Slashdot Mirror
Mars Rovers Facing Budget Cuts [Updated]
BUL2294 notes a CNN article reporting that the Mars Rovers program at NASA is facing budget cuts of $4 million for this year and $8 million for fiscal 2009. This will mean job cuts; and in all likelihood Spirit will be put in "hibernation mode," to be reactivated when or if future funding becomes available."
Update: 03/29 20:02 GMT by KD : NASA has rescinded the memo to the JPL threatening budget cuts, and is now saying that no rovers will be shut down.
Update: 03/29 20:02 GMT by KD : NASA has rescinded the memo to the JPL threatening budget cuts, and is now saying that no rovers will be shut down.
All NASA has to do is say they found indicators of [terr'rists | oil | bin Laden's hideout | WMDs ] on Mars and they're good to go.
And for a manned facility, they can pitch Mars as the next Gitmo. Think of the security!
I don't understand these funny "comments" people post on their "websites." I was put into hibernation mode centuries ago, and only recently awoken, but I do know this... Martians need safe drinking water. It's time to melt the caps.
Billions wasted in Iraq and one of the most exciting programs since the Moon landing starts a slow death from budget cuts. Just plain sickening. We need a grass roots funding effort to save the Rovers since it looks like the second one will be cut next year.
Why is it that we can't support cheap science that provides valuable insight into our solar system and neighboring planets, but we can find hundreds of millions of dollars to piss away on some congress critter's self named statue and bridge? Is it really possible that not one person in congress can be asked to not screw us over for self gratification?
They should sell one of the rovers to any institution willing to pay for it rather than let it die a slow death of neglect. A deployed rover with a proven track record is better than an $800 million shot that might arrive and land successfully.
I'm sure non-scientists could find a use. Use it to write messages in the sands of mars.
Maybe some Slashdotters could pool their money to write "First Post" on mars.
So in twenty years, they expect to just hit the start button again?
In that case, we can rename it Rip Van Winkle
The Mothership
That's nice and all, but aren't we lucky to have had the landers last longer than their original expectations to begin with? Now that we can't come up with pocket change (in comparison to Iraq, for example), we're expecting them to work when we 'get around' to reactivating them?
What I want to know is how 300 scientists manage to take turns operating because one time me and my brother tried to share a video game and it didn't end well.
Now Spirit is out there, how much does it cost to run on a day-by-day basis? Surely there are enough scientific groups around the world with the money and the projects to buy time with Spirit to keep it running. There's no way we should be even contemplating new missions to Mars if nobody can find a use for the perfectly good and proven rover that is already there.
I am sooooo in on this. I'd like "CHA" written across the surface...
The article mentions that funding is being reduced for the current mission, but that decision is being made in the context of (cost overruns) with the upcoming "Mars Science Laboratory, a follow-on rover set to launch next year". So while they are cutting funding for the current rovers, it's not as if they're stopping the Mars science-based mission overall?
So they can spend $4000 dollars a second killing people pointlessly and getting killed pointlessly but they can't aford NASA?
I just called mine and told them to fund the rover.
Get their info here.
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
While the rovers have done an excellent job, i wonder how much there is left to do with worn out drills and failing drive wheel motors. No doubt there is a change in priority from doing good science on mars to establishing livable habitats off Earth. Hopefully there will be some good stuff come back from the ISS to justify this change in priorities.
"No one is any hungrier because we went to the moon, no one is any colder and certainly no one is any dumber. Why go to Mars? 'Cause it's next. 'Cause we came out of the cave and we looked over the hill and we saw fire. And we crossed the ocean and we pioneered the West and we took to the sky. The history of man is hung on a timeline of exploration and this is what's next."
This sig is false.
Whoa. Let me sort of agree with you... if the Bush administration had stuck to the platform of a humble foreign policy, they would have been alright.
