A $208 million satellite instrument under development in Fort Wayne has been shelved.

The federal spending plan approved last week by Congress contained no money for the Radiation Budget Instrument, which was being built at the Harris Corp. plant at Lima and Cook roads.

Scheduled to launch on the Joint Polar Satellite System 2 in 2021, the instrument would have measured sunlight reflected by the Earth. NASA and Harris had said the collected data would have been used to study the effects of radiation on the planet's atmosphere, climate and weather.

But last year, the Trump administration proposed eliminating the nearly finished device, and NASA announced this winter it had decided to cancel the project.

The Consolidated Appropriations Act directs NASA “to preserve the significant investment made to date when closing out the program and to retain appropriate options to utilize the instrument in the future.” That would seem to ensure that the Harris instrument will be available for possible use on another satellite rather than being dismantled for parts.

“We are directed to retain the hardware and any other information which may be useful in the future,” NASA spokesman Steve Cole said Tuesday in an email.

NASA said Jan. 26 on its website that it decided to discontinue development of the instrument because of “significant technical issues and substantial cost growth over the past two years” and “the low risk of experiencing a gap in this data record over the next eight years due to having two relatively new instruments presently in orbit.”

A Harris spokeswoman said in an email that the project “will be mostly shut down by the end of April.”

She said the instrument is 80 percent finished, which is what Harris said in May and September. About 65 employees at the Fort Wayne operation are assigned to the program, down from about 100 last year.

“Given the amount of work already completed on RBI, we hope NASA uses it,” the spokeswoman said.

Eight subcontractors and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory had been involved in the program, according to NASA.

The office of Rep. Jim Banks, R-3rd, confirmed that the project had been halted by NASA and was not funded by the Consolidated Appropriations Act. His office said in an email that Banks “fought to include language in the bill” that preserves the instrument and requires NASA to report to Congress within 180 days on plans for collecting radiation data beyond what is gathered by the Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System launched on a satellite in November.

“The talent and expertise of the Fort Wayne workforce is world class, and I look forward to NASA's report to Congress on how it intends to fill the gap it created by terminating the RBI program,” Banks, a member of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, said in a statement.

Harris said Sens. Joe Donnelly, D-Ind., and Todd Young, R-Ind., also pressed for inclusion of the language.

NASA awarded a $208 million contract for the Radiation Budget Instrument in 2014 to Exelis, which was acquired in 2015 by Melbourne, Florida-based Harris. The Radiation Budget Instrument had been among five Earth Science missions that NASA proposed eliminating in its budget request for fiscal 2018.

The $1.3 trillion spending package passed last week retained all the missions except for the Harris project. Those missions include studying clouds and aerosols, measuring carbon dioxide, testing climate monitoring technology and taking pictures of the Earth and its atmosphere, according to Space.com.

bfrancisco@jg.net