Odyssey and MER Budgets Cut Options

[elakdawalla]

...(and even a few that worked.) ...

[Of counsel]

Breaking news?

NASA: Mars rovers won't be cut
1 hour, 19 minutes ago

LOS ANGELES - NASA says it has absolutely no plan to turn off either of the Mars Rovers because of budget cuts. NASA is saying Tuesday that it has rescinded a letter that recommended budget cuts in the Mars Rover program to cover the cost of a next-generation rover on the Red Planet....

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080325/ap_on_...HKf8Jxo8IZxieAA
No news source cited. Please excuse me if this was already posted--I haven't seen it yet.

[bmerrow]

The directive was rescinded an hour ago - there will be no shutdown of either Rover. Last weeks letter was removed from the table.
See http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080325/ap_on_...OlHz0gApw_737YB

[imipak]

The directive was rescinded an hour ago - there will be no shutdown of either Rover. Last week sletter was removed from the table.

My first thought was: w00t! Thank goodness it seems to have been a trial balloon. But a second, guilty thought occurs... presumably this means $8m in additional cost-saving now needs to be found elsewhere.

Any news on Odyssey?

(Two thoughts in one day? I'm going for a lie down.)

[JRehling]

If you go to Google news and search for "Mars rover" you get 265 hits as a result of this cancellation/noncancellation.

If you look at the same thing a month ago, you see a trickle, most of which were extremely peripheral in so far as the Mars rovers actually being the topic.

Mission accomplished. Mars exploration and space exploration is in the news, and the tightness of their funding is the headline. That's the sound that this gunfire was intended to create. There was no actual target for the bullet.

[PaulM]

I read an interview with Steve Squyres (it might have been one of Doug's interviews) in which Steve was asked if a stationary rover would continue to be funded. From what I remember what Steve said was that there would be no problem funding the management of a stationary rover. What could be done is that the number of rover teams could be reduced from two to one and the stationary rover could be managed as a part time activity by the one remaining rover team. What Steve said however was that if both rovers were stationary then it might be difficult to find the money given the limited scientific return from two stationary rovers.

I think that Spirit will be unlikely to do more than 2 days serious science each week for the next year. The remaining 5 days will have to be dedicated to recharging the Solar cells. It seems reasonable to me that the Oppy rover team manage Spirit as a part time job?

I wondered if some of the routine scientific analysis of Spirit and Oppy data could be out-sourced to India or China? I suspect that India might be prepared to generate calibrated colour panoramas for little more than the cost of the donation of computers and software required to do the work.

I wonder if ESA could also be persuaded to help out as practice for operating the Exomars rover?

I would also like to know what the maximum possible life expectancy of Phoenix is? I think that I read that Phoenix can not last more than 5 months because after that the Sun will be too low in the sky at mid-day to generate enough power to do science. I would rather Phoenix be stoped by the Sun than by a budget cut.

[JRehling]

Phoenix will eventually be encased with seasonal polar CO2 ices, so it has a definite death day lurking when that takes place. But let's not bury the living just yet!

[Guest_PhilCo126_*]

http://www.physorg.com/news125666692.html

[brellis]

Edit: just read your link, Phil - what a relief!

Regarding sponsorship, why shouldn't Google take up the slack on keeping mapping data flowing? "Google Mars" to the rescue!

[Astro0]

This reprieve is good news, but let's keep a vigilant eye on matters in case they try it again.
This year's $4m cut is 'off the table', but are we sure about next year's proposed $9m chop?

And...what about Odyssey? Demoted from a science mission to a comms relay?
I'm hoping to get a direct answer to that question soon.

Astro0

[vjkane]

The money restored to MER and Odyssey will have to come out of something else. My fear is that it will come out of the science analysis budgets. So we'll have data that never gets analyzed.

[MahFL]

Good news. Always a stupid idea turning off working spacecraft.

[tedstryk]

As was pointed out earlier, the kind of money we are talking about may well be found in discretionary funds somewhere.

[Stu]

Not wanting to kick a gift horse in the mouth and then run away with its hay, and maybe I watched too many conspiracy-filled X-Files episodes, but as brilliant as this news is, and thank you whoever tore that letter up... this reprieve sounds a bit quick and easy, doesn't it? So what was the point of all that? Was it The Powers That Be firing a "We're keeping an eye on your spending" warning shot across the bows of the Mars exploration community? A hand-slap for the MSL people, letting them know that other projects and programs might suffer if they don't get a handle on spending? A water-testing exercise to see what public reaction there'd be to possibly shutting down a rover? A similar test of reaction within the scientific community? A way of seeing if there would be any interest or approaches from private companies or individuals interested in funding/sponsoring space exploration?

Looking at the bigger picture, was this a subtle sign that perhaps, just perhaps, NASA is losing faith in the possibility of finding life - or even just evidence of past life - on Mars until they can afford a sample return mission, and this focus on the Outer Worlds is a shift towards conducting outer solar system exo-biology, on what many think are more promising candidates for life such as Europa, Titan and Enceladus..?

Discuss.

[tedstryk]

Like I have said, at the LPSC, there was a great tension between the Griffin/Stern camp and the Mars camp, and the fact that on Griffin was furious over what he claimed was the Mars program's feeling of "entitlement" to the next flagship after MSL and a mission every two years. Griffin kept emphasizing that it could be worse - he is only talking about bringing Mars funding back to its average over the past 25 years, not zeroing it out like lunar exploration post-Apollo. He seemed genuinely angered by the lack of willingness of the Mars community to accept this (and, for the record, I am just reporting observations here, not my own opinion). I think this suddenly called meeting was a tactic, possibly to warn the Mars team that things could get much worse, so they had better quit complaining. Also, it may have been a tactic, assuming the planned to carry this out, to punish the Mars community for their "entitlement" attitude. On the scale of MSL, the amount of money in question seems suspiciously small for budgetary factors to be the real motivator.

What Griffin (and possibly Stern - it is difficult for me to tell what he thinks vs his serving as Griffin's messenger) didn't count on was that this would hit the press so quickly. The quick reversal leads me to think that the purpose was to scare the Mars community enough to make the post-MSL cutbacks not seem so bad. I think this was a bluff intended as a a scare tactic, and that they never intended to actually shut down a rover or Odyssey science. However, when, thanks to the story hitting the press in such a big and negative way, it backfired, the powers that be no doubt realized that they had better bail or end up with major egg on their face.