All they've done is start a new age of McCarthyism, suspend habeas corpus, agree to formally demolish our borders with Mexico and Canada, extend the powers of the executive branch beyond the oversight of congress, lied under oath or refused to even testify about the terrorist attacks under oath, wiretapped American citizens who are 'guilty' of receiving 'suspicious' phone calls, run the economy into the ground... caused two to three trillion dollars of damage to our economy for a war that was both illegal and unnecessary, which also caused the price of oil to quintuple, and probably caused the sharpest devaluation of the American dollar since the depression...
You say the word "war" like it doesn't mean much.
The current burn rate is over $100B (that would be 100 billion dollars) per year for the war in Iraq. Simple math shows that we could fund the Rover program for about what we're spending in 20 minutes in Iraq.
It's painful watching some of the most fascinating projects ever conceived being raked over the coals of budget cuts in the U.S., but you guys aren't alone.
Some of you may have seen that giant freakin' cool space robot called Dextre that just went up to the ISS. The Canadian company responsible (MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates or MDA) for that coolness is being sold off to a U.S. company.
The important thing to realize about MDA is that it was started over four decades ago and has been carefully nurtured by public funding with the express intention of forwarding Canada's space technology sector. MDA is the backbone of Canada's space program. (as small as it may be) In addition to selling off Canada's space program, this sale also includes RADARSAT-2, which was built with Canadian tax money and is currently used by the government to monitor the arctic. The sale of this satellite to a U.S. company will mean that the Canadian government will be ceding control of the satellite which it paid for to the U.S., a country which disputes Canadian sovereignty in some of the areas RADARSAT-2 monitors. RADARSAT-2 was effectively *given* to MDA to simplify operations, but now it's being sold to the U.S. and the money is going to MDA's shareholders rather than the Canadian government that paid for it!
The only thing standing in the way is a Rubber Stamp from the Industry minister Jim Prentice. Seeing as he's never failed to rubber stamp a sale before, the picture looks grim.
So, the U.S. is not alone in being mismanaged from the very top.
Cassini was supposed to be NASA's last Battlestar Galactica. But Mars Science Laboratory is scope creeping and soaking up much of the Mars funding these days. As smartly designed and surprising as the previous Mars Rovers missions have been run, the most successful planetary missions of all time, Mars Science Laboratory is a bloated monster. For the same $1G+ we could have had 4 improved rovers of the earlier model covering the planet. The new rover had better cover a lot of ground and land in an interesting place for it to be worth the cost. Unfortunately mission planners will have to be cautious because there is only one.
an ill wind that blows no good
This just in: older programs often must be cut to provide money for newer things. More on this strange "economic" theory at 11.
Klingon programs don't timeshare, they battle for supremacy.
limited allocation of resources == debate about proper usage.
geez the mods are insane lately...god i hate our new election cycle.
...and all the other cuts that f**king bush (he doesn't deserve even capitalization) has enacted in this budget.
We can't afford that! But we can sure as sh!t afford to keep troops in Iraq for the next 100 years XD
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
I find this sadly typical of the kind of defective fiscal NASA-think that emerged when the engineers running things were replaced by professional administrators (and the political thinking that made that happen). The rovers are the single most successful high profile mission since the Apollo 13 rescue. The good PR generated is worth the budget. Witness the persistence of positive media reports about the success in excess of the intended mission, and compare with the other long term, ongoing mission ISS and the positive reactions of those who see those reports. (Not to compare with long term, punctuated missions, such as the Voyagers' fly-bys with long absence of reporting in between). NASA has people whose job it is to keep people engaged. Were they included in this decision?
In any case, I'd think it more productive to hibernate the two rovers alternately, 20% of the time each. Or even 25% each, to make up for the additional shut-down and start-up costs. Both regions get 75%+ of the exploration and science done with only about half the ground personnel at the consoles and performing analyses. Hopefully some one or more group like The Planetary Society or the Mars Society will collect donations to make up for the cut.
We hatessss adminimonstersssss, don't we my precioussss roverssss?
