Proposing Pandora
May 22nd, 2024. Author: Jessie Christiansen.
There are many steps to making a NASA mission happen, and one of the first is proposing — submitting a formal description of the idea and plans to be considered for funding. In our second installment, we present an interview from Pandora Archive Scientist Jessie Christiansen with Pandora Principal Investigator (PI) Elisa Quintana, discussing the process of proposing the mission now known as Pandora.
Caption: Pandora project logo. Image Credits: NASA/Pandora/Elisa Quintana.
Welcome to the Pandora mission blog! In this series of blog posts, we’ll be telling you the story of the mission from its conception through development, and all the way through launch and the first science results. Our goal is to record the journey of Pandora, while demystifying the process and effort of designing a NASA mission for early career scientists, and showcasing our amazing science team. Thanks for reading, and feel free to ask any questions or leave any comments below!
Jessie: Can you describe your first conversations with Tom [Barclay] and Josh [Schleider] about what would become Pandora? When did the idea first come to you?
Elisa: Josh and Tom described [in the last interview post] how we got some seed funding to do some initial investigations. One of our mottos [at NASA Goddard] is that “Goddard starts with science” — so, that was the case for this mission as well. We were interested in the prospects for long-duration observations of exoplanets with spectroscopy, and came across studies on stellar contamination by Daniel Apai and Ben Rackham. These studies inspired us to think more about the influence of the stars on this technique, andwhat it would take to help answer some of these outstanding questions. We knew JWST was going to have infrared observations, so we asked ourselves — what could we answer if we had simultaneous observations in optical or UV? We knew the science questions we wanted to answer, so the first step [towards Pandora] was trying to understand what measurements would be needed.
Jessie: When did you first start to get excited about Pandora, like as an idea, and as an actual way to address this problem? When did you first think, “Oh, this could really work!”?
Elisa: At Goddard, we're surrounded by a lot of people who are working on mission concepts from small, tiny missions and balloons to large flagships. Straight away, we heard that if we were interested in pursuing this idea, there were resources for this kind of thing — some internal at Goddard, and some external, like at JPL. NASA has a mission planning lab at Wallops, which is for small missions. And they also have an instrument / mission design lab. One thing I noticed at Goddard was, even though they've done lots and lots of missions, there's not a cookie cutter recipe or program to get you along - it always starts with something like, “You should call Bob over in Building 14, then talk to Steve over here.” There's a lot of little things, and you have to tailor what you do to your mission idea. And there are a lot of different resources you have to find. For Pandora, we got excited pretty early on. We had heard that there were some seed funding opportunities that were more towards technology development, but we tried to request some for some mission concept development instead. We got enough support to do an abbreviated mission planning workshop.
Jessie: How do people usually get access to a workshop like the Wallops mission planning lab?
Elisa: One way to do it is with a recently started proposal call for astrophysics, called AS3. It’s Astrophysics… Something Something.
Jessie: Something Something *Something*, obviously.
Elisa: It's a proposal to get funding to develop a proposal. You get something like $100k to flesh out a concept that could go into a proposal. Kind of like pre-work before you would think about putting in a mission proposal.
Jessie: Okay, so the fact that people were really excited and receptive and willing to support the idea was when you were like, “Oh, this could be real, this could turn into something!”
Elisa: Yeah. And I mean, for every idea that that pans out, there are many, many more that don’t. Our center can't support everyone that has an idea, so there’s competition at every level. You want to go with the smallest scope and the smallest proposal possible.
Jessie: You're not coming into it being like, “What's the smallest thing I can propose for?” Instead, it’s: “What's the smallest thing I can propose that gets me the answer to my question?”
Elisa: Yeah! I guess, to take a step back, every SMD [Science Mission Directorate] division has their own proposal programs, with different scopes of proposal calls. For example, astrophysics has SmEx (Small Explorers) and MidEx (Medium-Class Explorers) calls that alternate every few years. Planetary science has Discovery missions and New Frontiers. Then NASA headquarters recently developed the Pioneers program for astrophysics since they saw a gap between the smallest SmallSats/CubeSats and Small Missions of Opportunity (SMOOs), and the Explorer-Class missions.
Jessie: It was a circuitous process before Pandora eventually landed in the Pioneers call. Can you talk about the different calls, how they were different, and how the idea had to change to fit into each box?
