GAO: NASA Heliophysics Mission Heading for $26M Overrun

摘要

The Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission will need at least $26 million more than NASA has budgeted for the formation-flying heliophysics observatory, the U.S. Government Accountability Office warned in an April 15 report. The four-spacecraft observatory - identified by the heliophysics community as a top priority in a 10-year roadmap, or decadal survey, published in 2003 - has been plagued by defective parts in its Fast Plasma Instrument suites, but it was the partial government shutdown of 2013 that ultimately set MMS on a course to exceed the budget NASA established for the mission in 2009 by about 3 percent, GAO said. MMS was supposed to launch this October aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5, but last October's partial government shutdown locked workers out of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., where MMS is being built, for about two weeks. The work stoppage forced NASA to reschedule launch for no earlier than March 2015 - the earliest date United Launch Alliance could accommodate the mission once it blew its October launch date, Chris Scolese, director of the Goddard Space Flight Center, said in March.