Cumbrian Sky

As regular readers of this blog will know, NASA's twin Mars Exploration Rovers have been - and continue to be - amazingly succesful. Designed to last 90 days or so after landing, the rovers "Spirit" and "Opportunity" are still going strong 4 YEARS later. They've survived technical faults, software glitches, becalming dust dunes, and even rode out a martian dust storm that tried to kill them by starving them of energy-producing sunlight. They've come to seem immortal.

But in a bitterly ironic development, it has been announced that the MER program might have its budget cut to provide funds for another Mars project, the "Mars Science Laboratory", which is in financial trouble. The proposed cut of $4 million would mean that one of the rovers might have to be put into hibernation until funds could be found to wake it up again. It would also affect the less glamourous but equally valuable Mars Odyssey orbiter.

This is terrible news for the MER and Odyssey teams, Mars science and space exploration in general, and already there is a campaign among the space advocate community starting to speak up for the rovers and protect their budgets from these cuts. After all, Odyssey is collecting extremely useful data, and both rovers are incredibly useful assets, doing great and productive science each and every day. Both have other places to go after finishing up where they are now. Both have a lot more work to do. The MER team, if reduced or split up, would be incredibly hard to put back together again, and a lot of their expertise and experience would be lost.

Reading between the lines, it's possible that this is just some political manouvering on NASA's part, an attempt to get more money from The Powers That be to support the increasingly-disjointed Mars exploration program, and the latest reports suggest that the rovers are actually safe, but everything is a bit muddy at the moment. One thing is certain - it would be wrong, and ridiculous, to sacrifice one of the rovers for that little money. "That little"? $4m?!?! Well, in Government circles, especially US Government it is, it really is. It's, what, 2 cruise missiles? Maybe even just one. The War in Iraq costs the US $4m every 15 MINUTES. The money is there, it's available, it's just being spent on other, less-deserving stuff.

One option might be to seek some kind of business or private sponsorship to top-up the MER budget, and I wouldn't see anything wrong with that. Is there anyone who would object to Spirit or Opportunity being part-sponsored by Google or some other company if it meant their mission continued? Would it be such a bad thing? This might have to be the way things are in this cash-strapped future. Here's an idea, and a semi-serious suggestion: Google seem determined to conquer the world, and space too. Why not let Google put a Google logo on MSL, close to the calibration dial - or make the Google logo part of the calibration dial - if that kind of advertising would bring in a contribution that would allow the MERs to work on?

I mean, come on, looking at this practically, the money we're talking about here is very small change to today's business community, and sports community too. Here in the UK football players are "bought" and "sold" for tens of millions of pounds and a lot, lot more, yet there are no howls of complaint. Here and across the world I'm sure, business people spend fortunes on extravagances, and $4m would be what we call "back of the sofa" money to them. Business people have already spent millions of pounds going into space as space tourists. The money is out there for this, if it comes down to sponsorship of some kind, I'm sure it is. The question is, what would such a sponsor get back in return?

This is far from a done deal, there are wheels and cogs turning over there in Washington and within NASA offices too, we have to wait and see what happens. But the main thing is to take a deep breath and figure out how to challenge this, seriously and through the proper channels, so we don't come across as a bunch of angry internet space geeks who are p****d that their hi-tech toys are being taken away from them. Once we identify the right people to target, and agree on a common message, that will allow us to make a solid, practical and economic case for keeping the rovers funded, then we can gather allies around us and move forward.

There may come a day when the rovers have to be abandoned. There may come a day when it simply makes no sense to keep throwing money at them. There may come a day when we have to accept that they've nowhere else to go, nothing else to do, and should go to sleep.

But today is not that day.

Watch this space.

UPDATE: Both rovers are safe. NASA has changed its mind. Read all about it here.

Phew!!

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