

The summer of 2004 was filled with 31 incremental preliminary design reviews 

of components and subsystems, culminating in the successful mission Preliminary 

Design Review on 12–15 October 2004. The project was on schedule for an October 

2007 launch.83

While NASA Headquarters had expected there to be transient effects in the overlay 

of Jet Propulsion Laboratory management over Ames’s management of Ball Aerospace, 

grossly insufficient attention was given to the conflict created by having JPL manage 

a mission that was designed to meet standards (test requirements, margins, etc.) that 

were not their own. Ball had experience working with Goddard Space Flight Center 

and, in order to ease the design, implementation, and review processes, had adopted 

Goddard’s set of standards for flight missions. This straightforward decision—made 

undoubtedly in part to be a better partner to NASA—caused difficulty with their new 

NASA partner, JPL. The latter lab was now in the position of having to manage the 

project to, essentially, a competitor’s specifications.

Whether this would cause an intractable problem was not immediately certain.84

The team was relieved that the prior work was kept, and the mission continued as 

planned—not a certainty for those who had been in the business and seen this happen on other missions.85

Several coincidences eased this path for the initial stages of development. The 

Independent Review Team, for instance, had a number of members who had built 

hardware at Goddard and were able to help “translate” the standards and requirements 

to ensure that the planned tests met the needs of both project and management. Other 

review team members came from JPL’s community and helped explain the needs of 

the project to its JPL management in its own terms.

Said Koch, “This is different than a planetary mission. It doesn’t have to have 

quadruple redundancy and be a class A mission.... That was very counterculture to 

[JPL], and we worked real, real hard at JPL to not let them turn us into another JPL 

engineering extravaganza” that was not allowed to fail.86 This was a difference in culture 

with far-reaching implications into such mundane areas as fault protection.

Whereas many Jet Propulsion Laboratory missions sling a spacecraft rapidly by a 

planet with a single opportunity or a small, discrete number of opportunities to collect 

data, the Kepler imager would have nearly four years to collect data. A fault shutting 

83 Borucki et al. (2004, January). “The Kepler mission: a technical overview.” In Second Eddington 

Workshop: Stellar structure and habitable planet finding, 9–11 April 2003, Palermo, Italy. 177–182.

84 Niebur, S. (2009, 16 December). Personal interview with M. Moore. Located in “Kepler” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

85 Niebur, S. (2010, 6 January). Personal interview with D. Koch. Located in “Kepler” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

86 Niebur, S. (2010, 6 January). Personal interview with D. Koch. Located in “Kepler” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
Chapter 7: Renewed Commitment: Kepler

269

the system down wouldn’t be an emergency requiring multiple redundancies (and 

many layers of depth) to reduce data loss. A fault, instead, could be treated more like 

a fault on a telescope, where a software patch could be sent on the next daily, or even 

weekly, upload with no loss in fidelity.

The initial tendency of the JPL managers and the Ball engineers was to protect the 

spacecraft with a Deep Impact–like multi-layer, multi-option fault protection system 

that had multiple levels of getting back up and running. The project began to spend 

significant time and financial resources on fault protection, testing, integration, and all 

the consequences of this design. And then, according to Michael Moore, the program 

executive, the question was asked: “Do we really need this?” He said, “Convincing 

everybody that what you really needed [instead] was a very robust but fairly simple 

fault protection safe mode approach was really fairly tough to do with the JPL guys.”87

Although Ames, Ball, and JPL resolved most of the initial discrepancies, discussions about the roles and standards used for the final test and integration continued. 

Five degrees might not matter much in the build of an airplane, for instance, but for 

spacecraft components in stressful environments, it might determine whether the 

mission could achieve the four-year mission lifetime required to confirm the existence 

of an extrasolar planet.

Despite the inherent difficulties, JPL’s expertise benefited the Kepler mission by 

bringing a broader experience base, additional resources, and the governmental oversight experience that had not been developed at the vast majority of potential industry 

partners—even those with prior NASA mission contractual experience. JPL also served 

as a greater “management counterweight,” in Moore’s words, sufficient to impress Ball.88

Refining the Field of View and Defining the Stellar Catalog

As a graduate student, Natalie Batalha read a report about FRESIP, the first iteration 

of the Kepler proposal, in the office of her collaborator and undergraduate adviser, 

Gabor Basri. On a National Research Council fellowship the next year, she worked on 

stellar variability—a relevant issue because 30 percent of the stars (she found) were 

so young and magnetically active that detection of their planets would be difficult or 

impossible. Meanwhile, Jon Jenkins, a researcher at SETI, did a study on solar variability 

based on recent Solar and Heliospheric Observatory data. Taken together, these two 

pieces helped demonstrate that “Earths” around Sun-like stars would be detectable 

and that enough stars are expected to be as quiet as the Sun. This was an important 

contribution in convincing planetary scientists and stellar astrophysicists alike of the 

virtues of detection endeavors.

87 Niebur, S. (2009, 16 December). Personal interview with M. Moore. Located in “Kepler” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

88 Ibid. 
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After selection, Batalha ran the robotic Vulcan telescope, a ground-based prototype 

for Kepler at Lick Observatory, before doing a study to optimize Kepler’s field of view. 

“We discovered that the science yield would be higher if we pointed a little bit off the 

galactic plane just to get out of the glare of the giants that contaminate the field,” said 

Batalha.89 She would be named the project scientist of Kepler later in the mission.

Jenkins and collaborator Hema Chandrasekaran, then also of the SETI Institute, 

performed tradeoff studies, and they and Batalha talked about the results of the stellar 

population model simulations at the Kepler science working group meetings for about 

a year before proving in 2006 to the group that the shift in field of view was worthwhile. 

After that, the team had to identify the top 170,000 targets of the 4.5 million stars in 

the field of view, a “huge effort” that took nearly four years. Observing 170,000 stars 

would allow the observation of every star that was brighter than the 15th magnitude 

in the field of view.

The creation of the stellar catalog required a massive ground-based observation 

program to characterize all the stars in Kepler’s field of view, identifying the surface 

temperature, surface gravity, metallicity, and size for each of the possible candidates. 

Initially, the science team had planned to classify the stars spectroscopically, but the 

task of quantifying enough of the millions of stars in the field of view in this way 

would stretch on much longer than the mission would allow. Even restricting the 

search to stars brighter than the 19th magnitude, 107 stars remained. The team had 

to completely rethink their strategy for an effort of this size. Kepler co-investigator 

Dave Latham settled on the necessary parameters, which would help define the size 

and nature of each star, and convinced the team. These characteristics would allow 

observers to exclude giants and early spectral types of stars from the target list. They 

built a photometer specifically for the purpose of creating the stellar catalog, dubbed 

Kepler Cam, on Whipple at Mt. Hopkins. Over the next several years, Latham took 

1,600 pointings with multiple observations in every one of the broad and intermediate 

band filters to observe the stars at various colors. The observations took $2.5 million 

and over four years to complete.90

Co-investigator Tim Brown then used the results of the photometry to derive the 

stellar parameters for each star. This work resulted in the Kepler input catalog, with 

1.5 million stars classified of the 13 million sources. Thus they completed a task that 

89 Niebur, S. (2010, 6 January). Personal interview with N. Batalha. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

90 Brown, T., Latham, D., et al. (2011). “Kepler input catalog: photometric calibration and stellar 

classification.” Astron. J. 142, 112.
Chapter 7: Renewed Commitment: Kepler

271

a co-investigator would later recall as “an amazing, Herculean effort,” and one that 

Borucki would proudly announce to the American Astronomical Society in 2007 as 

“the most comprehensive study of stars in this portion of our galaxy.”91

Ground-based observatories, in fact, were an additional limitation on Kepler’s mission design. Suitable exoplanet candidates would have to be within observing limits 

of terrestrial hardware. For example, if Kepler spotted a possible Earth-size planet at 

a sixteenth magnitude M dwarf star, but the ground-based observers couldn’t follow it 

up because of their technical limits, Kepler’s observation would not be nearly as useful, 

as it couldn’t be confirmed from the ground. Out of all of this and other efforts (such 

as the Guest Observer Program, which added 3,000 targets of cluster stars, eclipsing 

binaries, and other stars) came a master list of 170,000 stars for observation during 

the four-year mission.

Development

Kepler passed its System Requirements Review on 2 September 2003, its Preliminary 

Design Review in October 2004, and its Confirmation Review on 2 December 2004.92

The early management changes seemed to have settled into equilibrium, leading Borucki 

and team to state publicly: “The JPL team members have been smoothly integrated 

with those at Ames and [Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corporation].”93 Further, 

the D&NFPO provided added value when small technical problems arose during 

development, finding experts to help the team solve problems in real time—both small 

ones in wiring and more significant ones, such as when the coating on the sapphire 

lenses began to peel. The strong optical department at Marshall Space Flight Center 

was able to step in and help the team understand the issues.94

Ames continued to support the mission as it ran into troubles as well, as Borucki 

relates: “We had difficulty when we purchased the glass for the Schmidt corrector and 

when we needed to grind and polish the corrector and the primary mirror. DX (i.e., 

military) programs had overlapping needs for optical glass, the grinding machines, 

91 Niebur, S. (2010, 6 January). Personal interview with N. Batalha. Located in “Discovery Program” 

file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, 

DC; Borucki et al. (2006, December). “Kepler mission development, update at the 2007 AAS/

AAPT Joint Meeting, American Astronomical Society Meeting 209, #124.06.” Bulletin of the 

American Astronomical Society, Vol. 38. 1071.

92 Koch, D. (2004, 27 October). “Kepler Mission: A Search for Habitable Planets.” PowerPoint 

presentation to the Ames Internship Program. Downloaded from http://kepler.nasa.gov/ppt/

Ames_Internship_2004_10.ppt; Borucki et al. (2006, December). “Kepler mission development, 

update at the 2007 AAS/AAPT Joint Meeting, American Astronomical Society Meeting 209, 

#124.06.” Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 38. 1071.

93 Borucki et al. (2004, January). “The Kepler mission: A technical overview.” In Second Eddington 

Workshop: Stellar structure and habitable planet finding, 9–11 April 2003, Palermo, Italy. 177–182.

94 Niebur, S. (2009, 16 December). Personal interview with W. Borucki. Located in “Kepler” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
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the polishing machines, and for the facility for coating the glass. Both the Discovery 

Program Office and [Ames Center Director] Pete Worden were a huge help” in moving 

the optics development forward.95 Kepler acquired a science director in Janice Voss, 

an astronaut assigned to Ames, from October 2004 to November 2007.96

On 25 January 2005, the Kepler mission entered Phase C/D and NASA simultaneously approved an eight-month launch slip, to 2008.97 The contract for building the 

photometer, the instrument on the mission, was awarded to Ball in early February 

2005.98 The mirror was already being manufactured by L-3 Communications Brashear 

as a subcontract to Ball. L-3 had quickly fallen behind in the optics fabrication, however, 

“running a little late and being more expensive than we expected,” said Michael Moore. 

He noted that personnel staffing loads at Ball were likewise running over what had 

been estimated during that time. The reason: the avionics system needed additional 

work. Ball responded by replacing the project’s program manager, Len Andreozzi, with 

Monte Henderson, who had just managed the development phase of Deep Impact.99

By October 2005, the Schmidt corrector and the 1.4 m aperture primary mirror were 

complete and were being polished. All 46 CCDs had been delivered and tested. The 

team was building and testing the CCD driver, data acquisition, and science data 

accumulator boards, as well as the first build of the flight software.100 Meanwhile, the 

co-investigators continued to prepare the stellar catalog of targets.101

Over Budget and Behind Schedule

Kepler’s initial cost of less than $300 million had been raised to $457 million shortly 

after selection for several reasons unrelated to the project team. First, the mission 

had to accommodate the slow start mandated by NASA Headquarters. There was the 

mandated change to full-cost accounting (which affected Kepler more than most, due 

95 Ibid.

96 Whitney, P. (2008, 25 June). “Astronaut brings space adventures to Hanover Audience.” 

Madison Courier.

97 Morris, J. (2005, 13 June). “Discovery program to release AO.” Aviation Week’s Aerospace Daily 

& Defense Report. 214(51).

98 Mewhinney, M. (2005, 14 February). “NASA awards contract for Kepler mission photometer.” 

NASA Ames news release.

99 Berger, B. (2006, 23 January). “Despite problems, Kepler on track for June 2008 

launch.” SpaceNews.

100 Borucki, W. (2005, December). “Kepler Mission: Current Status, presented at the American 

Astronomical Society Meeting 207, #153.01.” Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 

Vol. 37. 1412.

101 Latham, D., et al. and T. Brown. (2005, December) “Presentation at the American Astronomical 

Society Meeting 207.” Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 37.
Chapter 7: Renewed Commitment: Kepler

273

to the large number of NASA civil servants at Ames on the project). The cost for the 

Delta II rocket booster had increased. Finally, the project had to bear the extra layer 

of management added to the team by NASA.

Although a first look at the 2006 NASA budget held no surprises for Kepler and 

much of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, trouble was soon 

to come.102 Kepler would face yet another delay—this time of undetermined length, 

and not of its own making. Rick Howard, deputy director of the Universe Division 

at NASA Headquarters, went on record as saying that the mission was coming along 

well, but due to overruns and problems on other missions within the Science Mission 

Directorate, the planet-finding telescope was hit with a $35 million reduction in the $136 

million budget that year.103 To accommodate that reduction, the launch date was again 

slipped to June 2008, and the total cost continued to increase toward $515 million.104

Years later, when asked about cost caps after the spacecraft had launched, Borucki 

said: “Although the AO said that you must cost the mission in 1998 dollars, the moment 

that we got accepted, cost estimates were changed to be in real-year dollars. That 

jumped the price up $20 million above what we had proposed. Further, as required, 

we had priced the proposal with government employees at no cost to the mission. 

[The new NASA requirement to employ full-cost accounting] also increased our cost 

estimate.... We were at $400 million from the $300 million estimate within a year 

although we [had] not yet started mission development. So, the thing to learn is that 

a lot of this—the rules and requirements change continuously.”105

The move to full-cost accounting was a NASA-wide initiative intended to improve 

competitiveness for mission proposals from non-NASA centers. For years, aerospace 

contractors and other institutions had complained about the inherent advantage of 

NASA centers, since NASA civil service personnel were paid out of NASA general 

funds and projects were not charged for their use. Full-cost accounting would correct 

this. Meanwhile, projects affected during the transition were compensated for the 

apparent increase in funds needed so that their management and implementation 

would not be affected. It did have the effect, though, of increasing the perceived cost 

of missions caught in transition, and the Kepler mission more than most due to its 

management and implementation by NASA Ames civil servants, in cooperation with 

Ball engineers and technicians.

102 Zimmerman, R. (2005, 9 February). “Commentary: Analysis: A Promising NASA Budget.” 

United Press International.

103 Berger, B. (2005, 7 June). “Big Universe: tightening budget: NASA looks for ways to pay for 

Hubble, cost overruns.” SpaceNews. 

104 Berger, B. (2009, 16 December). “Despite problems, Kepler on track for June 2008 

launch.” SpaceNews.

105 Niebur, S. (2009, 16 December). Personal interview with W. Borucki. Located in “Kepler” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
NASA′s Discovery Program

274

The upshot of all this is that Kepler was over budget and behind schedule, and there 

was no instrument easily descoped without affecting the core science of the mission. 

Indeed, cutting aspects of the science was not even an option—the only thing that 

could be cut was the quantity and certainty of the extrasolar planet candidates. The 

team found it a real challenge to cut science or make trades that affected the science, 

and they recognized this early on.106

In March 2006, a 21 percent cost overrun caused a corresponding slip in launch 

date to 1 November 2008, and raised the total cost of the mission to $550 million. 

In addition, the spacecraft design was modified to reduce risk, cost, and complexity 

by replacing its gimbaled high-gain antenna in the design with a fixed antenna. This 

change required the spacecraft body to change its attitude in order to downlink the 

scientific data; the team noted that the change in pointing would result in a loss of 

about one observing day per month. But there was more to it than that: although the 

team was still able to double the size of the data recorder, in order to downlink once 

a month instead of every fourth day, there was an additional loss in precision. The 

original requirement of 20 parts per million in four hours to see an Earth-size transit 

was relaxed to 20 parts per million integrated over five hours. After further changes, 

the final build specification was 20 parts per million integrated over six and a half 

hours. This was the upper limit, as that was the exact value for a grazing transit. (A 

central transit was 13 hours.)107 With these changes, the Kepler mission proceeded 

into subsystem critical design reviews beginning in April 2006.

After years of delays and budget overruns, however, the Discovery Program had 

had enough. There simply was no money to provide to Kepler as needed. It was a costcapped mission, and there was no extra discretionary money at the division level to 

cover expenses. To cover Kepler’s price increases, the next Discovery Announcement 

of Opportunity would have to be pushed out uncomfortably far—and still, that would 

not be enough to fund the program fully in certain fiscal years. Andy Dantzler, director 

of the Planetary Science Division, went to talk to the Astrophysics Division director, 

Anne Kinney, and laid out his concerns. The program could no longer afford to pay 

for the increased costs of Kepler, yet the Astrophysics Division had adopted it as a key 

part of its exoplanet program. Thus, the mission could not be canceled. Despite being 

a strategic investment, however, the project was too small for its own project office. 

106 Borucki, W. (2007, 19 September). Presentation at the Discovery@15 workshop in 

Huntsville, Alabama.

107 Niebur, S. (2010, 6 January). Personal interview with D. Koch. Located in “Kepler” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
Chapter 7: Renewed Commitment: Kepler

275

Out of these meetings came an agreement: the mission would not be canceled, but the 

Astrophysics Division would pay for its overruns. The mission would continue to be 

managed out of the Discovery and New Frontiers Program Office.108

William Borucki made the issue crystal clear: “Kepler was in the middle of the 

two programs and thus an orphan. To succeed, there must be somebody at [NASA] 

Headquarters to look after it.... Everybody wants each of them to succeed because they 

will do great science. But [NASA] Headquarters always has a shortage of funds.”109 By 

moving the project and its overruns to Astrophysics, it got more attention from management, and problems were identified earlier and in the context of what they would 

cost the Astrophysics Division. Astrophysics now had fiscal responsibility and could 

weigh the value of funding increases against its plans for future exoplanet missions, 

flagship missions, and other needs.

On the Discovery side, this removed a huge potential lien from the program and 

enabled Discovery to begin planning for the next Announcement of Opportunity. 

On 8 August, the Kepler mirror—the largest optical mirror ever built for a mission 

beyond Earth’s orbit—arrived at Ball for environmental testing and integration with 

the spacecraft.110 In October, both the mission’s Integrated Action Team and a center management review team participated in the intensive, five-day Critical Design 

Review, which was successfully concluded without any additional slips in launch date. 

In December, Borucki announced that plans for the 2007 Participating Scientist and 

2008 Guest Observer Programs were on track.111 But Kepler’s financial troubles were 

far from over.

When a new Associate Administrator, S. Alan Stern, arrived to lead the Science 

Mission Directorate in April 2007, he had a very low tolerance for cost overruns. A 

Principal Investigator himself—of New Horizons, the first New Frontiers mission, 

bound for Pluto—he quickly appointed a new “front office” management team and 

set about making policy changes across the board.112

108 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 December). Personal interview with M. New. Located in “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC; Niebur, S. (2009, 16 December). Personal interview with M. Moore. Located 

in “Kepler” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

109 Niebur, S. (2009, 16 December). Personal interview with W. Borucki. Located in “Kepler” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

110 Ball Aerospace. (2006, 8 August). Press release. Downloaded from http://www.prnewswire.com/

cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/08-08-2006/0004412377&EDATE=. See also 

https://spaceref.com/press-release/kepler-mirror-arrives-at-ball-aerospace-for-test-and-integration/.

111 Borucki et al. (2006, December). “Kepler mission development, update at the 2007 AAS/AAPT 

Joint Meeting, American Astronomical Society Meeting 209, #124.06.” Bulletin of the American 

Astronomical Society, Vol. 38. 1071.

112 Leary, W. (2008, 1 January). “Wielding a Cost-Cutting Ax, and Often, at NASA.” The 

New York Times.
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One of the first challenges for this new team was a request for an additional $42 million and a four-month launch slip for Kepler, due to difficulties building the focal plane. 

At $550 million, the mission already greatly exceeded the Discovery box for which 

it was selected, but because of the myriad NASA Headquarters fiscal, schedule, and 

management mandates, the overruns were largely outside the control of the mission 

itself. Despite this, Stern’s immediate response was to reject the request and tell the 

project to come back with a replan in June, with no additional funds.

On 1 June, Kepler came back to NASA Headquarters with a revised request, this 

time asking for $54 million. Stern countered, “If you don’t think I’m serious, just come 

back to me with numbers like these again and that will be the end of the project.”113

And yet Stern gave the team another month to cut costs and present a replan within 

the current budget. He threatened to open the project to new bids for others to finish 

using the completed hardware as no-cost, government-furnished equipment. He held 

fast to this decision, later telling The New York Times, “Four times they came for more 

money and four times we told them ‘No.’”114

Faced with a $54 million deficit, the team was directed to take a closer look at the 

overruns and replan both mission development and future operations. The replan 

was presented at a project management meeting in Boulder, Colorado, on 6 July 2007. 

The replan included everything from restructuring project management to eliminating tests from the project plan. The replan was regressive in some sense, as science 

operations were once again cut in Phase E to pay for development issues in Phase C. 

Six months of observations would be cut, purely to save the cost of monitoring the 

spacecraft and staffing the mission operations center. The 25 percent reserve rules had 

not, in the end, put an end to the robbing of the science return to pay for overruns in 

engineering; 12 percent fewer planets would be observed under the now-shortened 

three-and-a-half-year mission.

When the changes were announced to the public, Stern observed: “No tests that affect 

the safety or ultimate performance of the system have been dropped...no significant 

science will be lost.” To restore project reserves to 24 percent without impinging on 

other current or future missions in the Astrophysics Division, Ball followed Orbital’s 

lead from several years before and gave up some of its earned fee.115

Stern changed many things at NASA Headquarters, but he had reinforced former 

Associate Administrator Ed Weiler’s earlier management strategy, stating publicly to 

113 Berger, B. (2007, 17 July). “Kepler team cuts costs, avoids cancellation.” Space.com.

114 Leary, W. (2008, 1 January). “Wielding a Cost-Cutting Ax, and Often, at NASA.” The 

New York Times.

115 Stern, A. (2008, 13 March). Statement of S. Alan Stern, Associate Administrator for the SMD 

National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 13 March 2008, before the Subcommittee 

on Space and Aeronautics Committee on Science and Technology of the U.S. House of 

Representatives.
Chapter 7: Renewed Commitment: Kepler

277

the Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics Committee on Science and Technology 

of the U.S. House of Representatives: “NASA’s approach to both the [Solar Dynamics 

Observatory] and Kepler issues conform[s] to the general principle that resources 

to solve project problems should come first from the mission lines or programs that 

include that project. Problems in programs and missions should be addressed within 

the Division (science area) in which they occur whenever possible.”116 Stern was willing 

to take those steps, and he approved the replan and the continuation of the project.117

The extent of Kepler’s replan was unprecedented in the Principal Investigator–led 

mission line programs. To convince a reluctant Associate Administrator to continue 

their program, Kepler had to sacrifice engineering tests, part of the spacecraft provider 

fee, and even the position of the Principal Investigator. Everyone had to pay for the 

overruns. Like Dawn’s first overrun, Stern predicated success in part on the agreement of the spacecraft provider to give up millions of dollars of their corporate bonus 

(“earned fee”). Wholesale management changes were also in order. A respected senior 

manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Leslie Livesay, was put in charge of the entire 

mission, outranking Ames project managers and even the ex–Principal Investigator. 

This change emphasized the role of the project manager. The mission had grown so 

large that it would now be managed as a larger mission, with increased attention to 

management and a decreased role for the Principal Investigator, as NASA Headquarters 

engaged in significant discussion over the appropriate role of the PI in a $600 million 

mission such as Kepler and future New Frontiers missions.

William Borucki, Principal Investigator of the whole mission, was reduced to science PI for the duration of the mission’s development and operation, and his deputy 

was reduced to deputy science PI. This was a major change in how NASA executed 

small missions, reflecting its transition from the Discovery Program to a pathfinder 

role in the Terrestrial Planet Finder program in the Astrophysics Division.118 The 

project organization and management of 2007 looked very little like it had even a few 

years earlier.

Throughout Kepler’s development, extrasolar planets were discovered by groundbased telescopes, using the transit technique that Kepler would later employ. By late 

2006, over 200 extrasolar planets had been discovered—eight of them using the transit 

116 Ibid.

117 Leary, W. (2008, 1 January). “Wielding a Cost-Cutting Ax, and Often, at NASA.” The 

New York Times.

118 David, L. (2009, 15 January). “Kepler spacecraft to hunt Earth-like worlds.” Space.com.
NASA′s Discovery Program

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technique.119 These discoveries, and those of 16 more candidates discovered in a single 

Hubble image, led Kepler science working group team member Alan Boss to conclude, 

“Planets are everywhere.”120

COROT, a French satellite designed to use the transit technique, launched in 

December 2006 and announced its first detection of a planet just five times the mass 

of Earth in May 2007. Early estimates showed COROT to be outperforming its sensitivity in design specification by 10 to 30 times.121 While COROT was seeing the first 

signs of extrasolar planets, the Kepler team was still planning on a late 2007 launch—

although with less certainty.122

Kepler would have an advantage in orbit, if not in time: Kepler’s detector would be 

more sensitive, and its heliocentric, Earth-trailing orbit would be much better suited 

to extrasolar planet detection than the low orbit of COROT. Moreover, COROT had a 

much lower duty cycle for observations, as Earth, the Moon, and the Sun periodically 

blocked its view. Indeed, Kepler had every advantage over COROT—except launch 

date. COROT’s effective aperture was 588 square centimeters; Kepler’s was 5,800 square 

centimeters. COROT had a 9-square-degree field of view; Kepler’s was over 100 square 

degrees. COROT was able to spend less than half a year on its target; Kepler planned 

to spend over four years.123

The first images of extrasolar planets were reported later that year in the journal 

Science, by two teams who independently reported seeing planets in images taken during observing opportunities. Christian Mario, of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics 

in Victoria, British Columbia, used adaptive optics on ground-based telescopes on 

Mauna Kea and software that acted like a coronagraph to block the light from the 

star, known as HR8799.124 Paul Kalas of the University of California, Berkeley, used 

Hubble to observe nearby Formalhaut, one of the brightest and coolest stars with a 

massive dust disk. Such direct observation of extrasolar planets was one of the most 

speculative goals of the Hubble Space Telescope; even Ed Weiler, who spent most of his 

career nurturing Hubble through development and launch, was pleasantly surprised, 

saying, “I actually never thought it would happen.”125

119 Than, K. (2006, 8 September). “Modified backyard telescopes find extrasolar planet.” Space.com.

120 Spotts, P. (2006, 6 October). “Deep in the galaxy, signs of Jupiter-like planets.” The Christian 

Science Monitor.

121 Clark, S. (2007, 4 May). “European planet hunters on brink of earth-sized prize.” New Scientist.

122 Modine, A. (2007, 13 April). “Kepler telescope primed to search for earth-like planets.” Register.

123 Koch, D. (2004, 27 October). “Kepler Mission: A Search for Habitable Planets.” Presentation 

to the Ames Internship Program. Downloaded from http://kepler.nasa.gov/ppt/Ames_

Internship_2004_10.ppt.

124 Overbye, D. (2008, 14 November). “Now in sight: Far-off planets.” The New York Times.

125 Achenbach, J. (2008, 14 November). “In a first, astronomers report viewing planets of other 

suns.” Washington Post.
Chapter 7: Renewed Commitment: Kepler

279

By September 2007, the precision coating process of Kepler’s primary mirror and 

the integration of the detector array assembly had been completed.126 The spacecraft 

assembly had started, including work with the reaction control system, reaction wheels, 

attitude determination and control, and power. All subsystems had passed their environmental and performance tests. It was set for launch in February 2009. After much 

discussion at NASA Headquarters, the project initiated a Guest Observer program, in 

which scientists could propose that Kepler view objects within its field of view but not 

already in the Kepler Target Catalog. In Paris, meanwhile, the Kepler Asteroseismic 

Science Consortium, comprising over 100 astrophysicists led by Jørgen ChristensenDalsgaard, held its first meeting in 2007 to organize an international data analysis 

team to determine the sizes and ages of a portion of the stars monitored by Kepler.127

In late 2008, however, an unexpected technical problem arose when engineers 

discovered that the titanium used to build the spider ring of the spacecraft was falsely 

qualified and made from “substandard and non-conforming titanium,” according to 

the U.S. Attorney’s Office.128 The discovery of counterfeit parts led to a search warrant 

in April 2008 and a federal indictment against Western Titanium Incorporated and 

four company executives, including CEO Daniel Schroeder, in December 2009.129 The 

indictment accused the company of “knowingly and intentionally” misrepresenting the 

quality of 7,900 parts made of nonconforming titanium to the Defense Department, in 

addition to the parts delivered to Ball Aerospace and its subcontractors for the Kepler 

mission. The titanium was bought at about the same time as titanium bought by the U.S. 

Air Force under military specification MIL-T-9046, reportedly requiring a rolled plate 

process in manufacturing, but the parts were alleged to be forged instead. “Titanium 

made with a forging process results in different properties and the strength of the metal 

is diffused through the finished product,” explained Keith Meyer, Boeing materials 

specialist.130 (The charges against the four executives were dismissed in 2011.)131

126 Ball Aerospace. (2007, 27 September). “Ball Aerospace Completes Primary Mirror and Detector 

Array Assembly Milestones for Kepler Mission.” News release.

127 Borucki, W., et al. (2007, December). “Kepler mission: current status. Presented at the American 

Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #211, #36.03.” Bulletin of the American Astronomical 

Society, Vol. 39. 788.

128 Croft, J. (2008, 16 December). “NASA investigates effects of falsely certified titanium.” Flight 

International. 

129 Iannotta, B. (2009, 14 March). “Engineering society helps NASA combat counterfeit parts 

problem.” Space.com.

130 Rector, G. (2009, 23 January). “Company denies allegations of falsely certifying parts.” 

Macon Telegraph.

131 Western Titanium, Inc. (2011, 13 January). “Western Titanium Resolves Pending Charges.” 

Retrieved September 21, 2022, from https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/western-titaniumresolves-pending-charges-113487664.html.
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The parts were used on U.S. Air Force F-15s, F-22s, and C-17s, according to the U.S. 

Attorney’s Office in San Diego.132 Ball Aerospace, who apparently bought the titanium 

in good faith, and NASA were concerned. Internal e-mails cited by the media indicate 

that “it was concluded by the program personnel that the substituted titanium was 

a mission catastrophic risk should it fail,” according to NASA lead counsel Richard 

McCarthy.133 NASA inquired into the actual material properties of the titanium and 

indicated that testing would be done to determine whether the incorporated titanium 

would be appropriate for the spacecraft, saying, “We cannot, I imagine, get a ‘re-do’ 

accomplished in time if it turns out that the Kepler mission has a defective critical 

part.”134 In March 2009, acting NASA Administrator Chris Scolese testified to the 

House Science and Technology subcommittee on cost implications: “If you don’t find 

out about them at receipt, you find out about them when you are in test or you find 

out about [them] when you’re sitting on the top of the rocket, or worse, you find out 

about it when you’re in space. And all of those have cost implications.”135

Miraculously, given Kepler’s track record and despite concerns, the spacecraft passed 

its pre-ship review and was shipped to the Cape, arriving on 6 January 2009.136

“An Image of a Blue Ball”

Kepler was fitted with a DVD containing the names of millions of people wanting to 

participate in some small way in a mission to space.137 Along with the names, participants were given the chance to express their thoughts about the importance of the 

planet-finding mission as part of the celebration of the International Year of Astronomy 

2009, four hundred years after the astronomer Johannes Kepler published the first two 

laws of planetary motion. A copy of the names and messages would be stored at the 

Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.

National and global outreach was essential to Kepler, which was itself a mission 

immediately understood by a swath of the public: the search for another Earth. As San 

132 Iannotta, B. (2009, 14 March). “Engineering society helps NASA combat counterfeit parts 

problem.” Space.com.

133 Croft, J. (2008, 12 December). “Suspect Titanium could ground NASA planet-finding satellite.” 

Flight Global.

134 Croft, J. (2008, 16 December). “NASA investigates effects of falsely certified titanium.” Flight 

International. 

135 Iannotta, B. (2009, 14 March). “Engineering society helps NASA combat counterfeit parts 

problem.” Space.com.

136 NASA. (2008, August). News release. Downloaded from http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/

news/releases/2008/08-111AR.html; Dean, J. (2008, 22 December). “Kepler ready for delivery 

to space coast.” Florida Today.

137 Jones, K.C. (2008, 7 May). “NASA to launch names into space in search for planets.” 

Information Week.
Chapter 7: Renewed Commitment: Kepler

281

Francisco State University astronomer Debra Fischer said at the time, “The ultimate 

goal of NASA, in 15 years or so, [is] to take an image of a blue ball. Kepler will tell us 

how to get (to that goal).”138

In 2009, Ed Weiler called Kepler a pathfinder for more sophisticated missions that 

may one day study the atmospheres of Earth-like planets to look for signs of biological—or even industrial—activity. Before the astronomy community could take that 

next step, however, “we’ve got to be sure there are at least a few earthlike planets out 

there. That’s why Kepler is so important.”139

Expectations rose, and quickly.140 Author and planetary scientist Alan Boss spoke 

enthusiastically about Kepler and COROT at the annual meeting of the American 

Association for the Advancement of Science, promoting their potential for finding 

Earth like planets. The media took his words and ran with them, reporting that the 

potential for habitable worlds had risen to “billions,” “trillions,” and “one hundred billion 

trillion”—as many Earths as there are stars in the universe. The media was enchanted 

with this idea and the inevitability of which Boss spoke when he said, “If you have a 

habitable world and let it evolve for a few billion years then inevitably some sort of life 

will form on it.”141 Many of those associated closely with the mission, however, were 

careful to be cautious in their optimism.142

In the early-morning hours of 19 February, the Kepler spacecraft arrived at Launch 

Complex 17 at Cape Canaveral Air Station, ahead of its March 2009 launch. Several 

days later, the spacecraft and its third stage booster were mated to the United Launch 

Alliance Delta II 7245 rocket, and the work at the launch pad began.143

Because of concern over the recent launch failure of the $270 million Orbiting 

Carbon Observatory, an Earth System Science Pathfinder mission, which launched on 

24 February 2009, on the Orbital Sciences–made Taurus XL and failed to reach orbit, 

Kepler’s launch was delayed a day to allow additional analysis of the commonalities 

between launch vehicles.144

138 Robert Sanders, “With March 6 Kepler launch, work begins for Berkeley astronomers,” 3 March 

2009. https://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2009/03/03_kepler.shtml.

139 Harwood, W. (2009, 9 March). “Kepler Spacecraft Leaves Earth To Discover New Worlds.” 

Spaceflight Now.

140 Niebur, S. (2010, 6 January). Personal interview with D. Koch. Located in “Kepler” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

141 Alleyne, R. (2009, 16 February). “AAAS: ‘One hundred billion trillion’ planets where alien 

life could flourish.” Daily Telegraph; AFP. (2009, 20 February). “NASA readies mission to find 

Earth-like planets.”

142 Klotz, I. (2009, 17 February). “UK ‘eyes’ to hunt for other Earths.” BBC News.

143 Dean, J. (2009, 19 February). “Kepler reaches Cape launch pad.” Florida Today.

144 Swift, M. (2009, 1 March). “Mountain View scientists giddy over NASA’s search for faraway 

planets.” Silicon Valley Mercury News.
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Finally, at age 70, surrounded by his wife, daughters, grandchildren, and 

team, William Borucki saw his photometer mission launched on 6 March 2009 at 

10:49 p.m. EST.145 The rocket soared into the air and out of it, sending the spacecraft 

away from Earth and boosting it into an Earth-trailing solar orbit as planned. By trailing Earth, the spacecraft could avoid observing it; there would be no light interference 

or occultation of the stars in Kepler’s field of view by our own planet.

Shortly before 11:30 p.m. EST, the spacecraft attained orbit, and control of the spacecraft was transferred to the mission operations center at the University of Colorado’s 

Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. The center was staffed by a mix of 

students and professionals from the university and technicians from Ball Aerospace, 

who oversaw their contract. It was a way to train students while providing mission 

operations at a lower cost. Bill Possel, director of mission operations, characterized 

Kepler operations as “maybe a notch above” that of ICESat.146

Two students who were quoted on the first night of operations noted that the twomonth checkout would be demanding. Expectations included “No life for the next 

two months,” said Laura Bush, an aerospace graduate student. Matt Lenda, another 

student, agreed, saying “this is definitely the coolest thing.” Twenty students had been 

trained and would be overseen by 16 professionals. As Lenda said, “In space operations, boring is good. You want boring.”147

Even before the photometer took its first images of the star field, important data 

collection was taking place. “We have thoroughly measured the background noise so 

that our photometer can detect minute changes in a star’s brightness caused by planets,” 

said Borucki three weeks after launch. After those measurements were completed, 

the 1.7- by 1.3-meter oval protective dust cover—key for protecting the photometer 

from particle contamination and stray light during launch—was jettisoned into space. 

Engineers at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics mission operations 

center heated up the “burn wire” remotely. As the thin wire heated with an electrical 

current, it weakened and broke, releasing a latch on the photometer’s cover. The springloaded cover swung open, the fly-away hinge released, and then it was gone.148 As the 

photometer continued moving away from Earth at about a kilometer per second, the 

engineers and scientists prepared to take the mission’s first stellar measurements—its 

“first light.”

“I came in early that morning—I was holding my breath in anticipation,” said Jon 

Jenkins, a researcher at SETI, of the day the first data came down. Once he opened 

the software with the Kepler data and the light curve for HAT-P-7, an early target, 

145 Dunn, M. (2009, 9 March). “Telescope Blasts into Space To Find Other Earths.” AP.

146 David, L. (2009, 15 January). “Kepler Spacecraft to hunt Earth-like worlds.” Space.com.

147 Jaffe, M. (2009, 9 March). “CU, Ball Space Mission Blasts Off.” Denver Post.

148 “Cover taken off planet-hunting telescope.” (2009, 9 April). Space.com.
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Jenkins saw distinctive dips in the light curve. Excitedly, he showed them to the team, 

saying, “I think we are looking at our first science paper.”149 The transit signal was so 

strong that both the transit and the eclipse of the planet as it passed behind the star 

were clearly detected.

A “hot Jupiter” had thus been spotted in the first ten days of the mission. The planet 

had been detected previously by ground-based telescopes, demonstrating Kepler’s 

detection capabilities. The paper would be published in the journal Science the first 

week of August 2009, but the team could not wait to release the first images to the 

press and the American people, who funded the mission.

The release policy for Kepler data was strict, requiring that planet detections be 

validated by ground-based observations that met rigorous requirements.150 Since it 

takes time to schedule telescope operations and to make the observations on a clear 

night and from observatories that can see the Summer Triangle clearly, no data of new 

planets would be released until several months after the first transits were detected.151

The first new science discoveries were announced in January 2010, at the American 

Astronomical Society meeting and in a special issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters. 

Twenty-eight papers were published on the first 10 days of data, including that (rare) special issue of the journal. On 15 June 2010, the Kepler data release contained 165,000 stars 

monitored for planetary transits, 750 of which had candidates for transiting planets.152

The Kepler data also revealed stellar oscillations, or “starquakes.” Such data allowed 

astroseismologists to study the interior of stars in much the same way that seismologists 

study earthquakes to understand the interior of Earth. Daniel Huber, lead author on a 

Kepler Asteroseismic Science Consortium study, said, “Kepler data ultimately will give 

us a better understanding of the future of our Sun and the evolution of our galaxy as 

a whole.” The first results released included detailed studies of the six-billion-year-old 

stars KIC 11026764 and RR Lyrae, shown to oscillate with not only the well-known 

period of 13.5 hours, but also an additional oscillation period twice as long.153

On 10 January 2011, the Kepler science team announced the discovery of the first 

rocky planet outside the solar system, orbiting a star now named Kepler 10. Scientists 

confirmed the observations with the W. M. Keck Observatory 10-meter telescope in 

149 Swift, M. (2009, 7 August). “Kepler Spacecraft Discovers Atmosphere of ‘Exoplanet.’” San Jose 

Mercury News.

