"I suppose it is ironic, but each government agency has to report in that way," says Brian Dunbar, a spokesman at NASA headquarters in Washington, who will be at Goddard this weekend. "We have to use a web application that was developed by the White House to do our reporting."
Dunbar already is making plans for how best to issue NASA status reports to more than 34,000 subscribers on his media distribution list should e-mail fail.
Faxing is the next best option, he says, assuming the phones are working.
The reports are to start coming out after 7 p.m. ET on Friday, which is midnight Greenwich Mean Time. Updates are scheduled to come out after 1 a.m., 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. ET Saturday.
Assuming computers are still running, the public can access the reports though the Web at ftp://ftp.hq.nasa.gov/pub/pao/statrpt/1999/y2k or by calling NASA's voicemail system at 202-358-1445.
"We honestly feel like we have examined every system, from major spacecraft systems down to desk tops and we're not expecting any major problems," Dunbar says. "But (the rollover) is obviously something we've never been through."
NASA headquarters will be among the emptiest of all the centers this weekend, staffed only by a skeleton crew to watch mainly for problems with the building's central computers. About a dozen managers from headquarters will set up offices at Goddard, effectively making the Maryland center the seat of power at NASA -- at least for this weekend.
NASA Administrator Dan Goldin won't be among them. He's on vacation in France.
But even at Goddard there won't be much activity. No computer commands are to be sent to any spacecraft thoughout the holiday weekend, just in case of a Y2K hiccup. It's the same sort of concern that led NASA to cut short the Space Shuttle Discovery's mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, so no shuttles would be in the air on New Year's Eve.
All the centers, including Goddard, are closed to the public from Friday until Monday.
Goddard will have a total of about 575 people on site, the largest of any NASA center. It's not only the clearinghouse for NASA's status reports but also operates more spacecraft than any other center. Its 23 low-Earth orbit satellites include the Hubble Space Telescope, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory and the recently launched Terra Earth observing probe.
"We've done everything we know to do to get ready," says Mark Hess, a Goddard spokesman. "We've checked, double-checked and triple-checked everything."
Two other NASA centers -- the Johnson Space Center in Houston and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. -- also will be keeping an eye on space, though with fewer people.
Houston will have no more than 20 engineers monitoring the health of the embryonic International Space Station, which is awaiting a crew quarters before humans can take up residence.
Pasadena will have about 50 people tracking data from seven deep-space missions, including the Saturn-bound Cassini probe, the Galileo probe at Jupiter and the twin 1970s-era Voyager probe.
None of NASA's spacecraft are at any risk, no matter what happens to systems on Earth, spacecraft managers say. If anything, the spacecraft are among the safest of any computerized devices.
"They're immune from any calendar problems," says Dick Mathison, Y2K manager at JPL. With spacecraft, "there's no indication of a year, date or month.
The computers and software keep time by counting the number of seconds from a particular start time. That is usually some short period before launch or at launch."
Since 1996, NASA has spent between $60 million and $70 million getting ready for the Y2K rollover. Most of that went to upgrading computer systems and software and paying for the contractors to install it.
Soon it will be time to see if the investment pays off.
Beyond the agency's field centers, NASA has to look in on tracking stations around the world that it uses for its missions. Goddard depends on ground radars in such far-flung places as Guam, Alaska and Antarctica while JPL's Deep Space Network relies on dishes in California, Spain and Australia.
"It's funny how you couldn't get volunteers for this duty," says Dunbar, who'll start his shift at Goddard on Friday afternoon. "When we look back years from and say what were you doing for Y2K, hopefully I'll be able to say I sat overnight and watched that nothing happened to the United States space program."
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