Budget blues for US space agency
Nasawillhavetoensureithasapursebigenough tomatchitsaspirations,writesjoelachenbach
their primary mission and are still blinking away.
One probe, New Horizons, is on its way to Pluto. Another, Messenger, has been orbiting Mercury since March. A lunar orbiter launched in 2009 has mapped the moon in unprecedented detail, and two more Nasa spacecraft achieved lunar orbit six weeks ago on a mission to study the moon’s gravitational field and interior structure.
Nasa’s Juno spacecraft blasted off in August on a fiveyear mission to Jupiter. The robotic probe Cassini continues to study Saturn, and in a week will make another close pass of the huge moon Titan.
Kepler, a space telescope launched in 2009, had found 61 planets at the last count, with many more candidate planets yet to be confirmed. The longer it observes a small patch of deep space, the more likely it is that it will detect a true Earth twin – a planet that is both Earth-size and in a propitious orbit that puts it in a star’s “habitable zone”.
Nasa is eager to see what happens on the morning of Augugust 6, when the $2.5-billion (R19 billion) Mars Science Laboratory, launched in November, lands in a crater and dispatches a souped-up rover, Curiosity, to look for signs that Mars was once warm, wet and teeming with life. The laboratory will land on Mars using a never-before-deployed technology called a sky crane.
“It’s going to be an incredible nail-biter during the descent and landing, but then we’re going to have this amazing rover,” said John Grunsfeld, the astronaut and astronomer who now heads Nasa’s science directorate.
Meanwhile, the sun, which has been in the news lately after spitting massive amounts of plasma at Earth, is being scrutinised by the space agency’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Saturday marked the second anniversary of its launch. The observatory has made discoveries that help scientists understand the phenomenon of “space weather”. – The Washington Post