150 Bryson, S., et al. (2020). “The occurrence of rocky habitable zone planets around solar-like 

stars from Kepler data.” Astron. J. 161, 36. See also Kepler Data Processing Handbook, KSCI19081-003, (2020) edited by Jon M. Jenkins.

151 Borucki et al. (2004, January). “The Kepler mission: A technical overview.” In Second Eddington 

Workshop: Stellar structure and habitable planet finding, 9–11 April 2003, Palermo, Italy. 177–182.

152 NASA. (2010, 26 October). “NASA’s Kepler Mission Wins 2010 Software of the Year Award.” 

NASA news release 10-245.

153 NASA. (2010, 26 October). “NASA’s Kepler Spacecraft Takes Pulse of Distant Stars.” NASA 

news release 10-276.
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Hawaiʻi and measured the planet’s properties. Kepler 10b, its second planet, is 1.4 times 

Earth’s size, 4.6 times Earth’s mass, and has an average density of 8.8 grams/cubic centimeter. Measurements of the variation in Kepler 10’s light showed that Kepler 10b has 

an orbital period of 0.84 days; Kepler 10b is therefore over 400 times closer to its star 

than Earth is to the Sun, and the planet is not in the habitable zone.154 Just over a year 

earlier, after a meeting at NASA Headquarters held on 16 December 2009 that included 

a presentation by William Borucki providing a peek at the mission’s first results, NASA 

announced the transfer of management of all operations for the Kepler mission from 

JPL back to NASA Ames. James Fanson was succeeded as project manager by Roger 

Hunter, who had joined the project earlier in 2009 as Kepler project manager at Ames. 

Borucki and Koch retained their roles as science Principal Investigator and Deputy 

PI. “The transition of the mission leadership from JPL to Ames is the culmination 

of a transition plan agreed to some time ago by the two centers,” Hunter said. “Ames 

had a large role in the development of the mission and plays an even larger role in its 

operation. The transfer of the project management role is the final milestone of this 

mission transition.”155

During its eight years of operation, the Kepler/K2 mission detected over 2,600 

confirmed planets with several thousand more candidates. These range from rocky 

planets like Earth to giant planets that have densities as low as that of plastic foam.156

Many of these planets are similar in size to Earth, and a fraction are in the habitable 

zone of their stars where life might be possible. The results show that there are more 

planets than stars in our galaxy and imply that there are billions of Earth-size planets 

in the habitable zone. The Kepler mission provided the data needed to develop more 

advanced (and much more expensive) space missions that will be able to determine 

which planets have an atmosphere, liquid water, and signs of life.

THE MOON MINERALOGY MAPPER (M3)

While Dawn and Kepler were moving toward launch, NASA selected a mission of 

opportunity to be implemented through the Discovery Program: the Moon Mineralogy 

Mapper (M3). The instrument, led by Carle Pieters of Brown University, would map 

the mineral composition of the entire lunar surface at high resolution, flying on the 

Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO’s) Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, which was 

154 NASA. (2011, 10 January). “NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers its First Rocky Planet.” NASA 

news release 11-007.

155 NASA. (2009, 16 December). “NASA Transfers Kepler Mission Management to Ames Research 

Center.” NASA news release 09-156AR.

156 Borucki, W. (2016). “Kepler Mission: Development and Overview.” Rep. Prog. Phys. 79, 036901.
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scheduled to launch in late 2008. Pieters was also a team member on the Dawn mission. The selection by the Discovery Program was only a first step toward approval 

for M3. It still needed to be selected by ISRO for flight.

To hedge its bets, NASA gave M3 a six-month Phase A, at $250,000 in real-year 

dollars in April 2005, that would occur concurrently with the ISRO selection time 

frame. If selected by the space agency, NASA and ISRO would work together to draft 

an international agreement before confirming the Moon instrument for full development.157 The investigation complemented other experiments selected by NASA in 

response to the Announcement of Opportunity for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter 

(LRO), a spacecraft set to launch in 2009 to study the Moon for future human missions.

Driving the science of M3 was the search for direct evidence of water ice pockets 

inside craters near the lunar poles. The instrument was an 8.3-kilogram visible–to–

near-infrared grating spectrometer (0.43 to 3.0 microns), with a 24-degree field of 

view and two imaging modes: global (140 meters spatial, 20–40 nanometers spectral) 

and targeted (70 meters spatial, 10 nanometers spectral), all at higher resolutions than 

any previous, similar lunar science instrument. The spectrometer would acquire long, 

narrow, 40-kilometer images of the lunar surface in a 260-color spectrum. A full map 

of the lunar surface would be created by combining over 274 image strips after the 

data were received back on Earth.

The lunar mission Chandrayaan-1 (“moon craft” in Sanskrit) would carry 11 instruments in its payload, with six provided by consortia outside India. In addition to orbiting the Moon, it would carry a 64-pound smart impactor with camera, altimeter, and 

spectrometer, which would be released from the spacecraft to plow into the lunar surface.

The notion of a joint U.S.–India mission emerged from the Next Steps in Strategic 

Partnership, announced by President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Atal Bihari 

Vajpayee in January 2004.158 Four years later—long after M3 was approved by ISRO—

NASA Administrator Mike Griffin and ISRO Chairman G. Madhavan Nair announced 

the renewal and expansion of an older international agreement for cooperation between 

the two space programs in the areas of Earth and space science, exploration, and human 

spaceflight. (The previous agreement, signed on 16 December 1997, had addressed 

only the areas of Earth and atmospheric sciences.)159

There were, initially, concerns among observers about International Traffic in Arms 

Regulations (ITAR) requirements, particularly since nuclear weapons development and 

ISRO’s space program are closely tied. In fact, “initially, ISRO refused to sign the ITAR 

157 NASA. (2005, 2 February). “NASA Selects Moon Mapper for Mission of Opportunity.” NASA 

news release 05-037.

158 “Chandrayaan marks new beginning in Indo-U.S. relation.” (2008, 4 February). Times of India.

159 “India, U.S. to cooperate in space exploration.” (2008, 4 February). Press Trust of India.
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agreements,” said project manager Thomas Glavich of M3, because the ITAR agreements 

characterized India’s role as “technical assistance.” The agency repeatedly pointed out 

that it was their spacecraft, and they were helping us, not the other way around.

M3 was required to have a “Technical Assistance Agreement” prior to its confirmation review, scheduled for February 2006. To make progress on instrument development despite legal formalities, the M3

 team developed a document they called 

“Assumed Requirements” based on ISRO information, for internal use only. Work 

on the Technical Assistance Agreement continued at NASA Headquarters, the State 

Department, and the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi. It was finally signed the day before 

its immovable deadline.160

There was an international learning curve. Bonnie Buratti, a planetary scientist at 

the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who was part of the M3 team, said: “I think the big thing 

was coming to terms with the fact that the Indians do things a lot different than we 

do....” That didn’t mean the mission was beset with problems. Just the opposite. “The 

thing that really amazed me is that this is the only project I’ve ever been on where the 

schedule was speeded up.”161

The team noted that “the technical sophistication of the ISRO is every bit the 

equal of NASA’s.” The processes, however, were not the same. There was no integrated 

control document as part of the ISRO process, for example, so the M3 team and the 

Chandrayaan-1 team had to work together to create one. Management, system engineers, and subsystem leads from each team spent four days in a conference room in 

Bangalore with M3’s export compliance officer, Discovery and New Frontiers Program 

management, and two engineers from Marshall Space Flight Center. Since Marshall 

already had a Memorandum of Understanding in place with ISRO, their engineers 

could communicate more freely with the ISRO team. On the fifth day, they signed the 

integrated control document, and all returned home, communicating frequently by 

teleconference, e-mail, and WebEx.162

Another difference was apparent in scheduling. The project director maintained 

the schedule and schedule control; the project did not use schedule tracking software 

or Earned Value Management. Late schedule problems were solved by reducing the 

number of tests. The day-to-day integration and testing schedule, however, was really in 

160 Glavich, T., and M. White. (2010). “The Moon Mineralogy Mapper on Chandrayaan-1.” 

Presentation at the 2010 Project Management Challenge. Downloaded from http://pmchallenge.

gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/2010/Presentations/Glavich.pdf.

161 Niebur, S. (2009, 11 August). Personal interview with B. Buratti. Located in the “Moon Mineralogy 

Mapper” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

162 Glavich, T., and M. White. (2010). “The Moon Mineralogy Mapper on Chandrayaan-1.” 

Presentation at the 2010 Project Management Challenge. Downloaded from http://pmchallenge.

gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/2010/Presentations/Glavich.pdf.
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the hands of experienced personnel who had worked together for many missions and 

were familiar with the software. As with many new partnerships, vernacular became 

an issue, as M3 and Chandrayaan-1 engineers with the same job titles often had different responsibilities. Daylight between ISRO and NASA requirements was most 

visible during project reviews and in the test verification and validation processes.163

The pre-ship review from M3 was held just a year after the Critical Design 

Review, in May 2007. The instrument—the first of the eleven instruments to fly on 

Chandrayaan-1—was delivered in August.164 Thermal and vacuum testing took place 

the following summer, and the spacecraft survived a 20-day test at temperature extremes 

between –100° and 120°.165 Final integration and checkout occurred in August 2008.

Then the M3 team waited. And waited.

Because lunar mission launch windows open every two weeks, Chandrayaan-1 was 

not under the extreme time pressure that constrains many planetary missions. The 

original launch date of 9 April 2008 slipped when two ESA instruments were delayed.166

As late as the end of May, the launch date was still unknown, with news organizations 

reporting the launch scheduled sometime between July and September.167 Finally, a 

launch date of 19 October materialized, with a window extending to 28 October.168

After four days of heavy rain over and around the spaceport, the 575-kilogram 

Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft launched to cloudy skies at 6:20 a.m. on 22 October 2008, 

atop a 4-stage core Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle—India’s 44.4-meter, 316-ton rocket 

with six strap-on boosters—from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, in the Sriharikota 

range in Andhra Pradesh in southern India.169

Eighteen minutes later, the rocket had placed Chandrayaan-1 into an elliptical 

geostationary transfer orbit, just as planned. After a series of firings by its liquid rocket 

engine, the spacecraft eventually rose from an orbit of 14,200 miles to 235,000 miles 

from Earth. It entered lunar orbit two and a half weeks after launch, on Saturday, 

8 November 2008.170 Its orbit over the lunar surface was lowered eventually to a circular path about 62 miles up. On Friday, 15 November, at 8:06 p.m. Indian Standard 

Time (9:36 a.m. EST), an impactor named “Aditya” was released from Chandrayaan-1.

A video camera transmitted images as it descended, and the impactor also had an 

onboard radar altimeter and mass spectrometer. At 8:31 p.m. Indian Standard Time 

163 Ibid.

164 Clark, S. (2008, 29 May). “India’s moon probe being fitted with instrument suite.” Spaceflight Now.

165 “Spacecraft for moon mission unveiled.” (2009, 19 September). PTI.

166 Srikanth, B. (2008, 19 September). “Mission Moon.” Hindustan Times.

167 Clark, S. (2008, 29 May). “India’s moon probe being fitted with instrument suite.” Spaceflight Now.

168 Srikanth, B. (2008, 19 September). “Mission Moon.” Hindustan Times.

169 “Rocket completes mission, India’s first moon spacecraft now in orbit.” (2008, 22 October). 

Thaindian.com

170 Clark, S. (2008, 10 November). “First Indian ‘moon craft’ goes into lunar orbit.” Spaceflight Now.
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(10:01 a.m. EST), the 29-kilogram, 375- by 375- by 470-millimeter honeycombed Moon 

impact probe crashed successfully into a crater at the Moon’s South Pole. It impacted 

at 1.6 kilometers per minute. The probe was the first time India had touched the lunar 

surface, and painted on four sides of the impactor were miniature Indian national flags, 

to commemorate the birth of the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru (a 

holiday known as Children’s Day), on that day 119 years earlier. (Nehru was prime 

minister when the modern Indian space program was initiated in 1962.)171

Finding Water

Before launch, the strategy was to use the spacecraft’s first optical period to acquire 

global mode data, and the three remaining periods to target prioritized regions “likely 

to exhibit mineral diversity (fresh craters, large central peak craters, basin massifs, 

mare basalt boundaries, etc.).” The project also sought “recommended priority targets from the science community.”172 On 24 September 2009, Carle Pieters, the M3

Principal Investigator, and the M3 team published a paper in the journal Science titled 

“Character and Spatial Distribution of OH/H2O on the Surface of the Moon Seen 

by M3 on Chandrayaan-1.”173 Detailed findings from the Moon Mineralogy Mapper 

revealed absorption features near 2.8 to 3.0 micrometers on the lunar surface. This is 

characteristic of hydroxyls or water-bearing minerals. The signature was widely distributed across the Moon and strongest at the poles, suggesting that water processes are 

feeding cold traps that astronauts might one day use for long-duration lunar missions.

As Pieters explained, “When we say, ‘water on the moon,’ we are not talking about 

lakes, oceans or even puddles. Water on the moon means molecules of water and 

hydroxyl that interact with molecules of rock and dust specifically in the top millimeters of the moon’s surface.”174

Jessica Sunshine of the University of Maryland, a scientist on M3, said, “With 

our extended spectral range and views over the North Pole, we were able to explore 

the distribution of both water and hydroxyl as a function of temperature, latitude, 

composition, and time of day.... Our analysis unequivocally confirms the presence 

of these molecules on the Moon’s surface and reveals that the entire surface appears 

to be hydrated during at least some portion of the lunar day.”175

171 “India slams probe into the moon.” (2008, 15 November). Space.com.

172 Pieters, C., et al. (2007, March). “M3 on Chandrayaan-1: Strategy for mineral assessment of 

the moon.” LPSC XXXVIII.

173 Pieters, C., et al. (2009, 24 September). “Character and Spatial Distribution of OH/H2O on the 

Surface of the Moon Seen by M3 on Chandrayaan-1.” Science.

174 Asplund, S. (2009, November). “M3 Reveals Water Molecules on Lunar Surface.” Discovery 

and New Frontiers News. 1.

175 Ibid.
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It was consistent with data captured by the Visual and Infrared Mapping 

Spectrometer on the Cassini spacecraft, which a decade earlier had made observations on the Moon that suggested water and hydroxyls at all latitudes of the Moon, 

including in daylight.176 The Deep Impact mission, in its extended phase called EPOXI, 

made observations of the Moon during a flyby and likewise observed water signatures 

in June 2009.177 On 19 May 2009, ISRO announced the “successful completion of all 

major mission objectives” and raised Chandrayaan-1 from a 100-kilometer lunar orbit 

to 200 kilometers, ostensibly to enable imaging of a wider swath of the lunar surface. 

A broken star sensor caused the spacecraft to lose pointing accuracy—an early sign 

of trouble to come. On 29 August 2009, ISRO lost contact with the Chandrayaan-1 

mission. In addition to the spacecraft’s star sensor, its thermal and power supply systems likewise had been uncooperative. The spacecraft in total operated for 312 days 

and circled the Moon more than 3,400 times. Despite the premature ending, the large 

volume of data from Chandrayaan-1’s instrument payload included mapping more 

than 90 percent of the lunar surface and met most of the scientific objectives initially 

laid out.178 The mission was a great success for India, and the presence of M3 proved 

the responsiveness of the Discovery Program to inexpensive Missions of Opportunity.

176 NASA. (2009, 24 September). “Cassini’s Look at Water on the Moon.” Downloaded from https://

www.nasa.gov/topics/moonmars/features/clark1.html.

177 NASA. (2009. 24 September). “Deep Impact Identifies Water on the Lunar Surface.” Downloaded 

from https://www.nasa.gov/topics/moonmars/features/sunshine1.html.

178 Asplund, S. (2009, November). “M3 Reveals Water Molecules on Lunar Surface.” Discovery 

and New Frontiers News. 1.
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Figure 7-1: Kepler spacecraft 

The Kepler spacecraft at Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colorado. The Kepler mission 

surveyed a region of the Milky Way galaxy, discovering the first Earth-size exoplanets and determining 

that there are more planets than stars in our galaxy. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Ball, image no. 

PIA11733)
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Figure 7-2: Kepler’s first light 

This image from the Kepler mission shows the telescope’s “first light”: a full field of view of an expansive 

star-rich patch of sky in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra stretching across 100 square degrees. (Image 

credit: NASA/Ames/J. Jenkins)

293

In the first two decades after its founding, the Discovery Program continued to evolve 

in response to external pressures of budget, risk tolerance, and competing priorities, 

in addition to internal pressures like overruns and technical challenges on individual 

missions. The first five years of the program, 1992–1997, encouraged a significant 

amount of experimentation in many aspects of mission planning. After the failures 

of the adjacent Mars Program, the level of risk tolerance contracted, and the second 

five years of the program brought additional requirements from the NASA Integrated 

Action Team, increased agency scrutiny of the planetary program, additional projectlevel review, and the belief that more reviews meant fewer possible errors. For the 

first time, meanwhile, the Discovery Program had a Program Plan and a Program 

Commitment Agreement required by the agency.

But by the end of the first decade, a sharp dissonance manifested between the 

projects selected in the era of experimentation and management scrutiny intended 

to identify possible signals of future failure. CONTOUR failed shortly after launch. 

MESSENGER’s deputy project manager disappeared, potentially overwhelmed at 

the late delivery of parts and potential overruns. Deep Impact suffered cost threats, 

CHAPTER 8

Lessons Learned from the 

Evolution of the Program
NASA′s Discovery Program

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requiring a delayed Preliminary Design Review and additional oversight of industry 

partners. Dawn suffered after its own management institution changed the burden 

rates and reserve requirement, requiring descopes even before the project really began. 

Kepler was selected at a time when the management of most NASA space science and 

planetary missions was a privilege reserved for Goddard Space Flight Center and the 

Jet Propulsion Laboratory; as such, Ames management had an extra layer of management foisted on their project. All these missions, except CONTOUR, would require 

additional resources to compensate for project delays, funding delays, and new program requirements. The CONTOUR failure was, ironically, the only thing that kept 

the program in the black from 2001 to 2003, as much of the funding intended for 

mission operations was redirected to cover overruns in later missions. Nevertheless, 

the failure and later overruns put the Discovery Program in a difficult situation, and 

program management at NASA Headquarters worried about congressional scrutiny 

should the overruns continue.

This chapter will discuss lessons learned in the decade that followed, as identified 

formally from studies by the National Research Council; the NASA Planetary Science 

Subcommittee; the Discovery and New Frontiers Program Office; and, informally, by 

mission management, the proposing community, and program management. This 

chapter will also demonstrate how the program evolved as lessons learned were implemented into the program’s guidelines and assessment, represented by each of the planned 

Announcements of Opportunity—snapshots in time of current policies. It will also 

examine aspects and challenges of the program in 2011, where this narrative ends.

The decade began with National Research Council and Independent Review Team 

reports, and the postponement of the 2002 Announcement of Opportunity due to 

financial pressures. The 2003 Decadal Survey of planetary science that created the New 

Frontiers program line praised and prioritized the Discovery pipeline. A Discovery 

Lessons Learned Retreat was held. As funding became available in the outyears, the 

2004 Announcement of Opportunity became a reality. Non-selections and a protest 

postponed the traditional Lessons Learned Workshop following that AO. The 2005 

Announcement of Opportunity was announced with the selection of M3, but it also 

had to be postponed, eventually becoming the 2006 AO as a flurry of cost studies were 

commissioned by NASA Headquarters.

The findings and recommendations of these studies by the Space Studies Board, 

NASA, the Science Support Office, and the Discovery and New Frontiers Program 

Office in the second half of the decade will be discussed, tabulated, compared, and 

traced to changes that resulted in the 2010 AO. It is important to keep in mind, 

however, that while these studies excelled at capturing the zeitgeist of the times, 

recording lessons learned and discussion by mission leadership, and in codifying 

recommendations proposed and advocated by both the proposing community and 
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management, there is rarely a one-to-one correspondence between recorded lessons 

learned and changes in program policy. Recommendations may be rejected or ignored, 

particularly where they correctly identify the problem but propose a solution that is 

impractical in the current environment, is inappropriate for reasons of directorate 

policy, or has already been rejected by upper management. No response from NASA 

is required to these studies, and so the results are rarely tracked, as report after report 

is issued and ultimately sits on someone’s shelf. This chapter is one attempt to look at 

the recommendations and corresponding changes in policy over the second decade 

of the Discovery Program.

COMPLEX AND THE NRC REPORT: ASSESSMENT 

OF MISSION SIZE TRADEOFFS

Periodically, NASA asks the National Research Council’s Space Studies Board to study 

a particular question relevant to space and Earth sciences. As part of the Fiscal Year 

1999 budget process, the Senate conference report directed NASA to contract with 

the National Research Council “for a study across all space science and Earth science 

disciplines to identify missions that cannot be accomplished within the parameters 

imposed by the smaller faster, better, cheaper regime. The [study] report should focus 

on the next 15 years, and attempt to quantify the level of funding per project that would 

be required to meet the specified scientific goals.”1

NASA commissioned the study with a letter on 22 April 1999 to the Space Studies 

Board, noting that although future mission planning was currently underway at NASA 

and “a complete allocation of science objectives to particular missions cannot be made 

at this time,” NASA would like the study to identify “the general criteria for assessing 

strengths and limitations of small, medium, and large missions in terms of scientific 

productivity, including quality and amount of science value returned, responsiveness 

to evolving opportunities, ability to take advantage of technological progress, and other 

factors” and to identify which of NASA’s planned science goals would require the use of 

medium and large missions, where medium-class missions would cost between $150 

million and $350 million.2 Since Discovery fell squarely in the medium category, the 

most relevant results would be a) input and b) output from the discussion on criteria 

for discussing strengths and limitations of medium-size missions. 

1 Congressional Research Service. (1998). Department of Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban 

Development, and Independent Agencies Appropriations Bill, 1999: S. 2, 105th Congress. 

pp. 105–216.

2 Asrar, G., and E. Weiler. (1999, 22 April). Letter to C. Canizares. See also: Space Studies Board. 

(2000). Assessment of Mission Size Trade-Offs for NASA’s Earth and Space Science Missions. National 

Academies Press: Washington, DC. 91.
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The National Research Council’s Committee on Planetary and Lunar Exploration 

proposed the following criteria for evaluating the mission mix:

• Addresses high-priority scientific goals 

• Optimizes science return for the money spent 

• Exhibits compatibility between mission goals and scale

• Demonstrates a balanced-risk strategy 

• Considers future application of new technologies 

• Shows balance between technology and science 

• Involves community in mission/instrument/technology selection 

• Promotes stable funding and continuous planetary exploration 

• Is consonant with Deep Space Network and Mission Operations and Data 

Analysis support 

• Uses diverse modes of mission implementation (principal investigator–led, 

university-industry-NASA, NASA-led) 

• Incorporates education and public outreach3

Several of these criteria were then folded into Recommendation 2 of the Ad Hoc 

Committee on the Assessment of Mission Size Trade-offs for Earth and Space Science 

Missions: “Ensure that science objectives—and their relative importance in a given 

discipline—are the primary determinants of what missions are carried out and their 

sizes, and ensure that mission planning responds to 1) the link between science priorities and science payload, 2) timeliness in meeting science objectives, and 3) risks 

associated with the mission.” How Recommendation 2 would be implemented, however, was not as clear. 

Selection of Discovery missions required that three major criteria be met: the science is of high merit and relevance, the instruments are appropriate for the investigation and of sufficient technology readiness level, and the mission is of low or medium 

risk. No one factor counted significantly more than the others; a proposal that scored 

“Excellent” or “Very Good” on science merit would still be un-selectable if it was highrisk. A “Good” science proposal would not likely be selected even if it was low-risk. 

This overall philosophy had not changed since the 1996 AO. 

The second phrase in the recommendation urged the Science Mission Directorate to 

consider the relative importance of the proposed science objectives in a given discipline 

when making selection or planning decisions. On the face of it, this was a plausible 

recommendation, but when one looked at it from a Discovery perspective, this was 

impossible. Missions proposed to Discovery were required to show their relevance to 

3 Space Studies Board. (2000). Assessment of Mission Size Trade-Offs for NASA’s Earth and Space 

Science Missions. National Academies Press: Washington, DC. 91.
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the NASA strategic plan, but the strategic plans can be quite broad. Even the strictest 

interpretation of requirements allowed Discovery missions to focus their investigations on nearly any aspect of the origin or evolution of planetary bodies, as well as the 

search for exoplanets (in some Announcements of Opportunity). Selection was always 

based on the presentation of high-quality science tempered with an acceptable level 

of risk within the constraints of cost and schedule. 

The second half of Recommendation 2 urged the correspondence of science priorities 

and science payload, which was the mechanism for fellow scientists and instrument 

builders to determine whether the proposing team had chosen appropriate instrumentation for the mission so that the major questions in the investigation could be 

answered. (The remainder of the recommendation was satisfied by the tenets of the 

Discovery Program: development time constraints and acceptable risk were always 

criteria of selection.) 

Returning to the COMPLEX criteria, the question of whether the missions optimized science return for money spent was a hot debate in the early years of the first 

decade of the twenty-first century in both Discovery and Explorer mission lines, particularly under the leadership of Paul Hertz, chief scientist in the Science Mission 

Directorate and, later, head of the Astrophysics Division. Hertz and others determined 

that Discovery missions were explicitly not looking at “science per dollar,” but instead 

looking to maximize science return within the Discovery cost cap. This was a subtle but 

important distinction that drove proposal strategy. If Discovery was looking for “science per dollar,” proposers would likely underbid as a strategy, coming in with plenty 

of “room to the cap.” Since room to the cost cap was ignored in most competitions in 

the first twenty years of the Discovery Program, this strategy, and the recommendation, 

could be set aside. The program continued to approach the process with the strategy 

of optimizing science return within the program cost cap instead. 

The criterion that each mission should exhibit “compatibility between mission goals 

and scale” is interesting in the context of the time; MESSENGER had, at the time, been 

recently selected by the Discovery Program, and it was touted as “a flagship-quality 

mission” in a Discovery box.4 The study was correct in foreseeing that an incompatibility would cause the program all kinds of problems, including the delay of future 

Announcements of Opportunity, as will be shown later in this chapter. However, that 

did not stop the program from selecting the Kepler photometer the next year.

The “balanced-risk strategy” became meaningless at about the time that the report 

was issued, as the pendulum of NASA’s risk tolerance swung far to the cautious side 

with the 1999 Mars mission failures and the subsequent NASA Integrated Action Team 

4 “Lab wins Discovery mission.” (1999, 9 July). JPL Universe, 29(14). 6.
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recommendations. No longer was the occasional failure an acceptable outcome of the 

faster, better, cheaper missions. Instead, the projects would have additional requirements, 

reviews, and deliverables, in many cases far more than they were bound to at selection.

The technology metrics, and the subsequent committee Recommendation 

3—“Maintain a vigorous technology program for the development of advanced spacecraft hardware that will enable a portfolio of missions of varying sizes and complexities”—and 4—“Develop scientific instrumentation enabling a portfolio of mission sizes, 

ensuring that funding for such development efforts is augmented and appropriately 

balanced with space mission line budgets”—were largely ignored, as NASA’s new risk 

posture required the adoption of more mature technologies developed through other 

programs, minimizing development during the Discovery formulation phases. The 

early Announcements of Opportunity encouraged new technologies and significant 

technology transfer, but this disappeared with the changes in the 2004 AO. Additionally, 

the metric that the mission mix should show “balance between technology and science,” in fact, conflicted with the first recommendation, that science objectives be the 

primary determinant of mission selection. 

The metrics that the community be involved in mission, instrument, and technology 

selection; that the division approach promote stable funding and continuous planetary 

exploration; and that the missions incorporate education and public outreach were 

core values of the Discovery Program that did not change in the following decade. The 

missions were supported with Mission Operations and Data Analysis as proposed and 

also in external data analysis programs as necessary. From the NEAR data analysis 

program (2001–2003) to the Discovery data analysis (2003–2006) to the planetary 

missions data analysis program, the Planetary Science Division made sure that there 

were opportunities and funding for data analysis from the Discovery missions.

One proposed metric was seemingly forgotten: using diverse modes of mission 

implementation (e.g., PI-led, university-industry-NASA team, NASA-led) is no longer 

a priority in the PI-led era. NASA-led missions are reserved for large flagship missions; 

small or medium Discovery missions are always PI-led, with teaming arrangements 

at the discretion of the PI and his or her team.

After receiving these metrics and other input from the four standing committees of 

the Space Studies Board, the ad hoc committee met 8–10 September 1999 and released 

its report, “Assessment of Mission Size Trade-Offs for NASA’s Earth and Space Science 

Missions,” on 15 January.5 In addition to the recommendations discussed above, the 

committee had Recommendation 5, “Develop more affordable launch options for 

gaining access to space, including—possibly—foreign launch vehicles, so that a mixed 

portfolio of mission sizes becomes a viable approach,” which was out of scope for the 

5 Space Studies Board. (2000). Assessment of Mission Size Trade-Offs for NASA’s Earth and Space 

Science Missions. National Academies Press: Washington, DC. 91.
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OSS in terms of both policy and budget; and Recommendation 6, “Encourage international collaboration in all sizes and classes of missions, so that international missions 

will be able to fill key niches in NASA’s space and Earth science programs. Specifically, 

restore separate, peer-reviewed Announcements of Opportunity for enhancements to 

foreign-led space research missions.6 The former was a policy for a few years, until an 

overdependence on international collaborations caused the Associate Administrator 

to resist selecting proposals with heavy dependence on foreign instruments, and the 

latter finally became a policy with the initiation of the first Stand-ALone Missions of 

Opportunity Notice (SALMON) in 2008.

The committee report noted several findings on the effectiveness of the faster, 

better, cheaper approach, with an important caveat: “Policy makers looking for guidance on these programs in terms of cost and size trade-offs should be made aware 

that the variables are more numerous and much more complex than might at first be 

supposed.”7 While this is certainly true, the 1999 National Research Council findings 

are included here as external evaluations of the Discovery and Explorer programs run 

in the faster, better, cheaper mode.

The committee supports several principles being implemented in the FBC methodology. 

Specifically, it found a number of positive aspects of the FBC approach, including the following:

• A mixed portfolio of mission sizes is crucial in virtually all Earth and space science disciplines to accomplish the various research objectives. The FBC approach 

has produced useful improvements across the spectrum of programs regardless of 

absolute mission size or cost.

• Shorter development cycles have enhanced scientific responsiveness, lowered costs, 

involved a larger community, and enabled the use of the best available technologies.

• The increased frequency of missions has broadened research opportunities for the 

Earth and space sciences.

• Scientific objectives can be met with greater flexibility by spreading a program over 

several missions.

Nonetheless, some problems exist in the practical application of the FBC approach, including the following:

• The heavy emphasis on cost and schedule has too often compromised scientific 

outcomes (scope of mission, data return, and analysis of results).

• Technology development is a cornerstone of the FBC approach for science missions 

but is often not aligned with science-based mission objectives.

• The cost and schedule constraints for some missions may lead to choosing designs, 

management practices, and technologies that introduce additional risks.

6 Ibid., p. 5.

7 Ibid., p. 2.
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• The nation’s launch infrastructure is limited in its ability to accommodate smaller 

spacecraft in a timely, reliable, and cost-effective way.8

The first criticism was a reaction to NASA’s approach to overruns in development 

in the previous decade, often allowing a mission to “move money forward” to pay 

for development costs at the expense of data collection and analysis time during the 

operations phase. This happened notably in the Discovery Program on Genesis; efforts 

were made in the early part of the decade to take this option off the table and protect 

the science return of the Discovery missions. It remained an issue with respect to 

science descopes, removing scientific instrumentation from the payload, or observation time from operations, to pay for overruns in development, whether the overruns 

originated from an element of the science payload or an engineering subsystem. Given 

the choice to non-confirm or terminate the mission, to allow it to exceed its cost cap, 

or to descope a science instrument—for some managers, the last choice was often the 

path of least resistance. After all, descoping an instrument could be seen as both a 

solution to the cost overruns and a punishment. This was not one of the more inspiring aspects of the program, but in a cost-constrained environment that did not allow 

missions to exceed their cost cap, this option was preferable to non-confirmation or 

termination of the entire mission. 

The third criticism was certainly valid. It played out in an interesting way. With 

cost and schedule constraints fixed and risk one of the primary selection factors, not 

all mission concepts or investigations were on equal footing at proposal. A mission to a 

particular comet, for example, may be ideal for one set of Announcement of Opportunity 

parameters, but changes in the “launch by” date or significant delay in the release of 

the AO could make the original trajectory unusable. The team could often torque the 

proposal to fit into the constraints of the new AO, but the resulting plan would have 

been placed in a higher-risk category and therefore become un-selectable. Cost and 

schedule constraints, coupled with a desire for lower-risk missions, constrained the 

choice of science investigations in the Discovery Program. 

The availability of small, low-cost launch vehicles was and remained a difficult 

parameter for proposers developing mission concepts for Discovery in its first twenty 

years. At one point, the program faced the option of extending NASA’s contract for 

Delta II expendable launch vehicles to accommodate a single launch; Discovery would 

have to pay not only for the launch vehicles desired, but also the launch pad and “standing army” costs of required personnel up to the last launch date—including times 

when no Discovery mission was being readied for launch. This option was prohibitive on a long-term basis, and it temporarily threw the program into crisis. Because 

of the phase-out of the Delta II rocket at NASA, proposers to the 2010 AO were able 

8 Ibid.
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to propose missions using three larger launch vehicles: the Delta IV, the Atlas V, and 

the Falcon 9. The only catch was that as the NASA launch services contract was not 

finalized when they proposed, proposers would have to keep their designs compatible for all three shrouds, masses, and power constraints, or discuss their rationale 

for proposing to a use a particular launch vehicle (see Requirement 88 of the 2010 

Announcement Opportunity).

In the early years of the Discovery Program, the use and development of new 

technologies was a supporting objective. As this report made clear, however, its pairing with scientific objectives was not always an ideal match. For a new technology to 

be ready to launch on a mission with a 35-month development phase, its expected 

development time would need to be considerably shorter. This required the initial 

development of these technologies to occur well before the proposal of any individual 

mission proposing its use. 

This “reliance on non-mission funds (e.g., Planetary Instrument Definition and 

Development Program, or PIDDP),” was an accepted aspect of the program, and PIDDP 

was funded appropriately, making a wide range of selections of technologies that later 

were incorporated into NASA flight missions.9 The stated goal of the PIDDP program 

was always “to define and develop instruments or instrument components to the point 

where the instruments may be proposed in response to future announcements of 

flight opportunity without additional extensive technology development.”10 When that 

report was written, and for several years afterward, this was the case. PIDDP provided 

funding for the development of instruments at low technology readiness levels (1–3), 

including “feasibility studies, conceptual design, and laboratory breadboarding (but 

not brass-boarding) of critical components and complete instruments,” and Discovery 

proposals were encouraged to propose new technologies, as shown in the following 

excerpt, identical in the 1998 and 2000 Discovery AOs:11

Supporting Objective 2: Encourage the use of new technologies to achieve program objectives and foster their transfer into the private sector.

The inclusion of new technologies to achieve performance enhancements and to reduce 

total mission cost is encouraged in Discovery proposals. Proposals that include new 

technologies should pay especially careful attention to technology development plans 

and/or risk mitigation approaches. The use of new technologies will enable more 

9 Ibid.; NASA. (1998, 5 February). Research Opportunities in Space Science 1998, NRA 98-OSS-03. 

Planetary Instrument Definition and Development Program. Appendix A 3.5.

10 NASA. (1998, 5 February). Research Opportunities in Space Science 1998, NRA 98-OSS-03. Planetary 

Instrument Definition and Development Program. Appendix A 3.5.

11 NASA. (2003). Research Opportunities in Space Science 2003. Planetary Instrument Definition 

and Development Program. Appendix A.2.11.
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aggressive and exciting scientific objectives to be pursued. The teaming of industry, 

university, and government is meant to foster an environment conducive to technology 

development, utilization, and commercialization.12

However, the changing risk tolerance at NASA, precipitated in part by four FBC 

mission failures (Lewis, the Wide-Field Infrared Explorer, Mars Polar Lander, and 

Mars Climate Orbiter), would lead to the deletion of this supporting objective for the 

program and also in the 2004 AO. In its place was a much harsher demand of technology readiness, using the agency-wide definitions:

2004: “Investigations proposing new technology, i.e., technologies having a technology readiness level (TRL) less than 7 (see TRL Definitions in the DPL), will be penalized for risk if 

adequate backup plans to ensure success of the mission are not described.” All proposals 

would be required to include a “Description of the proposed plan for bringing each of the 

identified items to a minimum of TRL 6, defined as “system/subsystem model or prototype 

demonstration in a relevant environment, space, or ground” by Confirmation Review (CR) 

at the end of Phase B (include discussion of simulations, prototyping, systems testing, life 

testing, etc., as appropriate).”13

The 2006 Announcement of Opportunity had the exact same wording of this 

requirement, with a slight change to the first sentence, where the flight requirement 

was relaxed to “less than 6.”14 By the end of the decade, the expectation was even more 

stringent: “Proposed investigations are generally expected to have mature technologies, 

specifically all technologies at a technology readiness level (TRL) of six or higher.”15

However, PIDDP still allowed only the development of instruments through 

technology readiness levels 1 to 3 (breadboarding, but not brass-boarding) until the 

release of the 2008 Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Science (ROSES). This 

caused quite a problem for proposers in the early and middle parts of the decade, as 

they struggled to continue instrument development without the support of a NASA 

Supporting Research and Technology program. Astrobiologists and Mars scientists 

had mid-level technology readiness level programs, the argument went, but the other 

planetary scientists did not, and they were at a disadvantage. As they realized this 

to be true, the expansion of PIDDP or the addition of a mid-technology readiness 

level technology program was discussed and advocated for by the Discovery Program 

Scientist, who also managed PIDDP for a time; the Discovery Program Manager at 

NASA Headquarters; and others, but approval would not be granted until 2008. 

12 NASA. (1998). Discovery Announcement of Opportunity. See also: NASA. (2000). Discovery 

Announcement of Opportunity.

13 NASA. (2004). Discovery Announcement of Opportunity.

14 NASA. (2006). Discovery Announcement of Opportunity.

15 NASA. (2010). Discovery Announcement of Opportunity.
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Meanwhile, the Discovery Program still had to plan and release AOs under its 

current constraints and within the environment of Office of Space Science and NASA 

in the early days of the twenty-first century.

CURRENT NEEDS VS. FUTURE PLANS: THE 2002 AO

The 2000 AO selection process was the last to go smoothly for quite some time. The 

program was not able to hold program-level reserves, due to a difficult budget environment and the OSS philosophy that project overruns should be solved “within the 

Division,” making funds interchangeable for planetary projects. Any reserve held was 

held at the division level, and there were many claims on the small amount of funds 

available in any given year. The delays imposed on Dawn and Kepler due to insufficient funds at time of selection had been funded by this time, but additional funds 

were still required for the additional layer of management imposed as the mission 

team complied with the Associate Administrator’s direction to add NASA Goddard 

Space Flight Center or the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as the management institution. 

CONTOUR was getting ready for launch, and frequent management changes at the 

program level may have lessened the traceability of needs signaled in previous years. 

