WASHINGTON — NASA has agreed to postpone the announcement of a call for proposals for its next New Frontier Planetary Science mission, originally planned for this fall, to 2026 due to budgetary concerns.
in Community announcement NASA’s Science Missions Directorate (SMD) announced on August 24 that the announcement of opportunity (AO) for the fifth New Frontier mission was delayed, and that the list of eligible missions may change. .
“Planetary Science Division (PSD) budget uncertainty is complicating the 2023 AO release and subsequent new mission selection,” the agency said in a statement. “NASA SMD’s new target is for his final AO release by his 2026.”
Until this summer, NASA was working toward a final AO release for its New Frontier mission in November. This included releasing a draft version of the AO in January to solicit feedback on its content from the scientific community.
However, NASA has decided to reduce funding to non-defense discretionary agencies like NASA by the summer, citing uncertainties around the debt ceiling agreement, which would keep funding to non-defense discretionary agencies like NASA flat in fiscal 2024 and increase by 1% in 2025. delayed the plan. NASA leaders said in June that the deal meant NASA was unlikely to receive the full $27.2 billion it requested in 2024, posing a “challenge” to NASA’s program. said.
At the NASA SMD Town Hall meeting on July 27, Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, warned that the release of New Frontiers AO could be significantly delayed. “Even if the level of funding for planetary science expected as a result of this tight budget environment does materialize in the next two years or so, it is unlikely that New Frontiers will be recruited, probably not before 2026. ” she said. ” The delay was officially revealed with the release of a community announcement.
The AO draft called for mission proposals on the six themes recommended by the 2011 Planetary Science Decade. A comet surface sample return mission, a mission to Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io, a lunar geophysical network, and a sample return mission to the South Pole of the Moon. – Aitken Basin, a mission to characterize the potential habitability of Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus and Saturn’s atmospheric exploration.
But significant delays may cause NASA to change that list, based on guidance from the latest Decade of Planetary Science Survey released in 2022. The report did not recommend changing the list of potential missions for the 5th New Frontier Contest, but the proposal did. Recommendations for the 6th and her 7th mission objectives. This 10-year plan anticipates competition over the next 10 years.
The decade-long list of explorations of the 6th New Frontiers Contest maintains the concepts of comet surface sample returns, lunar geophysical networks, Saturn probes, and orbiters to centaurs in the outer solar system. A lander mission, a sample return mission on Ceres, multiple flyby missions on Saturn’s moon Enceladus, an orbiter on Saturn’s moon Titan, and an in-situ probe on Venus.
In a community announcement, NASA said it would ask the National Academies to consider which potential mission concepts from two lists should be included in the postponed AO. “This also provides an opportunity to update the mission-themed science objectives based on the recently published decadal survey of the planet,” the announcement added.
The delay comes after a number of scientists had already begun planning for the proposed mission, including establishing partnerships and beginning work on spacecraft design and scientific goals. In the draft AO, he expected April 2024 to be the deadline for proposals, five months after the announcement of the final AO. NASA planned to select several proposals by the end of 2024 for Phase A research, which will last until the end of 2026. NASA chose one of those finalists as its next New Frontier mission in late 2026, expected to launch between 2031 and 2034.
The AO draft set a cost of $900 million for mission development and another $300 million for operations. But last year’s 10-year study suggested raising the cost cap for development and operations to $1.65 billion, plus a $30 million annual cap for “quiet cruise” operations for long-transit missions. is recommended. The cost cap does not include launch.
NASA has so far selected four New Frontier missions. The New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper belt, the Juno mission to orbit Jupiter, and the OSIRIS-REx mission to bring back samples from the asteroid Bennu in September. A fourth Dragonfly mission to Titan is in development for a 2027 launch.