Mars explorers should be ecstatic. At Cape Canaveral, the biggest, most sophisticated rover ever aimed at our planetary neighbor sits atop a towering Atlas V rocket. Dubbed Curiosity, the $2.5 billion dune buggy-sized robotic scientist is poised for a Nov. 25 launch. Arrival is scheduled for next August.
And yet, top Mars scientists are worried and angry. They fear an end to a carefully-crafted campaign underway since 1994 to explore the red planet ahead of an eventual human landing.
Haggard-faced and weary-eyed, an international team of six researchers climbed out of a set of claustrophobic windowless capsules where they spent 520 days on a mock mission to Mars. (Nov. 4)
At a White House meeting during the last week of October, administration officials “were clearly not very keen on signing up” for unmanned Mars missions in 2016 and 2018, said Daniel Britt, who attended the meeting as head of the planetary science division of the American Astronomical Society.
That presents an international problem. In 2009, NASA agreed to jointly fund the dual missions with the European Space Agency, a longtime partner in space. But now, “the administration’s position is that they cannot commit to the plan of Mars in 2016 and 2018,” said Jim Green, director of NASA’s planetary science division.
Because interplanetary missions can take a decade to plan and build, Mars scientists say time is running out to fund the two probes.
“The Mars program is now in a trajectory to, in effect, go out of business,” said Scott Hubbard, a Stanford University professor who revitalized NASA’s Mars exploration program after two missions to the planet failed in 1999. “That would be a tragedy.”
White House officials said no decision to kill the Mars program has been made. The administration is deliberating how to mete out NASA’s uncertain budget, said Rick Weiss, a spokesman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy,
On Thursday, the Senate and House began negotiating the NASA budget for fiscal year 2012. The Senate version, passed earlier in the week, would provide $17.9 billion, including $1.5 billion for the planetary science division, which houses the Mars program. The Republican-led House wants to cut the agency budget to $16.8 billion.
“It would not be appropriate to discuss detailed budget outcomes while deliberations are ongoing,” Weiss said in an e-mailed statement Friday. “Even in these times of fiscal restraint, President Obama has laid out an ambitious plan of exploration and discovery for NASA that includes . . . robotic missions as well as the ultimate goal of a human mission to Mars.”
But the Mars campaign faces intense pressures as NASA seeks to finish the hugely over-budget James Webb Space Telescope and build a giant new rocket, the Space Launch System, which was announced in September.
For now, NASA is moving ahead with planning the 2016 and 2018 Mars missions, the next steps in an effort to deliver a huge scientific prize to Earth: Precious canisters of Martian rocks and soil.
“There’s broad consensus that Mars once had a habitable environment,” said veteran Mars explorer Jim Bell, president of the Planetary Society. “It may still be habitable below the surface.”
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