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
The Planetary Society immediately comes to mind as a serious buyer. They launched the Cosmos 1 Solar Sail on an all-private budget of $4M. The mission failed due to hardware problem (hey, it really is rocket science), but it proved that private charitable organizations are quite capable of raising $4M for space exploration.
The Planetary Society was also instrumental in getting the word out (and raising funds to rescue the data) regarding the Pioneer Anomaly.
More important than the funding angle is the political one, but the Planetary Society has worked extremely closely with NASA over the past 30 years. The collaboration has been sufficiently close that they've actually flown hardware on the ill-fated) Mars Polar Lander. The Society's work with NASA on Spirit and Opportunity goes all the way back to when the rovers were named in the first place, as well as the calibration target" for the rovers' cameras.
In other words, $4M isn't just a business possibility, the handover of a rover from NASA to the Planetary Society is a political possibility too.
A long time ago I wrote to the IRS and NASA and proposed that a box be added to the tax return forms that would allow people to donate directly to NASA. It wouldn't come out of their taxes - it would just be a convenient way to donate.
I never heard from either of them.
States have similar programs to donate to various wildlife and other programs. I think if there was a way for people to donate to NASA, there would be a real boost to NASA funding.
I'm boggling at the number of scientists. 300? Just what sorts of new and phenomenal information are the rovers sending back that 300 people are needed to run them? I cannot imagine why they'd need 300 people. Best guess I'm making is 45 or 55 people, depending on if they have some people dedicated to one rover or another.
What if they spent 5 years or however long it would take for getting these two robots to get within spitting distance of each other, then had them attack each other Battlebots style while recording the encounter with whatever orbiters Europe and the US have circling Mars?
If it does not line his personal pocket, then he is not interested.
I believe this is a sad state of affairs as this is something that I feel has energized younger children to be interested in Science. We need more engineers and those thinking about new ideas to try out. We need to find more and more ways to energize our people to development things good for humanity instead of more things to destroy it.
Neither of them are cut yet, and as you can see in the article, the plan is still to keep Opportunity moving next year, and ceasing operations from Spirit doesn't necessarily mean it's out of the picture completely either. While driving would almost certainly cease, and communications resources would be limited, an automated, stationary program of observations may be feasible.
This is definitely sad, but I wouldn't call it sickening. The rovers have accomplished far more than probably anyone at JPL expected them to do in their not-quite-wildest dreams (wildest being to photograph either a Martian or a Starbucks coffee shop).
We've developed a habit of expecting space missions to continue until they either run out of fuel (in this case solar power) or something catastrophic breaks. The cost of doing that, however, has to be weighed against the money it takes away from other programs which might be able to produce more gain from that money. Late next year NASA will be launching the much more capable Mars Science Laboratory, a bigger, fancier, nuclear-powered rover, to Mars. Its budget is already extremely tight. Plus the Mars Phoenix Lander is already on its way there. NASA will likely have to forego a mission to Mars during the 2011 launch window due to limited funds.
While Spirit and Opportunity were designed to live past the 90 day "warranty" that the news articles all focus on, beyond 1 year seemed unlikely enough mission team hadn't even asked for funding that far out. They've been rolling for over 4 years now! My understanding is that's costs over $100 million extra (which NASA happily spent at the time), but as you run out new things to discover in each location, the value of redundant data gets increasingly hard to justify.
At some point you simply have to say, "it's been an outstanding run, but the money can be better spent elsewhere." Are we there yet? I don't know. I'm sure the rover team would say very loudly "No!" and I'm personally very inclined to agree, but Congress, the GAO, or higher ups in NASA apparently see it otherwise. If NASA opens the decision up to public comment, I know which way I'll be arguing.
As for which child to abandon on Mars' doorstep, Spirit has been slowed greatly by a dead drive motor, is currently in a poor energy situation due to dust coverage, and the rock abrasion tool is very worn. The solar panels are producing only a 1/3 of the nominal amount of juice per day, and just 60% more than what it theoretically takes to stay alive. Meanwhile, Opportunity is currently in a good position inside a giant, interesting crater, with a decent energy budget.
