Now, I've been on the wrong end of an federal department investigation, so I'm somewhat cynical about the process. But this would not be happening is, for good reasons or bad, high up folks in NASA did not have significant concerns about Dawn's prospects for success.

Let me suggest a conspiracy theory behind the EO cancelation. While money is sure to be tight, and an axe is going to be aimed somewhere, the choice of EO and TPF may have been performed by someone who wanted to see as little as possible in the way of cuts and reckoned slyly that those two missions are most likely to get a reprieve (by Congressional fiat). If so, putting them in harm's way, which they will, as my theory goes, escape, leads to the least eventual cuts, because putting some other projects in harm's way might have been harder to reverse.

In other words, the sort of campaign that saved NH is not to be considered an extraordinary follow-on to "the system", but part of the de facto system. And in some sense, these missions aren't in jeopardy until a similar movement fails to save them. Warm oceans nearby and earthlike worlds far off should perk some interest, what say...

First good closeup of the layered rocks..unfortunately half the pic is missing.

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/pa...55P2578L2M1.JPG

If Oberg knows that the Russian picture is "ripped off" then he ought to be able to identify the source.  (He doesn't.)  If he doesn't know what the source is, then he has no basis for accusing the Russians of ripping it off.  Either he's sloppy, or he's making unsupportable accusations -- I don't know which.

This is incomprehensible to me. Dawn may be cancelled, but congress approved next 6.2 billion dollars for ISS and pseudo-experiments like this SuitSat experiment.

SuitSat experiment

Spirit, Cassini, New Horizons and Dawn it's real space exploration. Gravity Probe B it's real great scientific experiment !

SuitSat and other "great" ISS's experiments (mostly biological), it's scientific humbug. Wasted 100 billion dollars and counting, therefore no money for Down, no money for real science.

When all you have is an impactor, everything looks like a comet? 

I do wonder, though, whether it might be possible to augment its previous budget with the $35 million that goes to the next Discovery Mission of Opportunity, allowing it to fly after all, albeit late.  NASA might be amenable to this way out of the problem, given how close the craft is to completion.  I intend to look into this.

Thanks, Pat, I'd forgotten about that detail.  I just posted the story here.

--Emily

Another Stardust press confeence coming up next week, I wonder if they've found something unusual  :

NASA ANNOUNCES STARDUST MISSION MEDIA UPDATE

The next Stardust comet mission media briefing is at 1 p.m. EST (noon,
CST), Tuesday, Jan 24 in room 135, Building 2, Johnson Space Center,
2101 NASA Parkway, Houston.

The briefing will be live on NASA TV with questions also from
reporters at participating agency centers. NASA experts will discuss
the analysis of comet and interstellar dust samples returned by the
Stardust spacecraft.

Participants:
-- Dr. Donald Brownlee, Stardust Principal Investigator, University of
Washington, Seattle
-- Dr. Peter Tsou, Deputy Principal Investigator, Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
-- Dr. Michael Zolensky, Stardust Curator and Co-investigator, Johnson
Space Center

Easy for you to say -- as of right now, assuming NH gets off before the Jupiter-assist window closes, I will be 59 years old when it gets to Pluto.  If we slip past early February and have to take one of the direct-to-Pluto trajectories, I'll be 64 or 65 when NH arrives.

Not that I'm being morbidly concerned about my own lifespan, but when you start talking about the range between 59 and 65, especially in white American males, you're looking at the age range during which a majority of us die.

I *really* want to see NH encounter Pluto.  My odds of seeing it are *greatly* enhanced if it takes 9 and not 15 years to get there...

-the other Doug

If we are talking purely about alignment and origin, I still think the oceans are worthly of a good head scratch - Magnetic moments originating in the oceans could be selectively magnitizing the underlying core materials - a small dynamo driving the otherwise chaotic ramblings of a much larger one. This is consistent with metal deposits in the continental crusts piling up in anomalies, since they don't get their daily dose of order.

Since the ESA -- to my amazement -- seems to be serious about flying ExoMars (maybe serious enough to cancel BepiColombo for it), the obvious question is: should both it AND MSL be sent to phyllosilicate sites, or should one of them be sent to a different type of terrain, such as a Meridiani-type sulfate deposit?  (A pretty strong case can be made, actually, that they SHOULD both go to diferent phyllosilicate sites.)