<p text="PASADENA, Calif. — Laurie Leshin, the new boss at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, showed up recently at the Mars Yard, where engineers test rovers by forcing them to navigate their way up and down steep inclines and through sand, gullies and boulder fields that have at least some semblance to the Martian terrain." class="wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css mw-md pb-md font--article-body font-copy ma-auto pl-sm pr-sm">PASADENA, Calif. — Laurie Leshin, the new boss at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, showed up recently at the Mars Yard, where engineers test rovers by forcing them to navigate their way up and down steep inclines and through sand, gullies and boulder fields that have at least some semblance to the Martian terrain.

Leshin arrived by a simpler conveyance: a golf cart. That’s the smart way to get around here, because the laboratory sprawls across 168 acres of hilly terrain.

“You know, JPL is bigger than Disneyland,” Leshin said. “And a lot cooler.”

It is, no doubt, a very cool place. But as the director of the laboratory — the first woman to lead it in its nearly nine-decade history — Leshin is now trying to steer this storied institution through an unusually rocky period.

<p text="JPL can be credited with many of the agency’s most flamboyant successes in planetary science. That’s why the aerospace world was surprised last year by the lab’s failure to deliver an asteroid probe on time, a stumble that NASA responded to by postponing a JPL-led Venus mission. A sobering report issued by an independent review board in the fall concluded that the lab simply has too many missions and not enough experienced engineers to pull them off." class="wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css mw-md pb-md font--article-body font-copy ma-auto pl-sm pr-sm">JPL can be credited with many of the agency’s most flamboyant successes in planetary science. That’s why the aerospace world was surprised last year by the lab’s failure to deliver an asteroid probe on time, a stumble that NASA responded to by postponing a JPL-led Venus mission. A sobering report issued by an independent review board in the fall concluded that the lab simply has too many missions and not enough experienced engineers to pull them off.

<p text="“The things they do [at JPL] require incredible people to do it,” Thomas Young, former director of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and chair of the internal review board, said earlier this year. “They just don’t have the manpower they need to do the missions.”" class="wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css mw-md pb-md font--article-body font-copy ma-auto pl-sm pr-sm">“The things they do [at JPL] require incredible people to do it,” Thomas Young, former director of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and chair of the internal review board, said earlier this year. “They just don’t have the manpower they need to do the missions.”

<p text="NASA officials acknowledge the recent problems and say they’ve made progress in resolving the workforce issues by luring back dozens of departed staffers. But the delays are a stark reminder that JPL needs to be firing on all cylinders at a time when missions are more complex, and the traditional aerospace sector is struggling to hire and retain talented engineers." class="wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css mw-md pb-md font--article-body font-copy ma-auto pl-sm pr-sm">NASA officials acknowledge the recent problems and say they’ve made progress in resolving the workforce issues by luring back dozens of departed staffers. But the delays are a stark reminder that JPL needs to be firing on all cylinders at a time when missions are more complex, and the traditional aerospace sector is struggling to hire and retain talented engineers.

<p text="Gentry Lee, a JPL veteran and member of the review board, said lab employees have seen pay bumps of 60 percent or more when lured away by the private sector. The United States needs to bring in more tech talent from abroad if it wants to maintain its technological exceptionalism, he added." class="wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css mw-md pb-md font--article-body font-copy ma-auto pl-sm pr-sm">Gentry Lee, a JPL veteran and member of the review board, said lab employees have seen pay bumps of 60 percent or more when lured away by the private sector. The United States needs to bring in more tech talent from abroad if it wants to maintain its technological exceptionalism, he added.

“I would call it a challenging phase,” Lee said.

<p text="JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech, had planned to launch a probe called Psyche on a voyage to a 140-mile-wide metallic asteroid by the same name. But Psyche missed its September 2022 launch date because of a failure to test software in a timely manner." class="wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css mw-md pb-md font--article-body font-copy ma-auto pl-sm pr-sm">JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech, had planned to launch a probe called Psyche on a voyage to a 140-mile-wide metallic asteroid by the same name. But Psyche missed its September 2022 launch date because of a failure to test software in a timely manner.