Meanwhile, here's a slice of what they've accomplished:
* 2,983 combined "rover-days" working on Mars (goal: 180) * 19.2 km combined driving (goal: 1.2 km) * Taken 210,000+ combined photographs * Almost completely worn down the rock abrasion tools from use * Countless hours of spectrometer readings * Countless rocks and geological features examined in unprecedented detail * Found strong evidence in multiple forms of past liquid water * Inspired almost every space-nerd alive
Honestly, I don't think this is so sad. I mean, the rovers are cool and all, but they were designed to look for life on Mars, and obviously there wasn't any. There really isn't that much of a point in continuing their mission. They've taken plenty of cool pictures, snooped around their immediate area (the one considered most likely to harbor life on the whole planet), and found nothing. So with no life on Mars, and the rovers too slow to get to the other side of the planet and send us some pictures we haven't seen, it seems like now might be a reasonable time to shut them down. NASA has lots of other cool missions and a new capsule to design and fly, and after all, these rovers would have eventually been shut down anyway.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
I confess complete and total ignorance here. I'm just trying to figure out why it's so expensive to run the rover program?
The rovers, it's true, cost a lot of money to design, build, test, and deliver to Mars. But that is money already spent. Now that they are there, what are the major expenses of running the program? I realize that you do need staff and equipment to maintain communication with the rovers, and to send them programming, and that implies needing facilities in which to house the staff and equipment. But NASA already owns the facilities and equipment, I believe?
How many staff does it take to run the program? I wouldn't think it would be a huge number of people? 20 or 30 (that might be way off, I'm just pulling numbers out of the air, admittedly, but I can't understand why it would take a lot of people to run the program)? I realize that the scientists and engineers working on a program like this would be higher paid than the general public. Assuming an average salary of 100k per year, plus benefits at, say, 20k per year, 30 people would run you 3.6M per year.
Also, quick question - sometimes in large organizations like NASA, you can get some tricks going like paying one person to work on something that benefits two programs, but who is officially working on the other program. Could the Mars Rover program be kept alive with assistance from other programs inside NASA that need to maintain 'shared infrastructure'?
School budgets are being cut.
Pick your poison. Would you rather search Mars for 'cool pictures', 'colored rocks' or enable entire states to give their elementary school students paper/pencils and books?
With finite budgets, someone has to lose.
I would expect the Planetary Society, through a mix of paid and volunteer labor, could operate the rover for much less than NASA could, but they run into a problem in that the communications assets are all operated by NASA, and scheduling time on the Deep Space Network is not easy.
Plus, these are almost entirely proprietary systems. It could take outside workers some time coming up to speed on how not to break them (like accidentally overfilling the memory or turning off heaters in the warm electronics box).
Why continue to spend money on probes that are already in place and working reliably, when that money could be spent getting more probes ... possibly ... built and ... possibly ... there?
That must be the question that was answered with "out with the old, in with the new."
How to get on mars if these kind of projects are in hibernation? With a U.S. government debt expanding by about $1.4 billion a day how much ambitions NASA can sustain to achieve?
Can't they cut the funding until after both rovers become useless? Or cut when one breaks down to be useless? Very bad news indeed. :(
:)
I wonder if both rovers know about the bad news. They haven't updated their blogs for ages (Spirit's and Opportunity's). They must be hibernating.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I've got a hell of lot more faith in China, or even a reformed USSR's ability to reach either goal first, and that depresses me immensely. The USA just ain't what it used to be.
The solution is simple. We offshore the rovers to India, Pakistan, or even China.
"I guess I'm gonna fade into Bolivian."
Surely that extra debt has affected our deficit, right?
Blar.
The Democrats passed the budget that Bush signed. The Democrats made it it illegal to work on a manned Mars mission, it is Barak Hussein Obama who doesn't want us to have -any- crewed space program. NASA management wants to keep their jobs past the end of next January, so they are trying to cater to the anti-Mars Democrats by doing this. MSL has already had -instruments- cut. It is Bush who set the program to go to Mars in a big way, including with crewed missions. Get your facts straight. I'm angered by this action at NASA, too! It is unconscionable. It is politics and brown-nosing, not good science-based decisions.
