Funding For New Manned Missions Could Mean Turning Voyager Off

For 28 years, the Voyager space probe has been faithfully reporting back to scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, CA. It's gone farther from Earth than any other man-made object... ever. But unless something changes, Voyager will be shut down in October to make room in the space agency's budget for President Bush's Moon, Mars and Beyond program.

"There are no other plans to reach the edge of the solar system," Stamatios Krimigis told the Washington Post. Krimigis has been a lead investigator for the project since before its launch in 1977. "Now we're getting all this new information, and here comes NASA saying, 'We want to pull the plug.' "

Voyager costs NASA $4.2 million a year -- a mere pittance in the overall scheme of things. But the space agency is trying to save pennies in advance of the new focus on putting an American back on the moon -- as well as sending a manned mission to Mars.

A growing number of scientists are upset at the idea of slashing the budget for unmanned spacecraft like Voyager. Like research physicist Louis J. Lanzerotti, they sense a trend.

"Voyager is the same [as Hubble] -- one of the classic American contributions to space," Lanzerotti told the Post. "Voyager's photographs are all over astronomy textbooks."

But the second-in-command for NASA's Earth-Sun Division said an outside experts' review of missions and priorities conducted two years ago showed, of 13 ongoing science quests, Voyager was relatively low on the list.

"If we use that set of goals, we would be looking at certain missions that would have to be terminated," Fisher said in a telephone interview with the Post. "We have to [decide] whether to sweat the rest of the budget to pay for this." 

Under that set of priorities, Voyagers 1 and 2 would be shut down, along with the Ulysses sun-study mission. Geotail, Wind, and Polar -- all designed to document the interaction between solar events and Earth weather.

FMI: www.nasa.gov