<p text="Psyche is now on track to launch this October, but the delay and associated budget overruns had a secondary effect: After reviewing the situation, NASA decided to postpone by at least three years a major JPL mission called Veritas that would have sent the first U.S. probe to orbit Venus in more than three decades." class="wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css mw-md pb-md font--article-body font-copy ma-auto pl-sm pr-sm">Psyche is now on track to launch this October, but the delay and associated budget overruns had a secondary effect: After reviewing the situation, NASA decided to postpone by at least three years a major JPL mission called Veritas that would have sent the first U.S. probe to orbit Venus in more than three decades.

<p text="One of the most ambitious and diabolically difficult missions is yet to come: Mars Sample Return. It’s a multibillion-dollar collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency that aspires to haul Martian soil back to Earth sometime in the next decade for laboratory scrutiny." class="wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css mw-md pb-md font--article-body font-copy ma-auto pl-sm pr-sm">One of the most ambitious and diabolically difficult missions is yet to come: Mars Sample Return. It’s a multibillion-dollar collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency that aspires to haul Martian soil back to Earth sometime in the next decade for laboratory scrutiny.

<p text="“This is a mission I’ve been trying to get flown for 25 years,” said Leshin, a geochemist and space scientist who is on the team studying Mars via the Curiosity rover. “It is the best shot we have of answering the question of whether there was life on Mars.”" class="wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css mw-md pb-md font--article-body font-copy ma-auto pl-sm pr-sm">“This is a mission I’ve been trying to get flown for 25 years,” said Leshin, a geochemist and space scientist who is on the team studying Mars via the Curiosity rover. “It is the best shot we have of answering the question of whether there was life on Mars.”

The agency’s attempt to lighten JPL’s workload by shelving Veritas has exacerbated a long-simmering feud among planetary scientists: Venus experts feel ignored. They think Mars always get the spa treatment while Earth’s twin gets a cold cup of gruel.

<p text="Veritas — which stands for Venus Emissivity, Radio science, InSAR, Topography, And Spectroscopy — was selected by NASA just two years ago, to the elation of scientists who think the planet is loaded with scientific treasures." class="wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css mw-md pb-md font--article-body font-copy ma-auto pl-sm pr-sm">Veritas — which stands for Venus Emissivity, Radio science, InSAR, Topography, And Spectroscopy — was selected by NASA just two years ago, to the elation of scientists who think the planet is loaded with scientific treasures.

<p text="The mission is supposed to be part of the “Decade of Venus,” teaming with two other probes due to launch around 2030: DaVinci, which remains funded and on track, is an atmospheric probe being led by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center; EnVision is an orbiter being built by the European Space Agency. The combined efforts were designed as a triple threat, using multiple suites of complementary instruments to delve deeply into the mysteries of Earth’s hothouse neighbor." class="wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css mw-md pb-md font--article-body font-copy ma-auto pl-sm pr-sm">The mission is supposed to be part of the “Decade of Venus,” teaming with two other probes due to launch around 2030: DaVinci, which remains funded and on track, is an atmospheric probe being led by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center; EnVision is an orbiter being built by the European Space Agency. The combined efforts were designed as a triple threat, using multiple suites of complementary instruments to delve deeply into the mysteries of Earth’s hothouse neighbor.

Venus, according to recent research, may have had oceans for much of its history, and potentially was habitable. It’s conceivable that life evolved there and could still exist in the upper atmosphere, where temperatures and pressures are benign.

Venus is also of great interest to scientists looking for Earth-sized planets orbiting distant stars, because the planet can serve as an unearthly role model. And climate scientists studying global warming on Earth see Venus as the ultimate horror story for what can happen to a habitable planet with a runaway greenhouse effect.

NASA budgeted $811 million for Veritas between 2024 and 2028. But to the consternation of the Veritas team, all that money has vanished, except for a tiny amount for scientific research.

