Due to a reduction in its budget,the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), is having to find another $4 million USD to cut somewhere from their projects.

Now, call me insane, but I would think you would cut the funding from a project that isn’t working quite right, or one you haven’t even launched yet, not one that is proving far more successful than originally planned. That’s what they’re doing though by parking and deserting the Spirit Mars rover.

For those who don’t remember, Spirit was the first of two rovers we landed on Mars in early 2004. Both rovers were expected to operate for 90-days, but as of today’s date, Spirit is 1,413 days past its expiration date, and is still fully operational. True, it is currently parked for Martian winter, but that’s a scheduled outage, but we will not be “waking” it come the spring so we can save money. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) division of NASA runs Spirit and Opportunity, the second rover, and they plan to appeal the decision.

I wouldn’t be so boggled by this if we weren’t getting ready to launch another rover to Mars. As John Callas, the Mars Exploration Rover project manager at JPL, said in the above linked article, “Any cut at any time when these rovers are healthy would be bad timing. These rovers are still viable capable vehicles in very good health.” That’s the whole point to me, they’re working, leave them alone! What if Spirit sits too long and we can’t reboot it down the road? Mothball the probe we haven’t launched yet, and work Spirit and Opportunity into the ground. This like throwing away a perfectly good car for… well… no good reason. To me, shutting down the working rovers is worse than having a budget over run.

Really, I do not understand the logic behind this at all. Hopefully the JPL will get somewhere with their appeal, but since it’s the government, I’m not holding my breath. If this has to be the end of Spirit, no one can say it didn’t have a spectacular run.

UPDATED: Who knows what the real story is, but they aren’t shutting Spirit down.  Yay!

I haven’t talked about outer space in awhile, and there seems to be a lot going on out there suddenly.

The biggest news, literally, is the discovery of a planet 1,400 light years away in the Hercules constellation. Ladies and Gentleman, I give you… TrES-4! Soon to be a HOT vacation destination for push pins?

Why push pins?

It has the density of cork, and a surface temperature of 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit. Bring at MINIMUM an spf-15 sunscreen.

The picture shown here is a computer rendering of the new planet as it orbits it’s sun, the streak behind it being a trail of the planet’s atmosphere. Apparently being so close to the parent star, the atmosphere gets pulled away by the gravity.

The big part of this story is the planet’s immense size. It is 70% bigger than Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. So, in short, this planet is enormous, but we will never reach it, so… oh well. Still interesting to know it’s out there.

Well, I am sure most of you have heard the news by now, but Pluto is no longer a planet, but a new classification, a “dwarf planet“. From the amazingly quickly created Wikipedia article:

The resolution describes a dwarf planet as an object that:

* is in orbit around the Sun,
* has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape,
* has not “cleared the neighborhood” around its orbit,
* is not a satellite of a planet, or other nonstellar body.

This definition demotes Pluto from a planet to a dwarf planet because it has not cleared the neighborhood of its orbit (the Kuiper Belt).

This decesion was reached by a vote taken by the International Astronomical Union who were meeting in Prague. As late as last week it thought 3 more bodies were going to be named to planet-status, but instead we lost a “planet”, taking the population of our solar system down to 8.

Science is an ever changing field of study, but it seems, I don’t know, sad, that we lost Pluto! It was a planet from it’s discovery in 1930 until now, and now it just seems weird now it’s just some hunk of rock out there.

See? Poor little guy! Oh well. Have fun replacing all those models, charts, and text books in schools now that teach the system has 9 planets!

So instead of admitting today is my 35th birthday, let us instead reflect on the fact it is also the anniversary of the fist landing of the moon.

Much more entertaining then thinking about how old I am.

NASA had two big stories today.

First up, a new orbiter entered the orbit of Mars. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will spend the next 4 years mapping the surface of Mars, testing the atmosphere of the planet and scouting possible locations for more rovers and human explorers.

This orbital insertion is exciting due to the numerous failures of past missions. This now puts four orbiters encircling the planet and Spirit and Oppurtunity are STILL roaming the surface. Mars is going to start looking like a NASA parking lot here pretty soon.

Now the mind blowing news comes from further out in our solar system. Saturn has 47 confirmed natural satellites and the Cassini-Huygens probe is exploring as many as possible. Today NASA announced that they have found evidence of ice plumes coming from the South pole region of the moon named Enceladus.

Why is this exciting? Well, water is one of the basic building blocks of life. The ice plumes suggest a heat source somewhere in the polar region is forcing the water that exists, already under pressure, to geyser, just like it happens here on Earth. This does make it seem possible there may be life on Enceladus. I don’t mean intelligent life, but still, life. NASA now wants to short list as a possible home to life. I am sure discussions are already happening about sending a probe directly to it.

Funny aside, the above linked article contained the funniest thing I heard all day.

“Enceladus measures 314 miles across and is the shiniest object in the solar system.”

Not sure why, but that made me laugh for about 10 minutes. Wow…it sure is shiny.

There just seems something very odd about NASA being excited about one of their probes crashing to destruction, but when you built it to do just that, I guess it’s a good thing.

We launched Deep Impact to collide with the comet named Tempel 1, a 14 km wide snowball essentially. The hope is this would give us a peak into the origins of our solar system as the comet dates from them.

Ok, here’s my question. As far as I can tell, all we did was take pictures. Most of them from a distance. According to a story on the BBC news site, scientists do think this is an exciting event.

UK planetary scientist Dr Monica Grady, from the Open University, watched a feed of the Deep Impact images sent down to Earth.

“We now have these high-resolution images and can compare this crater against natural ones. We’re going to get so much out of this.”

Why is this exciting? So we crashed something big into the comet, going at a speed of about 37,000 km/h. Of course it’s going to go *BOOM*. We spent $333 Million dollars to figure this out. I could have told them for free. Another scientist from the BBC article though says

And Professor Iwan Williams, from Queen Mary, University of London, who is working on Europe’s Rosetta mission to a comet, was also taken aback by the scale of the event.

“It was like mosquito hitting a 747. What we’ve found is that the mosquito didn’t splat on the surface, it’s actually gone through the windscreen.”

Again….why exactly is this exciting? Let me just say for the record, I am all for NASA and what it does. I am beyond stoked that Spirit and Oppurtunity have long outlived their projected 90 day lives on Mars.

I just think we could have spent this $333 million on something better. It looks like the Hubble Telescope will be shut down due to a lack of funds. Why couldn’t we have used the money to keep it running? The Hubble, despite initial problems, has proven to be a fantastic tool, providing thousands upon thousands of pictures of near and distant objects. Naw…lets spend the hundreds of millions on an object we get one use out of.

It just seems to me to be a bad use of funds in a very limited budget.