...a Washington Monument ploy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_ploy
rj
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Rover = Old Yeller? (Or zombie Yeller depending on future financing)
This means the PRC has the US over a barrel: if we try to stand up to them over, say, Tibet or Taiwan, they'll stop buying our bonds, or even dump them.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
If it's the choice between a) a polar bear museum in the lower 48 states and some bike paths, and b) one of only two robotic space rovers examining the surface of the one single planet in the universe (besides Earth) we currently have rovers on... wow that's a tough decision.
I agree with everyone else about the waste in Iraq and elsewhere, and the importance of space exploration. That said, it seems to me that NASA in general, and operating these rovers in particular, is pretty inefficient. The article says that some 300 people are working on these rovers and analyzing the data. If I recall correctly some 20,000 people work on the space shuttle. Really, how many people does it take to drive around those rovers? If they get funding cuts, could they consider reducing the number of decision-makers and analysts and just dump some of the data online? Or even more drastically, open up the rover operation to competitive bidding or find a suitable NGO to run them?
They always pull this stunt when funding gets cut. Instead of operating both rovers on a skeleton team or merging the teams into a more efficient unit, and/or releasing the data to the community they shut one team and rover down for headlines to pressure the dollars out of our pockets. Don't fall for it. A budget cut for the extended extended extended mission need not mean the demise of a rover. It's a false dichotomy and typical NASA man-month bad management.
Spirit Rover: I'm doing science and i'm still alive!
Uncle Sam: Thats great! Unfortunately your costing us millions, so we've gotta put you down boy.
Spirit Rover: I knew the cake was a lie...
I heard that Opportunity had to take a second job as a Roomba.
Have gnu, will travel.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
I quite like the idea of the space programme, although I don't pay for the US programme so I don't know if my opinion should be counted much in that respect.
That said, I still haven't seen a great argument as to why it makes more sense to throw massive amounts of money into a space programme when that money could be thrown more directly into developing the useful technologies directly for direct use on Earth, and having less overheads. Just to throw in one example, velcro has been very useful after being developed as part of the space programme many decades ago. But if there had been sufficient funding and an established demand for something that did the same kind of thing, it could have been developed without space.
If anything, I think the space programme has resulted in a lot of new technologies for which the demand outside space travel wasn't immediately obvious. Maybe that's where it's most useful... but it seems a bit far-fetched to use this an an argument to justify spending perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars to visit space when the same money might accomplish the same thing or more without visiting space.
Personally I think space travel is most useful in improving society because it gets people's attention. People will actually support spending hundreds of billions of dollars to visit space, or at least it's easier to convince them. If you try to argue that hundreds of billions (or trillions) of dollars should be spent on non-specific scientific funding to invent cool things, but nothing that anyone's thought of a clearly good reason for yet, then people will start complaining about day-to-day operational problems like overcrowded hospitals.
Seriously. This would be a huge PR boost for some company. Having "Coca Cola" written in the Martian soil is a small price to pay for funding the mission.
US agriculture is dominated by commodities traders and a handful of middleman packers/shippers/distributors. That's where your prices come from, farmers for the most part can't make enough to barely break even. I'll give you an example from here on our farm, if you could pay an additional 5 cents per whole chicken at the grocery store, that would double our net. *Double it*, if we got that nickle and it wasn't skimmed away upstream from us. The thing is, we can't set prices because it costs millions to set up a packing plant and a ton of governmental bribery..I mean hoop jumping, to pull that off. There's a small handful of large corporations that dominate the packing and distribution markets, and *they* set the prices on a take it or leave it manner, and if you leave it, you are screwed, out of business, you can't distribute in bulk (varies state by state, but mostly true). It makes getting Linux on all the OEM computers easy.
Anyway, all legals here, we are doing the jobs that...what was your point again?
