The Mission

by David W. Brown

  Pappalardo’s research sabbatical turned out to be a bicoastal hat dance, beginning at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and on to Cornell University and Boston University, and closing out 2012 at the University of California, Los Angeles.436 It was enough time to get some plates spinning. Enceladus was, as a matter of intrigue, white-hot by then. Cassini was flying ever closer and sampling as best it could the moon’s chemistry, and it had found organics—carbon compounds—which didn’t necessarily imply Life as We Know It but were a necessary ingredient thereof. Ganymede was also getting traction, known now not only to have an ocean and intrinsic magnetic field but also an approved mission: the former Jupiter Ganymede Orbiter had been given a green light by the European Space Agency. So after NASA’s edict in 2010 to keep Jupiter Europa Orbiter and ESA’s Jupiter Ganymede Orbiter separate so as not to saddle the agency with Europe’s pusillanimity, just the opposite would come to pass! The Europeans renamed their mission JUICE—the tortured acronym for JUpiter ICy Moons Explorer—and Bob corresponded with Elizabeth “Zibi” Turtle at APL, who invited him to join her team proposing an experiment to fly in its payload. He did a lot of Europa work on the sabbatical, too. At UCLA, he worked closely with Krishan Khurana, he of the very first paper positing that Europa harbored a subsurface ocean, and who had coedited Bob’s book on Europa. Krishan had noticed in the old Galileo data an unusual signature that might suggest transient plumes on Europa, something perhaps like those on Enceladus. Such a discovery could be as transformative as the discovery of the ocean itself.

  While bouncing from university to university, Bob gave guest lectures on Europa, and, if he was honest . . . he tested the waters. What if he went back to teaching? He had given up a tenure-track professorship in Boulder to go to JPL, a risk in terms of job security and life stability, but it would have been worth it had he managed to get something flying. That said, if he went back to teaching—say, he found a professorship at UCLA—he might still be at least a peripheral part of a Europa mission. But could he lead it? No, not likely. UCLA would have loved it, provided that Bob maintained his publishing cadence. But would the lab allow it? No way.

  ON THE OTHER side of the continent, Curt Niebur at headquarters further considered the orbiter and the multiple flyby missions. It would be one or the other, he was certain, orbiter or multiple flyby. (The team had written a report on a prospective lander, too, but no one took the lander seriously.)

  To keep things moving forward in Bob’s absence, NASA wanted the science definition team to remain active and led by someone capable of snapping bones if necessary to safeguard the integrity of the mission. Curt asked Louise Prockter to take charge, and she accepted.437 Her leadership came with the benefit of cementing the mission’s marriage to the Applied Physics Laboratory. She would make it work, keep her lab on track, and impede any JPL attempts to abscond solo with the entire mission.

  Don Blankenship suggested a nautical theme to describe the multiple flyby mission. He worked best by writing out his thoughts, journaling on legal pads that he stored away in great stacks in his Austin office. “The name,” he wrote on March 20, 2012, “must reflect the comprehensive traversal of the ocean to establish its suitability for sustaining life and natural selection. A name with a class of sailing ship would reflect that.”438 He wrote out seven options: caravel, cutter, clipper, schooner, barque, corvette, ketch. He circled the word clipper. The name was especially clever in that the Decadal and NASA headquarters both claimed that an outer planets flagship mission was unaffordable right now. In the nautical nineteenth century, a clipper ship was just a little bit smaller than a flagship.

  And the Clipper concept was turning heads. It was something different, cheaper, doable. In the consensus findings that emerged from its January 2013 meeting in Atlanta and sent out to the wider planetary science community, the Outer Planets Assessment Group reported “its unequivocal and strongest support for the Europa Clipper mission. The ultimate result of more than a decade of ever more detailed study and down-selects, this mission offers paradigm-shifting, flagship-level science at Jupiter’s ocean moon.”439 At headquarters as well, Europa Clipper was the consensus favorite over the orbiter, but there was one pressing concern: it broke the established order of scientific exploration.

