The president's 2013 budget request eliminates funding for the 2016 mission, which received $27 million this year, as part of a 20% cut to NASA's planetary science division.
The president's 2013 budget request eliminates funding for the 2016 Mars mission called Trace Gas Orbiter, which received $27 million this year, as part of a 20% cut to NASA's planetary science division.
"We haven't asked N.S.F. to operate any of our spacecraft," said James L. Green, director of NASA's planetary science division.
Those search programs are focused on larger asteroids, James Green, director of the planetary science division of NASA, told the Senate panel, the Science and Space Subcommittee.
NASA's planetary science division agreed in 2013 to pay $50m a year to the Department of Energy to resume production of plutonium-238, which is used as a power source in probes to distant objects and to places where solar power is less reliable (see article).The Europeans, by contrast, have kept their funding fairly steady.
Unfortunately, an apex already implies a fall, and the Obama administration's proposed NASA budget for 2013 seemingly wants to make that fall as immediate as possible, chopping $300 million from the agency's planetary science division — a whopping 20 percent cut from 2012.
As reported by The Guardian, Nasa's planetary science division director Jim Green thinks that the ultraviolet light on Mars may have killed any microorganisms that Curiosity may have brought with it, making it sterile and suitable to approach the RSLs - but other research suggests that the dust on the planet's surface could have protected the microbes and made it easier for them to survive.
The planetary science division was a chief recipient.
And as usual, NASA's planetary science division, a favorite of key congressional appropriators, did best of all, with a 13.4% boost to $1.63 billion.
