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Mars Rovers Get Extra 18 Months
iamlucky13 writes "NASA has stated in the latest mission press release that funding for an additional 18 months of exploration has been approved. The rovers have breezed through 14 months of operation so far, and the money will cover expenses through September of 2006. The rovers are still operating well, and recently both experienced dramatic power boosts from their solar cells. They are no longer like new, however. Opportunity has recently experienced data loss from one of its spectrometers, while Spirit has a smudged camera lens, a heavily used rock abrasion tool, and has previously struggled with intermittent steering issues."
Voyager is useless now. (No. It really is. No. Really.) This isn't about pictures on TV. This is about good science. The same general people who care about the rovers are the same general people who care about Voyager, even from the standpoint of what it symbolically represents. Most people got tired of the rovers after the first couple of days on Mars, and haven't cared about them since.
"Interstellar space" is an arbitrary distinction. What, it crosses this boundary and all of a sudden the state of the universe massively changes? For all practical purposes, there is no comparatively valuable information that can be obtained beyond the volumes of information it's already given us from it's primary mission.
It's had a remarkable mission, and it's time to put it to rest.
If you want to use it as an excuse to Bush-bash (not saying YOU are doing that specifically), or, startlingly, make irrelevant and nonsensical references to the US apparently devolving into the former USSR, because we won't continue to fund a useless project, go for it. Everyone else is, comrade.
Plus, the Voyager project's funding was just being *reduced*, not killed. It's up to NASA to decide what to do. The comparisons to how many "hours" of the Iraq war that can now be funded as a result are useless.
Really, it's worth tens of millions of dollars per year to get back occasional useless data from a decades old probe just because it's further away than any manmade object?
".........." indeed.
Regardless of what you think about Bush, he is very supportive of the space program.
Why, then, has NASA recently had to cut its Long Term Space Astrophysics and Astrophysics Data programs? These well-established funding programs provide vital support for scientists working on data from space telescopes, yet 6 days ago it was announced that they are cancelled for budgetary reasons. Bush is pissing on NASA's science goals from a great height, but you've got your head so far up his arse that you can't see this.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.