Dave Jarrett, who led the Discovery Program Office, continued ably at the NASA 

Management Office at JPL, assisted by Kate Wolf on financial affairs, but he became 

additionally taxed with frequent trips to the East Coast to help MESSENGER as it 

became apparent that the project was in financial trouble. As MESSENGER’s project 

manager, Max Peterson, retired, expecting his deputy to step up and fill in, his deputy 

likewise became overwhelmed, leaving the project after a particularly taxing trip to a 

West Coast supplier. The replacement project manager took a “clean slate” approach, 

buckling down with cost charts and outstanding needs to determine what would be 

required to bring the mission to the launch pad. Jarrett spent many hours with the 

project preparing their request to NASA Headquarters—a request for which they were 

not fully financially prepared. MESSENGER ultimately went to NASA Headquarters 

requesting additional funds. Deep Impact followed, their own requests ready and waiting. 

Unfortunately, NASA Headquarters had no program-level reserve with which to 

fulfill requests. Any additional funding granted the projects came out of a line labeled 

“Futures,” which Nancy C. Porter and Susan Niebur of the Discovery Program guarded 

staunchly; it was this line that would determine when the next Discovery Announcement 

of Opportunity could be released. The draft 2002 AO sat on Niebur’s desk through 

the five requests for additional funding from the projects in 2002–2003, progressively 

buried under iterations of the Discovery Program spreadsheet and the diminishing 

outyears of the Futures budget line that made it impossible to release. Each conference 

or community meeting brought questions about the subsequent AO release, and each 
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meeting saw Niebur, Jay T. Bergstralh, or Colleen Hartman of the Planetary Science 

Division reply that the AO could not be released until there was sufficient funding 

in the outyears to support an appropriate mission profile. The AO was pushed to late 

2002, then 2003, and then canceled altogether.

The budget overruns had not gone unnoticed. After yet another request for additional 

funding, Ed Weiler, the Associate Administrator of the Science Mission Directorate, 

showed great frustration during a monthly meeting of NASA center representatives 

and NASA Headquarters personnel. He pushed back from the table, looked the center representatives in the eye, and declared that these constant requests would not 

be tolerated on future missions. The trouble is, he said, that the missions don’t carry 

enough reserves. From that point forward, each mission would be required to carry 

25 percent reserves at confirmation. 

The news surprised even the Discovery personnel in the room. Niebur, who had 

just been speaking with Dawn management, worried about the missions in the pipeline. Before she could speak up, Weiler turned to Hartman and other Solar System 

Exploration Division managers seated behind her and repeated the policy: All future 

AOs will require 25 percent reserves at proposal and at confirmation. Niebur worried 

that this could adversely affect missions already struggling to stay within their budgets; 

she spoke up, forgetting for a moment that she was the youngest in the room and junior 

staff were not encouraged to speak when Weiler was interacting with center directors 

and their designees. So she asked if this applied to missions in formulation, hoping 

that he would issue an exemption for Dawn and Kepler and the Explorer projects 

proposed under one set of rules and now being faced with living by another. Weiler 

refused to grant any exceptions. All missions should be proposed with and maintain 

a level of 25 percent reserves by confirmation.

Clearly, Dawn and Kepler had some work to do. The program executives and 

scientists returned to their cubicles and offices and called their projects. This new 

edict would affect all missions that had not yet passed confirmation, and there would 

be no exemptions available for the newest Discovery missions as there was no argument that they were not prone to the same cost risks as their immediate predecessors, 

MESSENGER and Deep Impact.

Discovery’s troubles were reported in the press, and the postponement of the 2002 

Announcement of Opportunity was noted by SpaceNews: 

MESSENGER’s problems also prompted a number of changes in the way NASA manages its 

Discovery class missions, the most immediate being a postponement of a competition to select 

the next round of moderate-cost space science missions. When that competition finally goes 

forward, the selected missions will be required to hold 25 percent of their budgets in reserves 

to better deal with the kinds of technical and schedule challenges the MESSENGER team 
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encountered. While a 5 percent or 6 percent overrun is not considered serious enough to 

automatically trigger a program termination review, MESSENGER’s budget troubles stand 

out because it is the first Discovery class spacecraft not to be completed within the cost cap.16

This was not technically true, as Genesis had also required additional funds in operations to compensate for the funds that had been moved forward to compensate for 

technical needs, but the fiction remained “common knowledge” in the community 

for years afterward.

NASA Headquarters personnel continued to work toward a release as soon as possible—that is, as soon as the program’s budget profile allowed it. Potential proposers 

and planetary scientists believed it would happen, as did program management.17 That 

the 2002 AO would be canceled altogether was unexpected.

Delays in AO release impacted the public sharing of lessons learned, as each AO 

was typically followed by a formal Lessons Learned Workshop open to the community 

of scientists, project managers, business managers, and new business representatives 

from industry and other partners. Since the AO was delayed to 2004, the workshop 

was delayed as well, causing a large gap between public workshops. A program-only 

retreat, not affected by the imminent release of an AO, would be held in 2003.

NEW FRONTIERS

By this time, the Space Studies Board and hand-picked experts in solar system science had created the first planetary science Decadal Survey outlining the state of the 

field and the recommendations for flight projects in the next decade: “New Frontiers 

in the Solar System.” Discovery was recommended as the top priority in small solar 

system flight missions, and the New Frontiers mission line was created for mediumsize missions, at about twice the cost cap of Discovery. The survey noted, “Given 

Discovery’s highly successful start, the SSE Survey endorses the continuation of this 

program, which relies on Principal Investigator leadership and competition to obtain 

the greatest science return within a cost cap. A flight rate of no less than one launch 

every 18 months is recommended.”18

The report praised Discovery’s structure and performance, saying: 

The success of the Discovery Program, exemplified by the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous 

(NEAR) mission, Lunar Prospector, and Mars Pathfinder, has convinced even the most 

16 Berger, B. (2003, 22 September). “MESSENGER Busts Cost Cap, Prompting Changes to NASA’s 

Discovery Program.” SpaceNews. 1–3.

17 “Fayetteville prof making progress on space project.” (2002, 28 November). The Associated Press; 

Whitehouse, D. (2003, 24 April). “Bunker buster missiles aim at moon.” BBC News.

18 National Research Council. (2003). New Frontiers in the Solar System: An Integrated Exploration 

Strategy. National Academies Press: Washington, DC, http://nap.nationalacademies.org/10432, p. 2.
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hardened skeptic that small, relatively low-cost missions can effectively address significant 

scientific goals. The discipline of Discovery’s competitive selection process has been particularly effective in eliminating ill-conceived concepts and has resulted in a richness of mission 

goals that few would have thought possible a decade ago. The planetary science community’s 

enthusiastic support for Discovery has led to calls for the competitive acquisition of all flight 

projects.... Competition is seen as a vehicle to increase the scientific richness of flight missions and, perhaps of equal importance, as a device to constrain the large costs associated 

with flying robotic missions to the planets.19

The report also praised the education and public outreach efforts associated with 

Discovery missions, stating that the requirement for each mission to devote 1 percent 

to 2 percent of the mission budget exclusively to education and public outreach, along 

with the tradition of leveraging resources from other organizations identified by the 

mission team, has been very effective; all planetary missions of the time, including Deep 

Impact, MESSENGER, CONTOUR, and Stardust, had extensive education and public 

outreach activities. “Most planetary scientists agree that the current funding levels of 

1 to 2 percent are about right within the [solar system exploration] program,” said the 

report, and the mission education and public outreach programs serve as models for 

solar system exploration engagement in general, working much more effectively than 

the “supplemental” outreach awards for individual research grants, reviewed separately 

and without a mission connection.20 This one percent, however, would not last long, 

as the number would be drastically reduced by upper management by the time of the 

next Announcement of Opportunity.

Staffing Up: Changes in Program Management

The MESSENGER overruns highlighted issues within the project but also within the 

management of missions overall. While each mission had an assigned program executive and program scientist at NASA Headquarters, all missions reported to a single 

program manager at the NASA Management Office at JPL, Dave Jarrett. The needs of 

MESSENGER were tremendous during this time period, and Jarrett worked so well 

and so often with the team out there that he had trouble also being alert to changes 

and imminent overruns on other projects, such as Deep Impact.21

Program reviews had shown as early as the late 1990s that the Discovery project 

management office was insufficiently staffed. Study after study revealed that to staff 

the office in a similar fashion to the Explorers Program Office at Goddard Space Flight 

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid.

21 Niebur, S. (2009, May 14). Personal interview with D. Jarrett and Kate Wolf. Located in “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.
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Center, which had been operating for many years due to the earlier incarnations of 

Explorer projects, an independent Discovery Program Office should be staffed with 

approximately 17 people—a far cry from the NASA Management Office at JPL, composed essentially of Jarrett and Wolf. 

Fittingly, it was the November 2002 report of the standing Program Independent 

Review Team for Discovery that documented those numbers and pushed for changes 

from outside the program, again expressing the urgency to NASA Headquarters management. Faced with program overruns and threats of additional overruns on multiple 

projects, NASA Headquarters listened.

The Independent Review Team, charged with regular assessment of the technical 

and programmatic plans for accomplishing program objectives in accordance with 

the Program Commitment Agreement (i.e., AO process and release rate, checks and 

balances, lessons learned, program budget, risks to program budget, level of project 

cost cap), including assessing program risks and mitigations, was also asked to examine 

strengths and weaknesses of the approach to cost control, program-level and projectlevel technical reviews, and near-term actions that could strengthen the program. 

After attending several project reviews, interviewing program and project personnel, 

and conducting a review of the NASA Management Office, the Independent Review 

Team concluded that the Discovery Program continued to meet its commitments and 

objectives, with the work of the Discovery Program Office supplemented by Project 

Integrated Action Teams staffed by experts (most of whom continued from their original involvement with the projects during the myriad Technical, Management, Cost, 

Outreach [TMCO] reviews). And this is where it got interesting: The Independent 

Review Team characterized project cost control assurance by the program as a mixed 

bag. While they judged the cost analysis element of the TMCO process as providing 

a good assessment of a proposed project’s cost realism and risk—and in addition, 

stated that Integrated Action Team assessments at decision gates could provide good 

updates—they found the primary problem with maintaining cost control was inadequate staffing: “Current Program Office staffing level does not provide necessary 

ongoing insight into and evaluation of flight project technical performance or cost 

and schedule control.” At NASA Headquarters, “Program Executives have no technical support.” In all, “program staffing is inadequate to assure low risk implementation 

of missions that do not have GSFC, JPL, or APL as the implementing organization.” 

When briefed, Weiler immediately authorized adding four full-time employees at the 

NASA Management Office.22

To obtain parity with the Explorers Program Office at Goddard, however, the 

Discovery Program would have to add more than 17 full-time equivalents to the 

22 Report of the Program Independent Review Team. (2002, 19 November).
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NASA Management Office. Playing by Weiler’s rules of solving problems within the 

program, the funding for these new contractors or civil servants would have to come 

out of the Discovery Program itself. 

Senior Office of Space Science management would take these recommendations 

and work to implement them in a reasonable and effective manner, augmenting personnel and proficiencies at the program office. Changes were suggested, initiated, and 

discarded frequently during this time period, with the origins and justification behind 

each iteration not always publicly apparent. 

The first solution was to hire an independent organization, Aerospace Corporation, 

which had done analysis work on a number of NASA programs and projects over the 

years. That relationship dissolved, however, and JPL took ownership of the Discovery 

Program Office, appointing John McNamee, a veteran of multiple flight projects, as 

manager. There were obvious conflicts of interest, as McNamee’s line management 

stood to benefit from future Discovery missions. (McNamee reported indirectly to 

Charles Elachi, the Director of JPL.) This did not sit well with the broader planetary 

science community.

Reducing Risk: Evaluating Past Performance

As costs grew in the early part of the second decade of Discovery on flight project 

after flight project, management at NASA Headquarters realized that costs could be 

controlled only so much during a mission’s development, integration, and test stages. 

Problems had to be caught early. But even the pre-PDR interventions seemed inadequate 

to the task of addressing projects at risk of growing out of control, as Deep Impact 

had demonstrated, coming back for additional resources early on. The Dawn team, in 

addition, had trouble meeting their requirements in time for PDR. 

Preproposal evaluation of past performance of management institutions was 

proposed time and time again, but even this would prove unsatisfactory, as NASA’s 

procurement office pointed out: Everyone has had overruns. If evaluators had been 

provided with the full details of past performance on NASA contracts, all experienced 

players would have had major weaknesses, and only new players—those without any 

management experience of flight projects—could compete. The results would have 

had a devastating effect on these one-off, mission-unique requirements, and the agile 

management techniques that they required. After a great deal of work in 2002 to 2004, 

the proposal to evaluate past performance of management institutions was dropped, 

and the 2004 Announcement of Opportunity was released. 

In April 2004, NASA charged both the National Research Council and the National 

Academy of Public Administration with studying PI-led missions in the hopes of 

understanding financial overruns in several of the PI-led mission lines. The Discovery 

AO, however, could not wait.
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Implementing Change: The 2004 AO

Finally, on 16 April, NASA Headquarters released the 2004 Announcement of 

Opportunity, almost four years after the previous one. The 25 percent reserve requirement was added, and the cost cap increased to $360 million (Fiscal Year 2004 dollars)—

the maximum available within the “futures” line in the Discovery Program budget.

The AO had been rewritten substantially since 2000, with greater attention to 

incorporating lessons learned over the past five years to avoid recurrences of the 

problems incurred during implementation of previous missions. New requirements 

had been added—such as the staffing requirement of a deputy project manager—and 

additional financial reserves were now mandated. Investigations were now required to 

publish their data and analysis in peer-reviewed scientific literature—a change since 

the Stardust days, as management realized that the mission was not obligated to deliver 

NASA-funded mission science. Moreover, each mission was required to deliver data 

to the Planetary Data System. After some discussion, missions were again required to 

propose a full set of education and public outreach activities at 1 percent to 2 percent 

of NASA cost. To combat the bait-and-switch tactics that some perceived in the 1998 

competition, and the frequent personnel changes in Deep Impact leadership, the AO 

required that the project manager be named at proposal, and his or her qualifications 

would be evaluated as part of the Technical-Management-Cost evaluation. Missions 

were to launch by 31 December 2009. 

The Discovery Program held an AO Preproposal Conference in Washington, DC, 

on 23 April 2004, to provide a direct interface to the community, as well as AO clarification to assure high-quality proposals. Andy Dantzler, the Division Director of the 

Planetary Science Division, and Susan Niebur, the Discovery Program Scientist, had 

a message to send. Both Niebur’s first and last slides emphasized the importance of 

properly scoping mission investigations and accounting for adequate reserve: “Mission 

investigations must be appropriately scoped. Mission proposals must include adequate 

reserve. Remember the value to the taxpayers.”23

The new parameters were introduced, explained, and emphasized, as Niebur and 

Dantzler also emphasized the importance of scoping investigations to fit within the 

cost cap, proposing only the science that could be done for the available dollars. The 

25 percent reserve requirement was announced, justified, and clarified: All projects 

must show at least a 25 percent reserve at proposal, through the end of Phase A (selection) and Phase B (confirmation). 

The AO included new opportunities to involve other scientists, such as the Guest 

Observer program made popular by Kepler and astrophysical missions; the opportunity to propose Participating Scientist Programs at proposal that could be chosen for 

23 Niebur, S. (2004, April 23). “Discovery AO Highlights and Science Evaluation.” Slides. Susan 

Niebur’s personal collection.
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later implementation; and the option to propose data analysis programs to encourage 

community use of the data during and after operations. Other ways to involve taxpayers at large included the use of education and public outreach programs and Small 

Disadvantaged Business contracting.

Project management options had been opened up again and were not limited to 

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and JPL. In fact, project management was no 

longer limited to NASA centers, leveling the field for funded research and development 

centers, universities, and industry partners. The AO was management-centric, with 

the new requirement of a named project manager at proposal who would continue on 

to manage the project during formulation and implementation. 

Management approaches were codified, as all missions would be required to adhere 

to NPR 7120.5B for approval to progress to the implementation phase. In the 1998 

and 2000 AOs, NPR 7120.5A NASA Program and Project Management Processes and 

Requirements had been introduced to proposers; the AO stated that it “may be used as a 

reference in defining a team’s mission approach,” while reiterating that “[m]ission teams 

have the freedom to use their own processes, procedures, and methods, and the use of 

innovative processes is encouraged when cost, schedule, and technical improvements 

can be demonstrated.”24 In the 2004 AO, however, the words had changed, with the team 

now given “responsibility and authority to accomplish the entire mission investigation 

by utilizing innovative approaches to stay within the strict cost and schedule limits of 

the program, as long as fundamental principles for sound management, engineering, 

and safety and mission assurance (e.g., those listed in NPR 7120.5B and referenced in 

Section 5.3.1) are not compromised.”25

New language added to the 2004 AO also included a change in the degree of expected 

oversight of projects. Whereas in the 2000 AO, “the major responsibility for the selected 

investigation rests with the investigation team, which will have a large degree of freedom 

to accomplish its proposed objectives within the stated constraints with only essential 

NASA oversight” and “NASA oversight and reporting requirements will be limited 

to only that which is essential to assure science investigation success in compliance 

with committed cost, schedule, performance, reliability, and safety requirements,” in 

2004, the essential NASA oversight had morphed into more ominous language, made 

necessary by the multiple cost overruns and late parts deliveries in the missions in 

development at that time: “NASA intends to maintain a significant degree of insight 

into mission development.”26

New types of Missions of Opportunity would be allowed in the 2004 AO. In addition 

to the established opportunity to propose an instrument to launch as part of a foreign 

24 NASA. (2004). Discovery Announcement of Opportunity.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid.
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mission, separately competed, for the first time institutions could propose mission 

extensions. This was implemented in lieu of establishing a senior review process for the 

Solar System Exploration Division, such as existed in the Heliophysics and Astronomy 

and Physics Divisions. Ideas for mission extensions and new ways to use existing 

spacecraft for new scientific investigations were percolating in the community, and this 

would be an avenue for proposing in an open and competitive environment, evaluated 

to the same standards as new mission investigations by technical-management-cost. A 

compliance checklist was also introduced for the first time, to help proposers ensure 

that they had addressed the AO requirements. 

Despite all these changes, the principles of the program had not changed. The AO 

solicited small self-contained planetary mission investigations that would result in 

new science discoveries. Discovery Program missions were not fishing expeditions to 

new planetary targets, but carefully designed scientific investigations. The evaluation 

process would be a two-step evaluation by both science and technical-managementcost reviewers. The evaluation factors had not changed significantly, and the additional 

selection factors remained the same: cost and reserve, education and public outreach, 

and small and disadvantaged business commitment. Proposers were strongly encouraged to limit the number of co-investigators to the bare minimum, to allow sufficient 

availability of qualified scientists to serve as science reviewers. 

NASA expected to select three missions to perform concept studies during a sixmonth Phase A funded at a cost of up to $1 million.27 Proposals would be due 16 July 

2004. The agency ultimately received eighteen such proposals—the smallest number 

ever for the program—and categorization, steering, and selection committees at NASA 

Headquarters evaluated each on scientific, technical, management, and cost criteria.28

On 2 February 2005, NASA Headquarters made a shocking announcement: for the 

first time in the history of the Discovery and Explorer Programs, NASA had selected no 

proposals to proceed to the competitive concept study phase. The now-more-rigorous 

review cycle and selection process had found weaknesses with each proposal; none 

had met the high standards of the program in all areas of scientific merit; technical, 

management, and cost; and program balance. The press release did not detail the reasons for a non-selection but did promise an imminent opportunity to repropose in a 

less-constrained environment: “We are looking forward to the March release of the 

Discovery 12 AO that will provide greater flexibility commensurate with the technical complexities associated with Discovery class experiments,” said Dantzler, recently 

promoted to acting director of the Solar System Exploration Division.29

27 Niebur, S. (2004, 23 April). “Discovery AO Highlights and Science Evaluation.” Slides.

28 NASA. (2005, 2 February). “NASA Selects Moon Mapper for Mission of Opportunity.” NASA 

news release 05-037.

29 Ibid.
NASA′s Discovery Program

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The non-selection was a hard lesson for Discovery proposers. Each team was 

debriefed in person at NASA Headquarters, learning about their own mission’s shortcomings when judged against the requirements in the AO. After the announcement, 

the results were challenged, and a letter was written by Senator Barbara Mikulski to 

NASA Deputy Administrator Fred Gregory. A study later absolved the Science Mission 

Directorate of any wrongdoing and confirmed the results. There would be no mission 

selected in this round of Discovery.

FIFTH TIME’S THE CHARM: DISCOVERY AND NEW 

FRONTIERS PROGRAM OFFICE AT MSFC

Meanwhile, after months of active discussion, the Discovery and New Frontiers Program 

Office was established at Marshall Space Flight Center, a neutral center for the proposing community. The office quickly staffed up to a total of seventeen people that first 

year, with other technical experts available onsite for specialist reviews and assistance 

as requested. NASA Headquarters responded by adding layers of documentation, no 

longer constrained by the workforce available when the office consisted of only Jarrett 

and Wolf. “We were ‘better, faster, cheaper,’” recalled Jarrett. “If there is something you 

don’t need to do, you don’t do it. You don’t just build documentation as prescribed and 

at the time it wasn’t prescribed.”30

Program scientist Michael New added: “On a day-to-day basis, the mission managers at the program office are the ones who are almost daily, if not hourly, [in] contact 

with the [project managers and] sometimes the PIs.” A project in development could 

expect weekly teleconferences with the program executive, Program Scientist, and 

D&NFPO, in addition to the PI. The Discovery and New Frontiers Program Office 

advocated risk-based insight and oversight, with the ability to be hands-on and provide assistance or additional review in the face of problems. “One of the things they’ve 

been able to tap into is the large body of [Exploration Systems Mission Directorate] 

[and Space Operations Mission Directorate] engineers at Marshall who decide they’re 

a little tired of working on projects that either will never see the light of day or won’t 

see the light of day until they’re retired.” At the D&NFPO, however, engineers could 

get a broad view of the program and “see multiple missions go through their entire 

30 Niebur, S. (2009, 14 May). Personal interview with D. Jarrett and Kate Wolf. Located in “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC; Niebur, S. (2009, 4 September). Personal interview with L. Johnson. Located in 

“Deep Impact” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.
Chapter 8: Lessons Learned from the Evolution of the Program

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life cycle. And they really liked that. They like seeing a mission go from a concept 

study to launch, operations and then go to another one. It gives them a real charge to 

go through this whole life cycle. Those are really attractive features for recruitment.”31

Increasing the Cost Cap: The 2005 AO (Plan)

The Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation review into the 2004 evaluation delayed 

the next AO, planned for March 2005. When March, April, and May came and went, 

proposers again became anxious. On 13 June, Andy Dantzler gave an interview to 

Aerospace Daily outlining parameters for the upcoming AO, including an increase in 

cost cap from $360 million to $450 million—a figure even higher than Discovery’s 

companion program, Mars Scout. In this interview, he acknowledged that the AO had 

been delayed by an internal review to ensure that “all the processes are in place, make 

sure everything is fair.” He also admitted problems with the 2004 AO requirements, 

such as the oft-disputed budget profile that had frustrated proposers and even the 

program scientist, saying that the AO “kind of forced proposers to propose things 

not the way they would like to, creating a lot of the problems that we’ve seen, a lot of 

overruns, a lot of early problems. The new AO takes care of that by relieving a lot of 

those restrictions.”32

While not new in this AO, proposers showed a great deal of interest in the upcoming 

opportunity to propose a new science mission for spacecraft completing their prime 

mission. The Deep Impact flyby spacecraft, which had a high-resolution multispectral 

camera, an 11.8-inch-aperture telescope, an infrared spectrometer, and a mediumresolution camera, was still intact after its impactor collided with Comet Tempel 1. 

Community members were encouraged to write proposals to the upcoming AO, and 

every effort was made to release the AO as soon as the internal investigation into 

the 2004 AO non-selection was complete. The appropriate evaluation criteria were 

determined to be similar to criteria used in previous Discovery Program AOs, with 

the addition of the appropriateness of the proposed investigation for the available 

hardware and consumables. The opportunity to reuse Deep Impact was well known, 

since it had recently completed its prime mission and had been put in a holding orbit 

in the inner solar system, “making the task of tracking and communicating with it 

easier,” said Dantzler, but “the spacecraft is being offered as-is.”33

31 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 December). Personal interview with M. New. Located in “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

32 Discovery Preproposal Conference Transcript. (2004, 23 April); Morris, J. (2005, 13 June). “Discovery 

Program to release revamped AOA.” Aviation Week’s Aerospace Daily & Defense Report, 214(51).

33 NASA. (2005, 20 July). “NASA Announces Deep Impact Future Mission Status.” Press release.
NASA′s Discovery Program

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The opportunity to reuse other spacecraft would be riskier, as completed missions 

were turned off and allowed to drift through the solar system after their fuel had been 

expended. The Stardust spacecraft, still in operation, would have less than a quarter of 

its hydrazine remaining when it returned to Earth; the prime mission would not be 

sacrificed to increase the probability of reuse.34 This limitation did not deter proposers, 

though, including the Stardust team, who were busy preparing not only for launch, 

but for the proposal of their extended mission concept, Scar Quest, a proposal to send 

Stardust to observe the gash that Deep Impact had created in the comet.35 Overlap 

between the teams was strong. The Deep Impact team proposed as DIXI, and the 

Stardust team proposed as Stardust NExT, with the addition of Deep Impact alumni 

Michael A’Hearn, Mike Belton, Karen Meech, Ken Klaasen, Jay Melosh, Peter Schultz, 

Jessica Sunshine, Peter Thomas, and Joe Veverka. Another team would propose to reuse 

the Deep Impact spacecraft as well: the EPOCH team of extrasolar planet hunters, led 

by L. Drake Deming at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

New Competition: The 2006 AO

By the time the 2005—now 2006—AO was released, the climate at NASA had changed 

again. No longer the hot new program, Discovery was now a Solar System Exploration 

Division mainstay. NASA management in the positions of division director, Associate 

Administrator, and Administrator had changed, however, and the President’s new 

agenda to return to the Moon and Mars was driving New Starts and initiatives across 

the agency. NASA’s renewed emphasis on these human spaceflight plans worried many 

proposers, concerned how this would affect open competition such as Discovery, but 

the community was assured that all missions would compete on equal footing and 

according to the established ground rules laid out in the AO.36

The cost cap had seen a significant increase—the first in three years—to $425 million 

(Fiscal Year 2006). The mission cost profile and all associated references were removed. 

Proposers could propose any distribution of funding in the years post-selection; if the 

Planetary Science Division could not afford the proposed outlay in a given fiscal year, 

the decision would have to be made to move money between programs, move money 

between fiscal years, or not select that mission.

Phase A was increased to seven months and $1.2 million. The historical limit of 

36 months of development was removed in response to analysis that the program was 

over-constrained and that the strict three-year development cycle eliminated targets 

that fell between AOs. Missions still were required to meet a “launch by” date, but the 

date was extended to cover most potential targets and missions, with a longer actual 

34 Clark, S. (2005, 12 October). “Robotic comet explorers could be given new lives.” Spaceflight Now.

35 Erickson, J. (2006, 16 March). “Colorado craft could return to the stars.” Rocky Mountain News.

36 NASA. (2006). Discovery Announcement of Opportunity.
Chapter 8: Lessons Learned from the Evolution of the Program

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window ending on 1 October 2013. Although the 2004 AO budget profile had additional dollars available for Phase B formulation, the 2006 AO reinstated the limit on 

expenditures prior to confirmation at its previous value of 25 percent. 

The Discovery Program goals were revised and updated to more accurately reflect the 

current goals and desired outcomes of the program, as the original goals were overtaken 

by events and the faster, better, cheaper language no longer accurately reflected the 

management expectations of the program. The program now would “provide frequent 

flight opportunities for high-quality, high-value scientific investigations that can be 

accomplished under a not to exceed cost cap,” with the following outcomes:

• Advancement in scientific knowledge and exploration of the elements of our 

solar system and other planetary systems; 

• Addition of scientific data, maps, and other products to the Planetary Data 

System archive for all scientists to access; 

• Announcement of scientific progress and results in the peer-reviewed literature, 

popular media, scholastic curricula, and materials that can be used to inspire 

and motivate students to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, 

and mathematics; 

• Expansion of the pool of well-qualified Principal Investigators and Project 

Managers for implementation of future missions in Discovery and other programs, through current involvement as CoIs and other team members; and

• Implementation of technology advancements proven in related programs.37

All requirements in the new NPR 7120.5C, including the use of Earned Value 

Management and Cost Analysis Data Requirement reporting, were made requirements 

for Discovery mission proposals and plans. Draft Level 1 requirements were requested 

in an attempt to set them early and have them truly drive the missions as envisioned, 

rather than layered on top of the mission as late as the Preliminary Design Review, as 

in the case of Dawn. Without firm and steady requirements, the trade space remained 

fluid and decisions may have been made based on different understandings of the mission drivers. AO requirements for sample return, orbital debris, program and project 

management, communications link budget design data, and page count were updated. 

The program’s education and public outreach commitment was drastically reduced 

to 0.25–0.50 percent of the NASA Science Mission Directorate cost, excluding launch 

vehicles. Participating scientist programs, data access programs, and guest observers 

37 NASA. (2014). “Discovery Program Goals.” Downloaded from http://discovery.larc.nasa.gov/

dpgoals.html.
NASA′s Discovery Program

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were encouraged at no cost to the missions’ cost caps. Review by the NASA Independent 

Verification and Validation Facility in West Virginia was still required, but costs were 

not included in this AO. 

Student collaborations, science enhancement opportunities, and technology demonstration opportunities were added to the AO as the new Associate Administrator, 

Mary Cleave, put her own stamp on the process. Between the completion and approval 

of the draft AO and its release, several months passed while the budget became available. Susan Niebur had resigned from the position of program scientist but was not 

replaced until just before the AO release. During that time, several changes were 

made, including the insertion of a new concept: the student collaboration. Michael 

New remembers this being a problem when he first assumed the role vacated by 

Niebur: “That turned out to be an issue when we started figuring out how we were 

going to evaluate against the AO criteria, because the words used to describe student 

collaborations and their evaluation criteria were not consistent with the language 

in the rest of the AO.” Because the Discovery Program was unclear in its definition 

of what a student collaboration was, what its goals should be, and whether its goals 

should be linked to the scientific goals of the mission, evaluation became an issue. 

“Some teams embraced it wholeheartedly,” said New. “There was one team that even 

had their student collaboration write their section, and it was great. At the site visit, 

they actually had the students present [that part of the presentation]. They really 

embraced the whole concept.”38 Student collaborations had been a successful part of 

the New Horizons mission launching that year, and so the opportunity was seen as a 

positive enhancement to the next generation of NASA missions. 

Science enhancement and technology demonstration opportunities included 

innovative new instruments, investigations, technology, hardware, and software to 

be demonstrated on either the flight system or ground system during mission development and operations. By making them clearly separable from the proposed baseline 

investigation and the performance floor from selection onward, NASA could fund 

those options without adding unacceptable risk to a mission’s ability to meet its science 

requirements. The Discovery AO NNH06ZDA001O was released on 3 January 2006. 

At February’s preproposal conference, the Discovery and New Frontiers Program 

Office briefed proposers on the first results from their cost study, with these additional 

“areas to watch” recommendations:

• Software: Test beds and Fault Protection/Autonomy;

• Integrated Project Schedule;

38 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 December). Personal interview with M. New. Located in “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.
Chapter 8: Lessons Learned from the Evolution of the Program

317

• Heritage Hardware;

• Workforce roll off for launch, Optimistic Test Schedules, V&V [Verification 

and Validation]; and

• Vendor assumptions, both in the areas of experience and insight/oversight 

requirements.39

Discovery proposals were due 5 April 2006. 

NRC Assessment: Reports on PI-Led Missions in the Space Sciences

Though the National Research Council Space Studies Board’s report, “PrincipalInvestigator-Led Missions in the Space Sciences,” and the National Academy of Public 

Administration’s report, “PI Led Missions in Space Science,” had both been published 

in quick succession almost four months earlier, NASA’s response was muted, as it was 

already on the path for a Discovery AO release as announced in Federal Business 

Opportunities earlier that fall.40 No community discussion of policy changes could 

be held with an open or pending solicitation in the program.

Once the Discovery proposals were submitted, however, the NASA Science Mission 

Directorate hosted an event for community discussion of the recommendations and of 

lessons learned. The Lessons Learned Workshop for PI-Led Planetary Science Missions 

in Crystal City, Virginia, was held on 11 April 2006. Speakers included representatives 

of the technical-management-cost review process, the Integrated Action Teams, Science 

Mission Directorate science management, NASA and ESA international relations, 

implementing institutions (JPL, Goddard, APL, and Ames), PI institutions (University of 

Washington, University of Arizona, Carnegie Institution, Southwest Research Institute), 

and major contractors (Ball, Southwest Research Institute, JPL, Malin Space Science 

Systems, Lockheed Martin).41 The workshop was broadly applicable to the Explorer, 

Discovery, Mars Scout, and New Frontiers PI-led programs, and the lessons learned 

were collected over the review of 657 proposals to these programs from 1996 to 2005.42

The technical-management-cost lessons learned were illuminating, including the most 

common specific weaknesses over the set of programs. These were shared with the 

community in the hopes that future proposers would give the issues extra attention, 

39 NASA. (2006, 2 February). “Discovery and New Frontiers Program Office: Some Lessons Learned,” 

presented at the Discovery Preproposal Conference, Washington, DC.

40 National Research Council. Committee on Principal-Investigator-Led Missions in the Space Sciences, 

National Research Council Principal-Investigator-Led Missions in the Space Sciences. (2006). National 

Academies Press: Washington, DC. 132; National Academy of Public Administration. (2005). 

Principal Investigator Led Missions in Space Science.

41 NASA. (2006, 11 April). “Agenda: Lessons Learned Workshop for PI-Led Planetary 

Science Missions.”

42 Perry, R. (2006, 11 April). “TMC lessons learned from PI-led planetary science missions.” 

Presentation.
NASA′s Discovery Program

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reducing future weaknesses in both proposals and projects. Brad Perry of the Science 

Mission Directorate, and colleagues, also wrote an accompanying white paper, “to 

reduce the learning curve for new proposers, and to improve the overall quality and 

maturity of all proposals submitted.”43

In addition, a new National Research Council committee on PI-led missions in the 

space sciences had been convened and charged with six items: assessing the selection 

process and objectives; examining the roles, relationships, and authority among members 

of past PI-led teams, where members were defined as institutions; identifying lessons 

learned from scientific and technical performance of past missions; analyzing factors 

contributing to mission cost overruns; identifying opportunities for knowledge transfer 

to new PIs and sustained technical management expertise; and identifying lessons 

learned, recommending practices and incentives for improving the overall conduct of 

future PI-led missions. The resultant report had 15 findings and 15 recommendations. 

While the recommendations were largely either adopted (2, 6, 7, 8, 13, 14, and 15) 

or rejected (1, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, and 11) in the first five years after the report was issued, 

many of the findings remained relevant. The 15 findings are reproduced as follows:

Principal-Investigator-Led Missions in the Space 

Sciences Findings:

1. Proposals and Reviews: The PI-led mission selection process could be made more efficient 

and effective, minimizing the burden on the proposer and the reviewer and facilitating the 

selection of concepts that become more uniformly successful projects.

2. Concept Study: The still-competitive but already funded concept study stage (Phase A) 

of selected, short-listed PI-led missions is the best stage for the accurate definition of the 

concept details and cost estimates needed to assist in final selection.

3. Proposals and Reviews: Community-based studies of science opportunities and priorities can be used to focus AO proposals on specific topics of great interest and to guide the 

choices of selection officials.

4. The Proposing Team Experience and Leadership (PI & PM) is critical to mission 

success. Programs can emphasize the importance of experience in their selections and create 

opportunities for prospective PIs and PMs to gain such experience.

5. Technology Readiness: As a rule, PI-led missions are too constrained by cost and schedule 

to comfortably support significant technology development.... Regular technology development opportunities managed by PI-led programs could lead to a technology pipeline that 

would help to enable successful mission selection and implementation.

43 Perry, R., et al. (2006, 21 February). “Lessons learned from Technical, Management, and Cost 

Review of Proposals: A Summary of 10 years’ experience in reviewing competitively selected 

proposals for new science missions.” Presentation.
Chapter 8: Lessons Learned from the Evolution of the Program

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6. Funding Profiles represent a special challenge for PI-led missions because they are planned 

at the mission concept stage with the goals of minimizing costs and achieving schedules. 

However, like all NASA missions, PI-led missions are subject to the availability of NASA 

funding, annual NASA budgetary cycles, and agency decisions on funding priorities, all 

of which can disrupt the planned funding profiles for PI-led missions.

7. International contributions have an important positive impact on the science capabilities of PI-led missions but are faced with an increasingly discouraging environment, 

in part due to ITAR. In addition, logistic difficulties associated with foreign government 

budgetary commitments and the timing of proposals and selections persist. The result is 

both real and perceived barriers to teaming and higher perceived risk for missions including international partners.

8. The program offices can play a critical positive role in the success of PI-led missions if 

they are appropriately located and staffed, and offer enabling infrastructure for projects and 

NASA Headquarters from the proposal through the implementation stages.

9. NASA oversight of PI-led missions, as well as of all missions, increased following a string 

of mission failures in the late 1990s and is again increasing following the Columbia shuttle 

disaster. Some of the added oversight, and especially the style of that oversight, appears 

excessive for robotic missions as small as the PI-led missions. Increases in oversight also 

strain project resources and personnel to the point of adding risk rather than reducing it.

10. Program Oversight: There is confusion about the processes in place for adjusting PI-led mission cost caps and schedules to accommodate oversight requirements introduced after selection.

11. The threat of cancellation in a termination review is no longer an effective way of 

keeping PI-led missions within their cost caps, because few missions have been canceled as 

a result of exceeding their cost caps. Nevertheless, a termination review is taken seriously 

because it reflects negatively on project management performance and raises the possibility 

of science descopes. [Other] project leaders need to be made aware of problems that lead to 

termination reviews so that they can avoid them.

12. Descopes: High-impact decisions such as descopes made by NASA outside the termination 

review process undermine a PI’s authority and can cause a mission to lose science capability.

13. Technical and Programmatic Failures: Lessons learned from experience in both PI-led 

and other missions can be extremely valuable for reducing risk and inspiring ideas about 

how to do things better. Much useful lessons-learned documentation is available on the Web 

but is not collected in a coherent library or directory. A modest effort by the program offices 

to locate these distributed documents, provide a centralized Web site containing links, and 

advertise its existence would allow these lessons to be more widely used.

14. The leaders of PI-led missions occasionally find they must replace a manager or a key team 

member to reach their goals. While the cost and schedule impacts of such a major change 

must be considered, a change in project management needs to be allowed if it is for the good 

of the mission. The PI should make all final decisions on project management personnel.
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15. The summary cost and schedule performance records for PI-led and other missions 

are not kept in a consistent way, making external comparative analyses difficult. Science 

activities on PI-led missions seem to be competitive with those on core missions to the extent 

that the data sets are made available and science analysis is supported.44

Some of the conclusions were outdated before the report was published, such as 

this statement: “The Discovery Program Office has been relocated on more than one 

occasion and is in a state of flux, which has led to difficulties for some Discovery 

missions.”45 As a result of this flux, the D&NFPO had already been established at 

Marshall Space Flight Center, where it remained for subsequent years.

Other conclusions exposed the crux of the problem and a large part of the reason 

that the studies were commissioned in the first place: “The committee was unable to 

obtain the kind of moderately detailed [cost] data that would normally be expected to 

be readily available for NASA’s own internal use or for an analysis of historical trends.” 

