Tuesday, March 30, 2021

The “Waiting Game” in Space Research

This week, PVL MSc student Grace Bischof considers the time required for space missions to come to fruition. For martian missions, this process can take a few years. But for those spacecraft headed to the outer planets, to get from proposal to science results can take the better part of a career.
(Image:
https://pixabay.com/illustrations/calendar-date-mark-day-hand-4159913/ )

by Grace Bischof

When applying to grad school, I knew that space research was the only area of research I felt truly enthusiastic pursuing. So far, this research experience with PVL at York has been great. There are many wonderful parts of planetary science research – and astronomy as a whole – that I’ve learned over the past few months. However, I’ve also come to realize one its overwhelming downsides: How long it takes for anything to happen.

As a Mars researcher, it isn’t quite so bad. The Mars 2020 mission was first announced by NASA in 2012. The payload for the rover was determined only a couple of years later. Now, as of March 2021, Perseverance has been wandering through its home in Jezero Crater for over 30 sols. On average, an instrument sent from Earth will arrive at the red planet in 7 months. While the 8-year time period from proposal to landing might seem long initially, this is only the tip of the iceberg for the “waiting game” in planetary science and astronomy.

I recently listened to a talk given by Dr. Jason Barnes, who is a Deputy Principal Investigator on the Dragonfly mission. This mission involves sending a quad-copter to Titan – an icy moon of Saturn – to look for potential signs of life. First announced in 2019, Dragonfly is currently scheduled for a 2027 launch after being pushed back a year due to budget restrictions caused by the pandemic. By the time of launch, the Dragonfly mission will be the same age Mars 2020 was when it touched down on Mars’ surface. If that seems like a long wait, it gets even longer. Because Saturn is much further away than Mars, the Dragonfly will take another 6-10 years before it arrives at Titan, rounding off the mission life span to nearly 20 years before any primary science objectives have occurred.

Perhaps the most infamous long-wait in astronomy is the construction and launch of the James Webb telescope (JWST). The JWST is an incredibly powerful and complex infrared telescope, useful for its purpose of probing space to find the earliest formations of galaxies and planetary systems. Before the Hubble telescope had even launched, the JWST was proposed as a successor to Hubble in the 1990s. The JWST has seen many launch dates come and pass -- 2007, 2011, 2014, 2018 -- and was even in danger of being cancelled in 2011. The launch is now expected to occur on October 31st, 2021. After only a few months in space, the JWST will start its planned 5-year science mission.  There is a fun way I like to think about it: a baby born the day the JWST was proposed could be old enough to analyze the first data it returns in 2022.

Unfortunately, one of the biggest disadvantages to the long wait in space research is the advancements in technology that occur after the instrument has already been constructed but before the primary science occurs. The main objective of the New Horizons mission was to characterize Pluto by performing a flyby. After launching in 2006, the probe finally reached its target in 2015. Technology was 9-years advanced by the time New Horizons made it to Pluto. What else could we have learned if technology developed during that time was included in the mission? The vastness of space is both one of its most interesting characteristics and also one of the most frustrating aspects of studying it.

So far, I haven’t had to play this “waiting game” with my research. The data I work with primarily comes from the Phoenix mission, which completed its operations over 10 years ago. When campus opens back up (hopefully within the next few months), I will be testing a spectrometer under Mars-analog conditions. With these tests, we hope to use this instrument to measure methane on Mars in the future. Who knows where I’ll be if/when that time comes, but there is one thing I can be certain about: it will take a long time to happen.

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