NASA Running out of Money for Advanced Rovers to Study Life on Mars?
It looks as if Los Alamos is not the only laboratory to have had their funding capped by NASA with work almost done on the finished products, due to lack of money in NASA to cover overpriced projects. Alan Stern, head of science at NASA in Washington, D.C, said that if the project (Los Alamos) cannot finish with the money it has, it might be able to find funds elsewhere. But, he said, “I’m out of resources.” Last week the sensor at Los Alamos was more than 90 percent complete. A French company had delivered the laser, which has been under testing for several months, Los Alamos said.
Another laboratory that NASA has cut, the JPL-managed Mars Science Laboratory which is working on the next generation of the Martian rover, is experiencing financial cutbacks by NASA after it was found out that the laboratory was over-budgeted for the third time since the rover was first on the drawing board. The mission that Mars Science Laboratory is working on is to determine whether Mars is capable of studying life or not, and is a $1.7 billion dollar mission—but over-budgeted about $75 million by the time it reaches its fall 2009 launch. “I have entire space missions that cost not much more,” said said Alan Stern, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, of the overrun. “It’s quite large.”
The good thing is that the Mars Science Laboratory is receiving an addition $30 million from the Mars Program’s reserve pool, along with the cutbacks to the mission. Is one hand feeding the other—or what? Scientific instruments are being removed to cover the cutback, and hopefully will not have too much of an impact on the final mission. Some of these instruments are design complexity reductions, spare parts, one camera removed, and zoom capability in another camera. Oh yes, and once on Mars, the rock-grinding tool will be replaced by a less-complicated rock-brushing tool that is located on the rover’s arm.
NASA’s space technology, consisting of manned missions to the moon and Mars, is not the only program with cutbacks, but the two-year study of the National Academy of Sciences determined that NASA’s earth science budget has declined 30 percent since 2000. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration programs have experience enormous cost overruns and schedule delays, with NASA’s budget not having the scientific information it needs in the coming years in order to accurately diagnosis and analyze severe storms and climate changes on Earth, unless the needed programs are not only restored but also funding made available.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 6:02 am and is filed under Mission Objectives, Space Agency News, The Gear to Get There. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