Elisa: When we were originally proposing Pandora, we were looking at a CubeSat, roughly between the size of a Cheerio box and a microwave. We initially proposed for the SMOO, and we did the abbreviated mission planning lab. The mission planning lab was probably the most fun I've had so far in this whole thing, because you go in a room with different engineers that have different expertise. You go “this is my science idea!” with a rough sketch of what you think you can do, they ask a bunch of questions, and we collect a bunch of information on what size and orbit and other things we need. By the time you leave, you have a concept that's feasible, or you don't. They said that we didn’t have enough volume in a CubeSat to do what we needed, so they recommended we break out into an ESPA Grande [a larger, modular type of fairing] to accommodate the payload. But we still submitted to the SMOO. We submitted it on time, it went through the review process, and we were not selected. We did get feedback - in our case, the panel felt like the technical and management and cost side were really robust. And then the science was good, but not as robust.
Usually, when projects get selected, they’ve gone through several iterations of proposals. So, it wasn't surprising that we weren't selected because it's the first time we put it in. Kepler is a classic example — PI Bill Borucki put that proposal in over and over again for decades! I have even more respect for his commitment to that. After proposing once, you kind of want to throw your proposal in the trash and be done with it, because you're so over it. So, we took a break - we were really burnt out. Then, the Pioneers program call was announced. Our first thoughts were that it was a different scope - it was a $20 million dollar cost-cap [compared to a $35 million dollar cost-cap for the SMOO]. Nearly half of our original budget. However, it was being run under the Research and Technology program, not the space missions side of things. The requirements were different, and in particular the amount of money we had to have kept as “reserve” was smaller, so we kept finding things to cut to get under the cost cap. It’s like — the smaller the program, the higher risk and lower reserves NASA is allowed to take, and this was a smaller program. So, we actually didn't have to downsize the scope of our design. The biggest cost savings was stripping away the required reserves and stripping away the required overhead with project management. So we were able to just fit the project in that budget!
Jessie: So then you rewrote the proposal for Pioneers?
Elisa: Yeah! We had to develop a baseline mission — what you want to do to meet your goals — and a threshold mission. The threshold is asking yourself what the bare minimum is that makes the mission even worth doing. We submitted it, and we had no idea how it would do.
Jessie: Do you know how many were submitted that first round?
Elisa: I actually do.
Jessie: One question that I just thought of — at what point did you decide you wanted to be PI? How did it feel to be PI of a selected mission?
Elisa: It started out early on, when I was PI to get internal funding. Tom and Josh were involved in other larger projects at the same time we got started. Eventually, with Pandora in the Pioneers call, we got a phone call from Mike Garcia, the program manager, who said that the proposal was really well received and they’d send us more information. We were surprised! After going through the first round, we felt that we couldn’t really predict what a proposal panel was going to do or what they’d think of our idea. After the SMOO call, the panel did tell us some of our “Potential Major Weaknesses” to give us a chance to correct them and I think that prepared us for the second time around.
Jessie: A fun question for you - where did the name ‘Pandora’ come from? Did it ever have another name?
Elisa: It wasn’t always called that. One of the names we had thought of was Panterra, like the heavy metal band, but with two Rs. Then, when it was a CubeSat, Tom said, “Well, what about Pandora’s box, since it’s a cube?” The more we thought about it, the more we began to associate it with things like Earth and fire.
Jessie: Okay but, remember the original story - isn’t it bad that Pandora's box gets opened? That's where all the bad things come from!
Elisa: Yeah, but I think it's also secrets that we're going to understand!
*both laugh*
Jessie: To wrap up, do you have any general advice for someone starting out and thinking about their own proposal?
Elisa: I think it helps to reach out to people who have done missions before. I think now we’re in a better time since there are opportunities like the PI Launchpad. And, it’s fun. I think I'm at a stage in my career where I'm happy with my students and postdocs doing the science work, and I do management. I like budgets… when they work out. It's very gratifying when you can reconcile budgets and make a mission happen!
Notes
Otter.ai transcription: https://otter.ai/u/DP_fob0FuUdbK0yXJKD2TuAasSY
Wallops Mission Planning Lab: https://sites.wff.nasa.gov/mpl/
The NASA Astrophysics Explorers program (with the SMOOs and SmEx and MidEx): https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/programs/astrophysics-explorers
About the Author
Jessie Christiansen is the science lead at the NASA Exoplanet Archive, and interested in exoplanet populations and what they can tell us about planet formation, migration, and evolution. She previously worked on the NASA Kepler, K2, and TESS missions.