Mars Critics Say Billions Are Ill-Spent

Earth's oceans have been barely explored. New potential marine sources of energy and medicine, as well as knowledge about climate and origins of life on Earth 4 billion years ago remain largely unexamined.

Ocean research is divided among several agencies and laboratories. Its primary agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration receives about $3.2 billion annually, as compared with NASA's $15.5 billion. In his 2005 budget, the president wants to cut 8.4 percent from NOAA's budget while boosting NASA's by 5.6 percent.

The annual budget of the National Institutes of Health - the government's premier biomedical research arm - has been doubled over the past several years to about $27 billion. But that money is spread among 27 divisions, from cancer to Alzheimer's to drug addiction.

To some degree, Mars has divided space scientists, too. Astronomers bemoan NASA's decision to stop servicing the Hubble Space Telescope and let it die years ahead of schedule as the agency refocuses from stars to planets.

And Earle, the ocean explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society says, "I don't want to cut a penny from space.

"But the resources going into the investigation of our own planet and its oceans are trivial compared to investment looking for water elsewhere in the universe."

For decades the question of whether our nearest and most similar neighbor once supported life has been the subject of intense interest.

That Mars is so unforgiving - more than half of the 36 previous missions have ended in disaster, including a European one last December - serves only to make it a more tantalizing target.

Space enthusiasts don't claim the current twin rover mission to be a historic turning point on par with the conquistadors' arrival in the New World, or Darwin's voyage to collect specimens for his theories of evolution.

Nor does it compare to Neil Armstrong's giant leap for mankind on the surface of the moon.

Today, scientific exploration is performed incrementally because of the enormous distances and technological complexities involved.

That's one reason NASA attaches importance to what Opportunity and Spirit have found, Opportunity in an outcropping nicknamed "El Capitan" at its landing site in Mars' Meridiani Planum region and Spirit at its study area in the Gusev Crater, halfway around the planet.

Previously, the assumption that Mars was wet was based on circumstantial evidence, such as satellite imagery of what appeared to be canyons and surface channels carved by water now missing.

The rovers landed in January specifically to check its rocks for evidence that they were formed in a persistently wet environment.