It's very similar in most of farming, between local governments upping property taxes, that you can't avoid, cost of production, that you can't avoid-diesel, propane, electricity, bought in water, machinery, yada yada, salt to taste depending on type of farming, there's not much left to cut that you have any control over except labor. It's like they are doing all they can to destroy domestic agriculture on the family sized model, and the bulk of those subsidies you hear about go to those huge corporate conglomerates.
You can compete by being very small and in niche markets, or by being hugemongous and being part of a corporate enterprise, anything in between-the traditional professional family farm- is getting wonky.
NAFTA screwed over Mexican campesino farmers big time, put *millions* out of their own little farm jobs, drove them north in desperation, then here, caused a severe lowering of wages for existing workers. Remember way back a long time ago, Cesar Chavez, head of the farm workers union? HE called the illegals the ultimate wage lowering scab labor. It's like it was designed on purpose to turn family farms in both nations into FarmAgco International, Inc corporate farms. Gee, what a coincidence how that worked out, same as like what happened to them screwing over domestic manufacturing and now white collar IT, it's all designed to make the top 1% wealthier, that's it, that's the sum total of US economic policy in any direction you want to look at, just like now it is going to bail out the billionaire investment bankers.
I love America and Americans, they are fun and come up with some of the greatest ideas and concepts. But I cant help but feel that now we have a red flag situation and its time for the citizens of the USA to sit down and think seriously about what direction they are going.
It just so happens that the Bush administration doesn't have any friends in any other area other than homeland (read fatherland) security. So the answer is: Yes, we could explore Mars. No, we won't.
Does the US government have to do something like this again? They care less about space than any other government before. You know, if Bush had young kids, who enjoyed learning about space and space exploration, the world would be a better place, since he would keep Spirit up there forever to satisfy them. As it is, he denies young men and women the joys of marveling at the spirit and endeavors of these rovers, not caring one iota about the imagination of kids.
School funding is supposed to be local and state, not federal monies.
I don't know what the costs are, but you only mention personnel. I'm sure that's expensive, maybe even a very large fraction of the total $20 million / year that it takes to run the program, but I can include a few other expensive items on their budget. The cost of radio communication probably adds considerable expense, especially for several hours each day. Computer time on a mainframe--if they use one--would be expensive. They also run simulations on duplicate equipment on Earth, so that equipment is maintained.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
This just in: older programs often must be cut to provide money for newer things. More on this strange "economic" theory at 11.
It is not economic. They spend lots of money to build and get the rovers to Mars. It is a large up-front investment. Once the science starts flowing, the incremental costs for each day to run the rovers is cheap. It's like investing 1 million for a miniature golf hangout but then shutting it down 4 years later, despite profits, because you don't want to pay incremental costs. That is NOT "economic". Milking your existing probes for all they are worth is better science per dollar because you've already spent the design and launch costs.
And, thermal cycling from Mars temperature swings is hard on the probes, perhaps fatal, if they hibernate until money comes back.
Table-ized A.I.
But if things gets to be worst and worst, your willingness to trust other to change things and make a revolution would be higher and higher. Up to the point that if the state is really shitty down the drain, then you would probably trust quickly a stranger, take arms, and march onto the capitol (i.e. : a mob).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Wouldn't the cost of continuing the Rover missions for as long as they were able to keep moving amount to about 5 minutes of funding for the Iraq invasion?
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Sounds like Big Oil has finally tapped out the rover's gas money.....
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
People like shiney things.
The problem is our brain dead leader has been in hybernation mode for too long.
Hopefully things will turn around after the next election. The country needs to
change colors (less 'red' more 'blue')!
Still trying to think of a clever sig...
The Bush administration made it quite clear that they were interested in the weaponization of space and not in space science. Space science, and for what it's worth, manned space flight is going to be phased out in favor of LEO programs that deploy weapons and weapons related systems.
Simple solution. Iraq war now costs $700M a day.
