Facing rising costs, NASA scraps X-ray space telescope mission

NASA is canceling work on a new space telescope that was running significantly over budget. The GEMS telescope was intended to study black holes and neutron stars. 

|
NASA
Artist's illustration of NASA's GEMS X-ray observatory intended to study black holes and neutron stars.

NASA is canceling all work on a new space telescope designed to seek out black holes and other cosmic mysteries through X-ray light due to soaring development costs, the space agency announced today (June 7).

The mission, called Gravity and Extreme Magnetism Small Explorer (GEMS), was running significantly over budget, said Paul Hertz, director of NASA's Astrophysics Division, during a phone call to reporters today.

"The GEMS project was initiated under a very well-defined cost cap," Hertz said. "As they approached their confirmation review, it was clear they would not be able to complete it within their cost cap. NASA made the very difficult decision not to confirm GEMS into the implementation phase."

The mission team had almost completed the design stage of the project and was nearing the point where hardware for the mission would begin to be built. No working instruments were yet constructed, Hertz said. [NASA's 2013 Budget: What Will It Buy?]

The project was selected as a "small explorer" class mission, with a firm cost limit of $105 million, not including the price of launching the spacecraft. NASA recently commissioned an independent review of GEMS' budget, and found that the ultimate price tag for the spacecraft was likely to be 20 to 30 percent over budget.

Because of the cost overrun, NASA decided to pull the plug on GEMS last month. On June 5, the GEMS team, led by principal investigator Jean Swank of the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., appealed the decision and submitted documents to show they had identified new areas of cost savings.

However, NASA was not swayed.

The space agency will now have to pay an estimated $13 million in close-out costs to cancel the mission, including contract cancelation fees to Orbital Sciences Corp. and other companies that were hired to built the spacecraft.

GEMS was to use three telescopes to capture the bent X-ray light from extremely dense objects such as black holes, neutron stars and stellar remnants. The mission would have launched no earlier than 2014 and lasted two years.

"Although there aren't any other projects in the queue right now to measure polarized X-ray sources, there are a number of observatories which can address the science questions from different areas," including NASA's NuSTAR space mission, due to launch June 13, Hertz said.

The main factor behind the cost overrun was the trickiness of developing the technology needed for the mission, he said.

"The instrument technology was more difficult and took longer than they had originally estimated," Hertz said. "That delayed their ability to get started on the rest of their schedule."

Follow Clara Moskowitz on Twitter @ClaraMoskowitz or SPACE.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook &Google+

Copyright 2012 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Facing rising costs, NASA scraps X-ray space telescope mission
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/0607/Facing-rising-costs-NASA-scraps-X-ray-space-telescope-mission
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe