Glaze said it is "absolutely critical" for the two missions to launch on time because "they take a lot of resources on center" and delays to either would hold up personnel and resources needed for VERITAS. "This stand down order is highly unusual, perhaps unprecedented."Īt LPSC, Glaze said restarting VERITAS as soon as 2025 is dependent on three criteria: Securing funding, having JPL show progress in solving the reported issues, and timely launch of two other missions scheduled for 2024 - Europa Clipper and NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar ( NISAR). Usually, a small amount of "bridge funding" allows scientists to keep making progress on critical aspects of the mission, but "VERITAS requested such bridge funding at a meeting in January 2023 and was turned down," Dyar told. The proposed $1.5 million allocated to VERITAS is not sufficient to keep the team together in the coming years, which is not the norm for delayed missions. ![]() "The idea of standing the team down to help other missions just doesn't make sense in detail, and is really going to introduce a great deal of risk," Dyar told. Most work happens at the mission's spacecraft provider Lockheed Martin and with foreign partners, while a third to half of the JPL workforce is focused on developing VISAR at any given time.ĭyar said "VERITAS has a very light footprint in the specific workforce shortages identified by the Psyche report." So given the workforce shortages at JPL and cost of the Psyche delay, a 12-18 month delay can be justified - but not a three year one, the VERITAS team argues. While missions closest to launch like Psyche always have higher priority and using personnel from other missions to help meet projected launch dates is already how things work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, "the vast majority of VERITAS' workforce is not at JPL," Darby Dyar, VERTIAS' deputy principal investigator told in an email. An artist's depiction of the VERITAS mission concept, designed to explore Venus.
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