WASHINGTON — Congressional language designed to speed up work on NASA’s future space telescope is having the side effect of forcing the agency to disband a team it created to manage the mission’s early development.
NASA established two committees last year to support early development of the Habitable Worlds Observatory, a large space telescope recommended by the decadal survey Astro2020, which is expected to launch in the early 2040s at the earliest.
One, the Technical Assessment Group (TAG), includes NASA personnel who work on designs and key technologies for the spacecraft. The second, the Science, Technology, Architecture Review Team (START), primarily includes representatives from academia and industry to develop science objectives and instrument requirements for the mission.
The two groups began work last fall, but at the third joint committee meeting June 3 in Baltimore, Mark Clampin, director of NASA’s Astrophysics Division, said their efforts were complicated by language in the fiscal 2024 omnibus spending bill passed in March . A report accompanying the bill directed NASA to spend at least $10 million this year on the Habitable Worlds Observatory, as well as to establish a project office for it at the Goddard Space Flight Center.
“It was a surprise,” he said of the direction the office was set up. “We had to think a little bit about how to incorporate that into a plan that we can move forward with.
While the provisions show strong congressional interest in the mission, he said they also have “disadvantages,” namely reorganizing how NASA intended to conduct the observatory’s early development.
NASA created START with language requiring it to be dissolved upon establishment of the project office, a provision intended to limit conflicts of interest for future calls for participation by industry and science teams. Clampin said the provision will be enforced even with the earlier-than-expected creation of the project office.
“After consulting with the headquarters legal team, we have come to the conclusion that we must dissolve START immediately,” he said. “We are obliged to do this because of all the legal concerns of future conflicts.”
That won’t affect, he said, the volunteer task forces that have been associated with START researching science cases for the observatory. “We don’t want to lose all the work that the task forces are doing,” he said. Those efforts will continue and will now be filed directly with the project office, though Clampin said industry representatives on those task forces will have to step aside to mitigate conflicts.
NASA is currently establishing the Habitable Worlds Observatory project office at Goddard with the goal of having it in place by the end of the fiscal year in September. “It gets a lot of attention. We get a lot of ‘are we there yet?’ calling from the hill,” he said.
The early creation of the project office will not affect the observatory’s overall plan, including the initial focus on maturing the technology needed for it before formally starting its development. “Don’t think this is a fundamental change in approach or strategy. It isn’t,” said Clampin.
This approach includes funding work on these key technologies. NASA announced on May 31 that it had awarded three contracts worth a total of $17.5 million to BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman to work on concepts such as “ultra-stable” optics and a deployable telescope baffle.
Clampin added that the direction of establishing the observatory’s project office at Goddard does not mean that other NASA centers will be excluded from working on the mission. “This is the direction we got from Congress, and so we have to follow that, but we expect it to continue to be a very broad, diverse and inclusive program.”