Cost of science on probes?

Just wondering - in terms of a percentage - how much money is actually spent
on the science instruments on a space probe? I know the launcher accounts
for alot.
If it depends - lets use the mars probes as a example.

Just curious.

In article ,
Blurrt wrote:
Just wondering - in terms of a percentage - how much money is actually spent
on the science instruments on a space probe? I know the launcher accounts
for alot.

The launcher is usually a fairly modest slice of the pie, say a third or
less except in unusual cases.

As for the spacecraft itself, the instrument bill varies a whole lot, from
quite low to well over half. It depends greatly on what the spacecraft
has to do, and on how much restraint its organizers exercise. It's almost
always possible to improve the science results by spending more on the
instruments, so it comes down to how much money is available, and how big
a risk of overruns you want to incur.
--
MOST launched 1015 EDT 30 June, separated 1046, | Henry Spencer
first ground-station pass 1651, all nominal! |

"Henry Spencer" wrote:
Blurrt wrote:
Just wondering - in terms of a percentage - how much money is actually spent
on the science instruments on a space probe? I know the launcher accounts
for alot.

The launcher is usually a fairly modest slice of the pie, say a third or
less except in unusual cases.

As for the spacecraft itself, the instrument bill varies a whole lot, from
quite low to well over half. It depends greatly on what the spacecraft
has to do, and on how much restraint its organizers exercise. It's almost
always possible to improve the science results by spending more on the
instruments, so it comes down to how much money is available, and how big
a risk of overruns you want to incur.

It also depends a lot on how difficult, i.e. expensive, it is
just to "get there" and be a functional spacecraft with no
instruments. For, say, a Mars rover or a Saturn orbiter it
takes a large mound of expensive and sophisticated googaws
(and a shed full of engineers to lash it all together so it
works) just to collect zero science, so there's obviously
going to be less room in the mass and cash budgets for
instrumentation. Whereas something like an Earth orbiter is
a lot easier and cheaper, so you have more money and mass to
spend on science collection.

Thanks all. Just interested.


"Steve Willner" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Blurrt" writes:
Just wondering - in terms of a percentage - how much money is actually
spent
on the science instruments on a space probe? I know the launcher
accounts
for alot.

Aren't new Hubble instruments running around $150M these days? Of
course if you count the primary and secondary mirrors and the Optical
Telescope Assembly as part of the science instruments, the cost will
go up. I am not sure anyone knows the total mission cost, but $4G
wouldn't strike me as out of line. As has been often discussed, the
price of a shuttle launch can be estimated several ways with a wide
spread in the resulting costs. The major expense on HST seems to be
the servicing mission launches plus maintaining the servicint
capability.

For SIRTF, each of the science instruments was $30-40M; again this
doesn't count the telescope. Last I heard, total mission price to
launch+30 days (i.e., not including operations costs) was $650M, but
I think that was before the April launch delay. The launch itself
probably costs $50M or so (on a Delta 7920). The biggest single cost
of the mission was probably integration and testing.

Maybe someone else can supply figures for planetary missions.

--
Steve Willner Phone 617-495-7123
Cambridge, MA 02138 USA
(Please email your reply if you want to be sure I see it; include a
valid Reply-To address to receive an acknowledgement. Commercial
email may be sent to your ISP.)

Just what I was after! Thank you.

Looks like the payload takes up less than ~30% of the cost. However, the
figures presented do not seem to include launch costs.

Ta.
Nathan

"Andrew Gray" wrote in message
. ..
In article , Steve Willner wrote:

For SIRTF, each of the science instruments was $30-40M; again this
doesn't count the telescope. Last I heard, total mission price to
launch+30 days (i.e., not including operations costs) was $650M, but
I think that was before the April launch delay. The launch itself
probably costs $50M or so (on a Delta 7920). The biggest single cost
of the mission was probably integration and testing.

Maybe someone else can supply figures for planetary missions.

It's not a flown mission, or even a funded one, but there's a costing
here for a proposed Venus mission:

http://www.msss.com/venus/vgnp/vgnp.txt.html

(it's near the end)

which may be of academic interest... admittedly, this being a Venus
lander, there's a lot more "hardware" costs than might otherwise be
expected :-)

--
-Andrew Gray