Re: The destruction of NASA


"jacob.navia" <jacob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:4618a843$0$25918$ba4acef3@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
If the mission goes beyond its objectives this is good news.
It means that NASA doesn't have to invest a single penny more to get
science results from those machines. All the investment is already done:
rocket for launch, rover development,construction,testing, etc. The only
cost is now the cost of getting more science from the machines already
in place!

This isn't just a "harmless delay". Team has schrunk so badly that now the
number of photos and measurements done with the robots is just a
few percentage of what it could be if the team would be bigger. Spirit
and Opportunity are sending less than 10 photographs back each day,
compared to 100 when the mission started.

The rovers have been one of the most successful missions of NASA since
Apollo. The lack of money for those missions is just an absolute lack of
foresight.

These rovers are slow and getting slower due to some hardware degradation.
Taking hundreds of photos of the same area you took pictures of last week is
a bit pointless. Not much new science in that. Same goes for the
instruments like the rock grinders. They no doubt suffer from abrasion
against the rocks they're testing and since the rovers can't move very far,
testing more rocks isn't very likely to yield results of great scientific
value.

NASA doesn't like to cut funding off abruptly for projects like this, but
they do tend to let it slack off when the science returns aren't terribly
exciting anymore. Eventually, you've got to have people working on the next
generation of probes and manned missions.

Jeff
--
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a
little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor
safety"
- B. Franklin, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1919)


.

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