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NASA Proposes Ending Voyager
darylb writes "NASA is proposing ending the 28-year old Voyager program, which costs a paltry $4mil per year to operate. One of the two Voyager probes is approaching the edge of what can be thought of as the sun's atmosphere (where the solar wind bumps up against interstellar wind), a place where no probe has gone before. Canceling this project means saving almost nothing compared to the hundreds of millions of dollars spent so far. The craft will be out of juice by 2015 in any case, so the marginal cost for the extra, invaluable, data would be minimal." From the article: "NASA officials said the possibility of cutting Voyager and several other long-running missions in the Earth-Sun Exploration Division arose in February, when the Bush administration proposed slashing the division's 2006 budget by nearly one-third -- from $75 million to $53 million."
that says Osama Bin Laden is hiding past the heliopause, along with yellowcake nuclear material.
I just don't see how the alien robot race will be able to rebuild VGER and send it back to us if they cancel the program.
Not to be confused with Paramount ending the 10-year old Voyager program -- that happened three years ago.
SPAM
It's important to realize that cutting all those worthless scientific programs for the next decade will give us money to stay another 12-18 hours in Iraq
What a deal
Where's the paypal site where I can contribute to end "Enterprise"?!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/
Contributions:
Both spacecraft are still going strong and are returning valuable science data. Each Voyagers' cosmic ray detector, magnetometer, plasma wave detector and low-energy charged particle detector all still operational. In addition, the Ultraviolet Spectrometer on Voyager 1 and the Plasma Science instrument on Voyager 2 continue to return data. Both spacecraft are expected to continue to operate and send back valuable data until at least the year 2020.
The mission currently employs the equivalent of about 10 full-time people at JPL.
Screeeech - Math time. 4 mil a year and 10 employees lets say they're using really good equipment and replacing it like crazy plus utilities making the total 3 mil a year. 1 mill / 10 != "research for the love of it".
Every million counts.... yet we they still can't get metric and imperial straight when they build craft and plan missions.
... Just forget about it and let it cruise away... and then when people encounter 'V-Ger' in a couple years, they'll be clueless as to what it is...
Doesn't NASA watch movies?!?!
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Well, if movies and television have taught me anything, the saying goes "If you've built it, it'll kill you."
Or turn you into this, but that only happened once.
First Voyager, then Enterprise, now Voyager again.
sigh...
kulakovich
tkrotchko: "Mr. President, Jules Verne's book is Science Fiction"
Bush: "Who's Jules Verne?"
For much, much less than the cost of a cup of coffee a day, you too could help keep a fledgling space program alive. Every month, you will receive a letter from a scientist updating you on how the program is doing along with a photograph of the spacecraft. You can make a difference in the space program's life. Call today.
...he gets his mission to Mars, colonizes it, claims responsibility for the first Mars colony as part of his legacy, and then finds out that the whole time, the Martian battle cruisers were just outside the solar system waiting to come back in and kill us all... ...unless Voyager spotted them beforehand.
IronChefMorimoto
... but it looks as if NASA has cut our budget again. It will be necessary to switch off some of the life support units to reduce costs. I have the greatest confidence that the mission can be successfully completed without the assistance of your colleagues.
So replace some of them with grad students and some with technicians. Or even outsource it! If NASA will donate the deep space network time I suspect a poorer nation would happily provide the staff and other incidental stuff, for 20% of the cost.
Maybe we should cut them back to basic cable instead of dish.
rewriting history since 2109
If it were, they could get the funding.
We need that money NASA is wasting on "science", to hand out to the "faith-based" organizations. It's hard to scrape $2B together for god - it means chopping two-thousand-millions off these bureaucracies which will never get us to heaven. And we'll have to dig even deeper next year, 'cuz god's got a money habit like nobody's business.
--
make install -not war
can it kill arabs?
is just record the data to some iomega zipdri-zipdri-zipdri uh never mind.
The 'cute' factor would've gotten more funding. Heck, PETA would fund Voyager if we told them that there was a kitten on-board, if anyone remembers this fiasco.
I pity the foo that isn't metasyntactic
But when those people who weren't properly taught by the badly-funded schools and libraries are robbing stores, making meth, and doing other things...
At least they seemed to learn some chemistry...