  For any planetary body, the order of missions went: flyby, orbiter, lander, rover, sample return, astronaut. That’s how Apollo did it. That’s how Mars, in theory, was doing it. Europa had its flyby with Voyager 2. It had several flybys with the spacecraft Galileo. And now the Europa community wanted multiple flybys again? Why would NASA spend money on another Galileo? It did not compute. So Curt and his boss, Jim Green, had to clock a lot of hours explaining why the Galileo–Europa Clipper comparison was specious. Galileo had eleven flybys of Europa during which its data were constrained. Its instruments were state-of-the-art . . . in the early eighties. The two spacecraft were completely different, and a multiple flyby bypassed the radiation bath. You’d get a low-cost mission that lasted years rather than days. Europa wasn’t ready for a lander, the team argued; the moon’s surface was still too great a mystery. Under muted protest, headquarters allowed Europa Clipper to stay.

  Having now established what the science definition team could do with skeletal funding on two tightly focused spacecraft, Curt challenged them to try to find new sweet spots. The Europa Clipper was ideal for ice science but weak on ocean science. Given a little more money, could you get the ocean science in there? Likewise, the Europa orbiter wowed with ocean science but disappointed on ice shell stuff. And so the science definition team under Louise started study round two: the “enhanced” Europa missions.

  The first meeting under her aegis, she felt, did not go well.440 The scientists did what she had seen them do a hundred times and what she herself had probably done: they ran chaotically off in their own directions, an orchestral scherzo playing out in time. Louise stood there in front of the room, and no matter what she tried, she absolutely could not bring this group to consensus. How nice Bob’s sabbatical must have been! And whatever words she said aloud, in her mind, she could not stop saying, like a mantra: IcannotdothisIneedtoleavethisroomIneedtowalkawayfromthisroomrightnowbecauseIamnotgoingtomakethiswork, and it was the exact moment when she appreciated, and not for the last time, just how good Ron Greeley really was. But just as it fell to Bob to finish Ron’s book on geomorphology, it fell to Louise to finish this one, and she would find a way.

  Chapter 14

  Princess-Who-Can-Defend-Herself

  OF THE ONE HUNDRED TWELVE THOUSAND WORDS comprising Public Law 113-6, enacted by the Senate and the House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled on the twenty-sixth of March in the Year of Our Lord 2013—the short title: Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act, 2013, the purpose: making consolidated appropriations and further continuing appropriations for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2013, and for other purposes—fewer than forty words, a single clause of a single sentence, mattered to an orb of ice, water, rock, and iron six hundred million miles away.441

  Customarily, a budget, or, short of that, a “continuing resolution” to keep the government funded and open for business for some set amount of time—a week or a month or a fiscal year—doled out dollars in big bites and with onerous sentence structures. NASA, to name one agency, needs five billion dollars to fulfill its science mission, from launching telescopes to buying swag to hand out at school science fairs, so:

  For necessary expenses, not otherwise provided for, in the conduct and support of science research and development activities, including research, development, operations, support, and services; maintenance and repair, facility planning and design; space flight, spacecraft control, and communications activities; program management; personnel and related costs, including uniforms or allowances therefor, as authorized by sections 5901 and 5902 of title 5, United States Code; travel expenses; purchase and hire of passenger motor vehicles; and purchase, lease
, charter, maintenance, and operation of mission and administrative aircraft, $5,144,000,000, to remain available until September 30, 2014.

  But the will of Congress is more nuanced than just telling a government clerk she has five bil to blow as she likes. Accompanying every appropriations bill is a guidance report that lays out precisely what will be done with those dollars.442 Out of that five billion, We the People expect you to spend one hundred forty-six million on the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution orbiter.443 And sixty-five million on Mars Science Laboratory. &c. However, unlike the appropriations bill (“I give thee $5,144,000,000”), those precise dollar amounts are, technically speaking, only suggestions. They carry no weight of law. Oh, you will hear about it if you defy the stated will of Congress—but you won’t hear about it from the inside of a jail cell.

