Planetary Scientists Protest 'Disastrous' NASA Budget Cuts Proposed for 2014

Supporters of planetary science are rallying against NASA's proposed 2014 budget, which they say unfairly guts funding for solar system research and exploration.

The Obama administration unveiled the budget plan April 10, requesting $17.7 billion for NASA — $50 million less than the agency got in 2012. The budget must be approved by Congress before it becomes official. Under the budget proposal, planetary science would receive $1.217 billion in 2014. Discounting the $50 million earmarked for producing plutonium-238, which fuels deep space vehicles (this used to be paid for by the Department of Energy), and $20 million for asteroid detection in service of a future manned asteroid mission, this represents a $268 million cut from planetary science funding levels approved by Congress for 2013, advocates said.

"The Planetary Society has deep concerns about the continued effort to defund planetary science in NASA's 2014 budget proposal," wrote officials from the society, which was founded by astronomer Carl Sagan to promote solar-system exploration, in testimony submitted to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology April 24. "Without immediate investment in technology and mission development — not possible under the FY14 proposal — the United States will go 'radio dark' in almost all regions of the solar system by the end of the decade." [NASA's 2014 Space Goals Explained in Pictures]

The proposed budget would include $105 million in funds to support an asteroid-capture mission and other asteroid studies, but eliminate a planned robotic mission to Jupiter's intriguing moon Europa, which harbors an ocean buried beneath its icy surface that may support microbial life. And current missions, such as NASA's Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn and the Messenger orbiter around Mercury, may come to premature ends.

Bill Nye, chief executive officer of the Planetary Society, called the budget "shortsighted and disastrous" in a letter urging supporters to write their Congressional representatives in support of planetary science. The organization aims to send 25,000 messages to Capitol Hill by April 28.

A group of lawmakers also joined in the campaign, penning a letter to NASA administrator Charles Bolden on April 19 asking that he and the Obama administration rethink their 2013 NASA budget, which is still unfinalized.

"We write to express opposition to any Fiscal Year 2013 NASA Operating Plan that disproportionately applies sequester and across-the-board cuts to the science budget," wrote Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) in a letter signed by Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Representative John Culberson (R-TX). "While we fully understand that the funding levels enumerated in the bill and report are subject to change to reflect the across the board and sequester cuts, we expect that the balance among programs will remain consistent with the structure directed by Congress."

Follow Clara Moskowitz on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on SPACE.com.

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Scientists to Unveil New Planetary Science Discoveries This Week

Nearly 2,000 astronomers have converged in Texas this week to reveal the latest discoveries on the moon, Mars and other destinations across the solar system.

The gathering marks the start of the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, near Houston, an annual conference to discuss new discoveries by scientists and unmanned spacecraft.

"This is the premiere conference for planetary scientists, and has been a significant focal point for planetary science research since its beginning in 1970, when it was known as the Apollo 11 Lunar Science Conference," officials with the Lunar and Planetary Institute of Houston said in a statement. The institute organizes the five-day conference each year.

NASA officials said the U.S. space agency's unmanned Mars and moon missions will be featured prominently in the conference this week. [Spacecraft Now Exploring Deep Space (Photo Gallery)]

"Presentations will include recent science findings from the rover Curiosity on Mars, and an update on NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter missions," NASA officials said in an announcement.

NASA will webcast two press conferences on Monday and Tuesday (March 18 and 19) to discuss the Curiosity rover's Mars discoveries and the Grail moon probes. Today's press conference begins at 1 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT) and will focus on the Curiosity rover, which has confirmed that Mars was habitable for microbial life in the ancient past. NASA unveiled that discovery last week.

You can watch the Curiosity press conference live on SPACE.com here, courtesy of NASA and the Lunar and Planetary Institute. Curiosity landed on Mars in August to begin a two-year primary mission to determine if Mars could have ever supported life. The rover accomplished that goal in just seven months, NASA officials said.