<p text="“Heartbroken” is how Darby Dyar, a planetary scientist at Mount Holyoke College and member of the Veritas team, describes her reaction to NASA’s decision. She and other scientists are appealing to Congress to keep the mission on track for a launch before the end of this decade." class="wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css mw-md pb-md font--article-body font-copy ma-auto pl-sm pr-sm">“Heartbroken” is how Darby Dyar, a planetary scientist at Mount Holyoke College and member of the Veritas team, describes her reaction to NASA’s decision. She and other scientists are appealing to Congress to keep the mission on track for a launch before the end of this decade.

“It’s a really, really terrible situation,” said Stephen Kane, a planetary astrophysicist at the University of California at Riverside who is part of the team working on DaVinci.

“There’s a real sense of frustration within the community, that after all these decades of pushing for this, NASA has finally taken this direction to support this community — and then pulled the rug right out again,” Kane said.

<p text="NASA’s head of planetary science, Lori Glaze, said in an email that the money intended for Veritas is needed for the additional year of developing Psyche and for a second project underway, the Near-Earth Object Surveyor, a space telescope that will search for potentially hazardous asteroids and comets. She added that NASA continues to have a “robust portfolio” for Venus, and the agency will have an opportunity in the following budget cycle to create a restart plan for Veritas, with a projected launch no sooner than 2031." class="wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css mw-md pb-md font--article-body font-copy ma-auto pl-sm pr-sm">NASA’s head of planetary science, Lori Glaze, said in an email that the money intended for Veritas is needed for the additional year of developing Psyche and for a second project underway, the Near-Earth Object Surveyor, a space telescope that will search for potentially hazardous asteroids and comets. She added that NASA continues to have a “robust portfolio” for Venus, and the agency will have an opportunity in the following budget cycle to create a restart plan for Veritas, with a projected launch no sooner than 2031.

Leshin in an email called the delay of Veritas “obviously disappointing” and noted the “strong scientific value” to having the mission advance alongside DaVinci and EnVision. “We will continue to work closely with NASA on a path forward and are hopeful we can find a near-term solution to help VERITAS succeed,” she said.

JPL’s struggles with the Psyche mission, and the cascading effects on Veritas, are out of character for this swashbuckling lab. Top talent has long been drawn here for the reward of doing things no one has done before. Until China managed the feat in 2021, only JPL had ever landed a fully operational spacecraft on Mars.

<p text="“If it’s easy and boring, we don’t want to do it,” said Art Thompson, an engineer who has worked on five rover missions, going back to the 1990s, in a 40-year career at the lab. Thompson knows he has one of the snazziest jobs in the universe: “I drive to work and I go to work on Mars.”" class="wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css mw-md pb-md font--article-body font-copy ma-auto pl-sm pr-sm">“If it’s easy and boring, we don’t want to do it,” said Art Thompson, an engineer who has worked on five rover missions, going back to the 1990s, in a 40-year career at the lab. Thompson knows he has one of the snazziest jobs in the universe: “I drive to work and I go to work on Mars.”

<p text="In the Mission Control room, where staffers monitor transmissions from the current fleet of active spacecraft, a plaque installed in the floor calls this room “The Center of the Universe.” At last count, 16 marriage proposals had been made atop that declaration, said operations manager Jim McClure, who has been working there for 35 years." class="wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css mw-md pb-md font--article-body font-copy ma-auto pl-sm pr-sm">In the Mission Control room, where staffers monitor transmissions from the current fleet of active spacecraft, a plaque installed in the floor calls this room “The Center of the Universe.” At last count, 16 marriage proposals had been made atop that declaration, said operations manager Jim McClure, who has been working there for 35 years.

Outside, programmable signposts point at celestial objects of note: Mars is over there, Proxima Centauri thataway, etc. Visitors might feel compelled to follow the guidance, staring into the empty blue sky as if searching for the best route to these planets and stars.