  Which is why John Culberson of Texas, in his wheelhouse as a senior member of the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Subcommittee of the U.S. House Appropriations Committee, inserted not into the report, but into the budget itself, a single, absurdly specific sentence solving some long-unfinished business of his: “Provided, That $75,000,000 shall be for pre-formulation and/or formulation activities for a mission that meets the science goals outlined for the Jupiter Europa mission in the most recent planetary science decadal survey.”444

  Culberson, meanwhile, made his opinion known to top-level headquarters officials that he wanted a spacecraft to touch that ice.445 He never kept his desire for a lander a secret—it was the only way to answer definitively the life question—and a rogue group at the lab kept him appraised on a surreptitious lander study they were conducting. (Bob, Louise, and Dave knew nothing of it and were miffed mightily to learn it had taken place behind their backs.) NASA thus directed the Europa Habitability Mission science team to investigate the lander as a third spacecraft option.

  Culberson was by then in his ascendancy in congressional appropriations, with increasing sway in Republican politics by way of the emergent Tea Party movement, of which he was a founding member in the House, spurred by frustrations with Democratic success passing the Affordable Care Act. He was philosophically disposed toward low taxes and slashed spending; “Obamacare,” as it was sometimes called, offended him.446

  Still, some things needed a little coin. When John the junior subcommittee member funded JIMO all those years ago, the NASA administrator took a look at the budget (the law of the land) and the report (pretty please do JIMO), and tossed the report in the trash.

  Not this time, the administrator wouldn’t. Just like that, NASA by law had to get going on Europa and spend serious dollars on its development. It was, in fact, the only mission illegal for NASA not to fly.

  John Culberson had expanded the Katy Freeway into the widest highway in the world, and one way or another, he would build a much longer highway. He would get his spaceship to the Jovian system.

  THAT SEVENTY-FIVE MILLION dollars did not send Curt Niebur skipping to the local liquor store to buy a bottle of sparkles, singing and swinging from lampposts along his merry way. Just the opposite.

  Look, the money was wonderful. Jim Green, the head of the planetary science division, had been scrounging for years to keep Europa alive, and now there was a huge pile of coin to press forward on mission development. Jim, Curt, and the Europa team scattered across America could work wonders with it, but the administration’s hand had been pushed, and it had no problem slapping back. The White House was adamant: it was not pursuing a planetary science program right now. And unless NASA (via the White House) requested money for Europa, Congress could keep cash coming all day long, but the agency would not enter any long-term agreements to spend the money beyond the year appropriated.

  The split between the White House and Congress on NASA funding could be measured in Grand Canyons. The Obama administration came into office with a certain set of priorities and stuck to them. Of NASA’s four major scientific disciplines—heliophysics (i.e., the sun), astrophysics (i.e., the stars), earth science (i.e., rock no. 3), and planetary science (i.e., everything else in space, dust mote to gas giant)—Jim Green was told early on and point-blank which stood where.447 Earth science came first; under this administration, climate change would not be ignored. Second came astrophysics, but more specifically, the James Webb Space Telescope—successor space observatory to Hubble and billions of dollars in the red. It was being built in Maryland and thus represented by Barbara Mikulski, who was still the ranking member and future chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. If she wanted James Webb, she would get it, wrapped with a big red bow. Next came heliophysics, because it was small, with few pennies to shake from its piggy bank, and dead last was planetary science. There were only so many dollars, and the money for earth science had to come from somewhere.448 Why? Because Congress had foisted the SLS rocket on the administration, and there was no more money. From Lori Garver’s desk on the ninth floor at NASA headquarters, it was a terrible decision to have to make, but a decision had to be made. Planetary science would just have to take one for the team. The Mars Science Laboratory—the rover Curiosity—had just landed successfully on Mars. This was as good a place to pause as any.

  In the president’s budget request for fiscal year 2013, Jim lost three hundred million dollars.449 In one year. One-fifth of an entire scientific discipline: gone! And not just in 2013. As the Office of Management and Budget had told the Space Studies Board, the money would not return in 2014. Or 2015. Or 2016. Or 2017. The solar system was now being balanced on mountains of empty piggy banks. You lose twenty percent of your budget, and you tighten your belt . . . around your neck.