On Tuesday, NASA will hold another press conference at 1 p.m. EDT to discuss the Grail mission to map the moon's gravity. The two Grail spacecraft launched 2011 and orbited the moon together in order to measure the lunar gravitational field with unprecedented detail. The probes completed their mission last year, ending the expedition with spectacular back-to-back crashes into the lunar surface.

The conference will also include updates on the latest planetary science discoveries by scientists around the world, as well potential future missions to explore the solar system by NASA and other space agencies.

Visit SPACE.com each day this week for news from the 44th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.

Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com or follow him @tariqjmalik and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on SPACE.com.

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NASA's 'green' planetary test lander crashes

WASHINGTON (AP) — Earlier this week NASA safely landed a robotic rover on Mars about 150 million miles away. But on Thursday here on Earth, a test model planetary lander crashed and burned at Kennedy Space Center in Florida just seconds after liftoff.

The spider-like spacecraft called Morpheus was on a test flight at Cape Canaveral when it tilted, crashed to the ground and erupted in flames. It got only a few feet up in the air, NASA said.

NASA spokeswoman Lisa Malone said it appears that the methane-and-liquid oxygen powered lander is a total loss. Nobody was hurt in the unmanned experiment and the flames were put out, she said.

NASA suspects a mechanical device that is part of its GPS navigation system, spokeswoman Brandi Dean said.

So far NASA has spent $7 million on the Morpheus program, but that includes parts for a still-to-be-built second lander.

Morpheus is a prototype for a cheap, environmentally friendly planetary lander. Thursday was the first time it had been tested untethered in a free flight. It had performed 19 flights at Johnson Space Center in Houston, where it was designed and made, and one more in Florida, but it was always tethered to a crane, Dean said.

The testing moved from Texas to Florida last week and Morpheus had a successful tether test on Friday. NASA had planned to run tests for three months. The plan was for flights over a specially created field designed to mimic the surface of the moon, with boulders, rocks, slopes and craters.

The lander was built mostly with low-cost, off-the-shelf materials. It was an attempt by NASA to use cheaper, more readily available and environmentally friendly rocket fuel. The space agency was considering it as a potential lander for places like the moon or an asteroid, figuring it would carry a human-like robot or small rover.

NASA promoted Morpheus as a "green" project because methane is more environmentally friendly than the toxic rocket fuels it uses. Methane, which is the main component of natural gas, is also cheaper and could even be made from ice on the moon or Mars, NASA figured.

Morpheus was early in the NASA experimental "test bed" process and the space agency hadn't committed to using the lander in any specific flight, NASA officials said.

NASA has parts and plans to build a second Morpheus lander, Dean said: "Hopefully, we'll be testing again before too long."

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Online

Project Morpheus: http://morpheuslander.jsc.nasa.gov/

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Seth Borenstein can be followed at http://twitter.com/borenbears

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NASA's Mars Rover Curiosity Had Planetary Protection Slip-Up (SPACE.com)

All NASA spacecraft sent to other planets must undergo meticulous procedures to make sure they don't carry biological contamination from Earth to their destinations.

However, a step in these planetary protection measures wasn't adhered to for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity, now en route to the Red Planet, SPACE.com has learned.

The incident has become a lessons-learned example of miscommunication in assuring that planetary protection procedures are strictly adhered to.

The issue involves a set of drill bits carried by the Curiosity rover, which launched Nov. 26 to Mars. When project developers made an internal decision not to send the equipment through a final ultra-cleanliness step, it marked a deviation from the planetary protection plans scripted for the Mars Science Laboratory mission. [Photos: Watching the Mars Rover Curiosity Blast Off ]

That judgment, however, didn't reach NASA's chief protector of the planets until "very late in the game," said Catharine "Cassie" Conley, NASA's planetary protection officer. "They didn't submit the request for the deviation not to comply with their planetary protection plan until several months ago," she emphasized.

