By Archana Pyati
A recent analysis finds that the NASA missions that are the most economical – those that yield the greatest scientific bang for their buck – are mid-sized operations that cost the agency less than $1 billion per mission. As it turns out, these cost-effective missions are often led by university researchers, including scientists at AAU member campuses.
The analysis, conducted by Ari Koeppel and Casey Dreier of the Planetary Society, looked at the cost and scientific output of 90 NASA missions that have launched since 1994. The researchers measured scientific output using bibliometric data (the number of times a peer-reviewed scientific article is cited by other research papers). They focused on “high-impact science,” which they defined as scientific articles that have been cited in at least 100 other such papers.
Koeppel and Dreier found that missions with price tags between $250 million and $750 million result in more impactful science per dollar. These “mid-tier missions” are those that typically take about six years to generate publishable data or insights from their observations from space – what the researchers consider to be an efficient “time to science.”
The authors noted that their analysis comes at a critical moment for NASA, which faces increasing pressure to reduce science mission costs while also increasing the number of missions exploring space. In part to reduce mission costs, the current administration has prioritized contracting with commercial space companies to send scientific instruments – called payloads – to collect data and take measurements from the moon, Mars, and other planetary objects.
Congressional appropriators are currently considering NASA’s FY27 budget, including the request for NASA Science, which oversees the scientific missions into space. House appropriators have rejected steep cuts to NASA Science proposed by the president. However, the House recommendation of $6 billion falls well short of the $9 billion that AAU recommended.
NASA has increased the number of low- and very-low-cost missions in recent years, and the Planetary Society sought to determine if these missions have been producing cost-effective science. The short answer is “no.” The group’s analysis shows that missions costing less than $100 million typically result in failure and “lead to few, if any, high-impact publications.”
By contrast, high-cost missions – those signature missions that cost more than $1 billion – result in highly cited results that are delivered relatively quickly. However, these expensive missions take years to develop and operationalize. Examples include the Perseverance Mars Rover; OSIRIS-REx, which brought back samples of the Bennu asteroid; and Juno, which studied Jupiter. The mid-tier missions, however, exist in a kind of sweet spot between low-cost/low-value efforts and high-cost projects that are facing greater budgetary constraints.
University Researchers at the Helm of Highly Productive Missions
Senior researchers at several AAU member universities have served as principal investigators, or PIs, on these mid-tier missions. The role of the PI is to develop and pitch the mission’s concept and scientific proposal to NASA; assemble a team to collect, analyze, and publish findings based on observational data; and manage the project’s budget from start to finish. A few examples of mid-tier missions with AAU member PIs include:
- MESSENGER (which stood for Mercury Surface, Space, Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging) was the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury in 2004.
- The MESSENGER craft was built by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, and the principal investigator was Sean C. Solomon, the Doherty Senior Scholar at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
- At the time of MESSENGER’s launch, Solomon was director of the department of terrestrial magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington (he moved to Columbia when MESSENGER concluded in 2015). The project team was based at Johns Hopkins APL.
- MESSENGER yielded more insights about Mercury than we had previously known, including the presence of water ice on its polar caps, the volatile compounds in its makeup, and its volcanoes and craters. The mission also resulted in multiple technical innovations that informed future missions.
- TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) explores planets that exist in interstellar space, or the space outside of our solar system. It launched in 2018 and is an active mission.
- Led by PI George Ricker Jr., a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Kavli Institute, TESS scans interstellar space with powerful cameras that track the brightness of stars to determine which ones might be exoplanets. TESS has returned images of nearly 6,000 confirmed or hypothetical exoplanets. TESS is also staffed by scientists and engineers at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
- Data from the TESS mission has already generated more than 4,000 publications, the majority of them peer-reviewed, on exoplanets, stellar flares, and other astrophysics topics.
- THEMIS-ARTEMIS (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms – Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence, and Electrodynamics of Moon’s Interaction with the Sun) is an active mission led by PI Vassilis Angelopoulos, professor of earth, planetary and space sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles.
- Launched in 2007, this mission aims to understand the impact of solar wind on Earth’s magnetosphere – the magnetic field surrounding Earth – through five spacecraft.
- Solar winds can produce substorms and other space weather, resulting in massive surges of energy that can be quite disruptive. THEMIS has generated more than 1,000 peer-reviewed scientific papers.
Scientific missions aim to deepen our understanding of the solar system, the origins and workings of the cosmos, and even – closer to home – earth’s own atmosphere. But they do so in a time of great budgetary uncertainty. University researchers remain NASA’s steadfast partners in developing missions that generate high-impact science while also being careful stewards of federal investments.
Archana Pyati is editorial and content officer at AAU.