The problems weren’t just in PI-led missions, however. “The information that could be 

obtained on cost and schedule performance in PI-led missions indicated that they face 

the same cost growth drivers as core or strategic missions but that any such growth 

in PI-led missions is more visible within NASA because the cost caps are enforced 

so much more strictly. The cost growth, in percent, of PI-led missions is in any case 

documented as being, on average, less than that for core missions. The perception of 

a cost growth problem specific to PI-led mission lines is thus not supported by the 

records.”46 This was not surprising to many inside the program; it was, indeed, a source 

of frustration when directed missions with much higher costs overran significantly 

more, but the harsh adherence to cost caps enabled the Discovery Program and others 

like it to accomplish more than just a single directed mission, ending when the fuel (or 

dollars) ran out. By enforcing cost caps for each mission in development, future missions 

were protected. If the program had become lax in its attention to cost, it would face 

scrutiny and possibly cancellation, forcing the Planetary Science Division to propose 

each new mission separately to congress as a New Start—a very difficult process with 

the outcome anything but certain. No, by simply adhering to the Discovery Program 

principles of cost-capped missions, short development times, and focused science, 

they could initiate new missions approximately every two years, without congressional approval, whenever the “futures” budget supported the release of another AO.

44 National Research Council. Committee on Principal-Investigator-Led Missions in the Space 

Sciences, National Research Council Principal-Investigator-Led Missions in the Space Sciences.

(2006). National Academies Press: Washington, DC. 132. 

45 Ibid. 

46 Ibid. 
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The committee also “found that potentially valuable lessons learned in both the 

technical and management areas of PI-led missions are neither easily located nor 

widely discussed despite being resources of which every PI-led mission leader should 

be aware.”47 This had been addressed earlier in the decade in part with the creation 

of an online Lessons Learned Archive for Discovery, but the lack of written reports 

from most Lessons Learned Workshops inhibited archival, and the lack of incentive 

for proposers to absorb lessons from experienced mission leadership inhibited its use.

Termination reviews, particularly those faced by missions such as MESSENGER, 

came under strict scrutiny: 

The committee learned that termination reviews are no longer regarded as mission-threatening, 

because very few missions have been canceled even though some PI-led (and most core) missions do grow beyond their initial cost cap. Moreover, canceling a mission after substantial 

investment has been made is not reasonable if the mission has no fatal technical issues or 

additional cost or schedule requirements. However, a PI-led mission is more vulnerable than 

a core mission to cancellation or descopes because its cost cap was a key factor in its winning 

the competition. The committee considers termination reviews as an effective management 

tool for missions that overrun their cost caps, provided that both NASA and the project teams 

recognize that such reviews raise the prospect of NASA Headquarters–mandated changes to 

the mission capability. Lessons learned from these reviews should be used to inform other 

active PI-led program and project leaders.48

The National Academy of Public Administration study, meanwhile, was charged 

by NASA with providing an in-depth analysis of cost growth and relevant management aspects of PI-led missions. This study produced eight findings and associated 

recommendations. The first described the program’s “characteristics and limitations 

[25 percent minimum unencumbered reserve level, focus on end-to-end mission costs, 

high science return favored over lower cost and schedule risks, slowly adjusted cost 

caps, 20 percent maximum cost growth in Phase A] that encourage the submission of 

optimistic basic mission cost proposals for science missions.”49

The second stated that the 25 percent reserve mandate “operate(s) as a disincentive 

for the proposer to provide more realistic baseline cost estimates and an assessment of 

the appropriate level of reserves.” This was seen at NASA Headquarters as a somewhat 

curious statement, although it must have reflected the spirit of proposers consulted. 

From the program perspective, the 25 percent reserve mandate was a final check that a 

minimum level of reserves had been met for each phase of the program. The 25 percent 

47 Ibid. 

48 Ibid. 

49 National Research Council 2006. Principal-Investigator-Led Missions in the Space Sciences. 

Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/11530, p. 110.
NASA′s Discovery Program

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reserve level had been set in response to several missions in development simultaneously exceeding their bids by amounts significantly over their reserve posture and 

the corresponding need to protect the program from similar overruns in the future. 

Projects were still expected to provide realistic costs in both Step 1 and 2 proposals, 

to assess the appropriate level of reserves per project element, and to discuss the budget reserve strategy, including budget reserve levels as a function of mission phase.50

The third finding, “PIs are expected to provide leadership and management, but 

most lack the requisite skills,” could be seen as insulting, but it was indicative of a 

change in the implementation of Discovery and Explorer missions, which required 

a great deal more hands-on management than imagined in the early days of the program’s establishment. In 1992, the PI’s role was to manage the science; by 2006, the 

PI also was charged with full responsibility for “the execution of the investigation 

within the committed cost and according to the committed schedule,” a codification 

of the implications in AOs as far back as 2000 indicating that PIs “must be prepared 

to recommend project termination when, in the judgment of the PI, the successful 

achievement of established minimum science objectives, as defined in the proposal as 

the performance floor, is not likely within the committed cost and schedule reserves.” 

Perhaps since this clause had not been exercised before 2002, the full impact of its 

statement had not been tested, but certainly after that, PIs had to take a more handson role to avoid bringing their project in for termination or deleting instruments in 

order to achieve the mission within the committed cost and schedule reserves. This 

realization would indeed require a “fundamental understanding of the elements of 

project control,” as discussed in the last clause of the third finding, but it certainly 

wasn’t the way that the Discovery founders, including Wes Huntress, envisioned or 

managed the program in the 1990s.51

The fourth finding, “The costs incurred by proposers in responding to AOs has 

[sic] been identified as a potential limiting factor by the proposal teams as to whether 

they will respond to future AOs” and that “NASA does not possess good information 

on the costs incurred by proposers in responding to an AO,” was certainly true but 

was thought by NASA Headquarters to be ameliorated by increases in Phase A study 

funding in 2004, 2006, and 2010.52 The common wisdom was that initial proposal 

costs had to be undertaken by the proposing organizations; if a potential Discovery 

team didn’t have $1 million or so between them for proposing costs, they would be 

50 NASA. (2006). Discovery Announcement of Opportunity.

51 Niebur, S. (2009, 13 March). Personal interview with W. Huntress. Located in “Wes Huntress” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

52 National Academy of Public Administration. (2005). Principal Investigator Led Missions in 

Space Science.
Chapter 8: Lessons Learned from the Evolution of the Program

323

hard-pressed to manage a mission costing 300 times that. NASA was prohibited by 

the Federal Acquisition Regulation from funding preproposal costs, so this was seen 

as a necessary cost of doing business.

The fifth finding encouraged NASA to focus additional attention on the cost, schedule, and funding risks to a project at confirmation and to determine “whether the cost 

estimate reflects the level of design maturity and the related constraints.”53

The sixth finding encouraged all involved to carefully consider the financial implications of the changing risk environment at NASA in establishing cost estimates for 

future mission proposals. 

The seventh finding gave guidance on termination reviews, noting that “the forecasts given to decision makers of the costs required to complete the missions were 

consistently understated. Also, the decision official is not provided with high/mid/low 

confidence engineering estimates of the costs-to-go, and parametric cost-estimating 

tools are not used to provide comparative cost estimates.” These additional requirements could be implemented in future termination reviews.54

The eighth and last recommendation was damning for the record-keepers and 

provides an instructive point for those reading the analyses of the first two decades 

of Discovery found in this book and in later reports: “The recorded costs for PI-led 

science missions understate the true amount of the costs required to execute these missions.” The study also reported internal cost growth of each of the Discovery missions, 

comparing the C/D estimate (without reserves) to the actual costs in such a way that 

would indicate the appropriate level of reserves or extent of overrun, but the numbers 

do not correlate with numbers reported in either of NASA’s 2008 to 2010 studies, so 

the reports are difficult to reconcile.55

This study brought to light some interesting facts not otherwise codified, such as 

the understatement of costs-to-go at termination reviews, but unfortunately those 

lessons had already been learned informally after the Deep Impact and MESSENGER 

termination and continuation reviews at NASA.56

Three Competing Concept Studies

In parallel with the consideration of the findings of these two reports, evaluation of 

the 2006 proposals continued. After rigorous science and technical-managementcost evaluations, NASA announced the AO results on 30 October 2006. “The science 

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid.

56 Ibid. “NASA could gain useful information from proposers by requiring them to address a specific 

list of ‘cost risk subfactors.’ [Such as the list presented by JPL management to the NAPA study 

team.] The NASA evaluation team could use the responses to these subfactors as a consistent 

basis of comparison among proposals.”
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community astounded us with the creativity of their proposals,” said Mary Cleave, the 

Associate Administrator of the Science Mission Directorate.57 From a set of 24 proposals, NASA selected three missions for $1.2 million in concept studies: the Origins 

Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security (OSIRIS) mission to return 

asteroid regolith samples; the Vesper mission to study the atmosphere of Venus; and 

the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission to study the interior 

structure and history of the Moon.58

The $415 million OSIRIS mission would orbit the 580-meter-wide near-Earth asteroid RQ36 for 300 days at a very low altitude of 100 meters and return samples of asteroid 

regolith for study on Earth.59 “We’re going to an object that is a remnant of a planet’s 

formation,” said Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS Deputy PI and associate professor of lunar 

and planetary science at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. 

“This is really pristine material, and one of the mission’s goals is to keep it that way.”60

The samples would be scooped up by a spring-loaded robotic arm briefly touching 

the surface of RQ36, capturing the dirt in a sample return canister behind the arm’s 

trapdoor, and bouncing back like a pogo stick, heading back to Earth after the third 

scooping opportunity. The canister would be released as the spacecraft approached 

Earth in 2017, parachuting to Utah’s Dugway Proving Grounds, a favorite landing 

spot of NASA’s sample return missions. The long period of mission operations before 

sample return prompted the OSIRIS team to adopt a management structure that, 

like Dawn, involved the Deputy PI very closely in the management work but, unlike 

Dawn, stated explicitly that the Deputy PI would eventually succeed the PI. “I’ll be 71 

when the samples come back,” said Michael Drake, the OSIRIS Principal Investigator. 

“You not only want to make sure your mission is successful, but make sure the next 

generation [of scientists] is coming along.” Drake intentionally composed the team of 

both senior and junior scientists able to do the work.61 Mission management would 

be located at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.62

Vesper, a Venus chemistry and dynamics orbiter, would drop a probe into the 

atmosphere of Venus and orbit the planet for 486 days, enough time for Venus to 

rotate exactly twice. NASA had not been back to Venus since the days of Magellan, 

57 NASA. (2006, 30 October). “NASA Announces Discovery Program Selections.” NASA news 

release 06-342.

58 NASA. (2007, 11 December). “New NASA Mission to Reveal Moon’s Internal Structure and 

Evolution.” NASA news release 07-274.

59 Steigerwald, B., and Lori Stiles. (2007, 9 March). “Proposed Mission Will Return Sample from 

Near-Earth Object.” NASA press release.

60 Sorenson, D. (2006, 1 November). “NASA picks UA mission to asteroid as a finalist.” 

Arizona Daily Star.

61 Shiga, D. (2006, 1 November). “Deep Impact’s blurry camera may study exoplanets.” New Scientist.

62 Niebur, S. (2009, August). “Principal Investigators and Mission Leadership.” Space Policy, https://

www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0265964609000538?via%3Dihub, 181–186.
Chapter 8: Lessons Learned from the Evolution of the Program

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and scientists of the time were eager to investigate the composition and dynamics of its 

atmosphere—a wild, swirling mess of clouds of sulfuric acid, with “vortices of spinning 

clouds resembling twin hurricanes, side by side,” at both north and south poles of the 

planet. The thick atmosphere covering the hot, waterless planet (at 92 times Earth’s 

pressure) is rich with carbon dioxide, a compound that should be broken down by 

sunlight into carbon monoxide and oxygen. Because it exists still as carbon dioxide, 

however, scientists are intrigued by what in the atmosphere might be preventing its 

dissolution and what unknown chemistry may exist on a planet with very similar size, 

gravity, and bulk composition to that of Earth.“The big mystery Vesper will help answer 

is how these two similar worlds ended up with such different outcomes,” explained 

PI Gordon Chin of NASA Goddard, which would also be the managing institution.63

GRAIL, led by Maria Zuber, head of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and 

Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), would study the 

interior structure of the Moon using high-quality gravity field mapping conducted by 

twin satellites launched on a single launch vehicle. The satellites claimed heritage from 

the 100-kilogram Experimental Satellite System-11 (XSS-11) microsatellite developed 

by Lockheed Martin under the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Experimental Satellite 

System’s Micro Satellite Flight Demonstration Program and launched a year earlier, 

on 11 April 2005.64 GRAIL’s main instrument would be a Ka-band Lunar Gravity 

Ranging System built at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory with significant heritage from 

the twin Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites launched in March 2002. 

The mission boasted no new technology.65 JPL would manage the GRAIL mission.

NEW DISCOVERY MISSION: GRAIL

By the time the concept studies were submitted to NASA and reviewed by the technicalmanagement-cost evaluators, NASA Science Mission Directorate management had 

changed again. Alan Stern, the new Associate Administrator, announced the selected 

Discovery mission at a full meeting of the American Geophysical Union on 11 December 

2007. A press release followed the next morning with details about GRAIL, which had 

been selected for flight. For $375 million, GRAIL would launch two spacecraft on a 

single Delta 7920H-10 rocket and orbit the Moon in a low, 50-kilometer polar orbit for 

three months, mapping its gravity field in exquisite detail. The selection of GRAIL was 

in line with the agency’s renewed emphasis on sending humans to the Moon by 2020 

and then to Mars, as announced by President George W. Bush at NASA Headquarters 

on 14 January 2004. Stern confirmed that this was an important contribution when 

63 NASA. (2006, 24 November). “Vesper Mission Could Explore Earth’s Fiery Twin.” News release.

64 Air Force Research Laboratory (2011, September). “Fact sheet: XSS-11 micro satellite.”

65 Taylor, R. (2009). “Preparing for an NPR 7120.5D Life-Cycle Review.” Presentation.
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he announced the selection of this “low risk” mission, saying, “GRAIL also offers to 

bring innovative Earth studies techniques to the moon as a precursor to their possible 

later use at Mars and other planets.”66

Knowing the gravity field to such a high degree of certainty would enable scientists 

to understand the Moon’s interior structure better than ever before. This knowledge 

might reveal subsurface structures and, indirectly, the thermal history of the Moon 

and its evolution.67 “After the three-month mission is completed, we will know the 

lunar gravitational field better than we know Earth’s,” explained Zuber, the mission PI, 

to the media shortly after selection.68 It would be valuable information for any future 

lunar landings.69 The gravity data would also enable lunar studies from formation to 

evolution, and even the very stability of the Moon’s orbit. 

GRAIL’s primary science objectives were to determine the structure of the lunar 

interior from crust to core and to further the understanding of its thermal evolution. 

To achieve these goals, GRAIL would take measurements and the GRAIL science team 

would conduct six lunar science investigations:

• Map the structure of the crust & lithosphere. 

• Understand the Moon’s asymmetric thermal evolution.

• Determine the subsurface structure of impact basins and the origin of mascons.

• Ascertain the temporal evolution of crustal brecciation and magmatism.

• Constrain deep interior structure from tides. 

• Place limits on the size of the possible inner core.70

A secondary objective of the mission was to extend knowledge gained from the 

Moon to the terrestrial planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.

The winning GRAIL concept did have a student collaboration—an education and 

public outreach component led by co-investigator Sally Ride. Even this student collaboration had strong heritage: Ride’s successful EarthKam program on the International Space 

Station. Up to five MoonKam camera heads on each spacecraft would be operated by 

students from a separate MoonKam Operations Center—a collaboration of middle school 

students selecting targets and high school students performing operations under Ride’s 

66 NASA. (2007, 11 December). “New NASA Mission to Reveal Moon’s Internal Structure and 

Evolution.” NASA news release 07-274.

67 Fillion, R. (2007, 14 December). “Lockheed lands lunar mission.” Rocky Mountain News.

68 Chandler, D. (2007, 14 December). “MIT to lead ambitious lunar mission.” News release.

69 Shiga, D. (2007, 14 December). “NASA spacecraft to study moon’s lumpy interior.” New Scientist.

70 NASA. (N.d.). “GRAIL Science objectives and Investigations.” Downloaded from http://moon.

mit.edu/objectives.html.
Chapter 8: Lessons Learned from the Evolution of the Program

327

direction. “Interestingly enough,” noted Michael New, “the science goals of GRAIL are 

not really related at all to any science that would be done by the student collaboration, 

because GRAIL is a gravity retrieval mission, and the imaging is completely unrelated.”71

The project manager was Dave Lehman, who also had served in that role on the 

technology demonstration mission Deep Space 1. Gregg Vane of JPL called him “very 

successful. That’s the caliber of person we’re looking to put on a competed mission as 

the project manager.”72 Co-investigators were similarly seasoned, with specific experience in Earth and planetary gravity mapping investigations. Moreover, the project 

scientist, mission system manager, and instrument manager on GRAIL had recently 

had the same roles on GRACE. 

GRAIL proceeded to development, with the start of Phase B in January 2008 quickly 

followed by its Project Mission System Review in April. The next major gate would be 

November’s Preliminary Design Review. GRAIL wasted no time, setting out a detailed 

schedule in preparation for the latter review that began almost immediately, headed by 

a review captain, Randall Taylor, GRAIL Project Acquisition Manager, rather than the 

project manager. Taylor would later call the following tasks absolutely critical when 

preparing for a life-cycle review: 

• Establish the standing review board, and your relationship with it, six months 

in advance; 

• Draft the Terms of Reference early; 

• Negotiate the scope of review (any special assessments), pre-review documentation deliveries (including schedule), and participation of standing review board 

members in project internal reviews; 

• Establish a review organization with clear roles and responsibilities; 

• Identify all required activities and have a detailed schedule; 

• Determine how to handle reviews prior to the Preliminary Design Review, gate 

products, presentation materials, IT, and logistics; and

• Leverage institutional resources and learn from other projects.73

71 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 December). Personal interview with M. New. Located in “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

72 Niebur, S. (2009, 22 March). Personal interview with G. Vane. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

73 Taylor, R. (2009). “Preparing for an NPR 7120.5D Life-Cycle Review.” Presentation. See also 

R. L. Taylor, “Reducing NPR 7120.5D to practice: Preparing for a life-cycle review,” 2009 IEEE 

Aerospace conference, Big Sky, MT, USA, 2009, pp. 1–12, doi: 10.1109/AERO.2009.4839721.
NASA′s Discovery Program

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As the mission marched toward its Preliminary Design Review, GRAIL held thirteen formal element inheritance reviews, covering all spacecraft subsystems and all 

instrument assemblies; a flight system inheritance review in July; and an additional 

alternative avionics inheritance review in August. Each of these reviews, and the later 

ones, included board reports and responses from the project. Just as these inheritance 

reviews were completed, reviews before the Preliminary Design Review began. The 

20-element Preliminary Design Review and technical interchange meetings addressed 

requirements, verification and validation, mission design and navigation, all spacecraft 

subsystems, and all instrument assemblies. It wrapped up with a top-level assessment 

of the instrument at the payload Preliminary Design Review in November 2008.74

The mission confirmation review (Key Decision Point-C) was held in January 2009, 

followed by the risk management peer review in April and May’s mission operations 

system peer review, which showed that the project had answered the driving issues 

from the Preliminary Design Review.75 The system CDR in November 2009 showed 

that the mass and power margins were tighter and that the project was managing 

them closely. The top project risk was considered the launch vehicle, as GRAIL was 

scheduled to fly on the last Delta II. The total duration of the mission, including cruise, 

would be just 270 days, starting at launch on 8 September 2011.

Repurposing Spacecraft: Extended Missions and New 

Science Investigations

The 2006 AO also resulted in selections of three extended missions—new science 

investigations using the existing hardware on the Stardust and Deep Impact spacecraft. Deep Impact, with its telescope, proved particularly rich in opportunities after 

the completion of its prime mission, the impact of Comet Tempel 1. At one point, 

seven distinct proposals were in preparation for submission to NASA Headquarters 

for review. Of those submitted to the 2006 AO, two proposals were selected. The 

Deep Impact eXtended Investigation of Comets (DIXI) was selected to fly by a second comet, photograph the nucleus, and provide additional material for scientists to 

perform a comparative study of the comets observed by Stardust and Deep Impact. 

The Extrasolar Planet Observations and Characterization (EPOCH) mission was also 

selected, to operate while the spacecraft was in transit to the second comet, all the 

while searching for the first Earth-sized planets around nearby stars with Deep Impact’s 

high-resolution camera. 

Meanwhile, the Stardust NExT mission, reusing the Stardust spacecraft, would 

revisit Comet Tempel 1 after its closest solar approach and identify changes since Deep 

74 Ibid.

75 NASA. (2009, June). “Discovery and New Frontiers News.” 8.
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Impact’s encounter in 2005. Two of the three PIs selected to lead these extended missions had previous experience as Discovery PIs, and the third had Explorer experience; 

management of these missions of opportunity was thus expected to require minimal 

oversight. Each concept study was funded at $250,000, and each was eventually selected 

for implementation as an extended mission.76

Alan Stern, Associate Administrator of the Science Mission Directorate, summed 

up the opportunities to return to a comet, fly by a new comet, and search for small 

planets around stars with large known planets, saying: “These mission extensions are 

as exciting as it gets.”77 By reusing spacecraft that have completed their prime mission, 

“it’s an effective way to get more science done with our budget. Often this gives you 

more bang for the buck by providing important new science for very little additional 

cost. With these extensions, we’re going to get two new comet visits and a search for 

extrasolar planets for about 15 percent of the cost that either of the Stardust and Deep 

Impact missions took to build.”78 Or, as Michael Belton, the deputy PI of Deep Impact 

and co-investigator on the DIXI and Stardust NExT proposals, put it, “If you’ve got 

it, use it.”79

Evaluating Missions of Opportunity Like Full Missions: The 2006 

AO Evaluation

“It was a huge amount of work,” said Michael A’Hearn, the PI of Stardust NExT, “given 

that we had to do a proposal and a Concept Study Report, a Phase A study for a mission in Phase E, and then a site visit.” A’Hearn compared the two-step proposal process 

to Cassini’s extended mission proposal, saying, “I think we did far more work than 

Cassini did for its extended mission.”80

The combination of the Deep Impact and Stardust teams for the Stardust NExT 

study was a clever solution to a difficult problem: managing two extended missions for 

a fixed period of time for less than $35 million. Efficiencies were realized by combining not just the co-investigators, but also the project management, led by Tim Larson; 

education and public outreach, led by Aimee Meyer Whalen; administrative functions; 

76 NASA. (2006, 30 October). “NASA Announces Discovery Program Selections.” NASA news 

release 06-342.

77 Malik, T. (2007, 12 July). “NASA probes get new mission.” Florida Today.

78 Alers, P. (2007, 30 August). “Space, Science, and the Bottom Line.” Nature, 448(978).

79 Erickson, J. (2006, 16 March). “Colorado craft could return to the stars.” Rocky Mountain News.

80 Niebur, S. (2009, 11 March). Personal interview with M. A’Hearn. Located in “Deep Impact” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC; 

Niebur, S. (2009, 4 September). Personal interview with L. Johnson. Located in “Deep Impact” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
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and JPL oversight. “We basically told them here from [NASA] Headquarters that for 

us to be able to approve both these missions, you guys really need to consolidate your 

operations closely to cut down the cost,” said Lindley Johnson, the program executive.81

Reducing Risk to the Program: PI Experience Rule

Despite the best efforts of NASA and the planetary science community, flight project 

costs continued to grow. The Associate Administrator’s edict that divisions solve their 

own financial problems had not contained costs. Nor had the efforts of several division directors. Nor had the implementation of a minimum of 25 percent reserve for 

all current and future missions (indeed, it caused some missions like Dawn additional

troubles). Scientific instruments were thrown overboard to compensate for industry 

delays, and mission operations budgets were slashed to pay for overruns. Replans of 

current missions seemed to provide solutions, but in the end, costs continued to grow. 

Nearly everyone was frustrated, and NASA would have to introduce new ideas or lose 

credibility with the scientific community and with Congress over the definition of 

Discovery as a cost-capped program.

Less than a month after Alan Stern assumed the role of Associate Administrator 

of the Science Mission Directorate, he made a major policy change to all PI-led mission lines. Each proposing PI, Stern said, must have proven experience delivering a 

previous flight project in a leadership role. PIs without experience leading a small 

flight mission or an instrument development team on a larger flagship mission would 

be disqualified from even proposing a future mission to the Discovery, Mars Scout, 

New Frontiers, or Explorer mission lines. The community did not have to wait long 

for the official language, codified in an announcement of the upcoming SMEX AO: 

“A proposal PI for this AO must have demonstrated sufficient experience to successfully lead a SMEX mission by having held a key position (PI, PS, Deputy PI, Deputy 

PS) for a space project (orbital or suborbital or deep space, mission or experiment or 

instrument) that has launched.”82

The official policy further defined the required level of experience by mission 

class and duration. Discovery proposers were required to demonstrate “at least two 

years of experience in a lead role [responsibilities of a PI, PM, PS, or Deputy PI/PM/

PS] for an orbital or deep space mission or instrument that will be launched prior to 

AO downselection.” In addition, since “leading a spaceflight mission [is] one of the 

81 Ibid.

82 NASA. (2007, 24 April). “Explorer Program Announcement of Opportunity.”
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most difficult jobs in the world,” with this policy the Science Mission Directorate also 

established for the first time a mandatory post-selection training program for all PIs, 

including those already selected and leading missions in the program.83

The new preproposal requirements for formal demonstration of PI experience 

posed a problem. Very few PIs had led a mission before because of the extended time 

scales required for comprehensive mission development. After attaining doctorates, 

proposing PIs typically spent many years performing independent research and possibly serving as a co-investigator on one or more missions, and then submitting a 

series of unsuccessful proposals to competitive AOs, leading to successful selection 

of a mission with the scientist as PI. The series of proposals was key: in the Discovery 

Program, seven of the nine competitively selected missions in the first twenty years 

of the program were first proposed in some form in 1992 and 1994. The need for successive proposals over a decade further lengthened the time elapsed between PhD and 

selection as a PI. No studies then existed on the typical age or experience level of a PI, 

but anecdotal evidence was overwhelming: this rule would exclude most of the field.

While no one denied that the charge to design, develop, implement, and operate 

a space or Earth science mission on time and on budget encompassed many tasks 

and skillsets, some began to dispute, first quietly and then louder, whether previous 

experience in the leadership role was necessary for a proposing PI. Sean Solomon, the 

MESSENGER PI, acidly noted at a Planetary Science Subcommittee meeting that this 

rule would mean that only he, of all the PIs who had led Discovery missions, would 

be considered formally qualified to lead.

The PI experience rule, as it came to be called, also had the effect, if not necessarily 

the intent, of barring younger investigators and almost all women from submitting 

proposals, due to their lack of previous experience in these specific science leadership 

positions, despite mission experience as members of the science team in numbers more 

proportionate to their representation in the field as a whole. The policy undervalued 

the contribution of a co-investigator, who might have been responsible for the design 

and delivery of an instrument, completion of a scientific investigation, mission operations, and coordinating supporting observations from ground-based telescopes or 

other space assets, without providing any avenue for these co-investigators or other 

scientists to become qualified under the new definition. 

After a hue and cry, and a change of Associate Administrators at NASA, the explicit 

experience requirement was not included in the 2008 “standard AO,” a document 

proposed for use by all PI-led mission lines. The expectation of extensive experience, 

however, remained, as did confusion about what “experience” was considered suf83 NASA. (2007, 20 November). “SMD Policy: Experience Requirements for Mission Principal 

Investigators.” Approved by Stern on 15 January 2008. Revised policy document approved 19 

February 2008.
NASA′s Discovery Program

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ficient, how to obtain such experience, and what an aspiring PI might do to increase 

the odds of selection in the future. The 2010 AO stated: “The commitment, spaceflight 

experience, and past performance of the PI and of the implementing institutions will 

be assessed against the needs of the investigation,” and implemented the modified 

requirement as follows: 

Requirement 42. Proposals shall identify the management positions that will be filled by key 

management team members. These positions shall include, as a minimum, the PI, PM, Project 

Systems Engineer (PSE), and, where appropriate, the PS and partner leads. For management 

positions for which key management team members are named (including the PI and PM 

per Requirement 39 and Requirement 40), proposals shall describe the qualifications and 

experience of those team members who occupy those positions [and]...shall demonstrate 

that the described qualifications and experience are commensurate with the technical and 

managerial needs of the proposed investigation.84

The flexibility inherent in this text was an improvement over the 2007 requirement, 

but it replaced absolutes with ambiguity. The reader might have been left wondering 

whether there was an unwritten rule that adequate spaceflight experience included 

positions in the key roles as mandated the year before. In the absence of direction, there 

was no clear confirmation that, for example, experience as a deputy project scientist 

or as a co-investigator on several successful missions would be considered sufficient. 

The reader was left with uncertainty about the agency’s expectations and criteria for 

PI experience, evaluated by the science panel and technical-management-cost review.

This uncertainty led to broader questions of PI experience, such as acceptable 

career stage and expected previous participation on missions, as well as questions of 

adequate opportunity for newer scientists to gain such pre-PI experience.

Adding Capability: DSMCE Mission Studies 

At the conclusion of the Discovery 2006 AO cycle (and his first month in office), Stern 

set in motion a new initiative to encourage the community to think proactively about 

missions that could be submitted to future New Frontiers and Discovery AOs. Stern 

approached Division Director Jim Green about initiating a series of mission studies, 

to be paid for out of the Associate Administrator’s own budget reserve. While the list 

of allowable targets for New Frontiers specified in the 2003 National Research Council 

report had aged and become less relevant in the face of the council’s next study, internal Planetary Science Division discussions over the summer identified an additional 

benefit to mission studies: the ability to study the potential impact of new technologies 

84 NASA. (2010). Discovery Announcement of Opportunity.
Chapter 8: Lessons Learned from the Evolution of the Program

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such as Advanced Stirling Radioisotope Generators on Discovery mission concepts.85

Stern agreed to fund this kind of study at the 50 percent level and told the division to 

make it happen before the October meeting of the American Astronomical Society 

Division of Planetary Sciences. 

Less than three weeks later, the Discovery and Scout Mission Capabilities 

Expansion (DSMCE) NASA Research Announcement was prepared, announced at 

the Discovery@15 Workshop, and released on the NASA Solicitation and Proposal 

Integrated Review and Evaluation System (NSPIRES). While the Discovery Program 

Scientist and Program Executive may have remained unconvinced of the merit of 

expanding the Discovery Program’s parameters to include ASRGs and other new technologies, the studies proceeded under the direction of Curt Niebur, who had recently 

run a series of mission studies at this level, including the “Billion Dollar Box” study 

of Saturn missions, the Comet Surface Sample Return study, and various studies of 

future outer planet flagship missions. Although scientists and engineers were given 

no notice that the opportunity was coming, proposals were due a mere 60 days after 

the announcement. NASA received 40 proposals on 20 November—a rate that Curt 

Niebur called a “tremendous response” to this first Discovery-size mission study call 

in 15 years. Nine were selected and given $200,000 to $300,000 each—the full amount 

that each had proposed for the six-month studies.86

The DSMCE studies were evaluated by scientists from the planetary science community and mission designers from NASA Ames Research Center, the Jet Propulsion 

Laboratory, Goddard Research Center, and Aerospace Corporation. The evaluations 

showed that although the missions were all near the top of the DSMCE cost cap ($450 

million, Fiscal Year 2008 dollars), most of the concepts would be implementable within 

Discovery constraints. In accordance with the study ground rules, information about 

each mission concept was posted on the web in both abstract and fact sheet format. 

Consequently, there was now some evidence that opening up the Discovery mission 

line to Advanced Stirling Radioisotope Generators and other new technologies would 

expand the trade space available for future mission proposals. 

FAMILY REUNION: DISCOVERY@15

The Discovery Program held a program-wide Lessons Learned Workshop titled 

“Discovery at 15: Looking Backward, Looking Forward” (also called “Discovery@15”) 

on 19–20 September 2007. It was held in Huntsville, Alabama, home of the Discovery 

Program Office, by then a 17-person office staffed with engineers and managers working 

85 Beebe, R., et al. (2008) Opening New Frontiers in Space: Choices for the Next New Frontiers AO. 

Washington, DC: National Academies Press. 82.

86 Niebur, S. (2011, 19 March). Personal interview with C. Niebur.
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toward the program’s success. The agenda was filled with speakers from every mission 

and every aspect of program management. PIs introduced each mission or mission of 

opportunity; project managers spoke about mission development. Evaluators, NASA 

officials, and curation specialists gave cross-program perspectives. Education and public 

outreach plans were thoroughly discussed by both program and project personnel. 

The sessions were generally open and good-natured, and they were beneficial for the 

nearly 200 scientists and mission managers in attendance. Paul Gilbert, Discovery 

Program Manager, called it “a family reunion.”87

Meanwhile, back at NASA Headquarters, a formal process was instituted to create and use a standard AO across all the Earth and space science divisions, guided by 

three main principles: 

Any simplified AO must still enable [these] outcomes: (1) Maintain the ability for NASA 

to evaluate the science merit (through science peer review) to guide selection. (2) Maintain 

the ability for NASA to evaluate the feasibility of proposed missions (through TMC review) 

to guide selection. (3) Ensure that mission teams are ready to successfully conduct Phase A 

mission concept studies if they are selected.88

The standard AO would have clear and consistent requirements and standard 

reporting formats, and it would eliminate much guesswork as to what the program 

scientist was asking in any particular paragraph. Over the ten-plus years of PI-led 

missions in the Discovery, Explorer, Mars Scout, and Earth mission lines, the AOs had 

tended toward clunky amalgamates of requirements rather than the easy-to-understand 

requests for data that they were intended to be. Each program incorporated its own 

lessons learned after each proposal cycle, adding requirements as made sense in order 

to provide the most accurate evaluation and assessment of potential cost risk. In turn, 

the data submitted to satisfy these requirements grew and were more fully evaluated, 

and the next round of reviewers requested an even more detailed level of data. The 

cycle continued to the point where the claim frequently was made—by proposers and 

evaluators alike—that a Step 1 proposal now contained the information that NASA 

used to ask for in Step 2. 

Over the next year, NASA Headquarters and the Earth and Space Science Support 

Office at Langley Research Center convened a number of public meetings for community scientists, managers, and frequent technical-management-cost reviewers to 

attend and discuss the level and number of potential requirements in this standard 

AO. Meetings were held in conjunction with the annual Division of Planetary Science 

and American Astronomical Society conferences that year. Michael New, the program 

87 Spires, S. G. (2007, 18 September). “Space conference also reunion.” The Huntsville Times.

88 Stern, A. (2007, 17 December). “NASA Solicitation: Simplifying NASA Announcements of 

Opportunity—SMD.” Solicitation Number: NNH07ZDA001O.
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scientist, and Paul Hertz, the chief scientist in the Science Mission Directorate and 

later head of the Astrophysics Division, participated in the planning and the meetings themselves, along with Brad Perry of the Science Support Office; Jay Bergstralh, 

the chief scientist of the Solar System Exploration Division (and former Discovery 

program scientist); and others—all space science veterans of the Discovery Program 

and review process. Among them were Lisa May, who had worked Explorers from 

both proposal and review sides, and Cindy Bruno, who had served as Science Support 

Office Explorer lead at Langley. The study was co-chaired by Hertz and Perry.

The first stand-alone meeting was the Discovery, Mars Scout, and Small Explorer 

(SMEX) Lessons Learned Workshop, held at the Grand Hyatt Hotel at Dallas–Ft. Worth 

Airport on 28–29 February. At this workshop, Hertz, New, and Perry outlined current 

plans for AOs and their evaluation, as well as a “Quick List” of options. Speakers lined 

up to deliver 10-minute presentations with five minutes for discussion. Six proposers 

were on the agenda to discuss AO requirements, covering everything from cost and 

schedule data to letters of commitment and the time reserved for launch services.89

The next month, Hertz led an open session at the Lunar and Planetary Science 

Conference in Houston, TX, on 13 March to brief that community on the plan and 

gather community input. These sessions and others were followed by the AO Cost 

and Schedule Lessons Learned Workshop on 17 April, where Hertz opened with an 

overview of the AO simplification process and options, including the following three 

straightforward objectives for the process: “1) Simplify the proposal process to the extent 

possible to eliminate any unnecessary rules/requirements in the AO, and streamline 

the way that scientific and technical information is provided to NASA, 2) Reduce or 

eliminate the amount of work that the proposing team has to do over and above what 

they would have to do anyway to have a credible response, and 3) Revise the AO/

evaluation/selection process, as required, to reduce overall burden to the proposing 

community, the reviewing community, and NASA while maintaining or improving the 

present quality.” This meeting was to be a true exchange of perspectives, with proposers 

responding to ideas suggested by the evaluators, and evaluators responding to proposers 

on the content, format, and appropriate level of detail to require. NASA suggested four 

metrics for each suggested change: 1) Will it reduce work for the proposer? 2) Will 

it maintain NASA’s ability to evaluate and select? 3) What is the downside risk? and 

4) Is it a good idea?90 After this introduction, technical-management-cost reviewers 

and proposers responded to suggestions from the February workshop and presented 

some of their own. 

89 SMD AO Simplification Workshop. 28–29 February 2008. See https://web.archive.org/

web/20111015145949/http://soma.larc.nasa.gov/AO-LL-FinalAgenda.html (accessed on 11 May 2023).

90 Hertz, P. (2008, 17 April). “AO Simplification Overview.” Presentation at AO Simplification Cost 

and Schedule Workshop in Dallas, TX.
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Mike Stancati of SAIC referenced a 2007 study of 24 recent Science Mission 

Directorate flight projects in several mission classes and management modes, noting 

that 21 of the projects had cost growth (22 percent on average, and up to 98 percent 

over and above plan including reserve), for a combined impact of $2 billion on the 

Science Mission Directorate’s $9 billion mission portfolio.91 Two-thirds of the projects 

showed a substantially increased rate of internal cost growth after Critical Design 

Review. In addition, 19 missions had significant schedule slips of five to 42 months 

each. Technical-management-cost’s challenge, the study reported, was to analyze each 

proposal’s basis of cost estimate, design heritage, project reserve, and project plans and 

to create an independent cost model for comparison of stated costs in each area to 

identify cost threats and mitigations, answering this core question: “Does the project 

have enough resources to do what they propose?” Stancati’s final point went right to 

the heart of the initial issues on Kepler, when he noted that currently the proposer 

must “deal with any funding profile limits imposed by HQ budget reality,” proposing 

that NASA both eliminate funding profile constraints in future AOs and relax the cost 

cap. Preempting NASA Headquarters’ inevitable response that there are nearly always 

constraints on future funding, and that eliminating the stated profile would just postpone 

the release of future AOs, Stancati added: “Don’t have the money? Then don’t start!!”92

While this would be a simple solution, the budget reality that those outside NASA 

Headquarters may not have realized is that program reserve is the first to get “swept 

up” by budget analysts, division directors, and others looking for uncommitted money 

to rescue a development project from overruns in the current fiscal year. Larger sums 

attract more attention, and Discovery AOs had been postponed on several occasions 

over the second decade of the Discovery Program, including 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 

and 2009. If the program could always wait to have unlimited amounts of cash on 

hand, requiring no specific funding profile, release would typically be delayed time 

and again, and the money swept up betweentimes. After further discussion (and the 

passage of another four years), NASA Headquarters released the 2010 AO without a 

specific annual funding profile.

Technical-management-cost evaluator Bob Kellogg of the Aerospace Corporation 

provided additional perspective, reminding proposers that the overall goal of the evaluation is the ability to tell the selection official whether the proposed mission concept 

is mature enough to be executable within mission constraints. Cost model results, 

always an issue of concern with proposers, are primarily used as indicators of areas 

that need to be more closely examined. Discrepancies between models and proposed 

91 Perry, B. (2010, 29 April). “SMD Cost/Schedule Performance Study.” Presentation to the PIF-2. 

Downloaded from http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/457672main_PI2_SMD_Cost_Schedule_perry.pdf.

