Money well spent...now and for the future

The following was taken from today's Spaceflight Now:

Mission managers are finishing proposals to be submitted to NASA in April for consideration in a senior review, a process every two years in which an independent panel of respected scientists rank the value of continuing funding for each project.

The senior review board's recommendations will be announced in June, according to NASA. All of NASA's science divisions use a similar review to decide which missions most deserve continued funding.

Scarce funding, always a concern for NASA, is aggravated in this year's senior review cycle by the inclusion of the Curiosity Mars rover, which will complete its primary two-year mission this summer and must ask for approval for extended operations.

Seven missions are on the planetary science division's senior review docket this year:

• The Curiosity rover, initially approved for a prime mission lasting one Martian year, is participating in the senior review for the first time this year after arriving on Mars in August 2012. Curiosity is driving toward Mount Sharp, a three-mile-high peak believed to harbor layered clay minerals containing clues about the red planet's ancient past.
  
• The Cassini mission is proposing an extension until late 2017, when the spacecraft will fly inside of Saturn's outermost rings before plunging into the gas giant's atmosphere. Cassini's mission has been extended twice since entering orbit in July 2004. Unlike other projects in the senior review, which are on the hook for two-year extensions, Cassini is seeking a three-year commitment from NASA to operate the spacecraft until the planned conclusion of its mission, supporting flybys of Saturn's moons Titan, Enceladus, Dione and Tethys.
  
• NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, flying in orbit several hundred miles above the red planet, is seeking money for a fourth extended mission phase since it arrived at Mars in March 2006. MRO hosts a sharp-eyed high-resolution camera, a mineral mapping spectrometer and ground-penetrating radar. The orbiter also serves as a communications relay platform for the Curiosity and Opportunity rovers on the Martian surface.
  
• After a remarkable 24-mile journey across Mars, the Opportunity rover is exploring the rim of Endeavour crater, where scientists say they have found evidence of an ancient environmental that was capable of supporting microbial life. Opportunity landed in January 2004 at the start of a planned three-month mission, but the rover is still going and producing science results.
  
• Mars Odyssey is the longest-serving mission to ever visit Mars. The spacecraft entered orbit in late 2001 and still has fuel for nine or 10 years of operations, according to NASA. Odyssey is the primary communications link with NASA's rovers on Mars, and the probe is currently adjusting its orbit to fly over Mars during morning daylight, which scientists say could yield insight into ground composition, warm-season water flows found on steep slopes, and geysers spawned by dry ice during the spring thaw at the Martian poles.
  
• NASA is a junior partner on the European-led Mars Express mission, which has orbited Mars since December 2003. NASA supported development of the Mars Express subsurface radar and an instrument to monitor the interaction between the solar wind and Martian atmosphere to study what happened to the water that was once plentiful on Mars. NASA's limited involvement in Mars Express makes it the least costly mission in the agency's catalog of extended missions.
  
• The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is up for a two-year extension. LRO would be NASA's only spacecraft exploring the moon over the next two years, with instruments to gather high-resolution images, search for ice deposits, map the moon's jagged terrain, and measure radiation in the lunar environment.

NASA's other planetary missions, such as New Horizons, Juno and Dawn, are still in their primary mission phases. And the MESSENGER spacecraft at Mercury was already granted an extension to March 2015, when engineers expect it to run out of propellant and impact Mercury.

As a longtime space follower, the first five are of highest significance (particularly Cassini and Opportunity since those (along with Odyssey) are multi-decade missions and the chances for those occurring again are slight with the possible exception of Curiosity), with LRO and Mars Express important but not as essential. 

Of course, when one considers the cost of boondoggle projects like the advanced technical fighter (my contention is that keeping a proven design like the F-15 and improving ordinance/technology is a heckuva cheaper way to go, and the aircraft get built, flown, and maintained operational), it's amazing that anything close to real, meaningful science ever gets accomplished at the governmental level.