The Washington Post reported Saturday that two members of the House Science Committee have asked the Bush Administration to find funding to keep the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) spacecraft operating. Committee chairman Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) and space subcommittee ranking member Nick Lampson (D-TX) wrote separate letters—Boehlert to science advisor John Marburger and Lampson to President Bush—asking them to free up money in the budget to keep the satellite running for as long as four more years.
NASA announced a week earlier that it was shutting down the satellite, part of a joint mission with JAXA, because in part it could not afford to operate it, and because of the need to perform a controlled reentry of the spacecraft to avoid any risk of injury to people on Earth. (NASA announced its plans to decommission TRMM in a press release issued Friday evening, July 16, a move usually designed to make sure it misses the deadlines of publications like Space News and Aviation Week. However, since JAXA has already announced that it had agreed to NASA’s proposal to decommission TRMM, it made the news anyway.) While the Post article focuses on the funding issue, it doesn’t mention the controlled reentry issue. However, as Space News pointed out earlier in the month, TRMM proponents believe there is enough propellant on the spacecraft to allow it to operate for two more years and still have enough for a controlled reentry. Moreover, the benefits that TRMM provides to weather forecasting may outweigh any risks of injury from an uncontrolled reentry.
The Japanese have already declined to spend any money on this. One would think that if TRMM is so important for hurricane forecasting and science, NOAA would find some money to keep it going.
It seems that NASA is getting all the blame, but in many ways this is a classic game of budgetary politics. Nobody wants to be the first to offer to pay for something that everybody wants.
What is worse throwing away a working satelite or one that will go bad in just a few years (Hubble).
I think it has a large amount of fuel left. I wonder if it could be directed to the moon to use the on board camers’s for the mapping operations that the LRO is to due in a few years.