92 Stancati, M. (2008, 17 April). “TMC Resource Evaluation.” Presentation at AO Simplification 

Cost and Schedule Workshop in Dallas, TX.
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costs at lower levels can signal that a subsystem is immature, or an operations plan 

does not account for all the elements. The proposal is the team’s chance to educate 

technical-management-cost on the proposed approach; the cost tables support the 

design’s maturity. With this understanding, the basis of estimate gains importance as 

a further demonstration that the proposed cost is adequate to cover development, and 

the proposal is mature enough to know the cost with sufficient certainty. Grassroots 

estimates, analogies, and level-of-effort estimates indicate different assumptions about 

the project, and results of cost models or independent estimates can show how the 

project addresses any discrepancies. Agreements are good, but disagreements can 

be useful as well, if the basis for any difference is carefully discussed. As for heritage, 

Kellogg said, “All proposals claim extensive heritage in technical sections. If heritage 

is valid, then cost of heritage systems should provide a good sanity check on proposed 

costs. This is very convincing when it is done well.” A thorough discussion of heritage 

should include “cost of heritage item, discuss any significant technical or programmatic differences, and provide a rationale for the proposed cost.” Kellogg also echoed 

Stancati’s request for removing AO funding profiles and a minimum reserve level 

and added three other recommendations from the cost team: keep funded schedule 

reserve separate from cost reserves, add detail for projected cost and mass savings for 

any descopes (and during what project stage those savings would be realized), and 

remove education and public outreach plans from Step 1 proposals, as they are “not a 

discriminator.”93 History, however, would argue with the last point; the education and 

public outreach plan was indeed a discriminator in 1994 for the selection of Stardust 

over its closest competitor.

Mark Jacobs from SAIC, also a technical-management-cost reviewer, made the 

argument that the AO simplification process should not reduce the concept definition 

requirements of a proposal. Indeed, NASA’s emphasis on better cost performance would 

require more thorough definition of the baseline design. “Science objectives drive the 

entire implementation plan,” he said, and “cost is entirely dependent on the technical and management approach. Omitting technical/management definition details 

to simplify the process could seriously compromise independent cost assessments.”94

Jacobs then made a striking claim, saying: “Recent attempts to improve cost performance rely on higher reserve level requirements, although past history shows cost 

reserves typically do not offset issues with early estimates,” and he supported it with 

a slide showing that while CONTOUR and MESSENGER grew less than 20 percent 

93 Kellogg, B. (2008, 17 April). “Proposed Budget: Evaluator’s View.” Presentation at AO Simplification 

Cost and Schedule Workshop in Dallas, TX.

94 Jacobs, M. (2008, 17 April). “No Cost AO.” Presentation at NASA Cost and Schedule Lessons Learned 

Workshop. Downloaded from http://soma.larc.nasa.gov/StandardAO/PDFDallasPresentations/

%5B4%5DJacobs_goals.pdf.
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during development, Deep Impact grew 28 percent, Genesis grew almost 45 percent, 

and Dawn grew over 60 percent, excluding external impacts despite generally increasing levels of reserves.95

Note that the core problem in Discovery and related programs had historically 

been that although aerospace costs kept growing, management of these missions had 

become more complex and subject to more external pressures, and the stores of flight 

spares were becoming depleted. The planetary science community had not yet found 

a way to execute these small planetary missions or plan in this new environment. 

Furthermore, although cost models were typically quoted with accuracy plus or 

minus 20 percent, no PI-led mission yet had come in at the –20 percent level. Actual 

costs were typically +20 percent or higher, even when external impacts were excluded. 

To minimize growth, Jacobs suggested understanding flight hardware at the component 

level, particularly when subsystems or instruments were modified versions or amalgams of previously flown hardware, and, in addition, remaining aware of significant 

management and organizational cost drivers, including experience of all partners, the 

availability of test facilities, parts quality requirements, conflicts with other projects 

under development by the same organization, and risk mitigation plans.96

Violet Barghe-Sharghi, a technical-management-cost schedule evaluator from 

Aerospace, showed the group several examples of sample schedules from previous Step 1 

proposals and discussed their use, including the utility of “random (self-chosen) elements” 

of the schedule discussion. A list of requirements and “desirements” followed, and while 

she urged NASA Headquarters to more clearly specify the schedule requirements and 

a certain level of granularity, she also urged proposers to reflect in their proposal any 

cross-strapping of their implementation approach to their reported schedules, including 1) basis of estimates for the schedule elements; 2) the addition of schedule impacts 

to the areas of risk management, descope, and long-lead items; and 3) a rationale for 

the amount and placement of funded schedule reserves. Acknowledging that some of 

these requests reflected Step 2 criteria, she requested that the Step 1 schedule requirements be at the summary level of the Step 2 schedule details—a significant change.97

After the workshops were complete, the AO Simplification Team issued an interim 

white paper of draft decisions, noting that they had

solicited broadly for suggestions and ideas from the proposing and reviewing communities. 

This solicitation includes (i) setting up a dedicated website and email address, (ii) issuing 

NSPIRES and FBO announcements, (iii) conducting town meetings at major science conferences, (iv) holding two Lessons Learned Workshops for the proposing community (scheduled 

95 Ibid.

96 Ibid.

97 Barghe-Sharghi, V. (2008, 17 April). “Proposed Schedule: Evaluator’s View.” Presentation at AO 

Simplification Cost and Schedule Workshop in Dallas, TX.
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for after SMEX proposal submission), (v) holding a virtual Lessons Learned Workshop for 

the reviewing community (scheduled for after completion of SMEX proposal evaluation), 

(vi) requesting coordinated input from GSFC and JPL, and (vii) participating in an AO 

requirements review with a group of proposers. The Team has also worked with stakeholders 

to simplify and streamline various interfaces including proposal submission, international 

participation, launch services, space communications, procurement, and legal. The AO 

Simplification Team has received more than 500 suggestions for changes.98

Widespread community involvement resulted in significant revisions, including 

numbered requirements to improve traceability and increase efficiency for both proposers and reviewers. Since proposers no longer had to guess which AO statements were 

requirements (previous AOs had typically—but not always—used the word “shall” to 

denote requirements), teams could focus on answering the numbered requirements. 

Their resulting proposals would be more clearly responsive to the AO requirements, 

enabling a more straightforward technical-management-cost review. Fewer hours of 

work on both sides would translate to less investment required to create—and to 

review—a Discovery proposal. 

In addition to a new standard AO, NASA released templates for the Step 1 Proposal 

Evaluation Plan and Guidelines and Criteria for the Phase A Study, two documents 

that theretofore had been edited (and released, in the case of the latter) with each AO. 

Making these documents publicly available even between AO releases increased transparency and ease of preparation for both the proposing and reviewing communities, 

as would be seen in the 2010 AO.

PREDICTING RISK:

SSO EVALUATES THE EVALUATIONS

Several years earlier, the Space Science Office had performed a study of technicalmanagement-cost risk ratings over the history of the PI-led Discovery, New Frontiers, 

UNEX, SMEX, and MIDEX competitions from 1996 to 2005. The results of that study 

were reported to NASA Headquarters and published in written form without missionspecific detail.99 This lack of detail, likely intended to protect proposers and mission 

teams, unfortunately impeded the usefulness of the report. Fortunately, the data were 

revisited later and the data published more fully, in both white paper and briefing 

(PowerPoint) form, with some very interesting tables.

98 NASA. (2008, 31 May). “Announcement of Opportunity (AO) Simplification White Paper: 

Draft Decisions.”

99 Perry, R., et al. (2006, 21 February). “Lessons learned from Technical, Management, and Cost 

Review of Proposals: A summary of 10 years’ experience in reviewing competitively selected 

proposals for new science missions.” White paper.
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In the aggregate, the proposals from 2006 to 2009 were more likely to have received 

major weaknesses and higher risk ratings from technical-management-cost reviews 

(TMC) than the proposals initially studied. This finding was attributed to the increased 

expertise and depth of investigation in TMC assessments of the instrument development and operation plans, even though additional major weaknesses were detected 

in all areas (cost, systems engineering, schedule) except management. The 2006–2009 

proposals were also less likely to be rated Low Risk; only about 30 percent received 

that rating at Step 1.100

Common causes of major weaknesses in TMC reviews across all Science Mission 

Directorate programs from 1996 to 2009 included overstatement of heritage and 

maturity; inadequate definition, traceability, and flow-down of requirements; technical margins (particularly in mass and power); cost reserve; complexity of instruments 

or operations; attitude control and pointing; and—particularly in the case of Discovery 

projects—implementing new technology. 

Common causes of major weaknesses based on data from 783 Step 1 proposals:101

Technical design margins for flight system and payload: 

• 119 [22 percent of proposals] had one or more major weaknesses on 

mass margins; 

o Insufficient description to allow independent verification of the claimed 

mass margin;

o Heritage masses didn’t account for potential design modifications;

o No clearly stated mass margin (none given, conflicting statements, confusion between contingency and margin), characterized as both failure 

to follow AO directions and deliberate proposal puffery;

o Low mass margin; or

o Missing and undersized elements (e.g., launch vehicle payload adapter) 

create immediate lien on claimed margin.

100 Perry, R. (2010, 29 April). “Step 1 & 2 Lessons Learned Study: Presentation to the PIF-2.” 

Presentation to the second Principal Investigator (PI) Team Masters Forum. Downloaded from 

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/457658main_PI2_Lessons_Learned_perry.pdf.

101 Perry, R., et al. (2006, 21 February). “Lessons learned from Technical, Management, and Cost 

Review of Proposals: A summary of 10 years’ experience in reviewing competitively selected 

proposals for new science missions.” White paper. See also Perry, R. (2010, 29 April). “Step 1 

& 2 Lessons Learned Study: Presentation to the PIF-2.” Presentation to the second Principal 

Investigator (PI) Team Masters Forum. Downloaded from http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/457658main_

PI2_Lessons_Learned_perry.pdf.
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• 68 [13 percent of proposals] had a major weakness on power/energy margins, 

for similar reasons; also, power margin was not always calculated against the 

most critical or demanding operating mode;

• 53 had major weaknesses on data handling and communications links; and 

• Other common major weaknesses [less than 5 percent of proposals] were found 

regarding propellant, thermal design margins, volume margin, radiation protection factor, and other factors.

Cost: 261 proposals overall [33 percent] had a cost-related major weakness, including in cost-reserve. Of the 124 proposals [16 percent] with a cost-reserve-related major 

weakness, most fell into the following categories: 

• Reserve below the stated AO requirement for overall level or by project phase;

• Existing liens against reserve;

• Reserve too low to cover cost threats, as identified by proposer or TMC 

analysis; or

• Reserves phased too late in the funding profile to be available when the schedule 

of activity suggested the need.

Instruments: ~255 proposals [32 percent] had an instrument-related 

major weakness:

• Complex, new design;

• Inadequate or inconsistent description and detail;

• Weak heritage claims;

• Integration and accommodations, such as a mismatch between stated instrument requirements and known bus capacity;

• Integration and test program; end-to-end verification testing; 

• Pointing performance; or

• Detector contamination.

Systems Engineering: ~235 proposals with a related major weakness [30 percent]

• Science requirements and flow-down to instruments, payload accommodations, 

and flight systems (more common in earlier AOs); 

• Project-wide systems engineering responsibility;

• Credible plans for success; or

• Underestimates of the cost of this function.
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Management: 203 major weaknesses [26 percent]

• Low time commitments for essential members of the core management team;

• Confusing organization roles and responsibilities;

• Unclear lines of authority; or

• Missing commitment letters and/or endorsements from institutions and international partners.

Schedule detail and (funded) margins: 130+ with major weaknesses [17 percent]

• Inadequate detail presented for TMC evaluation;

• No reserve or inadequate reserve;

• Too ambitious or success-oriented for what needs to be done, especially 

during ATLO; or

• Unrealistic timing of key milestones.

Complex Operations: 64 proposals [8 percent] with complex operational requirements—for payload, observing sequence, landers, etc.

Interestingly, the number of proposals having a major weakness of any kind in 

Step 1 exceeded the number of missions rated Low Risk, which seems contradictory, 

as an evaluation ground rule had been that only major weaknesses affect the risk. No 

explanation for this was given. The paper noted recent improvements in the area of 

systems requirements and flow-down, perhaps in response to more detailed requirements in the AO and the additional requirement of a traceability matrix.

Proposers selected to perform a Concept Study Report were encouraged to specifically address the Step 1 weaknesses identified for their proposal; the study explicitly 

noted that most of the proposing teams later to be selected for implementation directly 

addressed the identified weaknesses and attempted to alleviate the reviewers’ concerns 

in their Step 2 Concept Study Report. Seventy-nine full mission Concept Study Reports 

were studied; common causes of major weaknesses are tabulated below.102

102 Ibid.
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Technical weaknesses: 

• Requirements definition, traceability, and flow-down [17 percent];

• Verification [15 percent], often correlated with major weaknesses in requirements, system complexity, or design maturity;

• Heritage [15 percent], including overstatement of the benefits or inaccurate 

accounting for modifications; 

• Mass Margin [9 percent]; 

• Thermal [7 percent], many of these at the instrument level;

• Optics/Focal Plane [7 percent], particularly overstatement of performance of 

instrument optics;

• Low Maturity/technology readiness levels [6 percent], particularly of 

instruments; and

• Attitude determination and control [6 percent].

Management major weaknesses:

• Key individuals [36 percent], including lack of relevant experience, limited project 

manager history of flight project accountability, and low time commitments;

• Schedule [27 percent]: incomplete schedule, inadequate or inappropriately placed 

schedule reserve, inadequate definition (or complete lack) of critical path;

• Management plans [19 percent], particularly risk management;

• Systems engineering [16 percent], often reflecting inconsistency among project 

elements; and

• Descope definition [3 percent], often associated with overstatement of heritage or TRL.

Cost major weaknesses:

• Inadequate cost reserve [36 percent], often the result of increased definition in 

the design and implementation in Phase A; also associated with low maturity 

and/or heritage major weaknesses;

• Cost [32 percent] significantly different from independent cost estimates, often 

due to a dispute in the proposer’s underlying assumptions in areas such as 

technical performance, TRLs, or heritage;

• Basis of estimate [20 percent] inadequate; and

• Credibility [12 percent] or relevance of supporting cost data.
NASA′s Discovery Program

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A relatively small percentage of proposals received improved risk ratings in Step 2. 

An equal number stayed the same or got worse. This may be explained in part by more 

detailed review and less “benefit of the doubt” given to proposers at Step 2.

SALMON AO

The first Stand Alone Missions of Opportunity (SALMON) AO was released in 2008, 

with proposals due in December. After five months of review, two of the eight proposed investigations were funded as Discovery Program Missions of Opportunity to 

be flown on future ESA missions. 

The Lander Radioscience (LaRa) on ExoMars, a radio science investigation, would 

have used the onboard X-band transponder provided by Belgium and NASA’s Deep 

Space Network to measure variances in the orientation and rotation of Mars in space. 

During normal operations, a signal would have been sent from Earth to the ExoMars 

lander, bounced back by LaRa, and returned to Earth. The measured frequency of the 

signal would have been shifted relative to the initial signal due to the Doppler effect 

as Mars moves relative to Earth. 

These measurements would have been used to study the interior of Mars and, 

on the surface, the sublimation/condensation process of carbon dioxide as it moved 

between the atmosphere and the ice caps with the seasons. The PI was William Folkner 

of JPL; the investigation would have included no instrument and would have cost 

approximately $6.6 million.

The second chosen was the STart from a ROtating FIeld mass spectrOmeter 

(STROFIO), a mass spectrometer designed to launch aboard ESA’s BepiColombo 

mission in 2013 and study the atoms and molecules that make up Mercury’s atmosphere—part of the Search for Exospheric Refilling and Emitted Natural Abundances 

(SERENA) experiment (which included three other sensors).103

2010 AO

As the decade came to a close, NASA prepared a new AO for release in January, 

then July 2010. NASA-wide changes since the 2006 AO included the implementation 

of NPR 7120.5D, issued on 9 March 2007. This NPR “focused on institutionalizing 

the processes by which NASA formulates and implements space flight programs and 

103 NASA. (2009, 18 May). “NASA Selects Future Projects To Study Mars And Mercury.” NASA 

News Release.
Chapter 8: Lessons Learned from the Evolution of the Program

345

projects, provided a standardized life cycle review process that is built around the key 

decision points, formalized the technical authority, dissenting opinion resolution, and 

waiver processes, and streamlined the document.”104

Michael Griffin ended his nearly four-year term as NASA Administrator, stepping down on 20 January 2009, at the start of President Obama’s administration. 

Associate Administrator Alan Stern had served from April 2007 to April 2008; Associate 

Administrator Weiler was in charge again, and a number of policies reverted to those 

in effect during his previous term as Associate Administrator. 

The Discovery Program had not substantially changed since the 2006 AO, but “a 

large number” of changes were made to the draft AO, “including both policy changes 

and changes to proposal submission requirements.”105 The draft AO (NNH10ZDA003J), 

based on the new NASA Science Mission Directorate Standard AO, was released 

7 December 2009, with a $425 million (FY 2010) cost cap not including launch vehicle, 

contributions, or specific NASA-developed technologies discussed in the AO. 

Proposers should be aware of the following major changes in this AO from the 

previous Discovery Program AO in 2006 (NNH06ZDA001O).

• The cost of standard launch services is not included within the cap on the 

PI-Managed Mission Cost (Section 4.3.1), but mission-unique launch services 

and the differential cost of more capable LVs [Launch Vehicles] than the standard 

LV will be included in the PI-Managed Cost (Section 5.9.2).

• The Discovery Program requirement that returned space-exposed hardware 

be curated and that the costs for such curation be included in the PI-Managed 

Mission Cost has been added (Section 5.1.5.4)[.]

• Proposals may designate a Project Manager Alternate. At selection and subject 

to the approval of NASA, the Alternate may be named as the Project Manager 

(Section 5.3.2).

• The minimum reserve level of 25% is now assessed against the Phase A-E cost 

(Section 5.6.3) rather than the Phase A-D cost.

• Proposal of investigations enabled by the use of Advanced Stirling Radioisotope 

Generators (ASRGs) is allowed (Section 5.9.3). ASRGs are provided as 

Government Furnished Equipment (GFE).

• New propulsion technology has been developed by NASA and is available for 

infusion into Discovery missions (Section 5.9.3).

104 NASA. (2012, 14 August). “NASA Space Flight Program and Project Management Requirements.” 

NPR 7120.5E. https://nodis3.gsfc.nasa.gov/npg_img/N_PR_7120_005E_/N_PR_7120_005E_.pdf.

105 NASA. (2009). DRAFT Announcement of Opportunity: Discovery 2010. https://

nspires.nasaprs.com/external/viewrepositorydocument/cmdocumentid=214565/

solicitationId=%7BCEE916F8-B142-2611-6CE0-399BCEDA3B3E%7D/

viewSolicitationDocument=1/Discovery%2010%20DRAFT%20RELEASE.pdf.
NASA′s Discovery Program

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• Investigations focused on Mars are allowed (Section 2.2).

• Missions of Opportunity investigations are no longer solicited through the 

Discovery AO. Missions of Opportunity investigations may be solicited through 

the Stand Alone Mission of Opportunity Notice (SALMON) AO at a future date.

• Letters of Commitment are not required from Co-investigators. However, 

all proposal team members must commit to the proposal through NSPIRES 

(Section 5.8.1.3).106

Changes in the final AO, as compared to the draft AO, included an extension of the 

no-later-than launch date from 31 December 2016 to 31 December 2017, as well as:

• The role of NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in the AO process is explicitly 

described (Section 4.1.2) as is the role of NASA Centers in public affairs for 

selected missions (Section 4.1.3).

• The costs associated with National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) compliance, Nuclear Launch Safety Approval (NLSA) compliance, and nuclear launch 

services for missions proposing to use ASRGs are reduced to a firm, fixed cost 

of $20M (FY10) (Section 5.2.4.4).

• The requirement for justifying the use of a frequency other than Ka-band for 

science data return is clarified (Section 5.2.5).

• The latest allowable Launch Readiness Date (LRD) is December 31, 2017 

(Section 5.9.1).

• Launch vehicles in the “medium” and “high” performance classes with 4m fairings have been added as options (Section 5.9.2).

• Proposed missions are required to be compatible with three families of launch 

vehicles: Atlas V, Delta IV, and Falcon 9 (Section 5.9.2).

• The minimum requirements for taking advantage of technology-infusion cost 

cap incentives are detailed in a new document in the Program Library entitled In-Space Propulsion Technologies Minimum Demonstration Requirements 

(Section 5.9.3).

• Missions to the Martian surface are not required to carry the Electra-lite UHF 

radio package (Section 5.9.4).107

106 Ibid.

107 NASA. (2010). Announcement of Opportunity: Discovery 2010.
Chapter 8: Lessons Learned from the Evolution of the Program

347

Michael New said: “We are allowing the use of RTGs, radioisotope power systems, 

in this Discovery area, which is a first for Discovery. It’s almost a first for the agency 

in the sense that this will be the first widely competed PI-led mission to use nuclear 

power systems.”108

There were four primary changes to the AO. The insertion of Advanced Stirling 

Radioisotope Generators was so new that a clarification amendment was issued on 

13 July asking ten additional questions on the cover page to be answered “yes,” “no,” or 

“possibly.” Then, two additional questions were also added to ease the assignment of 

proposals to TMC experts in radioactive power sources. A third set of amendments was 

released just three weeks before the due date, requesting additional technical trajectory 

information, including solar electric propulsion–specific assumptions, models, and 

operations concept to be included. The due date was delayed a week to accommodate 

this late request. Proposals closed on 10 September 2010. NASA received 28 proposals.109

The announcement of the selected missions was delayed due to a series of Continuing 

Resolutions by Congress; the selection would not be made until the enactment of a 

Fiscal Year 2011 budget for NASA. While this made good sense as a national policy, 

it would make it difficult for proposal teams to stay together and available.

Ultimately, by including options for advanced technologies, the Discovery Program 

had been expanded to include more complex missions and missions to planets beyond 

the asteroid belt.

STUDYING COST GROWTH: REPORTS 

In July 2008, three NASA study groups briefed the Planetary Science Subcommittee on 

their findings in parallel cost studies conducted by the Discovery and New Frontiers 

Program Office, the Space Science Office, and NASA Headquarters. The Discovery 

and New Frontiers Program Office, led by Paul Gilbert, studied five recent missions 

from its program in order to better understand the cost growth of missions since 

Genesis, using the official cost numbers from the proposal, Concept Study Report, 

and Preliminary Design Review, with additional information from Cost Analysis 

Data Requirement results, milestone review products at the Critical Design Review, 

the System Implementation Review, the Operations Readiness Review, the Mission 

Readiness Review, project status reports, and program budget exercises. Results were 

briefed to the community at the 2006 Discovery Lessons Learned Workshop, a July 

2008 Planetary Science Subcommittee meeting, and full results were written up in 2010.

108 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 December). Personal interview with M. New. Located in “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.

109 Green, J. (2010, 8 March). Presentation at the 2011 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.
NASA′s Discovery Program

348

This study was much more thorough in its methodology; the Discovery and New 

Frontiers Program officials performing the study met in person with representatives 

from the program management and project officials. Program management and analysis officials included NASA Headquarters Program Executives, Discovery and New 

Frontiers Program Office mission managers, budget analysts, and people involved in 

TMC. Project representatives included PIs, project managers, budget analysts, and 

representatives of the home institution. (The inclusion and role of the latter were 

not explained.) 

The cost growth figures for the missions were released. The last six missions included 

were Deep Impact, MESSENGER, Kepler, Dawn, New Horizons, and GRAIL. As in 

the CADRe study in the previous section, the data did not exclude the effects of programmatic changes implemented as NASA became increasingly less tolerant of risk. 

The study noted that the numbers did include the changes implemented to address 

the NASA Integrated Action Team recommendations, the change to accommodate 

a 25 percent reserve level, and the change to incorporate full cost accounting within 

NASA. As this book has discussed, there were other decisions that impacted the missions, such as lack of cash flow forcing the postponement of start dates of studies or 

mission formulation (i.e., Dawn and Kepler). This study did not address the effects of 

these changes and excluded any conclusions that could be drawn from programmatic 

or division-level changes. 

Early briefings discussed mission-specific and overall issues identified by the study: 

...technology challenges; longevity engineering issues; higher than anticipated ($1M/year) 

implementation costs of the NASA Integrated Action Team recommendations; higher than 

expected development costs for science instruments (exceeding preliminary design estimate 

by $18 million during Phase C/D in one instance (with the problem attributed to a contractor)); and lack of a revalidated vendor quote since the Concept Study Report (CSR) estimate. 

Another project had start-stop issues due to the events of September 11, 2001. In other 

instances, a project had three different PMs during Phase C/D; a contractor never had prime 

responsibility; a contractor had no primary system-level planetary experience; and in one 

project, the PI and PM expended reserves at a high rate during Phase C/D.110

At the 2008 briefing, the D&NFPO made a surprising conclusion: “one cannot perform 

credible estimates in the early stage of a project.”111

In addition, it reported that this was “a NASA-wide problem for missions, [attributed to] maturity of Phase A concepts, optimistic key assumptions (heritage, personnel 

sharing and multi-tasking), and perhaps competitive pressures.” Also, “programs and 

110 Planetary Science Subcommittee. (2008, 2–3 July). Report from the NAC PSS meeting at Goddard 

Space Flight Center.

111 Ibid.
Chapter 8: Lessons Learned from the Evolution of the Program

349

projects were not tracking or mitigating risks identified in the Phase A competitive 

review process, such as upper stage certification, or hidden costs for nuclear compliance processing.”112

By 2010, the Discovery and New Frontiers Program Office was able to draw nine 

conclusions from this study that they could use to better manage missions at the program or project level. These conclusions could be summarized as optimistic heritage 

and technology assumptions, insufficient project insight into contractor performance, 

inadequate planning for mission operations, inadequate mission replans, inadequate 

Integrated Master Schedules, inadequate time and effort planned to execute fault 

protection and autonomy, ineffective management structure and unclear roles and 

responsibilities, project team inexperience, and inadequate consideration of seniorlevel expert review team findings.113

Because these findings are so significant, the conclusions are explained further in 

the following figure, the executive summary of this report:

Executive Summary

In order to improve cost and schedule performance, the Discovery and New Frontiers (D&NF) 

Program Office studied life cycle cost (LCC) and schedule growth for five missions. The 

goal was to identify the underlying causes for the cost overruns and schedule delays, and 

to develop practical mitigations to assist D&NF projects in identifying potential risks and 

controlling the associated impacts to proposed mission costs and schedules. The study found 

nine systemic issues involving project management and systems engineering that were the 

primary contributors to LCC and schedule growth:

1. Optimistic hardware/software inheritance and technology readiness assumptions 

caused cost and schedule growth in the detailed design and development phases 

(Phases C/D) for all five missions studied.

2. Insufficient project management and technical insight into contractor performance 

resulted in poor communications, schedule delays, and technical problems that 

were manifested as cost overruns in three missions.

3. Inadequate planning for operations (Phase E) resulted in significant LCC impacts 

in four missions.

4. Mission replans were inadequate, and significant changes to mission scope, schedule, or funding profiles were not sufficiently understood or analyzed, resulting in 

unexpected cost increases and schedule delays in three missions.

112 Ibid.

113 Barley, B., et al. (2010, February). “Improving the life cycle cost management of planetary missions: 

Results from the Life Cycle Cost Growth Study performed by the Discovery and New Frontiers 

Program Office at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center.” Presentation.
NASA′s Discovery Program

350

5. Projects demonstrated problems developing and maintaining Integrated Master 

Schedules (IMSs); problems stemming from inadequate IMSs were seen in 

four missions.

6. The complexity drivers for fault protection and autonomy (FPA) capabilities are 

not well understood and projects underestimated the time and effort required to 

complete FPA development in four missions.

7. Ineffective management structure and unclear roles and responsibilities resulted 

in cost and schedule impacts to three of the five missions studied. Issues resulting 

from the management structure compounded the effects of other project issues, 

such as overly optimistic heritage or technology assumptions, inadequate project 

schedules, and inadequate planning or replans. The management structure issues 

were exacerbated by project team member inexperience.

8. Team players with limited experience in planetary mission development were a 

significant contributor to project management issues resulting in cost over-runs. 

Project team inexperience was a direct factor in only two of the missions studied, 

however it also contributed to other problems cited within this study.

9. Many of the technical and project management drivers for LCC escapes were identified as issues (weaknesses, risks, concerns, or findings) during one or more of 

the mandated NASA project reviews, but there was insufficient follow-through to 

address (mitigate or refute) the panel’s conclusions and recommendations.

The study also made three observations:

1. The collection, analysis, and synthesis of the study data was much more intensive 

than anticipated, primarily due to the lack of official, formal program and project 

historical documentation.

2. The D&NF programs, as well as NASA as a whole, need to address the credibility 

of project cost estimates, including independent cost evaluations.

3. The majority of the underlying causes are embedded in the project approach during 

the concept study (Phase A) and preliminary design (Phase B) phases, but the actual 

cost or schedule impacts typically are not experienced until late in the development 

or operations phases (Phases D and E).114

The most surprising result was that none of these findings were new. All the findings had been reported over the years as project management and systems engineering 

issues; good project management and systems engineering practices had been iden114 Life Cycle Cost Growth Study for the Discovery and New Frontiers Program Office—Final 

Report 2010.
Chapter 8: Lessons Learned from the Evolution of the Program

351

tified addressing each of the findings. However, the study concluded that problems 

remained, and additional attention was required to control or eliminate these problems 

and contain the resulting impacts to project costs and schedules.115

Although the Planetary Science Subcommittee in July 2008 called for these results 

to be incorporated into a PI Handbook, no such product exists to date. 

As part of this study, the program office also codified their definition of mission 

success in three parts: “delivering mission science to the PI (meeting the Level 1 

Requirements), ensuring the implementing organization’s success in delivering the 

spacecraft on cost and schedule (meeting the launch date and cost cap), and meeting 

the program launch frequency requirement for science missions.”116

Inherent Optimism and Cost and Schedule Growth

A 2008 study of ten NASA Science Mission Directorate missions found that the average 

cost growth was 76 percent over programmatic reserves and that the average schedule 

growth over and above reserves was 26 percent when the final cost was compared to 

the cost established at the beginning of Phase B. The study did not identify a common 

root cause of this growth beyond “the inherent optimism in initial concept designs 

due to competitive pressures,” stating that this optimism could cause underestimation 

of mass, power, data rate, complexity, and other technical specifications—which then 

would lead to underestimation of cost. This underestimation, coupled with successoriented schedules implemented to meet a launch window, control overall costs, and/

or to obtain science quickly, could lead to cost and schedule growth.117

The study was later expanded to 20 missions to quantify the effect of inherent 

optimism in early conceptual designs on cost and schedule growth of NASA Science 

Mission Directorate missions. Cost at selection—the Cost Analysis Data Requirement 

(CADRe) numbers submitted with the CSR—was compared with cost at Preliminary 

Design Review, Critical Design Review, and launch to quantify mission growth over 

time and compare it to industry guidelines. Overall results showed the following lifecycle growth: 37 percent in mass, 41 percent in power, 56 percent in cost, 38 percent 

in schedule. Discovery missions included in the study were Genesis, Deep Impact, 

115 Barley, B., et al. (2010, February). “Improving the life cycle cost management of planetary missions: 

Results from the Life Cycle Cost Growth Study performed by the Discovery and New Frontiers 

Program Office at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center.” Presentation. See also Clardy, D. (2010, 

9–10 February). “Improving Life-Cycle Cost Management of Spacecraft Missions.” Presentation 

at the 2010 NASA Program Management Challenge in Houston, TX.

116 Barley, B., et al. (2010, February). “Improving the life cycle cost management of planetary missions: 

Results from the Life Cycle Cost Growth Study performed by the Discovery and New Frontiers 

Program Office at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center.” Presentation.

117 Freaner, C., et al. (2008, 15–16 May). “An assessment of the inherent optimism in early conceptual 

designs and its effect on cost and schedule growth.” Presentation at the 2008 SSCAG/SCAF/EACE 

Joint International Conference in Noordwijk, The Netherlands.
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MESSENGER, Dawn, and Kepler. Of the seven planetary missions (Mars Reconnaissance 

Orbiter, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and New Horizons were also studied; Kepler 

was classified as an Astrophysics mission), six experienced 28 percent or more growth 

in cost. Two had 85 percent or more growth in power, two had about 27 percent growth 

in power, and two had less than 10 percent growth in power (one showed no data). As 

for cost growth, three planetary missions showed just less than 40 percent cost growth, 

one had about 25 percent cost growth, two had a little more than 15 percent cost 

growth, and one was less than 10 percent. This growth, while unfortunate, was dwarfed 

by the growth in Earth-orbiting missions (five Astrophysics, five Earth Science, and 

three Heliophysics, considered as a group) in development during the same decade. 

Four Earth-orbiting missions doubled their Phase B cost, and five more missions had 

more than 60 percent cost growth. Only two of the 13 experienced 25 percent or less 

growth in cost.118

The weakness of many CADRe cost studies of the time was the absence of reasons

for cost growth. Sometimes numbers can be misleading—and nowhere was this more 

the case than in the early days of Dawn and Kepler, when institutional and management 

changes caused the costs committed at the start of Phase B to be almost meaningless in 

the face of changes in institutional burden and the layering of an additional management 

institution at no fault of the project. These factors, and factors such as additional costs 

incurred to comply with the NASA Integrated Action Team recommendations for the 

earlier missions such as Genesis, Deep Impact, and MESSENGER, were essential to 

understand and track before making sweeping statements. This study notwithstanding, 

it was not at all clear that missions like Dawn were underscoped; instead, there were 

not sufficient reserves or commitment to proposed costs on the part of the managing 

institutions involved. Numbers alone do not tell the whole story.

Comparisons were also made between the individual missions and types of missions in schedule growth. Taken as a whole, the set of 20 missions showed 38 percent 

schedule growth. Seven Earth-orbiting missions had growth at about the 50 percent 

level or greater. Another four Earth-orbiting and two planetary missions had greater 

than 30 percent schedule growth. Only two planetary missions had 10 percent or less 

schedule growth, with the remaining three between 15 and 30 percent. But the study 

may not account for program-directed changes, such as the effects of the late start 

for both Dawn and Kepler after the 2000 selection, when the money to start Phase B 

was not available as predicted. Indeed, while schedule growth was a real problem 

for Astrophysics, Earth Science, and Heliophysics missions, it tended to be less of 

an issue for planetary and Discovery missions with fixed launch windows. Schedule 

growth of planetary missions was typically constrained by launch windows, but when 

118 Freaner, C., et al. (2010, 9–10 February). “Conceptual design optimism, cost and schedule growth 

effects.” Presentation at the 2010 NASA Program Management Challenge in Houston, TX.
Chapter 8: Lessons Learned from the Evolution of the Program

353

a launch window was missed, such as was foreseen during the development of Deep 

Impact, cost growth was commensurate with a year of development costs, unless other 

arrangements such as early delivery to the Cape were made explicitly with approval 

of the delayed launch date. The study did show unexpected growth for the missions 

after the Preliminary Design Review, but the numbers for post-PDR growth were not 

made publicly available.

Meanwhile, studies by the Space Science Office were based on detailed analyses 

of data at key milestones (“Project Milestone Performance History”) for 24 missions, 

both directed and PI-led, across the Science Mission Directorate.119 Recommendations 

conveyed to the Planetary Science Subcommittee included the following: 

...more emphasis on detailed technical design concepts, more rigor in process of generating 

early cost estimates, more conservatism in base estimates, and advocating options for extending Phases A and B whenever possible. To compensate for internal and external impacts, 

projects must develop a credible baseline plan, keep the funding profile constraints out of the 

AO, avoid redirection from SMD, become educated on EVM [Earned Value Management] 

and verify that projects are applying it. In order to curtail instrument cost growth, projects 

must address the weaknesses of current NASA tools for early estimation of science instrument 

costs and require a variety of baseline instrument estimates (using analogies, parametric 

models and grass roots estimates). For general cost performance improvement, it was recommended that NASA hold budget reserves at the program level. The key internal factors for 

cost growth were identified as over-optimism in early formulation and instrument development complexity, and the external factors were identified as launch and budget instability. 

Practices that improved performance of missions were the presence of ample reserves, best 

project managers, and best management practices.120

The Role of Leadership in Small Missions

NASA’s Discovery mission line demonstrated in its first two decades that with careful 

planning, flexible management techniques, and a commitment to cost control, small 

space science missions could be built and launched at a fraction of the price of strategic 

missions. Many credit management techniques such as co-location, early contracting 

for long-lead items, and a resistance to scope creep, but it is also important to examine 

what may have been the most significant variable in small mission implementation: 

the roles and the relationship of the Principal Investigator, who was responsible to 

NASA for the success of the mission, and the project manager, who was responsible 

for delivering the mission to NASA.

119 Perry, R. (2010, 29 April). “SMD Cost/Schedule Performance Study: Presentation to the PIF-2.” 

Downloaded from http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/457672main_PI2_SMD_Cost_Schedule_perry.pdf.

120 Bruno, C. (2008, 2–3 July). “SSO Studies of Mission Cost Drivers.” Documented in the NAC PSS 

Meeting Report.
NASA′s Discovery Program

354

This book concludes here, with a report on a series of 55 oral histories with PIs, 

project managers, co-investigators, system engineers, and senior management from 

nearly every competitively selected Discovery mission launched in the program’s first 

two decades. These figures shared the definition and evolution of their roles and offered 

revealing insights.121 There are as many ways to define the Principal Investigator and 

project manager relationship as there are missions, and the subtleties in the relationship often provide new management tools not practical in larger missions.

121 Originally published as Niebur, S. M. (2010) “Principal investigators and project managers: Insights 

from Discovery.” Space Policy. 1–11. 
355

THE ROLE OF THE PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR

Traditionally, the PI has been a senior scientist responsible for the delivery of the science from a mission or instrument. The PI led the science team and definition and 

development of the science instruments but left the spacecraft design and development 

to engineers at NASA centers, federally funded research and development centers, 

and industry.

New mission lines started or rescoped in the early 1990s, however, introduced a 

new paradigm, charging the PI with responsibility for the delivery of the entire mission, from design to decommissioning, including all aspects of project management 

and scientific success.1 The intent was sincere, and the ideas were radical. Scientists 

were charged with composing teams that would design, build, and operate whole missions and analyze the data returned within a predefined overall budget. Management 

restrictions were lifted, and the teams were given flexibility to design their management 

structure as best served the mission, with minimal oversight from NASA Headquarters. 

1 NASA Office of Space Science. (1992, November). Discovery Program Handbook. 

CHAPTER 9

Insights from Discovery
NASA′s Discovery Program

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The procurement process became one of buying scientific investigations, rather than 

instruments, and this change increased the focus on obtaining usable scientific results. 

The missions were cost-capped in order to increase the frequency of flight in the 

program. The cost constraints increased the possibility that unrestrained increases 

in engineering growth on a mission could require compensatory decreases in the 

capability for science return. To combat this, the role of the principal scientist was 

elevated above the project manager. The Office of Space Science at NASA had taken a 

chance on a new way of implementing missions, with Wes Huntress, then–Associate 

Administrator, saying, “We’ve turned the old way of doing business upside down.”2

Definition

From the first announcement of these new PI-led programs, the PI was responsible for 

managing the planning, development, and execution of the mission, from selecting 

the team members to defining roles and responsibilities.3 The PI served as a new kind 

of manager, responsible for meeting and reporting on cost and schedule objectives, 

even though he or she did not have matrix or line institutional authority over a single 

engineer. Due to the inherent difficulties of a scientist managing technical work at a 

federally funded research and development center or NASA center as much as three 

thousand miles away, early reviewers of the program strongly recommended that the 

management authority be delegated to a project manager, but this decision, like all 

other project design decisions, was left up to the PI by NASA Headquarters.4

Evolution

The first competitive selections for new missions in the Discovery Program allowed 

PIs the freedom to construct their management teams as they saw fit. This encouraged 

the use of innovative techniques customized for the smaller teams that must work 

together creatively to design and build a small mission for an even smaller cost cap. 