  On paper, it was the sort of existential science cut not seen since Reagan. And through 2017? Forget launching flagships to Mars or Europa. You’re trying now to keep from switching off the spacecraft you’ve launched. You’re trying now to keep from switching off the office lights.

  And the Office of Management and Budget was not playing a game. These cuts were real. From Curt’s office, although that seventy-five million dollars would enable all sorts of great work, it was a one-time thing. A Europa flagship mission was not a seventy-five-million-dollar mission. It was a two-point-five-billion-dollar mission . . . if it stayed perfectly on budget (which was unlikely—just look at Cassini or Curiosity). Europa was still in preformulation. Culberson was able to finagle seventy-five million dollars this year (and yes, Congress did restore much of the twenty-percent budget cut to planetary), but what about next year? The year after? The year after that? Once development really ramped up, there would be consecutive years with nine-figure price tags.

  So all things considered, having the money was in some ways worse than Europa’s panhandling days, because at least when it lived on a shoestring and a prayer, you could rage like Lear at the heavens, curse the feckless fiscal priorities of the American government. But to have the money and know it would amount to nothing?

  Shortly after the bill was signed by the president and Europa had sixty-nine million dollars in hand (Culberson’s target was reduced by a budget sequestration and federal rescissions), on April 22, 2013, Jim Green directed JPL to focus solely on the multiple flyby concept and to discontinue work on the orbiter and lander.450, 451 Europa Clipper was not the agreed-upon mission concept across the agency, but Jim was planting the flag, making a call that his superiors seemed incapable of making. “Given the funding for Europa mission pre-formulation efforts recently authorized in our fiscal year 2013 appropriation,” he wrote to the Europa team, “we can now move forward beyond the initial study phase. Please have your team focus solely on the ‘Europa Clipper’ concept, i.e. a multiple flyby mission, and do not continue development of the Europa Lander or the Europa Orbiter mission concepts at this time.”

  The studies backed up his conclusions. The enhanced Europa orbiter had limitations that the study team could not overcome.452 To get the data necessary to achieve its new goals, the mission would need one hundred eight days in orbit as opposed to t
hirty. But a longer orbit meant more radiation protection, and such shielding was precisely the thing that killed the Jupiter Europa Orbiter. To address the ice shell science and reconnoiter a landing site, meanwhile, the orbiter would need an ice-penetrating radar and a high-resolution reconnaissance camera—which could be done, but both were data-intensive instruments. The spacecraft would have to make the most important observations as quickly as possible and blast them back to Earth immediately, because regardless of shielding, the spacecraft would eventually (or might suddenly) die of radiation poisoning and crash into Europa. But the real problem with the enhanced orbiter was its inability to work out Europa’s composition: it could not carry two mass spectrometers, to say nothing of a thermal imager, without compromising its higher-priority payload. Which meant if the orbiter flew, the nature of the surface would remain a mystery—its salts, organics, and chemical makeup would remain blank spots on the map. Moreover, the enhanced orbiter was not “cost neutral,” as requested; it would break the cap.453

  An enhanced Europa Clipper, on the other hand, addressed every stated objective posed by the science definition team going back to the Jupiter Europa Orbiter (and by extension, the studies before that one as well). The spacecraft could accommodate a magnetometer, a thermal imager, a gravity science antenna, a high-definition reconnaissance camera (for a future lander), and a plasma instrument—everything, in other words, you would need to learn about Europa’s ice shell, ocean, composition, geology, and eventual landing site. Clever modifications to the model payload kept Clipper cost neutral. The mission would last for years, cost half the money, and do most of the science that the late, great, (allegedly) four-point-seven-billion-dollar Jupiter Europa Orbiter would have done, and because Europa Clipper would orbit Jupiter, NASA could, when the time came, safely dispose of the spacecraft. Rather than crash into a potentially habitable ocean world, it would dive into the Jovian abyss (or maybe even Io!—the possibilities were endless), where it would be vaporized. There was practically no risk of contaminating the whales of Europa.