Editor's Corner
--Michael King, EOS Senior Project Scientist
Nearly seven months into the fiscal year, Congress passed and the President signed the budget for FY96 on April 24. The NASA budget for the Office of Mission to Planet Earth was $535.3 M for EOS flights, $241.2 M for EOSDIS, and $248.2 M for science, including both the research and analysis program as well as EOS Interdisciplinary Science (IDS) investigations. This budget represents a $91 M reduction to the Office of Mission to Planet Earth from that requested by President Clinton, and is consistent with that agreed to by the Appropriations Conference Committee of the House and Senate, which voted to decrease the EOS budget by $75 M, eliminate NASA funding of CIESIN ($6 M), and give a blanket reduction to NASA overall (of which $10 M was assigned to Mission to Planet Earth).
President Clinton's budget request for FY97 was submitted to Congress on March19, and is currently in the process of undergoing hearings and markups by the House and Senate. The budget request for Mission to Planet Earth includes allocations of $585.7 M for EOS flights, $261.1 M for EOSDIS, and $277.1 M for science, including $50 M for purchase of MTPE-related data from the commercial sector.
On April 17, NASA resumed work with TRW Space and Electronics Group of Redondo Beach, CA on two "common" spacecraft (PM-1 and Chemistry-1), valued at $398.7 M. This contract was mired in protests, filed by losing bidders Hughes Space and Communications Co. of Los Angeles, and Lockheed Martin Missiles and Space of Sunnyvale, CA. The protests were only recently resolved by the General Accounting Office, which reviews all such protests. The contract includes two spacecraft along with options for two more spacecraft (for an additional $269.8 M), and permits work to resume in earnest towards a launch of EOS PM-1 in December 2000.
An advanced, lightweight scientific instrument designed to produce visible and shortwave infrared images of Earth's land surfaces has been selected as the focus of the first New Millennium Program mission selected by the Office of Mission to Planet Earth. The new Advanced Land Imager instrument, called EO-1, will demonstrate remote sensing measurements of the Earth consistent with data collected since 1972 from the Landsat series of satellites. In addition, it will acquire data with finer spectral resolution, a capability long sought by many elements of the Earth observation data user community, and it will lay the technological groundwork for future land imaging instruments to be more compact and less costly. The total NASA cost of this first New Millennium Earth science mission, including its Small Expendable Launch Vehicle, has been capped at $90 million. Launch is planned for late 1998. The current mission operations concept for the New Millennium flight has the spacecraft flying autonomously several minutes ahead of the ground track flown by the planned Landsat 7 satellite, to provide accurate paired scene comparisons between the new and the traditional observing technologies. Evolutionary versions of the Advanced Land Imager would be candidates for flight on future generations of EOS missions, beginning with the AM-2 spacecraft.
At the Payload Panel meeting in Annapolis last November, I outlined a tentative schedule for development of Algorithm Theoretical Basis Documents (ATBDs) for many of the instrument science teams of EOS. These 30-40 page documents, to be developed for each data product, should describe in detail the granules and metadata to be included, all internal and external data product flows to be utilized, a physical and mathematical description of the algorithm, variance or uncertainty estimates, and practical considerations, such as calibration and validation, exception handling, quality control, and diagnostics. Although closely related algorithms may be combined into one document, an ATBD must be prepared for each algorithm some 4-5 years before launch, at which point it will be reviewed through a written as well as a panel review process.
All EOS AM-1, LIS, and SeaWinds teams developed ATBDs in February 1994. These documents were subsequently reviewed and are now available on the World Wide Web. These teams are now expected to revise their ATBDs by August 16 for a second round of reviews; this time emphasizing the theoretical basis of the algorithms as represented in the flight-ready software that is now being developed. In addition to the AM-1, LIS, and SeaWinds science teams, I intend to initiate the first round of ATBD reviews for the following teams that have not yet developed ATBDs: AIRS/AMSU/MHS, ACRIM, AMSR, Data Assimilation, and SAGE III. These teams are expected to deliver their ATBDs to the Project Science Office by November 15. This process is extraordinarily valuable to the science teams and engages the larger scientific community, both nationally and internationally, in the process of providing feedback on approaches to routine data reduction from EOS sensors.
Finally, I would like to report that Dr. Piers Sellers, AM Project Scientist and Interdisciplinary Science Team Principal Investigator, has been selected as an astronaut candidate. He was selected as part of a class of 35 out of 2200 applicants, and will be leaving Goddard Space Flight Center, where he has worked for the past 14 years, for Johnson Space Center in Houston. He reports in August for a two-year training program, after which point he will start training for a specific spaceflight assignment. It is my distinct pleasure to have worked with him over the past several years, and to have witnessed the culmination of his dream to become an astronaut. For his many scientific accomplishments, he was recently elected a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (see other significant awards elsewhere in this issue). On behalf of the Earth Science and especially Goddard scientific community, I would like to extend my best wishes for his continued success in future endeavors, and look forward to his return to Goddard after completion of his years as an astronaut.