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26 March 2004

Editorial: NASA's conundrum

Forrest M. Mims III

In 1998, JPL lost two Mars missions, the Mars Climate Orbiter and the Mars Polar Lander. Investigations, accusations and low morale followed.

Today there is great excitement at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. JPL has successfully landed two robotic explorers on Mars. Both craft are sending back remarkable photographs and data. Software glitches have been overcome. Challenging scenarios have been successfully met. The same scientists who once brooded over the disastrous failures of 1998 are now jubilant.

The morale situation is very different at some other NASA laboratories . Consider NASA's Goddard Space Flight Laboratory (GSFC) in Greenbelt, Maryland. Earth scientists at GSFC have had a remarkable series of successes over the past few decades They have pioneered the development and launch of scores of remarkably successful satellites that have probed Earth's oceans, its land and its atmosphere.

GSFC scientists don't merely develop and launch Earth resource satellites. They process and post their data on numerous public web sites They perform countless studies and publish hundreds of scientific papers. They keep track of subtle environmental parameters that were never before measured from space.

In spite of these successes, the world class Earth resources science at GSFC takes a distant back seat to the heady atmosphere that pervades JPL. While JPL has been promised big increases in funding to send even more missions to Mars, the future of Earth resources science is less certain. With big chunks of NASA's budget possibly diverted to future Mars missions, Earth resource budgets are flat or worse. The major requests for proposals that GSFC once issued are missing. There is talk of delaying or canceling some future Earth resources missions.

The images flowing back from Mars are mesmerizing. Every night I log onto the JPL web site just to see the latest photographs of crater rims, finely laminated rocks, mysterious spherical pebbles, rippling dunes of sand and dusty skies.

But I spend far more time perusing GSFC web sites. There one can see color coded imagery of carbon monoxide flowing from forest fires and cities. Ozone layer images and data are updated each day. Spectacular imagery of massive dust storms and giant smoke plumes can be probed to yield the increase in optical depth they cause over specific sites, especially mine here in South Texas.

So much data flows back from the GSFC's fleet of Earth resource satellites that it is impossible for NASA's scientists to study all of it. Citizen scientists can play an important role helping NASA study these data. Chances are new discoveries are waiting to be made by reviewing data now archived on the web.

Recently I was asked to help design an experiment for a future interplanetary mission. This is an exciting project, and I hope it succeeds.

But because I live on Earth, and not on a foreboding and inhospitable distant planet, my priority remains here. So I am using this new opportunity as a chance to help design an experiment that can also be used on Earth.

And that's what's missing from the shifting priorities at NASA. Yes, the ongoing Mars missions are stunning achievements of technology and science. But if these accomplishments are being made at the expense of the high quality satellite studies of our own planet for which GSFC is famous, our priorities need readjusting. Because budgets are finite, it's clearly time for a high-level, objective examination of just where our priorities should lie.