Remember Triana, aka “Goresat”, the earth and space sciences satellite dreamed up (arguably literally) by then Vice President Al Gore about eight years ago? Science reports in its latest issue that NASA has “quietly terminated” the mission. Unfortunately, that’s all that the free summary provides, and I don’t have a subscription. As you may recall, Triana, to be stationed at the Earth-Sun L1 point, was designed to provide full-disk imagery of the Earth for a variety of purposes; it also has sensors to provide early warning of solar storms. The mission was sharply criticized by Republicans in Congress, although its scientific merits were eventually vindicated by a National Academy of Sciences report. The Triana spacecraft was built but put into storage since it had no ride available. Without access to the full article, it’s not clear what plans, if any, NASA has for the Triana hardware.
Update 12 pm: Several readers were kind enough to send me the full text of the Science article, although the full article doesn’t offer much more than my summary above. The principal investigator of Triana, Francisco Valero of UC San Diego, did say that he was disappointed that NASA made this decision before NOAA finished a study (due to be released next month) on potential cost-sharing for the mission. If NOAA could pay up to half the cost of launching and operating Triana (estimated to be between $60-120 million total), it would presumably be much easier to squeeze the mission within NASA’s budget, the primary reason why NASA cancelled it.
While I opposed the original Republican efforts to kill this project as hypocritical partisan politics at its worse, at this point in time I think this is probably the correct decision. In the VSE, today, NASA has more important fish to fry. While the advance warning of solar storms will probably be an essential service in the near future, not least because of the VSE, I also think this is an ideal opportunity for a new commercial industry. NASA should put out an RFP for the data, and let someone like SpaceDev bid on providing the service with a microsat.
— Donald
[Conflict of Interest Notice: I am a shareholder in SpaceDev.]
Why not put it up for sale and see if anyone wants to buy it? Heck, if they can get good money for it I say go for it.
But it’ll probably end up in a museum somewhere…
Triana was the project that just kept costing more and more money. It was originally supposed to be a $75M dollar project that eventually balooned to$275M dollars. The primary objection by many is that the mission was not competed and the science, (which was added much later after the initial round of criticism) was never subjected to the process where its value was traded against other scientific priorities.
NASA could donate the spacecraft to anyone in the commercial world that wanted to fly it and and then sell the data on the international market.
Dennis
Selling the spacecraft is an excellent suggestion that I fully support. How close is it to being complete?
— Donald