The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2019

54 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL NASA's New Horizons Senegal, Colombia, South Africa, Argentina, U.S.A., 2016 – Present By John Fazio and Heath Bailey Who does the National Aeronautics and Space Administration rely on to execute the most ambitious and challenging ground astronomy experiments ever conducted? The State Department, of course! Over the past two years, teams of economic officers and their colleagues frommissions in Dakar, Bogotá, Pretoria, Cape Town, and Buenos Aires worked day and (mostly) night to champion the cause of science diplomacy by sup- porting dozens of astrono- mers working on NASA’s New Horizons mission. Launched in 2006, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft encountered Pluto in 2015 and will soon—on New Year's Day 2019—fly by a Kuiper belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule, giving planetary scien- tists insight into the origins of our solar system. To optimize New Horizon’s instrumentation and trajectory, NASA sent teams of astronomers overseas on five separate expeditions to collect data on Ultima Thule’s size, shape and surface reflec- tivity. This information will also help to mitigate risks to New Horizons on its six-billion-mile journey to the most distant part of the universe ever explored by a spacecraft. Economic officers and other embassy personnel joined forces with NASA, coordinating logistics, addressing security issues and ensuring foreign government engagement. For example, General Services Office staff facilitated the import of telescopes and other sensitive equipment. Locally Employed staff arranged fleets of trucks and lodging for research teams in remote regions of Patagonia and Senegal, while regional security office colleagues worked with local law enforcement to ensure the safety of U.S. astronomers and their partners. Economic officers obtained host-country support and planned for future science collaboration. As New Horizons project leader Marc Buie remarked to U.S. Ambassador to Senegal Tulinabo Mushingi: “The expeditions simply could not have been executed without the flexibility of the U.S. embassy teams.” The astronomy expeditions faced unique challenges. The first hurdle was the need for a bilateral agreement between NASA and each host-country government to facilitate the import of equipment and data sharing. To speed up implementation in Senegal, Embassy Dakar—in close coordination with State’s Office of the Legal Adviser—used an exchange of diplomatic notes, with NASA’s standard agreement attached, to get all parties pointed in the same direction in record time. Early in the process, State’s Senegal desk officer facilitated a meeting between NASA’s Office of International Relations and the Sene- galese ambassador in Washing- ton, D.C., to secure support for the expedition. Together, these actions laid the diplomatic groundwork to ensure the tele- scopes and astronomers would arrive on time in Dakar. No strangers to interna- tional exchanges, economic officers facilitated this mul- tinational cooperation and helped build the capacity of our host country partners. In Argentina, the national space agency, CONAE, connected NASA to the local resources and expertise of provincial governments, which was crucial to the success of the expeditions. The expeditions also benefited from security escorts, weather reports and the use of commer- cial trucks to shield the telescopes from the fierce Patagonian New Horizons project lead Dr. Marc Boie (left), Dr. Adriana Ocampo of NASA (center) and Felix Menicocci of CONAE present occultation findings in Buenos Aires. U.S.EMBASSY INARGENTINA/JORGEGOMEZ PARKERCHRISTIANHINTON