The Phoenix Polar lander arrives on Memorial Day. It doesnt have wheels. Its going land near the arctic circle and poke around the moist soil there. It will freeze death the next Martian winter because its solar power will be cut off during the long arctic night.
If you believe that deficit spending is the cause of our economic woes, then you are faced with the fact that the war is the cause of much of our recent deficit spending, and so you have to admit that the war is therefore the cause of our economic woes.
...
If NASA would just do what corporate America does, outsource the entire program, I'm sure the savings would be substantial.
Why doesn't NASA sell time on the Spirit rover to universities?
Good...you beat me to it.
So to add on to your numbers, the $20 million per year is enough for maybe 75-100 technical staff members. A couple of those are in overall charge of the project and keep track of the overall progress and have the final say on objectives. A larger group is in charge of planning operations for each rover. This involves studying the various known nearby features, prioritizing those that are interesting, picking routes that allow them to efficiently and safely reach each one, and orchestrating the observations. Running the robot arm, for example, is not a simple point and click operation. Then they generate the instructions to send to the rover, get it approved, and release it to the guys over at the Deep Space Network.
I believe DSN use gets rebilled to the projects using it, so their costs for maintaining and operating the antennae get partially passed onto the rover budget. There's also an engineering support team to keep the rovers healthy, and they need time and communications planned in for rover diagnostics.
And finally, there's the science team who processes the data. Obviously, they have a huge say in rover planning because the goal is to gather data, but they also have the task of analyzing the data and publishing reports that detail their findings for others to use.
I find it hard to believe that the only place NASA could think of finding 4 *million* dollars was in the most successful, most popular, most world-renowned, most scientifically important program they have ever done, which just happens to be on the cusp of determining whether or not there was life on Mars.
Why not cut one bolt from that floating waste of money, the IST?
Is it me, or does NASA spend $100 on manned programs for every $1 on robot programs, when the robot programs return at least 1000:1 in scientific discoveries?
The AP is now reporting that rovers will NOT be cut
Mar 25, 12:17 PM (ET)
LOS ANGELES (AP) - NASA says it has absolutely no plan to turn off either of the Mars Rovers because of budget cuts.
NASA is saying Tuesday that it has rescinded a letter that recommended budget cuts in the Mars Rover program to cover the cost of a next-generation rover on the Red Planet.
The move comes a day after scientists at the agency's robotics center said they would need to hibernate one of the twin Mars robots and limit the duties of the other because their budget was being cut by $4 million.
That announcement was based on a letter NASA sent to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena last week.
But NASA is saying in a statement Tuesday that neither of the rovers will be shut down.
.....the Bush administration puts an end to Spirit and Opportunity.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Gadzooks, man. Eschew such calumny.
NASA is threatening to cut the rovers' budgets precisely because they are so popular and successful. They do this for all their space probes. The astronomers did this recently for the Arecibo telescope. If I were at the OMB or in Congress, I'd deduct double the needed money from NASA's budget and move these missions, together with their budgets and staff, to another agency. Then I'd demand that any future proposed missions contained an honest budget for future costs.
It's basically the same reason politicians get casinos approved by saying that they'll use the taxes to fund education. It's the same reason politicians tout unrealistically low budgets for major projects like the Big Dig.
This is not a comment on the value of any of the programs I mentioned, but only a complaint about the lies that were told to get them approved.
Does NASA have an associated charitable foundation? If not, why not? There are enough space exploration fans around to easily raise a few million dollars a year.
CPI includes energy:
"The CPIs are based on prices of food, clothing, shelter, and fuels,
transportation fares, charges for doctors' and dentists' services, drugs,
and other goods and services that people buy for day-to-day living."
You may be getting confused by the "core CPI" measure, which does indeed exclude food and energy. CPI, though, includes every type of energy you'd typically use, explicitly including electricity, heating oil, (natural) gas, propane, kerosene, firewood, gasoline, and non-gas motor fuel.
All tolled, energy accounts for about 10% of CPI in the US.
Does anyone else find it selfish to be spending millions of dollars on Mars when there are thousands of people in poverty in America?