Subsequent selections included greater constraints, as lessons were learned and best 

practices identified, but the responsibility was still left in the hands of the PI.

The first PI-led mission, Lunar Prospector, was led by a scientist who had been 

looking for a way to fly his mission to the Moon for years, seeking and obtaining funding from the Department of Defense and the short-lived Space Exploration Initiative. 

2 NASA Office of Space Science. (1995, July). “NASA’s Discovery Program: Solar System Exploration 

for the Next Millennium.”

3 NASA Office of Space Science. (1992, November). Discovery Program Handbook.

4 NASA. (1991, September). “Discovery Cost and Management Team Report.” As cited in the 

NASA Small Planetary Mission Plan, Report to Congress, April 1992; NASA Office of Space 

Science. (1994, 4 August). “AO: Discovery Missions.” NASA AO 94-OSS-03.
Chapter 9: Insights from Discovery

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This PI was involved in all phases and stages of design and development of the mission, leading his team with assurance through the many stages required for successful 

mission implementation.5

Later missions were characterized not by a single driving personality, but by the 

teamwork found to be essential between the PI and the project manager. Each mission 

teaming of Principal Investigator and project manager found their own balance, and 

each made the mission work in their own way. On CONTOUR and Genesis, the PIs 

remained deeply involved, traveling to the implementing organization several times a 

month to review progress and participating in change control boards, discussions of 

concern, and regular staff meetings as needed. The Stardust PI, in contrast, delegated 

implementation responsibility almost entirely to the project management organization, 

making himself available by telephone for questions about how engineering changes 

would affect the intended science. In nearly every case where the PI delegated more 

responsibility to the project manager, the project manager rewarded that trust with 

exemplary performance. Where this failed, however, the results were significant: both 

Deep Impact and MESSENGER, for example, experienced crises in project management 

and large overruns in 2002–2003, nearly ten years after the Discovery Program began.

During this time, Deep Impact, largely built by an engineering team in Colorado 

with a West Coast project manager and an East Coast PI, suffered from insufficient 

oversight of subcontractors. This problem deteriorated to the crisis point, requiring 

replacement of the project manager and a change in management style. The PI began 

spending increased amounts of time onsite with the prime contractor, getting to know 

its engineering culture and inviting informal questions in the hallway. Once the PI 

took these steps and the new project manager spent more time onsite managing the 

prime contractor and checking on the progress of subcontractors, the project turned 

around and delivered a successful spacecraft and spectacular science.

In the case of MESSENGER, technical challenges such as late deliveries coincided 

with an unexpected change in project management as the original project manager 

retired and his deputy disappeared, not returning to work after a particularly challenging trip to an underperforming subcontractor. The implementing organization 

was left scrambling, and the new project manager began a fresh costing effort that 

determined that the mission was in far greater trouble than imagined. This manager 

worked closely with the PI and NASA management to bring the mission back on 

track, and, after several infusions of additional funding, it went on to become one of 

NASA’s greatest successes.

As PIs delegated more and more responsibility to project managers, increasingly 

the roles returned to those of the pre-Discovery era, where the project manager was 

5 Binder, A. (2005). Against All Odds. Tucson: Ken Press.
NASA′s Discovery Program

358

in charge of delivering a mission and the PI was responsible for the science. NASA 

Headquarters was slow to acknowledge this reality, however, holding the PIs of the 

later missions responsible for errors in manufacturing, subcontractor oversight, and 

costs that had grown far beyond the mission cost cap. The Deep Impact, MESSENGER, 

Dawn, and Kepler PIs were held responsible for cost growth in heated meetings at 

NASA Headquarters. Each was directed eventually to perform a replan with the project 

where the science could still be accomplished within the agreed-upon constraints. This 

admittedly strange outcome, where a university professor was held responsible for cost 

overruns, tank qualifications, late delivery of parts, and changes at some of the largest 

aerospace corporations in the country, was a direct effect of the innovation heralded 

some years earlier, at the beginning of the program.

The Kepler mission, which had suffered from delays, management changes, and cost 

difficulties for years, had even been reclassified as a strategic mission for Astrophysics 

instead of a Discovery mission subject to firm cost caps. Then the Kepler mission 

exceeded its cost cap again in 2007, and NASA reacted strongly. The agency demoted 

the Kepler PI to a science PI, removing some of the responsibility for the mission 

from his shoulders. NASA insisted on a total rewiring of the organization’s management structure as well, with the project manager, deputy project manager, transition 

manager for operations, and chief engineer at the top and the science PI and project 

scientist in subordinate roles. This unusual step was not repeated in the first two 

decades of Discovery.

The 2010 Discovery Program AO solicited proposals for investigations led by a 

single PI “with full responsibility for its scientific integrity and for its execution within 

committed cost and schedule,” albeit with stronger language reinforcing essential NASA 

oversight “to ensure that the implementation is responsive to the requirements and 

constraints of the Discovery Program.”6

REFLECTIONS OF THE PIS

During a series of individual oral history interviews performed in 2009 as part of this 

NASA-funded research, each mission PI was asked to reflect on his or her own lessons 

learned and identify one thing he or she wished he or she had known before proposing 

a small planetary mission to the Discovery Program. Almost without exception, the PI 

was surprised to be asked such a question, often protesting that he or she would not 

change a thing, or that he or she was completely prepared for such a role. More than 

once, a PI responded that the answer was irrelevant, as he or she would never have 

listened to such advice or warnings when caught up in the first flush of proposing. 

6 NASA Science Mission Directorate. (2009. 7 December). “Draft AO: Discovery 2010.” NASA 

AO NNH10ZDA003J.
Chapter 9: Insights from Discovery

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However, as the discussions continued, these senior scientists revealed hints of doubt 

and an openness to considering what they might have done differently. The responses 

provide a window into nagging regrets in some cases, while in others the PI admitted 

that he or she had had no idea of the magnitude of the challenge that lay ahead.

Perhaps prompted by the 2007 discussion of screening requirements proposed for 

future PIs, every PI brought up the importance of experience.7 The CONTOUR PI had 

served in key science roles on NEAR and the Galileo imaging team, for example, and 

he emphasized the reliability of past performance in previous instrument deliveries 

as being predictive of performance leading a mission team, despite the difference in 

scope. He stopped short of requiring previous experience, however, recognizing that 

a lack of previous executive experience is not a fatal flaw, but something that can be 

remedied by earlier exposure through roles such as deputy PI or deputy project scientist. Increased exposure creates more qualified PIs who can then be trusted more 

completely to deliver mission success.

Remembering the incredible diversity of sample substrates deployed on the spacecraft and the intense preparation each required, the PI of Genesis might have taken 

greater care with scheduling so very many deliverables for the science co-investigators, 

particularly himself and his project scientist, in the same time frame in 2000. Perhaps 

it would have been wiser to be somewhat less ambitious, he reflected. This sentiment 

is interesting in the context of the outcome of the mission, where, according to his 

project scientist, the very diversity of the materials enhanced the science that could 

be salvaged after its crash landing.

The PIs of Deep Impact and MESSENGER had remarkably similar sentiments about 

the grand challenge of leading a multi-hundred-million-dollar mission as a university 

professor or researcher. The former expected to lead the science while the project 

manager made the mission happen, which, the PI admitted, was a misconception. The 

challenges of coming up to speed on managing contracts, managing engineers, and 

monitoring technical progress at contractor facilities went far beyond his expectations. 

In his case, he ended up with additional business management duties because of a 

transfer of contract management intended to save on overhead charges. Universities 

charge significantly less overhead on large contracts than government labs or federally 

funded research and development centers, so contract administration may be moved 

in order to cut costs when money is tight. Unfortunately for the project staff, lower 

overhead means fewer resources available to assist, and the PI and his team end up 

doing much more of the work themselves (at a greater real cost, but lower financial 

cost, to the mission).

7 Niebur, S. (2009). “Principal Investigators and Mission Leadership.” Space Policy, vol. 25. 181–186.
NASA′s Discovery Program

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Much of this contract management work on Deep Impact involved unexpected 

travel to contractor facilities. Demands for travel ballooned from roughly quarterly 

to monthly at the start of the design phase. The increased demands paid off, however, 

and the PI brightened as he talked about the rewards of being present and bringing 

science to the engineers on the ground. Their tremendous enthusiasm encouraged him, 

and he delighted in talking to them formally and in hallway conversations. In fact, it 

was the informal conversations in the hallways that contributed strongly to the team’s 

effectiveness, as the engineers asked to understand more about the science driving 

their requirements, about the goals of the mission, and about routine administrative 

details as well. It was a small thing, but the importance of being there was soon evident, 

as, for all the questions that came up informally, not once was the PI contacted by 

the engineers with similar questions by phone. The take-away lesson from this PI was 

straightforward: spend time with the engineering team doing the work.

The MESSENGER PI also invoked the broad scope of the role, noting that practical 

knowledge and experience in engineering, subsystem engineering, systems engineering, and project management, particularly of the kind gained by previous participation on flight missions, was an important component of an ideal preparation. The 

exact nature of the previous experience required was not immediately clear to either 

PI, however; they and others questioned whether serving as a co-investigator was 

sufficient or even helpful, although both agreed that previous exposure, of the casual 

everyday kind that one gets working on a project with or in proximity to another PI, 

would be extremely beneficial.

The PI of Dawn, another of the middle-era missions, also strongly recommended 

selecting future mission leaders with significant previous experience and a commitment to being present at the contractor site. He encouraged greater understanding of 

the political and social context in which management decisions are made. He worried that perhaps a greater attention to the appearance of progress, as well as progress 

itself, would have made his mission appear more favorable to NASA management. 

Like other scientists located near their management institution or prime contractor 

(a coincidence that Genesis and MESSENGER were also able to leverage), he made 

it a priority to attend weekly engineering staff meetings and participate in reviews. 

It was on the question of reserves, however, that he spoke the longest, discussing 

the importance of “stated reserves” and what he called “hidden reserves”—concealed 

“from everybody including your staff.”8 He continued, encouraging bookkeeping a 

high level (30–50 percent) of nonessential items, those you can later descope without 

affecting the program.

8 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with C. Russell. Located in “Dawn” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
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The Dawn PI also emphasized the point that no mission exists in a vacuum. Missions 

that encounter unexpected technical issues and overrun effectively “punished” other 

missions with additional reviews and requirements meant to stave off a recurrence of 

the same issue.9 These changes require additional robust reserves accessible only to 

the project at hand, and not others in the same institution or program, to carry the 

project through a difficult period.

Dawn’s Deputy PI spoke about the double-edged sword of requirements definition, 

a task not fully appreciated until much later, when the team was being held to account. 

Properly defining requirements—useful for the engineers and scientists alike—can 

guide the mission throughout development; it was a task with which that mission 

had trouble from the very beginning. Over-defining the requirements could cause the 

expenditure of significant resources unnecessarily. Under-defining the requirements 

could cause contractors to provide hardware insufficient to take scientific measurements 

with appropriate precision—or even work at all in the harsh environment of space.

The Kepler PI also found that there was a lot to learn, stating that scientists simply 

do not have the necessary experience. However, he continued, people at the NASA 

centers (for example) have a great deal of experience and are trained to handle such 

difficult tasks as requirements definition and reserve management. It is quite possible 

for a PI to rely on the implementing institution to handle the day-to-day management 

of a mission and all that it entails. The daily task of mission management is tremendous, 

requiring constant attention, 100 hours a week, leading him to say, “I probably wouldn’t 

have done this had I known how much work it would be, how long it would take, all 

the obstacles to be overcome, and all the frustration to be endured.”10

Time and again in interviews with project scientists, deputy project scientists, and 

co-investigators, science team members lauded the PIs of Discovery for their unwavering commitment to the science. These scientists stayed focused on mission goals, 

ensuring the delivery of the science to the community even as they struggled to manage 

missions threatening to grow out of control, often employing innovative approaches 

that required a great deal of additional, unexpected time and energy commitment. 

The Genesis PI, for example, proposed and received a funded analysis period for the 

Genesis scientists after the samples were returned, counting it as an official part of the 

mission; all other missions, including Stardust, which also returned samples to Earth, 

ended abruptly with the end of spacecraft operations. In another example, the PI on 

Deep Impact learned to spend substantial amounts of time onsite with the contractor 

during development, away from his own research and the students he was expected 

to teach at the university. The MESSENGER PI pushed his team to publish papers 

9 Ibid.

10 Niebur, S. (2009, 16 December). Personal interview with W. Borucki. Located in “Kepler” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
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without delay, reading every paper and conference abstract, and garnering special 

issues of Science for every planetary flyby, well before the spacecraft even achieved 

Mercury Orbit Insertion. The Kepler PI spent decades working to make his mission 

a success. These PIs worked day and night for many years to ensure mission success.

Insights from the Project Managers

These efforts did not go unrecognized by the project managers. In their formal oral 

history interviews, the project managers were also asked to identify the characteristics 

or skills that are important for a good PI. While a few reiterated points they had made 

earlier while discussing mission challenges, others credited the level of involvement of 

the PI who they had worked with, and how it contributed to mission development.11

The CONTOUR project manager for design and development named decisiveness, 

fairness, and taking a stand against scope creep (the temptation to add capabilities 

after design) as top qualities for a PI. It is very difficult for a scientist leading a team of 

scientists to resist recommending or approving small engineering tweaks that promise 

great increases in the science return. The temptation to improve the mission during 

development is present in every mission, often accompanied by pressure from the 

science team also invested in mission success. A good PI keeps careful watch on his 

or her payload, resisting changes in instruments that deviate significantly from the 

requirements in either direction, as small changes in scope can have disastrous effects 

on mission budgets. The CONTOUR PI also was described as a good listener, allowing 

new ideas from all sorts of sources, taking them into account while remaining focused 

on the carefully plotted next steps to mission success.

Stardust’s PI was focused on the science return of the mission and delegated the 

day-to-day work of management to the project manager. He understood the engineering 

enough, as the first project manager put it, that he felt it best to delegate its management and trust that he would be consulted on tough issues. Both project managers 

appreciated that, cajoling him occasionally to join them at certain meetings or travel to 

the implementing organization to review progress. The second project manager spoke 

just as highly of him as the first, calling him a gem who gave the project manager all 

the freedom he needed to get the job done. By delegating the contract management, 

cost and technical oversight, and mission planning to the project manager and his 

implementing organization, the PI was free to keep working on his own science, to 

serve on community panels, to give public talks, and to do interviews in support of 

the mission. He sparked interest in the mission by being present in another way—not 

at the engineering level, but at the level of public engagement.

11 Niebur, S. (2011, 19 March). Personal interview with C. Niebur.
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On MESSENGER, the PI was deeply involved in the implementation of the mission, 

asking the right questions, keeping abreast of developments, and being onsite as necessary. The project manager for most of the development called him a first-class scientist, 

very knowledgeable about the current status of development and cognizant of others’ 

roles as well. On cost and technical issues, the PI stood back to let the engineering 

team get the job done, an approach the project manager praised effusively. Since the 

PI could not be onsite every minute, the institution relied on an experienced project 

scientist for day-to-day oversight of the science and nuances in the written requirements. The MESSENGER team was not the only one to employ a project scientist or 

team member at the project manager’s institution, but it was one of the most visible.

The Deep Impact PI was praised by the project manager who got the mission to 

the launch pad. The project manager respected the PI’s decision to be a silent presence in the engineering meetings, always present, never interfering. The scientist was 

available, and he let the team know that, but he didn’t obstruct the engineers from 

doing the work that had to be done. A good PI has a positive outlook, motivating the 

team when necessary and trusting them to build the right instruments or spacecraft 

on time, on cost, under his high-level direction, but not with constant interference. A 

project manager on Deep Impact’s extended mission, EPOXI, noted that the Principal 

Investigator was hands-on with NASA Headquarters and with the management of the 

federally funded research and development center implementing the mission, in ways 

that the project team could not be. Both the PI and this project manager had significant 

previous mission experience, dating back to the mid-1970s and Comet Halley as well 

as European and Soviet missions, and they had a good relationship of mutual respect 

in part because of this experience and common background.

The Dawn project manager praised the PI for holding the line, refusing to let 

requirements creep during development even as his instrument scientists pushed him 

to do more. That commitment to requirements made implementation of the project 

easier, eliminating the burden of major readjustments to engineering hardware and 

design that could have caused major problems in development.

Former Discovery Program Manager Jarrett explained the requirements well when 

he described the ideal PI as “not just an expert in his particular scientific field, but the 

ability to comprehend spacecraft design, trajectory design, and the technical side of 

putting a mission together as well as the budgetary aspects of it.”12

12 Niebur, S. (2009, 14 May). Personal interview with D. Jarrett and Kate Wolf. Located in “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.
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THE ROLE OF THE PROJECT MANAGER

The project manager of a Discovery mission has in theory only the responsibilities 

delegated to him or her by the PI. In practice, however, the project manager must 

oversee the design, formulation, integration, testing, and preparation for launch of 

a spacecraft that may cost over half a billion dollars at launch. The role of a project 

manager is a challenging one, encompassing skills as varied as technical insight; cost 

containment; institutional advocacy; and the management, directly or indirectly, of 

the efforts of up to a thousand people per mission.

Definition

At first, the Discovery Program did not define the role of project manager, leaving it 

up to the PI to define. The first AO, however, did note that the project manager should 

oversee the technical implementation of the mission and that the project manager should 

have sufficient role and experience to meet the technical needs of the investigation.13

Evolution

The loose definition of the project manager’s role solidified over time, and requirements 

were added for the project manager to be named, for the role to be clearly defined in 

the proposal, and eventually for NASA to approve the project manager at each major 

milestone review. Principal Investigators were strongly encouraged at later points in 

the program to name a deputy program manager or an alternate project manager at 

the time of proposal. These stricter requirements or recommendations arose as a result 

of lessons learned from previous missions.

In the early missions, it was not uncommon for the same project manager to take 

a mission from proposal to launch. Stardust, for example, had that continuity, which 

enabled the mission leadership to keep tight rein on requirements and fight scope 

creep. In later missions, however, project managers, named as part of the proposing 

team, began to disappear after selection, to be replaced by unexpected players. In 

response, NASA required PIs to name the project manager at proposal. Project managers’ 

qualifications were carefully reviewed by technical-management-cost reviewers before 

selection, and NASA concurrence was required before a personnel change at this level.

The role of the project manager came under additional scrutiny after the 1999 

failures of the Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander, even though these missions were not part of the Discovery Program. NASA immediately introduced reviews 

where none had been before, adding layers of people to look at the mission reports 

and expanding the NASA Program Guideline for Program and Project Management 

13 NASA Office of Space Science. (1994, 4 August). “AO: Discovery Missions.” NASA AO 94-OSS-03.
Chapter 9: Insights from Discovery

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(NPG 7120) to include greater institutional oversight of mission development. NASA 

also increased review of the definition of the role of the project manager in its rigorous 

pre-selection evaluations.

Later missions recognized that some technical challenges in the changing landscape 

of the aerospace industry might be insurmountable for even a very highly qualified 

project manager, and the centers began to replace PMs with those of complementary 

expertise at key trouble points in a mission. For example, when a project struggled 

with late subsystem deliveries, a more aggressive manager with a “boots on the ground” 

philosophy for contractor oversight was appointed, and the climate of the mission 

development changed drastically. After this change in management style, the team 

successfully delivered the spacecraft to the launch pad, leading even the previous 

manager to conclude that his replacement had been the right decision.

Project managers began to change more often and with less provocation. One PI 

chuckled ruefully at the reflection as he enumerated the eight project managers he had 

worked with sequentially from proposal to extended mission. To combat this revolving 

door while encouraging the leadership of project managers with the appropriate style 

as times and circumstances require, NASA added a new requirement for approval of 

the project manager not just at selection, but at each major milestone review. By the 

2010 AO, the project manager was explicitly charged with overseeing the technical 

and programmatic implementation of the project and working “closely with the PI 

in order to ensure that the mission meets its objectives within the resources outlined 

in the proposal.”14

REFLECTIONS OF THE PROJECT MANAGERS

Each project manager was also asked to reflect on lessons learned. The project managers were asked to identify one thing they wished they had known before working 

on their first small planetary mission. The responses ranged from specific wishes for 

additional testing of spacecraft systems and subsystems to insights about managing 

offsite contractors separated by significant distances.

On Genesis, much of the spacecraft had high heritage from Stardust, and arguments 

were made that some of the testing required for other missions was unnecessary for 

this one, selected early on, while Discovery was still in faster, better, cheaper mode. 

If it had been selected later, it might have been subject to more rigorous testing; as it 

was, no one required a system-level test of the capsule, and none was performed. As it 

turned out, the similarity was an oversimplification. At the detailed design level, it was 

a different box, and the analogy arguments broke down. Missions selected later were 

14 NASA Science Mission Directorate. (2009, 7 December). “Draft AO: Discovery 2010.” NASA 

AO NNH10ZDA003J.
NASA′s Discovery Program

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much more reluctant to claim direct heritage, and the review boards repeatedly extolled 

the merit of this decision, particularly in cases where a technology or system had not 

yet flown. Another remnant of the earlier era, when Discovery was a grand experiment in possibilities, was the removal of requirements that critical areas of spacecraft 

design be built with multiple safeguards. It was not uncommon for mechanisms to be 

“single string,” without a built-in backup in case part of the mechanism failed. Genesis 

would have benefited from a second redundant technique—not just redundancy in 

parts—for sensing deceleration upon Earth return, for example. Safeguards like that, 

not deemed essential in the earlier era, were reintroduced over time.

Through formulation, design, development, and testing, the CONTOUR project 

manager echoed the Genesis experience; she added that one of the key things she liked 

about Discovery is that managers are forced to make decisions in short time frames 

and not let matters remain unresolved. The constraints force project managers to be 

even more proactive in addressing potential issues, as there is little time built in to 

correct problems that have gone on too long. Experienced project managers know 

to keep vigilant for potential issues, not letting optimism about the mission distract 

them, and for that reason, experience is important. Even small issues can have large 

consequences if not rapidly resolved. CONTOUR’s early financial difficulties also highlighted the importance of selecting savvy project managers with experience in costing 

and replanning space missions.

The second MESSENGER project manager reiterated the point about carefully 

scheduling or agreeing to delivery dates. The initial bid must be planned carefully, 

and the project manager should be involved at proposal so that he or she can not only 

enforce the words in the proposal, but also carry through with the intent, with full 

knowledge of the assumptions and context. Both project managers emphasized the 

importance of teamwork at all levels, including making sure that everyone down to 

the most peripheral contributor knows that their contribution is part of the success. 

As the second project manager put it, “I know the guy that loads the spacecraft on 

the truck and takes it down to the Cape.”15 Close-knit teams ensure critical crosstalk 

between the engineers, the scientists, and the managers. Scientists are often found 

talking to engineers on campus, and vice versa. This collaboration is both spurred on 

by and contributes to an overall excitement about the pending data return.

The Dawn mission, managed on the opposite coast and in a different engineering 

culture, ran into trouble in part because faraway contractors did not make satisfactory progress on technical deliveries, and the team did not realize the full extent of 

the problem in time. The second project manager faulted his trust in the contractor to 

deliver on its promises; the third project manager then acknowledged that trust was 

15 Niebur, S. (2009, 27 July). Personal interview with D. Grant. Located in the “MESSENGER” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
Chapter 9: Insights from Discovery

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not sufficient in this case. He frequently traveled 3,000 miles to the contractor to watch 

over the final stages of integration and testing. To overcome delays and uncertainty, 

project management had to return to pre-Discovery models in some sense, and the 

manager or his deputy had to be onsite essentially until the spacecraft was complete. 

Both these project managers now are firm believers in the benefits of project management spending significant time onsite at subcontractors’ locations, even though 

planning for such oversight may strain the lean budget of small missions.

Communication was deemed critical in many interviews, with project managers 

from MESSENGER to Deep Impact to Dawn talking about the importance of in-person 

discussions. The second Dawn manager, for example, advocated setting up “really, 

really flat lines of communication,” being visible to every member of the team, and 

having all-hands meetings several times a year.16 The program managers and the PIs 

enthusiastically recommended sharing not just the technical triumph with the team, 

but also the excitement of bringing home data that would be the key to new science 

in solar system exploration.

Insights from the PIs

At the end of each interview, the PI was asked to identify the characteristics or skills 

important for a good project manager. This is a role that had been discussed repeatedly 

within management institutions; funding agencies; and organizations such as APPEL, 

the Academy of Program/Project and Engineering Leadership at NASA; and yet the 

reflections here, collected in 2009, provide a new dimension of such discourse. The 

PIs were given the opportunity to discuss what they had learned about the role of the 

project manager over the course of the development of their missions, just as the PMs 

had been asked to talk about the role of the PI.

Each PI defined the role of project manager, agreed to the appointment of said 

project manager, and was responsible for the work of the project manager, and yet most 

were somewhat humbled by the fact that, in the end, it was the project manager who 

really had the power and skills to deliver a working spacecraft to the launch pad. The 

Genesis PI dealt with this dichotomy by recognizing that the project manager was very 

capable of delivering the mission and respecting his authority to do so, staying with 

the project to understand and concur on every major decision. The project manager 

knows what to do and does it, and the PI looks for insight into his or her decisions 

and confirms them. In the words of one, “You delegate, but you don’t walk away.” He 

16 Niebur, S. (2009, 12 August). Personal interview with T. Fraschetti. Located in “Dawn” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
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also appreciated the second project manager’s ability to “tell it like it is”—to effectively 

lay out the problems and the proposed mitigating strategies, and to sell the preferred 

option to the senior management and the team.17

After a first proposal that failed, the MESSENGER PI was convinced of the importance of selecting the right project manager. He insisted on approving the potential 

project manager before any subsequent proposal, selecting for certain skills, including 

communication. He valued a rapport with his project manager and insisted on someone 

who worked well with his own engineers, put together credible budgets, understood 

risk, and had the experience to see the project to completion.

Dawn began formulation with a less experienced project manager who had delivered 

a small payload on the Mars Polar Lander several years earlier, but never a full mission. 

The PI insisted that he needed a project manager with greater experience, and, after a 

difficult Preliminary Mission and Systems Review, the project manager was replaced 

with a more experienced manager. The second project manager was then lauded as 

a real leader, one who commanded respect from the engineers but was also available 

for questions and guidance.

The Kepler PI valued insight as a top priority for project managers. The project 

manager needs to know what every technical lead is doing during instrument development, to understand and perhaps to be deeply involved in every test, and to engage 

appropriate staff to realistically estimate schedule and cost for each task independently 

of the contractor.

The CONTOUR PI appreciated honesty in a project manager, requiring him to act 

aboveboard at all times, not promising different outcomes to different stakeholders. 

Hard work was essential, of course, as was respect from the team assembled both for 

their individual qualifications and ability to collaborate. In fact, he emphasized that 

the most important qualification is not an individual one, but how well the project 

manager and PI can work together.

Teamwork

The roles of PI and project manager do not exist independently but are interwoven 

with reciprocal responsibilities. As previously demonstrated, each team in Discovery’s 

first two decades was free to define its own division of labor at proposal but was then 

required to live within those constraints. The PIs and project managers often talked 

about teamwork and how they relied on each other to fulfill their respective responsibilities. Their duties varied, but one thing never changed: commitment to the success 

of the mission.

17 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 March). Personal interview with D. Burnett. Located in “Genesis” file, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
Chapter 9: Insights from Discovery

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PI and Project Manager Perspectives

One project manager, who worked on three missions, said that he was “blessed with 

three very good PIs.” From the project manager perspective, a PI’s working knowledge 

of NASA Headquarters and the lead NASA center on a mission could be valuable, and, 

likewise, being able to work with the highest level of an institution’s management is 

essential. The ability to stand up to a center Director or their assistants and say “no” is 

appreciated by a project manager who may not have such freedom.18

The CONTOUR PI had the advantage of decades of experience leading planetary 

missions and serving on science teams. When defining roles and choosing his approach 

to management, he purposefully struck a balance between the “PI who gets involved 

in everything and makes life miserable for the investigator and for all the people who 

work with him” and the PI who disappears into the background between selection 

and data return. Precisely because he wanted to be involved, he made a particular 

effort to find excellent people whom he could trust to work independently but who 

also would trust him enough to turn back for help when needed. He agreed to take on 

issues at NASA Headquarters, for instance, and to weigh in on technical issues when 

asked. Weekly conference calls helped the team work together between the monthly 

in-person meetings. The PI added, “I tried very hard not to get in the way of people 

who knew what they were doing,” as he complimented his team over and over again, 

as well as the team he had worked with as an instrument lead on NEAR, one of the 

first Discovery missions, implemented before the Principal Investigator mode.19 The 

relationship between the top technical and top scientific experts on the team is essential, 

and they must be well matched, he said, adding that he always insisted that the two 

should be able to select each other and that institutions not force relationships between 

personalities that do not work well together. Successful implementation of a mission 

within such tight constraints takes an extremely close relationship. Others, including 

funding agencies and managing institutions, must honor this as well, however, and 

he did note that one of the most significant activities for his mission—the Mishap 

Investigation Board after the failure of CONTOUR’s solid rocket motor burn 42 days 

after launch—was conducted entirely without the involvement of the PI. Because of 

his close relationship with his team, however, he continued to receive information 

about the review, even without any contact from the board.

The Genesis project managers were recognized by the PI for going out of their way to 

meet the science team and get to know them and what was important to their research. 

18 Niebur, S. (2009, 4 September). Personal interview with T. Duxbury. Located in “Stardust” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

19 Niebur, S. (2009, 10 September). Personal interview with J. Veverka. Located in the “CONTOUR” 

file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.
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On this mission, the science team was rarely involved with the engineers because of 

their disparate duties, but project managers before and after landing made efforts to 

travel and meet the science teams at their meetings and planetary science conferences.

Project managers emphasized the role of teamwork and a well-defined project 

management relationship over and over in interviews. The Stardust project manager 

during development reviewed several possible types of relationships, such as the more 

traditional model where science co-investigators or a science working group pressure 

the PI to increase scope, the PI does, and then the project manager must push back 

to stay within cost and schedule constraints. This tension can create an “us versus 

them” mentality, and traditional issues such as poor communication and competing 

requirements can threaten to derail the project.

In Discovery, however, the PI/project manager relationship was established differently, and this redefinition not only empowered the PI, but it also empowered the 

project manager because he or she no longer reported only to his or her own line 

management, but also to an outside senior scientist who reported directly to NASA 

Headquarters for the success of his or her mission. Wise project managers could leverage this relationship to push the project forward in the face of adversity. A good team 

could not only implement spacecraft development more effectively but also answer 

management queries from all levels faster, without delaying project progress. Project 

managers would help PIs understand center management concerns, and PIs could 

intervene when outside influences threatened the project. The two would work together 

and build a trust that would allow each to perform their own roles but work together 

as a team when difficulties arose.

Science benefits when a champion is established outside of the existing engineering 

structure that has the power to redirect the project back on track as necessary. The 

project managers recognized this, even writing protection clauses into proposals that 

required the PI’s approval before the spending of one penny of reserve. These gates 

introduced checks and balances into the system, reducing the possibility that engineering 

overruns would erode the science return without careful consideration and approval 

by the primary science stakeholder. The interjection of a PI at this point in the system 

caused the project managers to think twice about cutting the science budget and to 

resist such cuts if pressured, even directed, by their own line or center management.

Project managers who have worked with multiple Discovery PIs spoke highly of 

all of them, contrasting their different styles. One gave the project manager the freedom he needed to get the job done. Others were more hands-on in the day-to-day 

development. In every case, any decisions with potential impact on the mission design 

and subsequent performance were discussed thoroughly with the PI, with the project 

manager laying out a suggested direction, while reminding the PI that he had the 
Chapter 9: Insights from Discovery

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power to overrule him using the structures and review boards in place. That power 

was rarely used, but everyone appreciated the possibility that they might not agree 

and briefed each other thoroughly.

As the PI on CONTOUR brought forth proposed changes, the project manager 

detailed the impact that each would have on the spacecraft, and together they struck 

compromises that improved the science without increasing scope. Both kept tight 

rein on scope and how it affected the program budget. Their weekly conversations 

were wide-ranging and supplemented by phone calls as needed, both with the project 

manager and with instrument developers. This open communication enhanced their 

teamwork, and the project manager was not threatened by the PI also directing instrument developers at her institution.

Tight collaboration between scientists, engineers, and managers such as that exhibited on MESSENGER fed forward into excitement about engineering challenges met 

and anticipated data return, on all sides, making conflicts more negotiable. When 

scientists and engineers are used to working together in a culture and a problem 

arises, they have a common language and mutual respect that make issue resolution 

more straightforward and more effective. No one throws issues to the other side of 

the fence because everyone is already sitting at the table. Everyone’s contributions are 

well defined and valued, all in support of the successful launch and data return. This 

collaborative atmosphere increases the willingness of team members to take direction 

and implement decisions, since they have a greater understanding of the efforts of 

people on other sides of the interface.

The second Dawn project manager came to the project after much of the formulation work had been done, but he fit into the mission smoothly due to his two decades 

of experience working with scientists and engineers at a federally funded research and 

development center. As a deputy director for the Engineering and Science Directorate 

before joining Dawn, he spoke the language of both sides, appreciating science as well 

as the engineering that it took to obtain groundbreaking science results. It was this 

respect for science and scientists that gained the respect of the PI, and they worked 

together to heal the rifts left in the team after the systems requirements definition 

failures highlighted at the program mission and systems review. The two were able, 

quickly, to address the mass, power, and budget problems, facing them as a team rather 

than leaders of opposing sides. Working together, they harnessed their resources to 

proceed in a unified direction and keep the mission from being canceled.

The next Dawn project manager, who appeared at another critical juncture, agreed 

that the working relationship between the project manager and PI was essential. The 

PI needs to know when not to interfere in the engineering, and the project manager 

needs to honor the science requirements. This project manager had also been the project 

manager on Deep Impact just before launch, and he appreciated that the Deep Impact 
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PI or his representative was so often silently supporting the engineering meetings, 

ready to answer questions, but never interfering, and he praised that as a wonderful 

relationship that helped them get to launch.

On Deep Impact, the PI who had been so adamant about the importance of being 

onsite with the engineers was equally adamant that, on his visits to the contractor, he 

was not managing the mission but letting the project manager manage. It was on these 

visits that he learned another important lesson when working with distributed teams: 

despite written and unwritten agreements, confusion can arise when two groups use 

the same word to indicate different requirements or procedures. In his case, a lot of 

additional work was required to satisfy both parties that the implementation of the 

mission testbeds was sufficient to predict mission success. Project managers, PIs, and 

subcontractors must understand differences in culture and not only use the same words 

but ensure that the words being used mean the same thing to all parties.

No relationship is static, however, and the replacement of the project manager can 

cause difficulty in maintaining the forward momentum of a mission. The deputy PI of 

Dawn talked about the danger of losing continuity as project managers are changed and 

the inherent difficulty in maintaining priorities through personnel changes. As new 

project managers take charge, they tend to reprioritize to accomplish ambitious goals 

with small budgets and limited staff; it is then up to other members of the team to explain 

the assumptions inherent in the mission design, the approach, and the expectations.

Teamwork is essential all up and down the line, of course, but the project managers 

interviewed reinforced the importance of well-defined roles and responsibilities and 

communication. The second MESSENGER project manager pushed this point, saying 

that he had spent significant time thinking about the people necessary for mission 

work, particularly in the systems engineering function. “If you’ve got the right people 

then the work is heaven,” he said in an interview. “If you’ve got the wrong people, it’s 

hell.”20 The perfect match of skills, capabilities, and approach is difficult to define but 

well worth the initial investment. This project manager made it a point to get the best 

people on the team and to take care of them. He recognized that people are what make 

a spacecraft work and that the right person in the right job makes the work go much 

more smoothly. To get the most out of this match, a project manager must understand 

the engineers’ needs and assign the work accordingly. Knowing what each engineer 

does, what approaches he or she prefers, and what he or she really loves doing helps 

eliminate outside distractions and contribute to mission success. Seemingly small 

details, like inviting the most junior engineers to the parties, rotating critical test 

20 Niebur, S. (2009, 27 July). Personal interview with D. Grant. Located in the “MESSENGER” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
Chapter 9: Insights from Discovery

373

engineers out and sending them home for an occasional weekend with their families 

at home, and holding events for families all contribute to the engineers’ happiness and 

reinforce the total dedication required in the crunch.

These relationships are not formed in a vacuum, but typically during the first of the 

key project activities required by the Discovery Program: the proposal. The CONTOUR 

project manager described this experience as an intense period of work in which many 

hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent and many people are exhausted, but the 

effort pays off in well-designed missions and teams that are ready to work together 

from the start. Not only are the roles of PI, project manager, mission system engineer, 

and the rest defined during proposal, but they are tested under stress; team members 

come to understand each other’s strengths and how their team will solve the problems 

that invariably arise. Team members take on complementary roles and trust each other 

to accomplish defined tasks. While proposals consume large amounts of resources, 

the time and energy spent on this task set the tone for future collaboration critical to 

mission success.

Management Perspectives

A discussion of how PIs and project managers see their roles individually and with 

respect to each other would not be complete without a few comments from those in 

program leadership over the years. Each mission has a program executive and program 

scientist at NASA Headquarters who maintain cognizance of the mission and respond 

to issues raised by the project or their own management. Another pair, the Discovery 

Program executive and Discovery Program scientist, propose policy modifications and 

oversee the selection of future missions. All of these scientists and executives report 

to their division director. The NASA Associate Administrator for the Science Mission 

Directorate, who oversees all, is the selecting official.

Wes Huntress, former NASA Associate Administrator and the de facto founder 

of the Discovery Program, spoke passionately about the relationship as it had been 

envisioned at the start, saying, “You don’t hold the PI responsible for everything; he’s 

head of science,” and that the project manager does the best he can to implement the 

mission as the PI designed it, with all significant decisions made with the PI at the 

head of the table.21

A key player in a federally funded research and development center—and a former 

PI himself on a non-Discovery mission—explained that mission planning often begins 

with a discussion of the prospective roles and planned interaction. The initial conditions are set at the time of proposal, with ongoing dialogue through the years as the 

21 Niebur, S. (2009, 13 March). Personal interview with W. Huntress. Located in “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.
NASA′s Discovery Program

374

contexts change. This partnership is critical, and the institution puts a high premium 

on making a good match between the PI and project manager for new missions, in 

large part because a well-founded relationship and close-knit team make addressing 

future problems possible before they become crises requiring the attention of seniorlevel management and the costs that those incur.

The former head of the Space Department at another institution heavily engaged in 

the design, development, and implementation of Discovery missions—a scientist who 

has sent instruments to every planet in the solar system—agreed that the partnership 

is key, but the leadership of the PI is critical in the successful implementation of a 

mission, and his or her authority should be respected. When asked about the concept 

that a PI should stay out of the way of the implementing engineers, he called such an 

assertion “damn arrogant” and shortsighted for those interested in maximizing the 

science return within available resources.22

A program executive charged with the oversight of the Dawn and New Horizons 

missions at NASA Headquarters cautioned that project managers need to be receptive to 

requests from all sides without taking comments as direction. Communication is critical, 

but the project manager that is accommodating to everyone—or no one—may become 

distracted from achieving the defined requirements. Mission success often hangs on 

the willingness of project managers to listen to other ideas and the judgment to know 

when to push back on the customer or team when appropriate, asking for clarification, 

explaining the effect of such a change on other spacecraft systems, providing technical 

data that show the change to be unwise, and standing up to management when necessary. Judgment is a key quality necessary in a program manager, as he decides whom 

to trust, how much to verify, and whether a change can be accommodated without 

losing sight of the requirements necessary for mission success.

Another program executive discussed the challenges of PI management of missions that can exceed a half-billion dollars. Missions that struggle require additional 

management resources, and sometimes different arrangements. On Kepler, repeated 

financial overruns during development caused the mission to be redefined from a small, 

focused Discovery mission to a strategic mission for the astrophysics community, and 

the role of the PI was later downgraded in acknowledgment of the increased attention 

required by the project manager and senior management. The project manager was 

replaced with another experienced engineer then working in senior management, and 

she reported directly to the center Director. This brought an increased gravitas that a 

scientist working several levels down at another institution did not, and could not, have.