<p text="JPL officials can boast that their lab has visited every planet (minus Pluto, which was officially and controversially demoted in 2006 to the status of dwarf planet) and the asteroid belt. The lab in 1958 launched Explorer 1, the first U.S. satellite. In the 1970s, JPL sent Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 to the outer planets of the solar system and beyond. The Galileo mission in 1995 succeeded in orbiting Jupiter and kept operating for eight years. The Cassini probe reached Saturn in 2004 and orbited for 13 years." class="wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css mw-md pb-md font--article-body font-copy ma-auto pl-sm pr-sm">JPL officials can boast that their lab has visited every planet (minus Pluto, which was officially and controversially demoted in 2006 to the status of dwarf planet) and the asteroid belt. The lab in 1958 launched Explorer 1, the first U.S. satellite. In the 1970s, JPL sent Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 to the outer planets of the solar system and beyond. The Galileo mission in 1995 succeeded in orbiting Jupiter and kept operating for eight years. The Cassini probe reached Saturn in 2004 and orbited for 13 years.

There have been failures, too, of course.

<p text="A huge, expensive probe operated by JPL called Mars Observer vanished without a trace in 1993, right when it was about to reach Mars. No one ever found out why. Poof. Gone." class="wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css mw-md pb-md font--article-body font-copy ma-auto pl-sm pr-sm">A huge, expensive probe operated by JPL called Mars Observer vanished without a trace in 1993, right when it was about to reach Mars. No one ever found out why. Poof. Gone.

<p text="Then in September 1999, a probe named Mars Climate Orbiter suffered a navigation error and disintegrated as it plunged into the Martian atmosphere. Three months later, the Mars Polar Lander went silent during its descent and presumably crashed at high velocity. The paired disasters proved especially embarrassing because investigators found that, for the orbiter mission, NASA had been using metric units while a contractor had been using Imperial." class="wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css mw-md pb-md font--article-body font-copy ma-auto pl-sm pr-sm">Then in September 1999, a probe named Mars Climate Orbiter suffered a navigation error and disintegrated as it plunged into the Martian atmosphere. Three months later, the Mars Polar Lander went silent during its descent and presumably crashed at high velocity. The paired disasters proved especially embarrassing because investigators found that, for the orbiter mission, NASA had been using metric units while a contractor had been using Imperial.

<p text="But so far this century, JPL has been on a roll — literally, with the Mars rovers Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity and Perseverance landing safely and performing brilliantly." class="wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css mw-md pb-md font--article-body font-copy ma-auto pl-sm pr-sm">But so far this century, JPL has been on a roll — literally, with the Mars rovers Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity and Perseverance landing safely and performing brilliantly.

JPL’s daunting to-do list includes the launch next year of the spacecraft Europa Clipper, which will go into orbit around Jupiter and repeatedly sweep past the ice-covered moon for which it is named. Europa is believed to have a huge ocean underneath its sheath of ice. It’s conceivable that there are creatures swimming in that dark, cold sea.

In one of the boxy buildings on the JPL campus a visitor can view, through glass, a cavernous clean room that this spring houses Europa Clipper. At any given moment, the probe may be swarmed by technicians in matching white biocontainment suits adding pieces or fine-tuning the hardware.

To pull off these missions requires flashy hardware and sophisticated software. There’s a lot of code in the critical path.

“The software has to be written to allow a spacecraft to recover from all kinds of different problems,” Leshin said. “The spacecraft themselves are much more complex than they used to be.”

And no mission is more complex, fraught with technical challenges and important to JPL than Mars Sample Return.

<p text="Pristine pieces of Mars, scrutinized in laboratories, could lead to a revision of the solar system’s history — and might even preserve the first compelling evidence of extraterrestrial life. The White House has requested nearly $1 billion in Mars Sample Return funding for the next fiscal year. Ultimately it could cost $5 billion to $7 billion, said Casey Dreier, the policy director for the pro-space nonprofit Planetary Society." class="wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css mw-md pb-md font--article-body font-copy ma-auto pl-sm pr-sm">Pristine pieces of Mars, scrutinized in laboratories, could lead to a revision of the solar system’s history — and might even preserve the first compelling evidence of extraterrestrial life. The White House has requested nearly $1 billion in Mars Sample Return funding for the next fiscal year. Ultimately it could cost $5 billion to $7 billion, said Casey Dreier, the policy director for the pro-space nonprofit Planetary Society.

