WASHINGTON — NASA has confirmed it’s delaying the discharge of the decision for proposals for the following Recent Frontiers planetary science mission, originally planned for this fall, to no sooner than 2026 due to budget issues.
In a community announcement published Aug. 24, NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) said the announcement of opportunity (AO) for the fifth Recent Frontiers mission could be delayed and that the potential list of missions eligible for selection might be altered.
“Budget uncertainty within the Planetary Science Division (PSD) makes release of the AO in 2023 and subsequent choice of a brand new mission difficult,” the agency said within the announcement. “NASA SMD’s latest goal is not any sooner than 2026 for the discharge of the ultimate AO.”
Until this summer, NASA had been working towards a release of the ultimate AO for the Recent Frontiers mission in November. That included the discharge of a draft version of the AO in January to solicit feedback on its contents from the scientific community.
By the summer, though, NASA slowed down those plans, citing uncertainty linked to a debt-ceiling agreement that keeps funding for non-defense discretionary agencies, like NASA, flat in fiscal 12 months 2024 with a 1% increase in 2025. Agency leadership said in June that the agreement would mean NASA was unlikely to get the complete $27.2 billion it requested for 2024, creating “challenges” for agency programs.
At a NASA SMD town hall meeting July 27, Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, warned a possible prolonged delay in the discharge of the Recent Frontiers AO. “If the planetary science funding levels which are anticipated because of this of this tight budget environment are literally realized over the following two or so years,” she said, “it’s unlikely we’ll have the option to solicit Recent Frontiers perhaps not before 2026.” That delay was made official with the discharge of the community announcement.
The draft AO sought proposals for missions on six topics, as advisable by the planetary science decadal survey in 2011: a comet surface sample return, a mission to Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io, a lunar geophysical network, a sample return mission to the moon’s South Pole-Aitken Basin, a mission to characterize the potential habitability of Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus and a probe of Saturn’s atmosphere.
The long delay, though, may cause NASA to vary that list, based on guidance from the most recent planetary science decadal survey published in 2022. That report didn’t recommend changes to the list of potential missions for the fifth Recent Frontiers competition, but did offer recommendations for the targets for the sixth and seventh missions, which the decadal anticipated being competed over the following decade.
The decadal survey’s list for the sixth Recent Frontiers competition retained the comet surface sample return, lunar geophysical network and Saturn probe concepts, and added an orbiter and lander mission to a Centaur small body within the outer solar system, a Ceres sample return mission, a multiple flyby mission of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, an orbiter of Saturn’s moon Titan and a Venus in-situ explorer.
In the neighborhood announcement, NASA said that it could ask the National Academies to review what potential mission concepts from the 2 lists must be included within the delayed AO. “This also provides a possibility to update the science objectives for the mission themes based on the recently released planetary decadal survey,” the announcement added.
The delay comes after many scientists had already began planning for proposed missions, including establishing partnerships and starting work on spacecraft design and science goals. The draft AO had projected a proposal deadline of April 2024, five months after the discharge of the ultimate AO. NASA planned to pick out several proposals at the tip of 2024 for Phase A studies lasting to early 2026. NASA projected picking one among those finalists as the following Recent Frontiers mission in late 2026, launching between 2031 and 2034.
The draft AO set a value of $900 million to develop the mission, with a further $300 million for operations. Nonetheless, the decadal survey last 12 months advisable increasing the fee cap for development and operations to $1.65 billion, plus an allowance of $30 million a 12 months for “quiet cruise” operations for missions with long transit times. None of the fee caps included launch.
NASA has chosen 4 Recent Frontiers missions up to now. Three have launched: the Recent Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, the Juno mission orbiting Jupiter and OSIRIS-REx, which is returning samples from the asteroid Bennu in September. The fourth, the Dragonfly mission to Titan, is in development for launch in 2027.