22 Niebur, S. (2009, 24 September). Personal interview with T. Krimigis. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.
Chapter 9: Insights from Discovery

375

Several people who previously held the positions of Discovery Program Scientist 

and Discovery Program Executive were also interviewed as part of this series of interviews in 2009. All agreed that well-defined roles and responsibilities, teamwork, and 

a commitment to success are critical. One former program executive emphasized the 

power of the project manager to maintain cognizance of the status of all the pieces and 

players required for successful delivery of the spacecraft as a whole. Project managers should be encouraged to delegate responsibility such that they can act as a kind 

of coach, monitoring progress and looking for areas that need extra attention in the 

project, while maintaining awareness of developments external to the project that 

may affect mission success. Thoughtful communication with the team, the contractor, 

his or her management, the program officer, and NASA officials is essential; “feeding 

the management dragon” appropriately will keep issues at the proper level, rather 

than burying the issue and hoping for success or raising the issue too quickly, when 

additional resources may create more interference than assistance.23 It is recognized 

as a strength, he said, to identify issues that are beyond the capability of the project to 

resolve and to call for additional resources to help determine the best course of action.

When asked what makes a good project manager, former Discovery Program 

Manager Jarrett said, 

Someone who’s able to see the future, someone who is a very flexible individual who can 

roll with the punches as problems come in. You will always have funding issues where 

contractors don’t come in within budget or suppliers’ costs go up. You’ve got to know how 

to handle your reserve strategy to do that. You need to be able to juggle schedules to be able 

to account for problems and things you need to go fix. You don’t necessarily need to fully 

understand the scientific aspects of the mission, but you need to have an appreciation of 

them. An understanding of them is even better. And you have to have the people skills to 

be able to deal with the whole realm of the community from the NASA bureaucrats to the 

scientist who has his one little piece of data or her piece of data that they want to get. You 

have to really comprehend the significance of that.... And again, it’s a team effort between 

the PI and the project manager in order to accomplish the whole thing. There’s got to be 

a balance.24

Gregg Vane of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory emphasized the importance of teamwork, saying, “If the Project Manager and PI aren’t really a close-knit team, it makes 

it virtually impossible to come to agreement as to how to deal with the issues. Which 

23 Niebur, S. (2009, 4 September). Personal interview with L. Johnson. Located in “Deep Impact” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

24 Niebur, S. (2009, 14 May). Personal interview with D. Jarrett and Kate Wolf. Located in “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.
NASA′s Discovery Program

376

means it becomes a crisis for some senior-level management at JPL or at [NASA] 

Headquarters, and the cost of fixing it is much greater. We think it’s essential. It’s a 

requirement, really. We have to feel confident that both parties will be comfortable 

working with each other.”25

LESSONS LEARNED

Much was learned in the first twenty years after the first Discovery proposal about 

the nuances inherent in an arrangement that places a senior scientist at the head of an 

extremely large team of engineers at a NASA center, a federally funded research and 

development center, and aerospace contractors. Individuals, teams, and programs have 

all collected lessons learned and incorporated them into future missions to varying 

degrees. It is the intent of this chapter not to replace but to add to these conversations 

by conveying a sense of the reflections shared by the PIs, project managers, and management executives as interviewed by a colleague. Every Discovery mission is unique, 

and yet there are clearly some common strengths. The PI must remain cognizant of 

development milestones and challenges and be onsite at key reviews and as much other 

time as feasible, given the other demands on a mission leader and internationally known 

scientist. The project manager must understand the nature of the PI’s commitment and 

be comfortable with implementing the design of the mission independently, within 

the science requirements defined at proposal or shortly thereafter. Both parties must 

make substantial efforts at communication in weekly conference calls, in monthly 

meetings, in quarterly reviews, and as issues arise that may affect the science return of 

the mission. These principles are largely universal and have been used to define roles 

and responsibilities over the first two decades of Discovery.

There are, however, less obvious lessons to learn here about how a project evolves. 

Contractor oversight may require “boots on the ground” by both the PI and the project 

manager, to varying degrees and at various times during a mission. The ideal project 

manager skill set is not constant, varying with mission design and with mission phase. 

In some cases, a project requires a different management style in different phases of 

design and development. Communication choices adequate during design may be 

insufficient when the hardware is being built and contractors approaching deadlines. 

Projects should be willing to change approach as the demands of the project change, 

with the full understanding that changes in project management will tax the entire 

25 Niebur, S. (2009, 22 March). Personal interview with G. Vane. Located in the “Discovery 

Program” file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, 

Washington, DC.
Chapter 9: Insights from Discovery

377

team, including the PI, who must ensure that the new management fully understands 

not just the science requirements but the assumptions implicit therein. Change is not a 

panacea, but it may be a necessary kick-start to the successful completion of a mission.

Principal Investigator

PIs can employ varied management styles, but each must be available to the mission 

as needed and be willing to act, within the project or with more senior management, 

when the success of the mission is threatened. Because it is so difficult to determine 

the origin of a crisis, the PI must maintain a keen insight into the progress of the 

project and be ready to act appropriately. PIs must understand rudimentary aspects 

of project management, including effective requirements definition, allocation of cost 

and schedule reserves, systems engineering, and determination of the full impact of 

potential trades. A PI must be fair, reasonable, decisive, slow to anger, and careful to 

consider the impact of any decision on the mission and the personnel involved. A good 

PI resists scope creep, listens to team members, takes decisive action, and effectively 

represents the mission to NASA Headquarters, center management, the science community, and the media.

Experience is critical for both PIs and project managers, although there is no 

clear consensus on what experience would adequately prepare a person to lead a 

half-billion-dollar mission. All experience, from that of a co-investigator to an instrument developer to a leader of teams, is helpful, and each must be evaluated with the 

management expectations in mind. It is particularly critical that mission leaders have 

delivered projects or instruments on time in the past and that they have employed 

appropriate support for the scheduling function in mission development to minimize 

the impact of late deliveries, the end result of many, many technical troubles. Some 

systems engineering experience would aid in evaluating project plans.

PIs would be well served to have worked closely with engineering teams at the 

proposed NASA center or federally funded research and development center in the 

past, to understand the engineering culture there, to know and have good relationships with center management, to be able to push back on new demands from all sides, 

and to stand up for the project when unfairly affected by failures, delays, or overruns 

on other projects at the center. The PI must also, of course, have the experience to 

understand when the project is being punished unfairly for another’s mistakes, and 

when the new regulations reflect new insights into program and project management 

that will aid the project in its quest for mission success. An effective PI is aware of the 

daily challenges but does not interfere with the project manager’s implementation style 

unless it is adversely affecting mission progress.
NASA′s Discovery Program

378

Project Manager

Former project managers have identified challenges of managing within Discovery’s 

constraints on cost and schedule. Key among them are selecting the right level of 

testing, appropriately relying on heritage, considering when to move beyond “single 

string” to redundancy in parts and technique, and monitoring scheduled deliveries 

from subcontractors to detect problems well in advance. Project managers must be 

vigilant, decisive, open, and honest while accurately conveying to the PI and upperlevel management the severity of any given technical challenge. Teamwork is essential, 

and a good project manager not only knows the status of scheduled development 

and testing, but the principals involved, how they work, and what motivates them to 

deliver on time and on budget.

A good project manager likely has systems engineering experience under his or 

her belt and may have managed smaller missions or subsystems on previous missions. 

Experience managing contracts, understanding costs, and discovering potential problems 

early directly enables both PMs and PIs to do their job more thoroughly and effectively.

PIs say that they value the following characteristics in a project manager: honesty, 

capability, availability, insight, straight talk, experience, reputation, teamwork, financial 

acumen, scheduling experience, commitment, independence, and a good understanding 

of risk. They also require a rapport that makes them comfortable with delegating the 

engineering of their project, knowing that they will be called in to discuss any critical 

problems or those that may affect the science return. This rapport allows the team 

to focus on solving technical problems as they arise in the most direct way possible. 

Effective project managers in Discovery appreciate the science return of the missions 

that they design and build; PIs value the engineering breakthroughs that make it possible. A mission team that is designed and implemented with effective communication 

between the scientists and engineers creates a culture in which problems can be solved 

more quickly, more effectively, and with less stress on the team as they move to mitigate 

the effects and get back on schedule. Regular communication (formal, informal, and 

social) reinforces this sense that the implementers are all one team, rather than a team 

of scientists and a team of engineers as in the models predating Discovery.

Projects that require PI approval before spending reserves or making significant 

trades introduce checks and balances into the engineering culture from outside the 

system, reducing the possibility of engineering issues eroding the science return without careful consideration and approval by the primary science stakeholder. This does 

more than bring one scientist into the conversation; it introduces a wedge whereby 

the science community now has leverage into the project in ways that did not exist 

before principal-investigator-led missions. When engineering challenges threaten 

to erode the science return, the science community—represented by the PI—now 

is empowered to stand up and interject the implications of such modifications into 
Chapter 9: Insights from Discovery

379

the discussion and to stop overdesign or unnecessary improvements in the proposed 

design that would then take resources from operations. As mission after mission in 

the Discovery Program has shown, the era of cutting operations budgets to increase 

margins of certainty is over. In the end, despite the disparate mission designs, science 

goals, and team organizations, nearly all the PIs and project managers agreed on one 

principle. The PI/project manager responsibilities can be divided many ways, but those 

two people must be able to trust each other, to act in the best interest of the project, 

and to act as a team. If the mission is not executable within the constraints that NASA 

and each mission team have defined, the rest is simply theory.

The Job of a Lifetime

Every Discovery PI interviewed called his or her role the best job they ever had. In an 

interview in 2003, Wes Huntress, former Associate Administrator of NASA, said: “I 

think the Discovery Program has been an enormous success. It’s the thing I’m most 

proud of.... I have no disappointments in it at all, except for this one loss that we’ve 

had, but that’s the business we’re in. It’s a risky business, and that’s going to happen.”26

The first 20 years of Discovery missions included spectacular successes and difficult 

times, right along the learning curve that accompanies any new initiative. Through 

it all, the individuals and organizations involved persevered, using the constraints 

introduced by the crisis du jour in creative ways to implement their missions and the 

hardware required to reach the scientists’ dreams. By planning far ahead, manipulating 

constraints, being present, and coming up with innovative ways to approximate the 

results of much larger, deeper, more well-funded programs, the people of Discovery 

designed, built, and launched amazing spacecraft on their quests to explore other 

planets, comets, asteroids, the Sun, and planets around other stars.

NASA’s Discovery Program has been a grand experiment, implemented by some 

of the greatest scientists, engineers, and managers of our time. To continue its success, NASA must learn from the past and share both the trials and the joys of robotic 

spaceflight with generations to come. The students of today will be the PIs of tomorrow.

26 Wright, R. (2003, 9 January). Personal interview with W. Huntress. Located in “Wes Huntress” file, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

381

The project that led to this book began as a straightforward endeavor to document 

the history of the Discovery Program while it was still fresh. And who better, concluded the NASA History Office after reviewing her proposal, than Susan Niebur, the 

person who had recently run the program? But it was the stories Susan uncovered 

while researching that history that ignited her passion and lengthened the straightforward history book—and lengthened it, and lengthened it more. Because the most 

amazing things about NASA’s missions aren’t the discoveries, or the destinations, or 

even the science. It’s the stories. And those stories are about people. 

Spacecraft don’t build themselves, budget spreadsheets don’t spend funds, and 

policies are not self-executing. People do all of those things, and every single person 

has a story about how she did it and what she felt while doing it. NASA, like all government bureaucracies, tends to bury the individual and her story in favor of impersonal 

rules and policies and processes. Susan never lost her focus on the individual, and 

after leaving NASA, she was free to put the people and their stories front and center. 

After her death in 2012, the hundreds and hundreds of pages of stories languished, 

waiting for someone to undertake the task of editing them down to a book with the 

AFTERWORD

By Curt Niebur
NASA′s Discovery Program

382

proper balance of historical narrative, stories, and length. NASA and David Brown 

ultimately undertook that effort. The final book is a product of a diverse team effort, 

just like everything NASA undertakes.

Not all stories are happy ones. Sometimes they aren’t even true (though they are 

always true to the storyteller!). But all stories have value. They teach us. They motivate 

us. They make us stronger, smarter, and humbler. Stories make us better people. Susan 

knew this truth, and her hope was that this book and its stories would help its readers. 

Because her ultimate goal had always been to help people.

And after all, who doesn’t love a good story?
383

AA Associate Administrator

AAS American Astronomical Society

ACE Advanced Composition Explorer

ACME Asteroid, Comet, Moon Explorers

AGU American Geophysical Union

AMBR Advanced Material Bi-propellant Rocket

AO Announcement of Opportunity

APL Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University

APS Alpha Particle Spectrometer (on Lunar Prospector)

APXS Alpha Proton X-ray Spectrometer (on Mars Pathfinder)

ARC Ames Research Center

ARR Assembly, Test, and Launch Operations Readiness Review

ASI Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (Italy)

ASI/MET Atmospheric Structure Instrument/Meteorology Package 

(on Pathfinder)

APPENDIX A

Acronym List
NASA′s Discovery Program

384

ASPERA-3 Analyzer of Space Plasma and Energetic Atoms 

(on Mars Express)

ASRG Advanced Stirling Radioisotope Generator

ASU Arizona State University

ATLO Assembly, Test, and Launch Operations

AU astronomical unit

AXAF Advanced X-Ray Astrophysics Facility, later Chandra

BATC Ball Aerospace and Technology Corporation

BMDO Ballistic Missile Defense Organization

C&DH Command and Data Handling

CA Confirmation Assessment

CADRe Cost Analysis Data Requirement

CCD charge-coupled device

CDR Conceptual Design Review; Critical Design Review

CESAR Comet Earth Sample and Return

CfA Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

CFI CONTOUR Forward Imager

CIDA Comet Impact Dust Analyzer (on CONTOUR); Cometary and 

Interstellar Dust Analyzer (on Stardust)

CIW Carnegie Institute of Washington

CNR Comet Nucleus Rendezvous

Co-I Co-Investigator

COMPLEX Committee on Planetary Exploration

CONTOUR COmet Nucleus TOUR

COROT Convection Rotation and planetary Transits

COTS Commercial Off The Shelf

CR Confirmation Review

CRAF Comet Rendezvous Asteroid Flyby Return

CRISP CONTOUR Remote Imaging SPectrograph

CRR Capability and Requirements Review

CSSR Comet Surface Sample Return

CZT Cadmium-Zinc Telluride (detectors on Dawn’s GRaND)

D&NFPO Discovery and New Frontiers Program Office

DAP Data Analysis Program

DARA Deutsche Agentur für Raumfahrtangelegenheiten

DAVINCI Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, 

and Imaging
Appendix A

385

DFMI Dust Flux Monitor Instrument

DGE Doppler Gravity Experiment (on Lunar Prospector)

DIXI Deep Impact eXtended Investigation 

(proposed mission of opportunity)

DLLSG Discovery Lessons Learned Steering Group

DLR Institut für Planetenforschung of the Deutsches Zentrum für 

Luft-und Raumfahrt (Berlin)

DPI Deputy Principal Investigator

DPM Deputy Project Manager; Discovery Program Manager

DPO Discovery Program Office

DPS American Astronomical Society’s Division of Planetary Sciences

DSMCE Discovery and Scout Mission Capabilities Expansion

DSWG Discovery Science Working Group

ECF Early Career Fellow

ELV Expendable Launch Vehicle

EOM End of Mission

EPO Education and Public Outreach

EPOCh Extrasolar Planet Observations and Characterization

EPOXI Extrasolar Planet Observations and Characterization (EPOCh) 

and Deep Impact eXtended Investigation (DIXI)

ESA European Space Agency

ESSP Earth System Science Pathfinder; Earth System Science Program

ESSSO Earth and Space Science Support Office (at LaRC)

ETRR Environmental Test Readiness Review

FAR Federal Acquisition Regulation

FBC faster, better, cheaper

FBO Fixed-Base Operator

FC Framing Camera

FISTA Flying Infrared Signature Technologies Aircraft

FPA Fault Protection and Autonomy

FRR Flight Readiness Review

FTE Full-Time Equivalent

FY Fiscal Year

GAO Government Accountability Office

GAS Get Away Specials

GEM Genesis Electron

GFE Government Furnished Equipment
NASA′s Discovery Program

386

GIM Genesis Ion Monitor

GO Guest Observer Program

GPMC Governing Program Management Council

GR/NS Gamma Ray and Neutron Spectrometer

GRACE Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment

GRAIL Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory

GRaND Gamma Ray and Neutron Detector (on Dawn)

GRS Gamma Ray Spectrometer (on Lunar Prospector)

GSFC Goddard Space Flight Center 

HEAO-2 High Energy Astrophysics Observatory 2, later Einstein 

Observatory

HER Halley–Earth Return

HIM Halley Intercept Mission

HRD High Rate Detector

HST Hubble Space Telescope

HZ Habitable Zone

I&T Integration and Test

IAT Independent Assessment Team

ICE Independent Cost Estimate

IDP Interplanetary Dust Particle

IDS Interdisciplinary Scientist (on Galileo)

IIR Independent Implementation Review

IMP Imager for Mars Pathfinder (instrument); Interplanetary 

Monitoring Platform (series of satellites)

IMS Integrated Master Schedules

INAF Instituto Nazionale Di Astrofisica (Italy)

INSIDE Jupiter Interior Structure and Internal Dynamical Evolution of Jupiter

(proposed)

InSight Interior exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and 

Heat Transport

IPAO Independent Project Assessment Office

IR Inheritance Review

IRT Independent Review Team

ISAS Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (Japan)

ISIS International Satellites for Ionospheric Studies (series of satellites)

ISP Interstellar Particle

ISRO Indian Space Research Organisation
Appendix A

387

ISS International Space Station

ITAR International Traffic in Arms Regulations

JHU Johns Hopkins University

JPL Jet Propulsion Laboratory

JSC Johnson Space Center

KASC Kepler Asteroseismic Science Consortium

KDP Key Decision Point

KREEP potassium, rare earth elements, and phosphorus

KSC Kennedy Space Center

LANL Los Alamos National Laboratory

LaRa Lander Radioscience

LaRC Langley Research Center

LCC Life Cycle Costs

LDEF Long Duration Exposure Facility

LGRS Lunar Gravity Ranging System

LLIS Lessons Learned Information System

LLNL Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

LM Lockheed Martin

LMA Lockheed Martin Astronautics

LPSC Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference

LRD Launch Readiness Date

LRR Launch Readiness Review

M3 Moon Mineralogy Mapper

MAG Magnetometer

MAG/ER Magnetometer/Electron Reflectometer (on Lunar Prospector)

MBAR Main Belt Asteroid Rendezvous

MDR Mission Definition Review

MDRA Mission Definition and Requirements Agreement

MEGANE Mars-moon Exploration with GAmma rays and NEutrons

MER Mars Exploration Rovers

MESSENGER MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and 

Ranging

MIB Mishap Investigation Board

MIDEX Medium-Sized Explorer

MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology

MMR Monthly Management Review

MMX Martian Moons eXploration
NASA′s Discovery Program

388

MO Mission of Opportunity (formerly MOO)

MO&DA Mission Operations and Data Analysis

MOWG Mission Operations Working Group

MPS Max Planck Institut für Sonnensystemforschung (Germany)

MRO Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

MRR Mission Readiness Review

MS IR Mapping Spectrometer

MSFC Marshall Space Flight Center

MSI MultiSpectral Imager (on NEAR)

MSL Mars Science Laboratory

MSSS Malin Space Science Systems

MSX Midcourse Space Experiment (Department of Defense mission)

NAC NASA Advisory Council

NAPA National Academy of Public Administration

NASA National Aeronautics and Space Administration

NEAR Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous

NEPA National Environmental Protection Act

NEXT NASA’s Evolutionary Xenon Thruster; New Exploration of 

Tempel 1

NGIMS Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer (on CONTOUR)

NIAT NASA Integrated Action Team

NIS Near-Infrared Spectrometer (on NEAR)

NLR NEAR Laser Rangefinder

NLSA Nuclear Launch Safety Approval

NLT No Later Than

NMO NASA Management Office

NPD NASA Policy Directive

NPG NASA Procedures and Guidelines

NPR NASA Procedural Requirement

NRA NASA Research Announcement

NRC National Research Council

NRL Naval Research Laboratory

NS Neutron Spectrometer (on Lunar Prospector)

NSPIRES NASA Solicitation and Proposal Integrated Review and 

Evaluation System

NSTAR NASA Solar Technology Application Readiness

OAST Office of Aeronautics and Space Technology
Appendix A

389

OCO Orbiting Carbon Observatory

OIG Office of Inspector General

OMB Office of Management and Budget

ONR Office of Naval Research

ORR Operations Readiness Review

OSC Orbital Sciences Corporation

OSIRIS Origins Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and 

Security

OSS Office of Space Science

OSSA Office of Space Science and Applications

OTTR Ocean-going Transportable Test and Evaluation Resource 

(tracking ship)

PA Program Analyst (at NASA Headquarters)

PCA Program Commitment Agreement

PDR Preliminary Design Review

PDS Planetary Data System

PE Program Executive (at NASA Headquarters)

PETR Post-Environmental Test Review

PI Principal Investigator

PIDDP Planetary Instrument Definition and Development Program

PIR Program Implementation Review

PM Program Manager (at NASA Headquarters); Project Manager 

(at APL, JPL, or GSFC)

PMC Program Management Council

PMDAP Planetary Mission Data Analysis Program

PMSR Preliminary Mission and Systems Review

POP Program Operating Plan

PPS Planetary Protection Subcommittee

PS Program Scientist (at NASA Headquarters); Project Scientist 

(at APL or JPL)

PSG Project Science Group

PSI Planetary Science Institute

PSLV Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle

PSP Participating Scientist Program

PSS Planetary Science Subcommittee (of the NAC)

QuikScat Quick Scatterometer

R&A Research and Analysis
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390

RECON Rendezvous with a Comet Nucleus

RPS Radioisotope Power Systems

RS Radio Science

RY Real-Year (dollars)

SAIC Science Applications International Corporation

SALMON Stand-ALone Mission of Opportunity Notice

SAO Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (at Harvard)

SASF Spacecraft Activity Sequence File

SDB Small Disadvantaged Business

SDIO Strategic Defense Initiative Organization

SE Systems Engineer

SEI Space Exploration Initiative

SERENA Search for Exospheric Refilling and Emitted Natural Abundances

SETI Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

SIR System Implementation Review

SIR-C Spaceborne Imaging Radar-C

SIRTF Space Infrared Telescope Facility, later Spitzer Space Telescope

SJI San Juan Capistrano Research Institute

SMD Science Mission Directorate

SMEX Small Explorer

SOCCER Sample of Comet Coma Earth Return

SOFIA Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy

SOMA Science Office for Mission Assessments (at LaRC)

SR&T Supporting Research and Technology

SRB Standing Review Board

SRC Sample Return Capsule

SRR System Requirements Review

SSAC Solar System Advisory Committee

SSB Space Studies Board (of the NRC)

SSE Solar System Exploration (Division)

SSEC Solar System Exploration Committee

SSED Solar System Exploration Division

SSES Solar System Exploration Subcommittee (of the SSAAC)

SSO Science Support Office (at LaRC)

Stardust NExT Stardust New Exploration of Tempel 1 (mission of opportunity)

STA Sample Tray Assembly (on Stardust)

STROFIO STart from a ROtating FIeld mass spectrOmeter
Appendix A

391

STScI Space Telescope Science Institute

SWG Science Working Group

SwRI Southwest Research Institute

SWSR Solar Wind Sample Return (mission concept)

THEMIS Time History of Events and Macroscale Interaction during 

Substorms

TIE Twin Ion Engines produced for the Galactic Empire’s combat fleet

TIM Technical Interchange Meeting

TLA Three Letter Acronym

TMC Technical, Management, and Cost Review

TMCO Technical, Management, Cost, and Outreach Review

TOPS Toward Other Planetary Systems

TOR Terms of Reference

TRL Technology Readiness Level

UARS Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite

UCLA University of California, Los Angeles

UHF Ultra-High Frequency

USGS United States Geological Survey

UTTR Utah Test and Training Range

V&V Verification and Validation

VERITAS Venus Emissivity, Radio science, InSAR, Topography & 

Spectroscopy

VESAT Venus Environmental Satellite (proposed mission)

VESPER Venus Sounder for Planetary Exploration (proposed mission)

VEXAG Venus Exploration Analysis Group

VIR Visible and Infrared Imaging Spectrometer

VIRTIS Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer

WBS Work Breakdown Structure

XRS-GRS X-Ray/Gamma Ray Spectrometer (on NEAR)

XSS-11 EXperimental Satellite System-11

Note: Aladdin, Lunar Prospector, Mars Pathfinder, NetLander, Genesis, Stardust, 

Suess–Urey, Deep Impact, Dawn, Kepler, Space Lab, Kuiper Airborne Observatory, 

Ulysses, and Uhuru are names of missions but not acronyms.

393

NEAR

Bell, Jim, and Jacqueline Mitton. Asteroid Rendezvous: NEAR Shoemaker’s Adventures 

at Eros. Cambridge University Press, 2002.

McCurdy, Howard E. Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight: The NEAR Earth Asteroid 

Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker mission. Monographs in Aerospace History, 

number 36, 2005.

Russell, C. T., ed. The Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous Mission. Reprinted from Space 

Science Reviews, vol. 82, nos. 1–2, 1997.

Mars Pathfinder

Muirhead, B. K., and W. L. Simon. (1999) High Velocity Leadership: The Mars 

Pathfinder Approach to Faster, Better, Cheaper. Harper Business, HarperCollins.

Pritchett, P. (1998) The Mars Pathfinder Approach to “Faster-Better-Cheaper:” Hard 

Proof from the NASA/JPL Pathfinder Team on How Limitations Can Guide You to 

Breakthroughs. Pritchett & Associates.

Shirley, Donna. (1998) Managing Martians. Broadway Books.

APPENDIX B

Further Reading
NASA′s Discovery Program

394

Lunar Prospector

Binder, Alan B. (2005) Lunar Prospector: Against All Odds. Ken Press.

Stardust and Stardust NExT

Atkins, Ken. “Stardust: The rewards of commitment, care, and communication.” ASK 

Magazine 23:14–17, 2006.

Atkins, Kenneth L., Bredt D. Martin, Joseph M. Vellinga, and Rick A. Price. “Stardust: 

Implementing a New Manage-to-Budget Paradigm,” Proceedings of the Fourth 

IAA Conference on Low Cost Spacecraft, Johns Hopkins University, May 2–5, 

2000, also recorded in Acta Astronautica 52:87–97, 2003. Available online at 

http://www.sciencedirect.com.

Atkins, Kenneth L. “How to plan and manage reserves effectively,” IEEE paper #1292, 

2004 IEEE Aerospace Conference, 8–12 March, 2004, Big Sky, MT.

Brownlee et al. “Comet 81P/Wild 2 under a microscope,” and following papers in

Science special section, vol. 314: 1711–1739, 15 December 2006.

Brownlee, D. E., P. Tsou, J. D. Anderson, M. S. Hammer, R. L. Newburn, Z. Sekanina, 

B. C. Clark, F. Horz, M. E. Zolensky, J. Kissel, J. A. M. McDonnell, S. A. Sandford, 

and A. J. Tuzzolino, “Stardust: Comet and interstellar dust sample return mission,” 

JGR 108, no. E10, 8111–8125, 2003, and the following instrument papers in that 

issue of JGR.

“Stardust at Comet Wild 2”: Science special section, vol. 304, no. 5678: 1701–1856, 

18 June 2004.

Genesis

Roberts, Barney B., and Richard B. Bennett, “Risk Management for the NASA/JPL 

Genesis Mission: A Case Study,” 30 August 2000, available online from http://

www.futron.com/resources.xml?page=4#tabs-1.

Russell, C. T., ed., The Genesis Mission. Kluwer Academic Publishers. Reprinted from 

Space Science Reviews, vol. 105, nos. 3–4, 2003.

Williams, Kenneth E. “Overcoming Genesis Mission Design Challenges,” IAA-L0603P 2004.

CONTOUR

CONTOUR Mishap Investigation Board (2003). CONTOUR Mishap Investigation 

Board Report.

Deep Impact and EPOXI

A’Hearn, Michael F., and Michael R. Combi, eds. Deep Impact at Comet Tempel 1. 

Reprinted from Icarus, vol. 191, no. 2S, 2007.
Appendix B

395

Russell, C. T., ed. Deep Impact Mission: Looking Beneath the Surface of a Cometary 

Nucleus. Springer. Reprinted from Space Science Reviews, vol. 117, nos. 1–2, 

2005.

MESSENGER

Domingue, D. L., and C. T. Russell, eds. The MESSENGER mission to Mercury. Springer. 

Reprinted from Space Science Reviews, vol. 131, nos. 1–4, 2007.

Science special issues 2008, 2009, 2010.

Dawn

Rayman, M. D., et al. “Dawn: A mission in development for exploration of main belt 

asteroids Vesta and Ceres,” Acta Astronautica 58: 605–616, 2006.

Russell, C. T., et al. “Dawn: A Journey In Space and Time,” Planet. Space Sci. 52: 

465–489, 2004.

Lessons Learned

Bearden, D. A. (2003). “A complexity-based risk assessment of low-cost planetary 

missions: When is a mission too fast and too cheap?” Acta Astronautica, vol. 52, 

no. 2–6.

Discovery Program Goals (2005). Online at http://discovery.larc.nasa.gov/dpgoals.

html.

Discovery Program Handbook 1992. Solar System Exploration Division, Office of 

Space Science, NASA Headquarters.

Discovery Program Workshops (16–20 November 1992, 13–15 April 1993, 14–15 

June 1995, 30 January 1998, 23–24 February 2000, 24 July 2002, 2 February 

2006, 6–7 April 2006, 24 July 2002, September 2007); some available online 

at the Discovery Program Acquisition Web site: http://discovery.larc.nasa.gov/

lessonslearned.html.

McCurdy, H. E. (2001). Faster, Better, Cheaper: Low Cost Innovation in the US Space 

Program. Johns Hopkins University Press. Baltimore, MD.

Perry, R. B., and D. G. Pelaccio (2003). “Considerations and Lessons Learned in 

Implementing Effective, Low-Cost, Unmanned Space Exploration Missions.” 

Space Technology & Applications International Forum (STAIF-2003, 

Albuquerque, New Mexico, February 2003).

Perry, R. B., J. R. Rogers, and M. L. Stancati (2006). “Lessons Learned from Technical, 

Management, and Cost Review of Proposals.” Online at http://discovery.larc.

nasa.gov//discovery/PDF_FILES/TMC_Paper_21Feb06.pdf.

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Logsdon, John M. Together in Orbit: The Origins of International Cooperation in the 

Space Station. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 11, 1998.

Phillips, W. Hewitt. Journey in Aeronautical Research: A Career at NASA Langley 

Research Center. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 12, 1998.

Braslow, Albert L. A History of Suction-Type Laminar-Flow Control with Emphasis on 

Flight Research. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 13, 1999.

Logsdon, John M., moderator. Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned from 

Apollo. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 14, 1999.

Perminov, V. G. The Difficult Road to Mars: A Brief History of Mars Exploration in the 

Soviet Union. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 15, 1999.

Tucker, Tom. Touchdown: The Development of Propulsion Controlled Aircraft at NASA 

Dryden. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 16, 1999.

Maisel, Martin, Demo J. Giulanetti, and Daniel C. Dugan. The History of the XV-15 

Tilt Rotor Research Aircraft: From Concept to Flight. Monographs in Aerospace 

History, No. 17, 2000. NASA SP-2000-4517.

Jenkins, Dennis R. Hypersonics Before the Shuttle: A Concise History of the X-15 

Research Airplane. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 18, 2000. NASA 

SP-2000-4518.

Chambers, Joseph R. Partners in Freedom: Contributions of the Langley Research 

Center to U.S. Military Aircraft of the 1990s. Monographs in Aerospace History, 

No. 19, 2000. NASA SP-2000-4519.

Waltman, Gene L. Black Magic and Gremlins: Analog Flight Simulations at NASA’s 

Flight Research Center. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 20, 2000. NASA 

SP-2000-4520.

Portree, David S. F. Humans to Mars: Fifty Years of Mission Planning, 1950–2000. 

Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 21, 2001. NASA SP-2001-4521.
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Thompson, Milton O., with J. D. Hunley. Flight Research: Problems Encountered and 

What They Should Teach Us. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 22, 2001. 

NASA SP-2001-4522.

Tucker, Tom. The Eclipse Project. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 23, 2001. 

NASA SP-2001-4523.

Siddiqi, Asif A. Deep Space Chronicle: A Chronology of Deep Space and Planetary 

Probes, 1958–2000. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 24, 2002. NASA 

SP-2002-4524.

Merlin, Peter W. Mach 3+: NASA/USAF YF-12 Flight Research, 1969–1979. 

Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 25, 2001. NASA SP-2001-4525.

Anderson, Seth B. Memoirs of an Aeronautical Engineer: Flight Tests at Ames Research 

Center: 1940–1970. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 26, 2002. NASA 

SP-2002-4526.

Renstrom, Arthur G. Wilbur and Orville Wright: A Bibliography Commemorating the 

One-Hundredth Anniversary of the First Powered Flight on December 17, 1903. 

Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 27, 2002. NASA SP-2002-4527.

No monograph 28.

Chambers, Joseph R. Concept to Reality: Contributions of the NASA Langley Research 

Center to U.S. Civil Aircraft of the 1990s. Monographs in Aerospace History, 

No. 29, 2003. NASA SP-2003-4529.

Peebles, Curtis, ed. The Spoken Word: Recollections of Dryden History, The Early Years. 

Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 30, 2003. NASA SP-2003-4530.

Jenkins, Dennis R., Tony Landis, and Jay Miller. American X-Vehicles: An 

Inventory—X-1 to X-50. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 31, 2003. NASA 

SP-2003-4531.

Renstrom, Arthur G. Wilbur and Orville Wright: A Chronology Commemorating the 

One-Hundredth Anniversary of the First Powered Flight on December 17, 1903. 

Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 32, 2003. NASA SP-2003-4532.

Bowles, Mark D., and Robert S. Arrighi. NASA’s Nuclear Frontier: The Plum Brook 

Research Reactor. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 33, 2004. NASA 

SP-2004-4533.

Wallace, Lane, and Christian Gelzer. Nose Up: High Angle-of-Attack and Thrust 

Vectoring Research at NASA Dryden, 1979–2001. Monographs in Aerospace 

History, No. 34, 2009. NASA SP-2009-4534.

Matranga, Gene J., C. Wayne Ottinger, Calvin R. Jarvis, and D.  Christian Gelzer. 

Unconventional, Contrary, and Ugly: The Lunar Landing Research Vehicle. 

Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 35, 2006. NASA SP-2004-4535.
NASA′s Discovery Program

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McCurdy, Howard E. Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight: The History of the Near 

Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Mission. Monographs in Aerospace History, 

No. 36, 2005. NASA SP-2005-4536.

Seamans, Robert C., Jr. Project Apollo: The Tough Decisions. Monographs in Aerospace 

History, No. 37, 2005. NASA SP-2005-4537.

Lambright, W. Henry. NASA and the Environment: The Case of Ozone Depletion. 

Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 38, 2005. NASA SP-2005-4538.

Chambers, Joseph R. Innovation in Flight: Research of the NASA Langley Research 

Center on Revolutionary Advanced Concepts for Aeronautics. Monographs in 

Aerospace History, No. 39, 2005. NASA SP-2005-4539.

Phillips, W. Hewitt. Journey into Space Research: Continuation of a Career at NASA 

Langley Research Center. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 40, 2005. NASA 

SP-2005-4540.

Rumerman, Judy A., Chris Gamble, and Gabriel Okolski, comps. U.S. Human 

Spaceflight: A Record of Achievement, 1961–2006. Monographs in Aerospace 

History, No. 41, 2007. NASA SP-2007-4541.

Peebles, Curtis. The Spoken Word: Recollections of Dryden History Beyond the Sky.

Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 42, 2011. NASA SP-2011-4542.

Dick, Steven J., Stephen J. Garber, and Jane H. Odom. Research in NASA History. 

Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 43, 2009. NASA SP-2009-4543.

Merlin, Peter W. Ikhana: Unmanned Aircraft System Western States Fire Missions. 

Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 44, 2009. NASA SP-2009-4544.

Fisher, Steven C., and Shamim A. Rahman. Remembering the Giants: Apollo Rocket 

Propulsion Development. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 45, 2009. NASA 

SP-2009-4545.

Gelzer, Christian. Fairing Well: From Shoebox to Bat Truck and Beyond, Aerodynamic 

Truck Research at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center. Monographs in 

Aerospace History, No. 46, 2011. NASA SP-2011-4546.

Arrighi, Robert. Pursuit of Power: NASA’s Propulsion Systems Laboratory No. 1 and 2. 

Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 48, 2012. NASA SP-2012-4548.

Renee M. Rottner. Making the Invisible Visible: A History of the Spitzer Infrared 

Telescope Facility (1971–2003). Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 47, 2017. 

NASA SP-2017-4547.

Goodrich, Malinda K., Alice R. Buchalter, and Patrick M. Miller, comps. Toward 

a History of the Space Shuttle: An Annotated Bibliography, Part 2 (1992–2011). 

Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 49, 2012. NASA SP-2012-4549.
The NASA History Series

409

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1997–2011, vol.  2. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 50, 2016. NASA 

SP-2016-4550.

Gelzer, Christian. The Spoken Word III: Recollections of Dryden History; The Shuttle 

Years. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 52, 2013. NASA SP-2013-4552.

Ross, James C. NASA Photo One. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 53, 2013. 

NASA SP-2013-4553.

Launius, Roger D. Historical Analogs for the Stimulation of Space Commerce. 

Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 54, 2014. NASA SP-2014-4554.

Buchalter, Alice R., and Patrick M. Miller, comps. The National Advisory Committee 

for Aeronautics: An Annotated Bibliography. Monographs in Aerospace History, 

No. 55, 2014. NASA SP-2014-4555.

Chambers, Joseph R., and Mark A. Chambers. Emblems of Exploration: Logos of 

the NACA and NASA. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 56, 2015. NASA 

SP-2015-4556.

Alexander, Joseph K. Science Advice to NASA: Conflict, Consensus, Partnership, 

Leadership. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 57, 2017. NASA SP-2017-4557.

Electronic Media, NASA SP-4600

Remembering Apollo 11: The 30th Anniversary Data Archive CD-ROM. NASA 

SP-4601, 1999.

Remembering Apollo 11: The 35th Anniversary Data Archive CD-ROM. NASA 

SP-2004-4601, 2004. This is an update of the 1999 edition.

The Mission Transcript Collection: U.S. Human Spaceflight Missions from Mercury 

Redstone 3 to Apollo 17. NASA SP-2000-4602, 2001.

Shuttle-Mir: The United States and Russia Share History’s Highest Stage. NASA 

SP-2001-4603, 2002.

U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission Presents Born of Dreams—Inspired by Freedom. 

NASA SP-2004-4604, 2004.

Of Ashes and Atoms: A Documentary on the NASA Plum Brook Reactor Facility. NASA 

SP-2005-4605, 2005.

Taming Liquid Hydrogen: The Centaur Upper Stage Rocket Interactive CD-ROM. 

NASA SP-2004-4606, 2004.

Fueling Space Exploration: The History of NASA’s Rocket Engine Test Facility DVD. 

NASA SP-2005-4607, 2005.

Altitude Wind Tunnel at NASA Glenn Research Center: An Interactive History 

CD-ROM. NASA SP-2008-4608, 2008.
NASA′s Discovery Program

410

A Tunnel Through Time: The History of NASA’s Altitude Wind Tunnel. NASA SP-2010-

4609, 2010.

