Science in brief: New tool to help find planets
The instrument will measure the “tiny back-and-forth wobble of a star caused by the gravitational tug of a planet in orbit around it,” a NASA news release explained. That wobbling tells scientists there is a planet orbiting the star.
The project is the centerpiece of a partnership with the National Science Foundation, called the NASA-NSF Exoplanet Observational Research program or NN-EXPLORE.
The instrument itself is called the NEID, short for the cumbersome NN-EXPLORE Exoplanet Investigations with Doppler Spectroscopy. It will be built by a Pennsylvania State University research group and is scheduled to be completed in 2019. The NEID will be installed on a 3.5-meter telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona.
NASA’S SOFTWARE PROBLEMS: No one ever doubted that the trip into deep space would be fraught with technical obstacles and engineering challenges. But as it turns out, some of those challenges are also financial.
In an audit of NASA’s Ground Systems Development and Operations program released March 28, the space agency’s Office of the Auditor General found that the effort to develop a software involved in launching rockets into deep space is millions of dollars over budget and months behind schedule.
The context is that the Ground Systems program is preparing the Kennedy Space Center to launch more powerful spacecraft, including the Space Launch System and Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle.
The software development “has significantly exceeded initial cost and schedule estimates,” the auditor’s report says. “Compared to fiscal year 2012 projections, development costs have increased approximately 77 percent to $207.4 million and the release of a fully operational version has slipped by 14 months from July 2016 to September 2017.”
The software system is called the Spaceport Command and Control System. According to the report, it will:
- Control pumps, motors, valves, power supplies and other ground equipment.
- Record and retrieve data from systems before and during launch.
- Monitor the health and status of a spacecraft as it prepares for and undergoes a launch.
The auditor’s report recommended an independent evaluation to determine steps to reduce cost overruns and delays, including possibly acquiring commercial software to replace some or all of the system under development.
Related:
NASA marks verification of 1,000th planet
New planet spotted by repurposed spacecraft
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