[X] My Assistant

[Ryan]

Just found out today at a MER all-hands meeting that both MER and Odyssey will each be suffering an immediate $4 million budget cut to help defray the cost of MSL. Read more here: http://martianchronicles.wordpress.com/200...rs-budget-cuts/

[Mariner9]

But there is a decadal study in the planetary world. The last such full report came out about five years ago, and the gist of its reccomendations have been followed.

It reccommended that mid-range missions be funded to cover tasks that Discovery was just not up to. (aka: New Fronteirs). First priority was a Kuiper belt mission, and Pluto was a good start since it was the largest Kuiper Belt object. Hence, New Fronteirs #1 - New Horizons Pluto Probe.

Second set of suggested missions was Jupiter Orbiter with probes, Comet sample return, Venus in-situ analysis, and Lunar Sample Return. New Fronteirs #2 was the Juno Orbiter. The Venus mission turned out to be technically too challenging, the Comet Sample Return was out of the budget range, but the Lunar Sample mission was the run-off canidate mission up against Juno.


The report suggested flying one flagship every decade, a New Frontiers every 3 years, a Discover mission every 18 months. It also said that if you could not fly them at that frequency due to budget limitations, you should keep the general ratio of missions as it was presented, and spread out the frequency.

What has evolved since then is a New Fronteirs every 5 years, Discovery every 3, and (cross your fingers) a flagship every decade.

So it seems to me that the planetary sciences community is already doing a farily good job with planning, and that NASA headquarters takes them seriously (even if not every reccomendation is followed).