NASA’s decision to pull the funding for the modest VERITAS mission to Venus, which was both on track and on budget, in order to accommodate other missions facing cost overruns has left the team members outraged and confused.
“This mission that was on track is being effectively martyred for all those missions that are going over budget,” Suzanne Smrekar, VERITAS’ principal investigator, said Tuesday (March 14) during a NASA headquarters briefing. “It is a much more complicated and dire situation than the community realizes.”
The White House’s 2024 budget request for NASA, yet to be approved by Congress, proposes $3.38 billion to NASA’s Planetary Science Division that funds some of the agency’s missions, including the VERITAS Venus mission. The budget is great at supporting planetary science but “we still can’t quite fit everything in,” Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, said during the briefing at the 54th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) held in Texas and online.
Related: Venus: The scorching second planet from the sun
The 2024 proposal allocates a $1.5 million shoestring budget to VERITAS — a severe drop from NASA’s projected (opens in new tab) $56.7 million. Estimates for future years hold the mission funding at $1.5 million until 2028, reflecting NASA’s decision to indefinitely postpone the mission’s launch. The limited funding keeps the mission’s science team intact but disbands its entire engineering wing. Most of the anticipated funding will instead be used to fund other missions that are currently exceeding their initial budgets, including accommodating cost overruns for Mars Sample Return and helping the delayed Psyche meet its new launch date in October 2023.
“We looked across the board at a bunch of different options and VERITAS delay was the option that we picked,” Glaze said. “There were no good options here.”
VERITAS delays began in November 2022, when it was pushed from its initial launch in 2027 to no earlier than 2031. At the time, the delay was attributed to the institutional issues discovered (opens in new tab) across NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which is building a radar instrument called VISAR (or Venus Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar) for the Venus mission.
After JPL-led Psyche missed its fall 2022 launch window, an independent review found that JPL’s workforce faces an “unprecedented workload;” although VERITAS is not resource-intensive, multiple smaller missions were “stressing…
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