The mission is already underway: The Perseverance rover is digging up samples of Martian soil, leaving some on the surface and parking others inside the rover. The next big step is to send a spacecraft to land on Mars and pick up the stored cargo.

Then the landing vehicle must turn itself into a launch vehicle that will blast into Mars orbit, where the payload will be gobbled up by an orbiter built by the ESA. That spacecraft will rocket back to Earth and drop the samples in the Utah desert for very careful analysis in tightly sealed laboratories.

“This will be the most-watched extended mission in history at NASA,” Leshin said.

<p text="In the meantime, JPL is still trying to resolve the cascade of challenges set in motion by Psyche." class="wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css mw-md pb-md font--article-body font-copy ma-auto pl-sm pr-sm">In the meantime, JPL is still trying to resolve the cascade of challenges set in motion by Psyche.

Planetary scientist Lindy Elkins-Tanton admits she was surprised when NASA selected the Psyche mission so quickly after she proposed it.

“It’s not a household name like the moon or Mars,” Elkins-Tanton said. But she thinks she understands why: No one’s ever seen anything like Psyche.

Planetary scientists think the Psyche asteroid is an archaeological treasure, a remnant of the early, violent era of the solar system when thousands of rocky bodies orbited the juvenile sun and crashed into one another. Psyche could be a broken planet’s core, scientists think — which could offer an indirect way of modeling what’s inside our home world.

“It really is a giant question mark how these metal bodies came to be,” Elkins-Tanton said.

<p text="The Psyche team had expected to launch in September 2022, but as the launch date neared, the critical software on the spacecraft still hadn’t been fully tested. They feared they’d never arrive at the target and their spacecraft would wind up uselessly zooming through empty space — the ultimate swing and a miss." class="wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css mw-md pb-md font--article-body font-copy ma-auto pl-sm pr-sm">The Psyche team had expected to launch in September 2022, but as the launch date neared, the critical software on the spacecraft still hadn’t been fully tested. They feared they’d never arrive at the target and their spacecraft would wind up uselessly zooming through empty space — the ultimate swing and a miss.

“We were watching the clock tick and we started to realize we had a significant threat,” said Matt Wallace, who was installed last year as the project manager with the task of righting the ship. “We had more risk to retire.”

<p text="Leshin, who was president of Worcester Polytechnic Institute before taking the JPL job last year — and who arrived after the Psyche problems had flared — said the problem with the software should have been detected earlier, to give the team enough time to fix the issue and still make the launch date. A delay isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a mission, she suggested: “The team raised its hand and said, ‘We’re not going to make it.’ It’s way better to raise your hand before you launch.”" class="wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css mw-md pb-md font--article-body font-copy ma-auto pl-sm pr-sm">Leshin, who was president of Worcester Polytechnic Institute before taking the JPL job last year — and who arrived after the Psyche problems had flared — said the problem with the software should have been detected earlier, to give the team enough time to fix the issue and still make the launch date. A delay isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a mission, she suggested: “The team raised its hand and said, ‘We’re not going to make it.’ It’s way better to raise your hand before you launch.”

Leshin attributes many of the recent problems at JPL to covid. Technically challenging missions require intensive collaboration. That’s hard when everyone’s on Zoom, she said.

NASA officials say JPL has successfully addressed its workforce issues. JPL spokesperson Veronica McGregor said that in the past eight months the lab has hired back 43 experienced employees who had left.

“People return to JPL because we do one-of-a-kind missions and projects that they cannot do anywhere else,” McGregor said.

At the Mars Yard that day, Leshin talked about the pioneering Europa Clipper spacecraft and the importance of “getting that to the pad.” It’s what NASA calls a Flagship mission, and its price tag has steadily grown to $5 billion.

As she spoke, technicians observed the full-scale twin of the Perseverance rover crawling to and fro. It was a smog-free, brilliant day in Southern California, and the rover appeared to be having no problems making its way around this pleasant patch of planet Earth. The technicians looked pleased with how things were going. This is the work that gets no glory: the testing, the training, the what-ifs.

“All the things we do now,” Leshin said, “are the things that make it look easy later.”

Read More