An nameless reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Two small spacecraft ought to have now been cruising by means of the Photo voltaic System on the best way to review unexplored asteroids, however after a number of years of improvement and almost $50 million in expenditures, NASA introduced Tuesday the probes will stay locked inside a Lockheed Martin manufacturing facility in Colorado. That is as a result of the mission, referred to as Janus, was imagined to launch final yr as a piggyback payload on the identical rocket with NASA’s a lot bigger Psyche spacecraft, which is able to fly to a 140-mile-wide (225-kilometer) metal-rich asteroid — additionally named Psyche — for greater than two years of close-up observations. Issues with software program testing on the Psyche spacecraft prompted NASA managers to delay the launch by greater than a yr. An impartial assessment board set as much as analyze the explanations for the Psyche launch delay recognized points with the spacecraft’s software program and weaknesses within the plan to check the software program earlier than Psyche’s launch. Digging deeper, the assessment panel decided that NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the Psyche mission, was encumbered by staffing and workforce issues exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Psyche is now again on observe for liftoff in October on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, however Janus will not be aboard.
Janus was designed to fly to 2 binary asteroids — consisting of two our bodies close to each other — that orbit the Solar nearer to Earth than the metallic asteroid Psyche. Whereas the Psyche mission can nonetheless attain its asteroid vacation spot and achieve its science mission with a launch this yr, the asteroids focused by Janus could have modified positions within the Photo voltaic System by an excessive amount of since final yr. They’re not accessible to the 2 Janus spacecraft with out flying too removed from the Solar for his or her photo voltaic arrays to generate adequate energy. When it grew to become clear the 2 Janus goal asteroids had been not reachable, scientists on the Janus group and NASA administration agreed final yr to take away the dual spacecraft from the Psyche launch. Scientists thought-about different makes use of for the suitcase-size Janus spacecraft, which had been already constructed and had been weeks away from cargo to Florida to start remaining launch preparations when NASA determined to delay the launch of Psyche.
One of many concepts to repurpose the Janus spacecraft was to ship the probes to fly by asteroid Apophis, an area rock greater than the Empire State Constructing that can encroach inside 20,000 miles (32,000 kilometers) from our planet’s floor in 2029. For a time quickly after its discovery in 2004, scientists mentioned there was a small probability Apophis might influence Earth in 2029 or later this century, however astronomers have now dominated out any threat of a collision for the subsequent 100-plus years. In the long run, Janus fell sufferer to the delay of the Psyche mission and tight finances constraints at NASA. The company mentioned Tuesday it has directed the Janus group to “put together the spacecraft for long-term storage.”
