“It’s a blow” for Suzanne Smrekar, researcher at the head of NASA’s Veritas program. While NASA’s budget for 2024 is being studied in the Senate, the American space agency is forced to tighten its belt.
With 3.38 billion dollars dedicated to planetary sciences, Lori Glaze, the director of this section of NASA regrets having to make “difficult choices”. As far as the Veritas mission is concerned, it’s a cold shower. Of the promised $56.7 million, only $1.5 will eventually arrive at the research center.
A big money question
The program will therefore be abandoned, without NASA even daring to recognize it, which is still funding this mission, on paper at least. Instead, the American agency has emphasized more “contemporary” missions. Returning samples from Mars is going to cost a lot more than expected. NASA has also renewed its confidence in Psyche, the probe which must explore the asteroid of the same name before 2030.
Lori Glaze tries to justify the choice of her teams “there was no good option”, she assures. The “delay of Veritas” is not irremediable in his eyes, and the mission still has a chance of seeing the light of day, in many years. Veritas was originally scheduled to take off in 2027, but a first delay in November 2022 had shifted the launch date to 2031. Today it would rather be 2035, at the earliest.
Putting the JPL’s house in order
Led by the JPL (a NASA laboratory which also manages the Psyche mission or the Perseverance rover), the Veritas mission was postponed for economic, but also human, issues. JPL engineers are suffering from an “unprecedented workload” according to an external report carried out at the end of 2022.
If the Veritas mission does not consume a lot of resources, it which works with just a few engineers, these forces have been redistributed otherwise within the JPL by NASA. The laboratory has been affected in recent months by several cases, in particular concerning internal working conditions.
Veritas: what for?
Initially the Veritas mission was to allow NASA to launch a probe in the direction of our neighbor Venus. The latter would then be able to accurately map Venus, giving in passing a precise analysis of the composition of the soil.
With this mission, NASA opened a new chapter in its contrasting history with Venus. The American space agency has always neglected this planet, the last probe to have taken the direction was Magellan, which left Earth in 1989.