Conference Proceedings, NASA SP-4700

Dick, Steven J., and Keith Cowing, eds. Risk and Exploration: Earth, Sea and the Stars. 

NASA SP-2005-4701, 2005.

Dick, Steven J., and Roger D. Launius. Critical Issues in the History of Spaceflight. 

NASA SP-2006-4702, 2006.

Dick, Steven J., ed. Remembering the Space Age: Proceedings of the 50th Anniversary 

Conference. NASA SP-2008-4703, 2008.

Dick, Steven J., ed. NASA’s First 50 Years: Historical Perspectives. NASA SP-2010-

4704, 2010.

Billings, Linda, ed. 50 Years of Solar System Exploration: Historical Perspectives. NASA 

SP-2021-4705, 2021.

Societal Impact, NASA SP-4800

Dick, Steven J., and Roger D. Launius. Societal Impact of Spaceflight. NASA SP-2007-

4801, 2007.

Dick, Steven J., and Mark L. Lupisella. Cosmos and Culture: Cultural Evolution in a 

Cosmic Context. NASA SP-2009-4802, 2009.

Dick, Steven J. Historical Studies in the Societal Impact of Spaceflight. NASA SP-2015-

4803, 2015.
411

Index

A

Acuna, Mario, 35, 51

Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility 

(AXAF), 15

A’Hearn, Michael, xiii, xv

comet exploration, 161

Deep Impact, 135, 145–146, 149–151, 153

EPOXI, 164–166, 166

Stardust NExT, 164, 314, 329

Aladdin, 85, 135–136, 173

Allen, Carlton, 69, 101

Allen, Lew, 3–4, 7, 9

Allton, Judy, 101

Ambroise, Valerie, 43

Ames Research Center

Discovery and Scout Mission Capabilities 

Expansion (DSMCE), 333

Kepler Space Telescope origins, 249–250, 

259–261, 271–273, 277

Mars Environmental SURvey (MESUR), 7

Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous, 12

workplace culture, 294

Anderson, Brian J., 172

Anderson, Cliff, 135

Anderson, John, 76, 136

Andreozzi, Len, 258, 272

Annefrank (asteroid), 70, 80

Anteros (asteroid), 16, 35

Apollo program, 50, 54–55, 73, 86
NASA′s Discovery Program

412

Genesis crash landing, 129–130

sample collection, 101, 103, 122

solar wind collection, 92

Applebee, John, 172–173

Applied Physics Laboratory (Johns Hopkins)

CONTOUR, 86, 112–117

MESSENGER, 172–182

NEAR Shoemaker, 12, 25

problems, 120

successes, 173

workplace culture, 38–39, 185

Aspera-3, xv

Asplund, Sherry, 137, 194

Atkins, Ken, 55–56, 66–70, 76–77

B

Bagenal, Fran, 234

Ballard, Bob, 60

Banerdt, W. Bruce, xiii, xv, 192

Barghe-Sharghi, Violet, 338

Barraclaugh, Bruce, 234

Barriot, Jean-Pierre, 35

Barrowman, Jim, 137

Basri, Gibor, 252, 269

Batalha, Natalie, 269–270

Bedini, Peter, 182, 186, 189–190

Behne, Jacinta, 231

Belton, Michael, 10, 24, 110, 145–146, 314, 

329

Bell, Jim, 118

Bennett, Richard, 99–100

Bergstralh, Jay, 201, 304, 335

Beyer, Betsy, 37

Bhaskaran, Shyam, 82

Binder, Alan, xiii, 48–51

Blume, Bill, 157

Boethin (comet), 115, 165–168

Borucki, William, xiii, 193, 277

Kepler Space Telescope, 249–253, 

255–258, 260–261, 284

Kepler Space Telescope costs, 273, 275

Kepler Space Telescope input catalog, 271

Kepler Space Telescope launch, 282

Kepler Space Telescope objectives, 

261–262

Kepler Space Telescope successes, 284

planetary exploration, 265–266

Boss, Alan, 278, 281

Boyce, Joe, 7–8, 31, 48, 152

Boynton, Bill, 23, 24

Bradley, Theron M., Jr., 120

Briggs, Geoffrey, 5–8, 20–21, 55

Brinton, Henry, 41

Brown, David, xvi–xvii

Brown, Robert, 4–8

Brown, Tim, 261, 270–271

Brownlee, Don

aerogel (Stardust), 77

collaboration (Stardust), 63

comet exploration, 79, 144

Genesis, 141–142

Stardust, xiii, 43, 54–56, 60, 66–72

Stardust budget, 76

Stardust successes, 80, 83

Stardust testing, 142

Vellinga, Joe, 60

Brownlee particles, 54–55

Bruegge, Richard Vorder, 11, 21, 39–41

Bruno, Cindy, 335

Buratti, Bonnie, 286

Burnett, Don, 23, 24, 99

Elachi, Charles, 25

Genesis, xiii, 92–93, 102–106, 124–125

Suess-Urey, 43

Bush, George H. W., xi, 1

Bush, George W., 83, 285, 325
Index

413

Bush, Laura (aerospace graduate student), 

282

Butler, Paul, 256

C

Calloway, Andry, 187

Carle, Glenn, 24

Carr, Frank, 27–28

Cassini, 163

Comet Rendezvous Asteroid Flyby 

(CRAF) canceled, 15, 57

Moon observations, 289

New Start, 3

reused equipment, 62, 190

Stardust reuse, 62, 74–75, 207, 328

student outreach, 60

Ceres (asteroid), 192, 197–198, 200, 

202–205, 210, 216–220, 223–224

Challenger (Space Shuttle), x, 2, 4

Chandra X-ray Observatory, 158

Chandrasekaran, Hema, 270

Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, xv, 284–289

Charbonneau, Dave, 166, 266

Cheng, Andy, xiii, 12, 34–36, 107–108, 

207–208

Chin, Gordon, 136, 325

Chiu, Mary, 108–111, 116, 121

Christensen-Dalsgaard, Jorgen, 279

Clark, Benton, 60, 67

Cleave, Mary, 234–235, 316, 324

Clementine, 9, 49, 63, 74

Clinton, William, xii, 30, 39, 111

Cochran, Anita, 118

Cochran, William, 253

Collins, Katherine, 60

Columbia (Space Shuttle), 103–104, 319

Comet Boethin, 115, 165–168

Comet d’Arrest, 86, 113, 115

Comet Encke, 86, 107, 113, 115–116, 119

comet exploration, 54–58, 73–75, 109–110, 

147–148, 166–168, 328–329

Comet Halley, 55–59, 74–75, 363

Comet Hartley 2, xv, 167

Comet Nucleus Penetrator, 24

Comet Nucleus Tour, 24, 85, 93, 106, 200. See 

also CONTOUR

Comet Rendezvous Asteroid Flyby (CRAF), 

3, 15, 57, 106–107

Comet Schwassmann-Wachmann 3, 86, 113, 

115–119

Comet Tempel 1, ix, 115, 135, 147–148, 156, 

169, 328

Deep Impact contact, 161–162

NASA observations, 158–159

rotation, 158

Stardust NExT, 162–164

Comet Wild 2, xiii, 68–70, 76–83, 89, 115, 

162–163, 183

Cometary Coma Chemical Composition, 24

CONTOUR, xiii, 19, 93, 181. See also Comet 

Nucleus Tour

CONTOUR 2 (replacement), 119

costs, 111–113, 337

Discovery Program priority, 22

implementation, 86

launch, 86, 109–111, 115–116, 303

loss of, xii, 116–129, 198, 243, 293–294

Mishap Investigation Board, 120–122

mission studies, 85

origins, 106–109

Principal Investigator (PI), 369, 371

Principal Investigator (PI) role, 357, 359, 

362

Project Manager (PM), 362, 366, 368–369, 

371, 373

reviews, 111–112

testing, 114–115

Cook, Richard, 31
NASA′s Discovery Program

414

Coradini, Angioletta, 206

Corwin, Bob, 123, 127

Coughlin, Tom, 12

CubeSat, xvi

Cullers, Kent, 252

D

Dantzler, Andy, 126, 233–235, 274, 310–313

d’Arrest (comet), 86, 113, 115

Dasch, Pat, 21

DAVINCI, xiii

Davis, Donald, 53

Davis, Esker K., 53, 59, 67

Dawn, xiii, 19, 50, 85, 247, 258, 324

canceled, 234–238

collaboration, 245

concept study, 210

costs, 206–207, 210–214, 217–222, 277, 

304, 330, 338, 348

delays, 210, 234, 243–245, 303

development, 193, 197–210, 228–229

Discovery Program priority, 22

funding, 154, 221–222, 232

Hubble Space Telescope, 203

launch, 192, 243–245, 284

objectives, 192, 208, 223–224, 224–225

Principal Investigator (PI) role, 201, 358, 

360–361, 363

problems, xiv, 198–199, 213–214, 

219–221, 225–233, 241–245, 294

Project Manager (PM), 366–367, 371–372

reinstated, 236–241

spacecraft, 208–210

standdown, 230–233

successes, 217–218, 246

workplace culture, 238–240

Deep Impact, ix, xiii, 19, 85, 139, 170, 

293–294, 303. See also EPOCh; EPOXI

Announcement of Opportunity (AO) 

delay, 153

collaboration, 155–156

Comet Tempel 1, 115, 135, 169

concept study, 135

costs, 149, 152–153, 194, 198, 231, 

293–294, 304, 338

development, 145–157

Discovery Program priority, 22

DIXI, 164–166, 314, 328

EPOXI, 166, 363

faster, better, cheaper (FBC), 157

funding reserves, 153–154

hibernation, 162

impact with Comet Tempel 1, 161–162

launch, 156

Mars missions’ losses, 151

Moon observations, 289

named, 77

objectives, 135, 147–148

Planetary Society, 159

Principal Investigator (PI), 371–372

Principal Investigator (PI) role, 357–358, 

359–360, 363

problems, 152–154, 155, 157–158, 

159–160, 357

Project Manager (PM), 367, 371–372

reviews, xiv, 151–152

Stardust NExT, 162–164

workplace culture, 157

Deep Space 1, 110, 201, 228, 327

Delamere, Alan, 10, 145–146

Deming, L. Drake, 165–168, 314

DeVore, Edna, 251

Diaz, Al, 39, 214

Discovery Program. See individual missions

Announcement of Opportunity (AO), 

1996, 172
Index

415

Announcement of Opportunity (AO), 

1998, 130–135, 174, 256

Announcement of Opportunity (AO), 

2000, 190–194, 303, 310

Announcement of Opportunity (AO), 

2002, 294, 303–305

Announcement of Opportunity (AO), 

2004, 308–312

Announcement of Opportunity (AO), 

2006, 163, 302, 311–317, 323–325, 

328

Announcement of Opportunity (AO), 

2010, 301, 358

Announcement of Opportunity (AO) 

delay, 153

Announcement of Opportunity (AO), 

first, 41–42, 47, 53

Announcements of Opportunity (AO), 30, 

84–85, 298–303

Announcements of Opportunity (AO) 

strategy, 39–41, 136, 334–339

budget, x–xi, 15, 85, 293

collaboration, 61–65, 72–73, 315–316, 

376–379

COMPLEX, 295–303

cost study, 316–317

costs, xii–xiii, xiv, 13, 18, 131–132, 274, 

293, 303–305, 351–353

Dawn, 202, 221–222

Deep Impact costs, 154

delays, xiv, 274

Discovery and New Frontiers Program 

Office, 194, 226–227, 275, 347–349

Discovery and Scout Mission Capabilities 

Expansion (DSMCE), 332–333

“Discovery Plus,” 193–194

faster, better, cheaper (FBC), 28, 83–84, 

93, 199

funding, 136–138

goals, 29–30

Implementation Plan, 28–30

Kepler Space Telescope, 262–263, 297

launch schedule, 43

lessons learned and recommendations, 

84–85, 130, 293–303, 317–323, 

333–339, 347–351, 376–379

Mars Environmental SURvey (MESUR), 

12–13

maturation, 53

MESSENGER, 297

Mission Concept Workshop, 20–23, 92

mission concepts, 19–20, 22

mission life cycle, 48

Missions of Opportunity, xv, xv–xvi, 

134–136, 166, 190, 289, 309–312, 

329–330

Missions of Opportunity (Stand Alone, or 

SALMON), 299, 344

Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3

), 289

NASA Reduction in Force, 136

NEAR Shoemaker successes, 36–38

New Start, 14, 16–17, 18, 30, 320

NRC Report, 295–296, 299–303

objectives, 300–303, 315

organizing committee, 21–22

origins, ix–xii

partnerships, 40

Planetary Instrument Definition and 

Development Program (PIDDP), 

301–302

Preproposal Conference, 40

Principal Investigator (PI), xi, 138, 150, 

330

Principal Investigator (PI) experience 

rule, 330–332

Principal Investigator (PI) NRC Report, 

317–323
NASA′s Discovery Program

416

Principal Investigator (PI) role, 353–358, 

367–377, 376–377

priorities, 10–13, 17

problems, xii, 22–23, 293–294, 337–338

Project Manager (PM), xi

Project Manager (PM) role, 363–373, 

378–379

Report to Congress, 17–18

reporting structure, 25

requirements, 295–297

reviews, 41–42, 83–86

risk management, 104, 293, 339–344

sample collection, 86

Selected Mission Concept Studies, 24

staffing, 306–308, 312–313

standards, 86

successes, xvi, 43, 246, 289, 305–306, 

376–379

workplace culture, 59–60, 260–261, 

305–312, 322

DIXI. See Deep Impact; EPOXI

Domingue, Deborah L., 172, 184

Dougherty, Tom, 48

Doukas, Peter, 99

Drake, Michael, 324

Dunham, Ted, 253

Dupree, Andrea, 261, 266

Duxbury, Tom, 60, 62

Clementine FBC, 63

EPOXI, 167

faster, better, cheaper (FBC), 78

Genesis crash landing, 142

Stardust, 69, 71–72, 77–78

Stardust landing, 143–144

Stardust successes, 80, 82–83

E

Earth Orbital Ultraviolet Jovian Observer, 24

Economou, Thanasis, 33, 75

Elachi, Charles, xv, 53, 308

Dawn costs, 211–212, 223

Dawn problems, 228

Discovery and New Frontiers Program 

Office, 194

Discovery Program feasibility, 25

Genesis, 92

Stardust, 69–70

Elkins-Tanton, L., xiii

Elsila, Jamie, 145

Encke (comet), 86, 107, 113, 115–116, 119

Encke, Johann Franz, 113

EPOCh, 165–168, 328. See also Deep Impact

EPOXI, xv, 145–146, 164–167, 289, 363. See 

also Deep Impact

Eros (asteroid), ix, xii, 35–36, 38–39, 45, 111, 

172,

Esposito, Larry, 16, 24

F

Fanson, James, 264, 284

Farquhar, Bob

CONTOUR, 107–109, 115, 118–119

CONTOUR lost, 121–122

Discovery Program groundwork, 12

MESSENGER, 172, 183

NEAR Shoemaker, 35–39

Stardust, 55

faster, better, cheaper (FBC), 24, 191–192

Clementine, 63

criticisms, 299–301

Deep Impact, 157

Discovery Announcement of Opportunity 

(AO), 28

Discovery Program, 83–84, 93, 199

Duxbury, Tom, 78

Mars Climate Orbiter, 83, 93

mission losses, 302

NEAR Shoemaker, 37–39
Index

417

reviews, 83–84

Stardust, 61

Feldman, Bill, 50–52, 234–235

Feldman, Paul, 24, 159, 206

Figueroa, Orlando, 146, 185, 221

Fischer, Debra, 281

Franchi, Ian, 102

Fraschetti, Tom, 215–218, 222, 227–230, 

232–233, 237–238

Friedman, Lou, 55

G

Galileo, 2, 4, 58–60, 160, 163, 207, 359

Garner, Chuck, 229

Garvin, J., xiii

Gauss, Carl Friedrich, 202

Gautier, Thomas, 265

Gavin, Tom, 70, 152, 240

Gavit, Sarah, 192, 212–216

Geary, John, 261

Gemini, 54, 91–92

Genesis, xiii, 81. See also solar wind; Solar 

Wind Sample Return; Suess-Urey

collaboration, 100

costs, 305, 338

crash landing, 122–125, 141–144, 198

development, 92–102

Discovery Program priority, 22

grants, 138

implementation, 86

Lagrange Point 1, 98, 103

launch, 86, 102–105

Mishap Investigation Board, 127–128

mission studies, 85

named, 93

objectives, 94

Principal Investigator (PI), 369–370

Principal Investigator (PI) role, 357, 

359–360

problems, 105

Project Manager (PM), 365–367, 369–370

reuse from other missions, 99

risk management, 99–100

risks, 103–104

sample collection, 125–129, 140

sample collection/analysis, 99–106

sample return capsule, 100, 140

solar wind composition, 95–97

spacecraft, 139

Stardust, 103

successes, 106, 129–130

workplace culture, 94

Geveden, Rex, 235–237

Giberson, Gene, 8, 27–28

Gilbert, Paul, 334, 347

Gilliland, Ron, 261

Giotto, 55–57, 74–75, 81, 107, 110

Glavich, Thomas, 286

Gold, Robert, 12, 172

Goldin, Daniel

Announcement of Opportunity (AO) 

selected missions, 43

appointed NASA head, x

Discovery Program, xii, 21–23

Discovery Program funding, 38

Discovery Program groundwork, 18–19

faster, better, cheaper (FBC), xi–xii, xiv, 192

NASA failures, 191–192

NASA Reduction in Force, xv, 69, 136

Goldstein, David, 52

Golombek, Matthew, xiii, 31

Goody, Richard, 24, 43

GRAIL, xiii, 324–328

Grammier, Rick, 69, 154, 159–160, 240

Grandfield, Ann, 237

Grant, Dave, 182, 185–186

Greeley, Ron, 34

Green, Jim, 243–244, 332
NASA′s Discovery Program

418

Green, Simon, 69

Gregory, Fred, 312

Greisen, Ken, 251

Griffin, Mike, 9, 185, 285, 345

Grimberg, Ansgar, 129

H

Halley (comet), 55–59, 74–75, 363

Hartley 2 (comet), xv, 167

Hartman, Colleen, 153, 214–215, 230, 234, 

236–237, 304

Hartmann, William, 53

Henderson, Monte, 149, 272

Hermes Global Orbiter, 24

Hernandez, Gloria, 130

Hertz, Paul, 297, 335

Hickman, J. Mark, 199

Hirst, Ed, 82, 97, 104, 127, 142

Holdridge, Mark, 38–39

Hood, Lon, 51

Howard, Rick, 273

Hubbard, Scott, 49–51

Hubbard, William, 136

Huber, Daniel, 283

Hunten, Don, 5

Hunter, Roger, 284

Huntress, Wesley T.

Announcement of Opportunity (AO), 

1998, 134

Announcements of Opportunity (AO) 

Plan, 41

Announcements of Opportunity (AO) 

strategy, 39

Discovery Program, x–xii

Discovery Program groundwork, 8–19

Discovery Program missions selection, 86

Lunar Prospector, 48

Mars Pathfinder development, 31–32

Principal Investigator (PI) role, 356, 373, 

379

Recommendations for Discovery Policy, 27

Stardust, 54

I

Ingersoll, Andrew, 136

INSIDE Jupiter, 135–136, 192, 210

InSight, xiii

J

Jacobs, Mark, 337–338

Jarrett, Dave, 136–138, 194, 303, 306–307, 

312, 363, 375

Jenkins, Jon, 259–260, 269–270, 282–283

Jenniskens, Peter, 148

Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)

Active Magnetospheric Particle Tracer 

Explorers (AMPTE), 6, 12

collaboration, 268

collaboration (Stardust), 63–65

Comet Halley, 55–57

Explorer, 57

successes, xv

workplace culture, x–xi, 8, 63, 238, 259, 

268–269

Johnson, Lindley, 153–156, 330

Jones, Chris, 123–124

Juno, 85

Jurewicz, Amy, 93, 124, 129

K

Kalas, Paul, 278

Keddie, Susan, 41–42

Kellogg, Bob, 336–337

Kepler, Johannes, 254, 280

Kepler Space Telescope, ix, xiii, 19, 85, 193, 

197, 277–278

budget, 259–260
Index

419

collaboration, 310–311

concept study, 210

COROT, 278, 281

costs, 211–212, 215, 259, 272–277, 

279–280, 304, 348, 374

delays, 258, 272–277, 281, 303

design, 264, 267–269

development, 258–265, 271–272

Discovery and New Frontiers Program 

Office, 275

Discovery Program priority, 22

“first light,” 291

FRequency of Earth-Sized Inner Planets 

(FRESIP), 252–254, 269

funding reserves, 154

Hubble Space Telescope, versus, 254

input catalog, 270–271

launch, 258, 274, 278–279, 281–282, 284

objectives, 192–193, 261–265, 281

origins, 249–257

Principal Investigator (PI) role, 358, 361

problems, xiv, 274–277, 279–280, 294, 336

Project Manager (PM), 368

replan, 276–278

scope creep, 198

spacecraft, 290

successes, 256, 270–271, 281–284

Killeen, Timothy, 24

Kinney, Anne, 274

Kissel, Jochen, 75, 79–80, 107, 115, 146

Kistler, Samuel, 70–71

Klaasen, Ken, 314

Knudsen, Jens, 34

Koch, David, 251–253, 255–257, 259–261, 

268, 284

Konopoliv, Alexander, 35, 50

Krimigis, Stamatios, x–xi, 5–6, 11–12, 

35–37, 107, 112, 173, 180–182

Kuiper Belt, xv, 69

L

Landis, Geoffrey, 34

Larsen, Jeff, 117

Larson, Tim, 154–155, 160, 329

Latham, David, 265, 270

Lauretta, Dante, 324

Lawrence, David, xv, 52

Learned, Charles H., 70

Ledbetter, Ken, 85–86

Lee, Gentry, 103–104

Lehman, Dave, 327

Lenda, Matt, 282

Levison, H., xiii

Liceaga, Carlos, 130

Lin, Robert, 51

Lindstrom, Dave, 81, 125, 237

Lindstrom, Kurt, 213, 225, 237, 239–240

Lissauer, Jack, 261

Livesay, Leslie, 277

Livi, S., xv

Lucy, xiii

Lunar Observer, 4, 10

Lunar Prospector, xiii, 10, 19, 87

concept study, 48–49

costs, xiv, 199–200, 206

development, 47–51

Hubble Space Telescope observation, 147

launch, 51

objectives, 49–52

Principal Investigator (PI), 356–357

selected for flight, 42

successes, 48, 51–53, 305

Lunar Prospector: Against All Odds, 48–49

Lundin, Rickard, 136

Lyytinen, Esko, 148

M

M3 (Moon Mineralogy Mapper), xv, 284–289

Magellan, 2–4, 12, 113, 164, 172, 324
NASA′s Discovery Program

420

Mahaffey, Paul, 107

Mainbelt Asteroid Rendezvous Explorer, 24, 

200–201

Marcy, Geoff, 256

Mariner, 1, 106, 163, 173, 175, 183, 188–189

Mario, Christian, 278

Mars Climate Orbiter, 18, 83, 93, 111, 

141–142, 151, 302

Mars Environmental SURvey (MESUR), 7, 

12–13, 19

Mars Observer, x, 3–5, 7, 106, 172

Mars Pathfinder, ix–x, xiii, 19, 46

costs, 43

development, 30–34

Discovery Program announced, 17

innovations, 61

launch, 43

objectives, 32

Sojourner, xii, 8, 34, 43, 46

Spear, Tony, 70

Stardust design reuse, 62, 74

student outreach, 60

successes, xii

Viking discoveries, 34

Mars Polar Lander, 18, 83, 111, 117, 151, 

302, 364, 368

Mars Polar Pathfinder, 24

Mars Upper Atmosphere Dynamics, 

Energetics, and Evolution Mission, 24

Martin, Bredt, 64–65

Martin, Jim, 9–11, 27–28

Mathilde (asteroid), xii, 36, 38

Mauk, Barry, 136

MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile 

Evolution Mission), 19

May, Lisa, 335

May, Todd, 226–227, 244

Mayor, Michel, 256

McBain, J. W., 70

McCarthy, John, 237

McCarthy, Richard, 280

McCord, Tom, 200, 205

McFadden, Lucy, 147, 234, 236–237

McKeegan, Kevin, 125

McNamara, Karen, 125

McNamee, John, 154, 238, 308

McNutt, Ralph L., 172–173, 179–181

Meech, Karen, 146, 314

MEGANE (instrument), xv

Melosh, Jay, 146, 163, 314

Mercury, 173–175, 183, 187–190, 196

entire image of, 136

MESSENGER, ix, xiii, 139, 171–178, 

189–190

Strofio (instrument), xv

Mercury Polar Flyby, 24

MESSENGER, ix, xiii, 50, 139, 171–190, 195

collaboration, 245

concept study, 135–136

costs, xiv, 175, 184, 194, 198, 214, 231, 

304, 337

delays, 179–182, 184–186

development, 171–182

launch, 184–187

mission studies, 85

objectives, 136, 175–177

Principal Investigator (PI), 172

Principal Investigator (PI) role, 357–358, 

359–363

problems, 293, 303–306, 357

Project Manager (PM), 366–367, 368, 

371–372

reused equipment, 207

successes, 183, 186–190

testing, 185

Metzger, Bob, 137

Meyer, Aimee, 60, 77, 164, (Whalen), 329

Meyer, Keith, 279
Index

421

Mikulski, Barbara, x, 14–15, 38, 312

Miller, Ed, 222, 241

Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3

), x, 284–289

Moore, Michael, 259–260, 269, 272

Morris, David, 267

Muirhead, Brian, 149–150

Murchie, Scott, 108, 188

N

Naderi, Firouz, 92–93, 194

Nair, G. Madhavan, 285

Nakata, Al, 156–157

Nash, Doug, 21–22

National Aeronautics and Space 

Administration (NASA)

Announcement of Opportunity (AO), xii, 

145, 184

Announcement of Opportunity (AO), 

2000, 190–194, 201, 210, 258

Announcement of Opportunity (AO), 

2006, 323–325

Announcement of Opportunity (AO), 

2010, 344–345

Announcement of Opportunity (AO) 

delay, 153

Announcements of Opportunity (AO), 19

Announcements of Opportunity (AO) 

strategy, 39–41, 136, 334–339

budget freeze, 25

CONTOUR 2 (replacement), 119–120

cost overruns, 258, 274–275

criticisms, 299–301

Dawn canceled, 234–238

Dawn standdown, 230–233

Deep Impact termination review, 153

development innovations, 41–42

Discovery Management Workshop, 25–27

Discovery Program announced, 16–17

Discovery Program Announcement of 

Opportunity (AO), 41–42, 84–85

Discovery Program Draft Management 

Plan, 30–31

Discovery Program New Start, 30

Discovery Program recommendations, 13

Discovery Program reviews, 41

Discovery Program Workshops, xii

downsizing, xv

Earned Value Management System, 64–65

Explorer, 5, 14

faster, better, cheaper (FBC), xi–xii

full-cost accounting, 273

grants, 251

Hubble Space Telescope, 1

Hubble Space Telescope Comet Tempel 1 

observation, 158–159

Hubble Space Telescope Lunar Prospector 

observation, 52, 147

Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), 268

Kepler Space Telescope, 251

lessons learned and recommendations, 

84–85, 130, 293–308

mission changes, 5

Missions of Opportunity, xiv, xv

Missions of Opportunity (Stand Alone, or 

SALMON), 299, 344

NEAR Shoemaker costs, 36–37

NetLander, 192–193

New Start, xi

objectives, 281

public perception, xii–xiii

Reduction in Force, 69

risk management, 4–5, 22, 197–198, 

297–298, 308, 339–344, 348

sample custody, 40

Spitzer Telescope Comet Tempel 1 observation, 158
NASA′s Discovery Program

422

workplace culture, x–xiii, 3–4, 12, 20, 235, 

314

Near Earth Asteroid Returned Sample, 24

NEAR Shoemaker, ix–x, xiii, 12, 19, 44, 47

costs, xiv, 43, 76

data analysis, 298

development, 30, 34–37

Discovery Program announced, 17

Eros (asteroid), 45

innovations, 61

launch, 25, 36–38, 43

Near Earth Asteroid Returned Sample, 24

problems, 38–39

successes, xii

Nehru, Jawaharlal, 288

Nelson, Robert, 24

NetLander, xv, 192–193

Neugebauer, Marcia, 92, 95

Neukum, Gerhard, 235

New, Michael, 312, 316, 327, 334–335, 347

New Frontiers Program, 175, 294, 305, 330, 

332, 339

announced, 193–194

cost study, 316–317, 347–349

creation of, xv–xvi, 312

Dawn, 226, 232, 236, 244

“Discovery Plus,” 193

Great Planet Debate, 203

Kepler Space Telescope, 275, 277

M3 (Moon Mineralogy Mapper), 286

New Horizons, xv, 203, 225, 275, 316, 348, 

352, 374

Newburn, Ray, 74

Niebur, Curt, xvi, 333

Niebur, Susan, xvi–xvii, x, 81, 165, 303–304, 

310, 316

Nieman, Hasso, 107

Nordholt, Beth, 98

O

Olbers, Heinrich Wilhelm, 202

Oldham, Lloyd, 93

Olsen, Mary Kaye, 41

OSIRIS (Origins Spectral Interpretation, 

Resource Identification and Security), 

324

P

Paige, David, 23, 24

Parker, Bob, 137

Patel, Keyur, 154–156, 159–161, 229, 

231–232, 236–243

Pavri, Betina, 241

Perry, Brad, 130–131, 133, 194, 318, 335

Peterson, Max, 172, 174, 182, 303

Pieters, Carle, xv, 135, 284–285, 288

Pilcher, Carl, 19, 21

Pillinger, Colin, 102, 125

Pioneer program, 1, 207

Piotrowski, Bill, 30

planetary exploration, 42, 135, 168, 186–187, 

203–205, 261–262, 264–266, 277–278, 

280–289

Planetary Observer mission, x, 3–5, 57

Porter, Nancy C., 303

Possel, Bill, 282

Prettyman, Tom, 206–207, 236, 241

Principal Investigator (PI), 19–20

Active Magnetospheric Particle Tracer 

Explorers (AMPTE), 6

Announcement of Opportunity (AO), 

2010, 301, 358

Announcements of Opportunity (AO) 

strategy, 131

collaboration, 108, 368–373

costs, 320–323

defined, 356

described, x–xi, 5–6, 20
Index

423

Discovery Program maturation, 53

experience rule, 330–332

handbook, 351

Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), xv

NEAR Shoemaker, 36

NRC Report, 317–323

Project Manager (PM), versus, 22, 138

Project Manager (PM) role, 367–373

reflections by, 358–362

role, 25–28, 85, 138, 150, 277, 298, 

320–323, 330, 353–358, 376–377

Stardust NExT, 164, 330–331

workplace culture, 129

Prockter, Louise, 178–179, 186

Project Manager (PM), xi, 27–28, 41, 131, 

310, 364–365

alternate, 345

collaboration, 64, 108, 368–373

CONTOUR, 362

experience, and, 212–213

Principal Investigator (PI), versus, 22, 138

reflections by, 365–367

role, 10, 22, 367–373, 378–379

Psyche, xiii

Q

Queloz, Didier, 256

R

Rahe, Jurgen, 21

Rayman, Marc, 205, 208–209, 212–215, 223, 

243–245

Raymond, Carol, 201, 212–215, 219–223, 

229–230

Reagan, Ronald, xi

Reitsema, Harold, 252

Reynolds, Ed, 116–117, 121–122

Ride, Sally, 326–327

Rieder, Rudolph, 33

Riegler, Guenter, 52

Ritchie, Wayne, 130

Robinson, Jim, 225

Rosenblatt, Frank, 250

Rummel, John, 73, 99, 203

Russell, Chris, xiii, 211

Dawn, 192, 199–205, 207, 209–217, 246

Dawn funding, 222–223

Dawn launch, 244–245

Dawn problems, 219, 227, 241

Dawn standdown, 230, 232–241

NEAR Shoemaker, 35

Patel, Keyur, 238–240

Ryschkewitsch, Michael, 127–128

S

Sagan, Carl, 106, 252

Sander, Mike, 70

Sandford, Scott, 144

Sasaki, Chet, 93, 102, 258

Sasselov, Dimitar, 266

Saunders, Mark, 36, 39, 41, 49, 61, 67

Sevilla, Don, 93

Savino, Joe, 70

Scar Quest. See Stardust, Stardust NExT

Schofield, Tim, 34

Schroeder, Daniel, 279

Schulz, Peter, 146, 314

Schwartz, Carol, 101

Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 (comet), 86, 

113, 115–119

Schwehm, Gerhard, 115

Scolese, Chris, 235, 280

Scotti, Jim, 117

Seiff, Alvin, 34

Shiderly, Dave, 239, 242–243

Shoemaker, Carolyn, 110

Shoemaker, Eugene, 24

Sierchio, Mike, 238
NASA′s Discovery Program

424

Sierks, Holger, 206, 241

Simpson, John, 74

Small Missions to Asteroids and Comets, 24

Small Mission Program Group, 4

Smith, David, 172, 207

Smith, Edward, 135, 192

Smith, Peter, 33

Smrekar, S., xiii

Sobeck, Charlie, 259

solar wind, xiii, 42, 85, 91–92, 102 136, 188. 

See also Genesis

collections, 91, 94–98, 105–106, 123–125

composition, 95–97

findings, 125, 129–130

samples, 140

Solar Wind Sample Return, 23, 24, 92. See 

also Genesis

Solomon, Sean, xiii, 136, 172–188, 190, 331

Spear, Tony, 12, 31, 59, 70

Spilker, Tom, 135

Spudis, Paul, 24

Stancati, Mike, 336–337

Stansbery, Eileen, 94, 101, 103, 105–106, 

124–129

Stardust, xii, xiii, 19, 183

aerogel, 70–72, 77, 90, 145

Clementine FBC, 63

collaboration, 100

comet exploration, 78–83

Comet Wild 2, 115

concept study, 42, 59–61

costs, 43

Davis, Esker K., 53

development, 70–77

Discovery Program Announcement of 

Opportunity (AO), 53–54, 58–59

Earned Value Management System, 64–65

Genesis, 103

Genesis crash landing, 141–142

grants, 138

innovations, 54, 61

landing, 143–144

launch, 77, 80, 103

objectives, 58, 68–70, 74

Principal Investigator (PI) role, 357, 362

problems, 78

project office structure, 63

public outreach, 60–61

reuse from other missions, 62, 73–75, 207

reused equipment, 328

reviews, 151

sample collection, 100–101, 141

sample collection/analysis, 143–145

sample custody, 81

sample return capsule, 88, 100

scope, 61

scope creep, 65–66

Stardust NExT, xv, 141, 162–168, 314, 

328–329

student outreach, 60

successes, 79–83, 141–142

testing, 142

Vellinga, Joe, 60

workplace culture, 72–73

Stardust NExT, xv, 141, 162–168, 314, 

328–329

Starnes, Kenny, 123

Stern, Alan, 244, 275–277, 325–326, 

329–333, 345

Stone, Ed, 5, 11–12, 25, 92

Storms, Steve, 241

Strofio (instrument), xv

Strom, Robert, 175, 183, 188

Suess, Hans, 92–93

Suess-Urey, 42–43, 53, 59–60, 85, 92–93. See 

also Genesis

Sullivan, Robert, 34

Summers, Audrey, 250
Index

425

Sunshine, Jessica, 146–147, 288, 314

Sweetnam, Don, 93, 103, 128

Sykes, Mark, 203–204

T

Taylor, Randall, 327

Taylor, Tony, 113

Tempel 1 (comet), ix, 135, 147–148, 156, 169

Deep Impact contact, 161–162

NASA observations, 158–159

rotation, 158

Stardust NExT, 162–164

Tempel, Ernst Wilhelm, 147

Thiemens, Mark, 92

Thomas, Peter, 118, 146–147, 314

Trombka, Jack, 35

Toxos, Navi, 172

Troelzch, John, 267

Truly, Richard, xi

Tsou, Peter, 55–57, 71

Tupper, Craig, 137

Tuzzolino, Anthony, 74–75

Tyler, G. Leonard, 136

U

Urey, Harold, 92–93

V

Vajpayee, Atal Bihari, 285

Vane, Gregg, 85, 191–192, 327, 375–376

Vellinga, Joe, 60–61, 66, 123

Venus Composition Probe, 24

Venus Multiprobe Mission, 24, 42–43, 

53–54, 59

VERITAS, xiii

VESAT, 86

Vesper, 135–136, 324–325

Vesta (asteroid), xiii, 192, 197–205, 208–210, 

216, 219–220, 223–224, 245–246, 248

Veverka, Joseph, xiii, xv, 24

Comet Encke, 113

CONTOUR, 106–109, 115, 119–121, 138

CONTOUR 2 (replacement), 119

Deep Impact, 146

Discovery Program groundwork, 5–6, 9, 

13–14, 16

Discovery Program studies, 23

NEAR Shoemaker, 35

Stardust NExT, 162–163, 314

Whipple, Fred, 111

Viking, 8–9, 31, 33–34, 99, 163

Voss, Janice, 272

Voyager, 1, 59, 62, 74, 106, 163, 207

W

Wadhwa, Meenakshi, 94–95

Wanke, Henry, 33

Warren, Jack, 101

Warren, Jeff, 114

Webster, Larry, 255, 258

Weiler, Ed, 112, 251, 276, 345

Announcement of Opportunity (AO), 

1998, 134–135

CONTOUR lost, 120

Dawn, 193, 223

Dawn problems, 219

Deep Impact, 146, 152–153

Discovery Program costs, 184, 212, 304

Discovery Program funding reserves, 

153–154

Discovery Program staffing, 307–308

Discovery Program, 193–194

Kepler Space Telescope, 193, 278, 281

Kepler Space Telescope input catalog, 278

MESSENGER, 184, 190

Whalen, Aimee Meyer (née Meyer), 60, 77, 

164, 329

Whipple, Fred, 106, 110–111, 113
NASA′s Discovery Program

426

Whipple shields, 72, 74, 82

Wickramasinghe, Chandra, 79

Wickramasinghe, Dayal, 79

Wiens, Roger, 98, 106, 126

Wild, Paul, 68

Wild 2 (comet), xiii, 68–70, 76–83, 89, 115, 

162–163, 183

Williams, Bobby, 111

Winningham, David, xv, 136

Wissler, Steve, 151, 154–157, 161–162

Witteborn, Fred, 256

Wolf, Frank, 236

Wolf, Kate, 136–139, 194, 303, 307, 312

Worden, Pete, 272

Y

Yen, Chen-Wan, 68, 183

Yeomans, Don, 35, 107, 109, 113, 123, 146, 

148, 161

Z

Zolensky, Mike, 72–73, 80–81

Zuber, Maria, xiii, 35, 207, 325–326
S

tarted in the early 1990s, 

NASA’s Discovery Program 

represented a breakthrough 

in the way NASA explores space. 

Providing opportunities for low-cost 

planetary science missions, the 

Discovery Program has funded a series 

of relatively small, focused, and innovative 

missions to investigate the planets and small 

bodies of our solar system.

For over 30 years, Discovery has given scientists a chance to 

dig deep into their imaginations and find inventive ways to unlock the mysteries 

of our solar system and beyond. As a complement to NASA’s larger “flagship” 

planetary science explorations, Discovery’s continuing goal is to achieve 

outstanding results by launching more, smaller missions using fewer resources 

and shorter development times.

This book draws on interviews with program managers, engineers, and scientists 

from Discovery’s early missions. It takes an in-depth look at the management 

techniques they used to design creative and cost-effective spacecraft that 

continue to yield ground-breaking scientific data, drive new technology 

innovations, and achieve what has never been done before.

Dr. Susan Niebur

Author and former Discovery Program Scientist

Image courtesy of Curt Niebur

On the Cover: Views of the asteroid Eros taken by 

the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft in 2000

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Office of Communications 

NASA History Division

Washington, DC 20546

www.nasa.gov

NASA SP-2023-4238