14 DAY TRIAL // Although still healthy and working round the clock of the surface of the Red Planet, NASA's twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity may soon find themselves hibernating for a undefined amount of time. If mechanical and software problems won't disable them permanently, NASA will surely do so. According to a NASA Headquarters press release, the Mars Exploration Rover program operating the two robots will receive a budget cut of 40 percent for the remaining of 2008, spanning all the way to September.
The annual budged for the Mars Exploration Rover is 20 million dollars per year. After the budget cut, the finance for the program will go down by 4 million US dollars. When they were sent to the surface of the planet for the first time, in January 2004, the two rovers were supposed to carry out a mission of only 90 days. However, their power efficiency allowed them to continue the Mars Exploration Rover program for more than 1,400 days after the original mission.
Rover team principal investigator at Cornell University, Steve Squyres, argues that the implementation of the budget cut would basically mean that one of the rovers will have to take the bullet and stop all its scientific activities. This would probably be Spirit, because it already suffers from power shortage and mechanical failures, much severer than those of Opportunity.
Alternatively, Squyres says that, in order to keep both rovers alive and to implement the funding cut, the team must first evaluate the options: either powering down temporarily or halting all scientific operations of one of the two rovers. The most likely outcome will probably involve the second option, according to Squyres.
To make matters even worse, NASA announced that, in the following year, the Mars Exploration Rover program will suffer an 8 million dollars budget cut. "We would have to make some very tough decisions about which one would hibernate and which one we would keep active. That's a situation I do not want to face, but that's a future worry," said Squyres.
NASA spokesperson reveals that NASA administrator Michael Griffin does not intend to force a shut down on one of the rovers through the budget cut. Further still, he believes that both rovers should be kept alive even though less money are being allocated for the program.
It is currently unknown if the funding will be restored in the future, or if cuts have been operated on other Mars missions to keep Spirit still operational. Both rovers have completed their primary mission for a long time and it is unlikely that funding will be ever restored. Nonetheless, there are signals that other missions on Mars will receive budget cuts in the near future.