What’s Next for NASA’s Canceled Janus Spacecraft?
NASA recently canceled the Janus asteroid mission, which would have sent a twin pair of small spacecraft to two different binary asteroid pairs, and is instead placing the spacecraft into long-term storage. But Janus may yet be resurrected, as NASA has kept open the possibility of sending the two spacecraft to new targets.
“While it’s too early to say, NASA is not ruling out the possibility of future funding potentially enabling an opportunity to utilize the Janus spacecraft,” Eric Lanson, deputy director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division told SpaceRef.
The Janus mission was part of NASA’s Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx) program, which caps mission budgets at around $55 million and spacecraft sizes at 180 kilograms.
The two Janus spacecraft came in at just 36 kilograms. Powered by solar arrays and carrying both optical and infrared cameras, the two spacecraft would have separated after launch, with one heading to the binary near-Earth asteroid system (175706) 1996 FG3, and the other to (35107) 1991 VH, a similar binary near-Earth asteroid.
Psyche out
The plan had been for Janus to catch a ride share with NASA’s larger Psyche mission, which was scheduled to launch in August 2022. But multiple delays in the Psyche mission, which NASA to launch in October, resulted in a launch window from which Janus would be unable to reach its target asteroids. Therefore, Janus was pulled from the rideshare manifest in November 2022, a fate it shared with another SIMPLEx mission, the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, or ESCAPADE mission to Mars.
After considering the options, NASA canceled the Janus mission entirely on July 11, citing a lack of suitable scientific targets following a change in launch schedule, and a lack of funding for planetary science over the next few years.
While hardly typical, NASA canceling a mission with a fully developed spacecraft and placing that spacecraft in storage for later use is not unprecedented, according to Lanson.
“The specific circumstances of this mission are unique, but there are certainly examples of missions that have been shelved and then restarted,” he says. “One that comes to mind is the Triana mission, which was canceled and placed into storage in 2001.”
The Triana mission was intended to study Earth’s climate from deep space, and would have been the first Earth-observing satellite to orbit the L1 Sun-Earth Lagrange point, an area about 1 million miles from the Earth where the gravity of the Earth and the Sun cancels the other’s out, allowing a spacecraft orbiting the point to maintain constant position relative to the Earth.
Spacecraft storage
The spacecraft languished for seven years, but in 2008 it was pulled from storage and modified for use for the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) mission. DSCOVR was a joint effort between NASA, the US Air Force, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — NOAA’s first deep space observatory — and would both monitor Earth’s climate and space weather.
“The spacecraft was launched on February 11, 2015, and NASA officially turned DSCOVR control over to NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) nine months later, on Oct. 28, 2015,” Lanson said.
The Triana/DSCOVR was stored in a warehouse at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, but Lanson says the Janus spacecraft could wind up in storage at any of NASA’s facilities. Currently, the two spacecraft are still held at Lockheed Martin’s Denver facility, where they were designed and built.
“When storing a spacecraft, it is vital to control the environment to preserve the hardware,” Lanson said. ““For Janus, this will mean careful control of temperature and humidity, as well as protecting the hardware from dust and other contaminants that could have deleterious effects on sensitive instrumentation. Often, spacecraft hardware is stored in a dry nitrogen environment to prevent oxidation.”
How long Janus will have to stay in deep storage is unclear, but Lanson says NASA will continue to review alternative mission ideas to find a new use for the two spacecraft.
“In keeping with the intent and goals of NASA’s SIMPLEx program … NASA will ask the project team to continue looking for high-value science opportunities for the spacecraft,” he said. “If it could be accommodated within our budget, NASA would consider the potential options for access to space for such an opportunity.”
For the time being, however, the Janus project team is primarily focused on getting the spacecraft safely into storage, a process that will run into 2024, according to Dan Scheeres, principal investigator for the Janus mission at the University of Colorado. But he’s hopeful that something out there in the near future will strike NASA as a good reason to pull Janus out of the cold, and send it out into the black of space.
“The Janus spacecraft are designed and optimized for performing a relatively fast flyby reconnaissance of near-Earth Asteroids,” Scheeres told SpaceRef. “While our original intent was to use them to explore binary asteroids, they can be used to explore virtually any sort of asteroid that is not too far from or too close to the sun.”
