Citing budget uncertainty, NASA is delaying the launch of the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s moon Titan by a year, delaying a major development milestone. In a presentation at the Nov. 28 meeting of NASA’s Exoplanet Assessment Group (OPAG), Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, said agency management decided to delay formal approval of the mission earlier this month. Set a formal cost and schedule.

He said the delay in approval by NASA’s Program Management Council (APMC) was based on uncertainty about how much money would be available for the mission and other parts of NASA’s planetary science portfolio, given the agency’s increasing budget pressures. “Due to these incredibly large uncertainties in funding and budgets for FY24 and FY25, the decision has been made at APMC to delay formal approval,” he said.

Instead, the APMC will reconvene following the release of the agency’s fiscal year 2025 budget proposal in early 2024. “We expect to bring Dragonfly back to APMC in the spring,” he said of the approval decision. But in the meantime, NASA will allow the mission to move forward with some elements of final mission design and production, which would normally begin only after the verification check.

NASA requested $327.7 million in fiscal 2024 for Dragonfly; That would represent an 18 percent drop from what the mission received in 2023, but the agency said at the time that the mission would be on schedule to meet its June 2027 launch date. Project officials warned in May that the funding requested was below what they thought was necessary and that they were “evaluating cost and schedule options” for the mission.

Glaze told the OPAG meeting that the project team’s “re-planning” of the mission using a revised budget profile over the summer resulted in a new launch readiness date of July 2028, a year later than previously planned.

The delays on Dragonfly occurred as NASA grappled with projected funding shortfalls in its general planetary science division and many other parts of the agency; That’s driven by a budget deal in June that capped total nondefense discretionary spending at 2023 levels through 2024 and by just 1% in 2025.

NASA requested $3.38 billion for planetary science in 2024, but the House bill requested $3.1 billion and the Senate bill requested $2.68 billion. A report accompanying the Senate bill commits NASA to spending $327.7 million on Dragonfly in 2024, while the House report says nothing about the mission.

Despite budget issues, the agency remains “incredibly supportive” of Dragonfly, Glaze said. The mission, chosen by NASA in 2019 as part of the New Frontiers series of medium-range planetary missions, would send a drone to Titan that would fly through the moon’s thick atmosphere to visit various regions that could provide clues about whether the planet could make it to Earth. it once supported life.

When NASA selected Dragonfly, it planned to launch in 2026. In 2020, the agency announced a one-year delay of the launch to 2027, citing external pressures on the agency’s budget, including the pandemic. At the OPAG meeting, Glaze did not identify any internal mission issues that caused the latest delay.

He noted at the meeting that working opportunities with limited budgets are limited. The department’s priority is to complete Europa Clipper and launch it in October 2024, the official said, noting that any delay in this flagship-class mission will have its own budgetary impacts. Other priorities include research funding, as well as confirmed missions such as the NEO Surveyor spacecraft and the VIPER lunar rover to search for near-Earth asteroids.

In addition to the changes to Dragonfly, NASA delayed the challenges of the upcoming New Frontiers and Discovery missions and slowed the launch of its new flagship Uranus Orbiter and Probe mission. He also did not rule out changing other roles in the early stages of development, depending on the severity of budget cuts. “Anything in the portfolio that is not currently approved is in jeopardy,” he said later at the OPAG meeting. “We’re waiting to see what happens.”