Conley told SPACE.com that the initial plan called for placing all three of the drill bits inside a sterile box. Then, after Curiosity landed, the box would be opened for access to the sterilized bits via the rover's robot arm, extracted one by one and fit onto a drill head as the mission progressed.

But in readying the rover for departure to Mars, the box was opened, with one drill bit affixed to the drill head, Conley said. Also, all of the bits were tested pre-launch to assess their level of organic contamination. While done within a very clean environment, that work strayed from earlier agreed-to protocols, she said.

"That's where the miscommunication happened," Conley said. "I will certainly expect to have a lessons-learned report that will indicate how future projects will not have this same process issue. I'm sure that the Mars exploration program doesn't want to have a similar process issue in the future. We need to make sure we do it right."

Equatorial target

Conley said the deviation from protocol was reinforced by science and project officials concluding that Curiosity's target landing spot, Gale Crater, is free of potentially life-harboring ice — at least at depths that the drill bits would penetrate.

"That reinforced the reasonableness of not having the drill bits sterilized, because there's unlikely to be 'special regions' in the Gale Crater landing site," Conley said.

The $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory mission was designed to comply with a requirement to avoid going to any site on the Red Planet known to have water or water-ice within 3.3 feet (1 meter) of the surface.

Adhering to cleanliness standards is a way to make sure the mission does not transport Earth life to Mars. Doing so preserves the ability to study that world in its natural state and also avoids contamination that would obscure an ability to find native life on that planet, if it exists.

Conley emphasized that the Curiosity assembly team and technicians did an excellent job of keeping Curiosity cleaner than any robot that NASA' s sent to Mars since the Viking lander in the 1970s.

Still, the decision to not keep the drill bits ultra-clean shows the process needs to be fixed, Conley said.

"It would have been better for them to check with me before they opened the box of bits to confirm that it was okay … rather than trying to ask for it afterwards," she said. "In this case it was fine. But for future missions we want to make sure that they ask beforehand."

Habitable environments

The Mars Science Laboratory is not a life-detection mission. Rather, it will study whether the Gale Crater area of Mars has evidence of past and present habitable environments.

"Direct life detection is inherently difficult, some would argue currently impossible, because there is no uniform agreement on life," said Scott Hubbard, the former "Mars Czar" for NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Hubbard is now a professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University, Stanford, Calif., and author of the new book "Exploring Mars — Chronicles from a Decade of Discovery," published by the University of Arizona Press.

"There is no mathematical expression for life as there is gravity … only a series of attributes such as complexity, reproduction, metabolism, responsiveness and so on," Hubbard told SPACE.com. "We don't have a 'Star Trek' tricorder that says 'It's alive, Jim'."

Mars sample return

On-the-spot detection of life is difficult, underscoring the need to return to Earth well-selected samples from the Red Planet for analysis in a lab, Hubbard noted.

There are three reasons for pushing forward on a Mars return sample effort, he said: The best laboratory equipment can be employed, much of which cannot be reduced to spacecraft size; many labs and many scientists can be utilized to cross-check each other with alternate techniques; and discoveries can be followed and rechecked years later with new tools and techniques and hypotheses.

"The treaty-type agreements on planetary protection specify very rigorous levels of cleanliness to prevent forward and backward contamination," Hubbard said. "Spacecraft going to potential habitable zones on Mars must be cleaned to an amazing degree, even sterilized. Samples returned to Earth will be treated as if they were highly infectious until demonstrated otherwise."

Price tag estimates for a "Sample Receiving Facility" here on Earth have ranged as high as $300 million, Hubbard said. "Nevertheless, I think it is all worth it to find out 'Are we alone?'… 'Did life ever arise on Mars?'" he said.

Leonard David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. He is a winner of this year's National Space Club Press Award and a past editor-in-chief of the National Space Society's Ad Astra and Space World magazines. He has written for SPACE.com since 1999.

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