Los Angeles— At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, tucked into the hills above Los Angeles, these are heady days.
The robot dubbed Curiosity is hurtling toward Mars and is expected to put scientists on their strongest footing yet to determine whether the Red Planet is or ever has been hospitable to life. More than 1,000 of JPL’s scientists, engineers and technicians — a full fifth of the lab’s work force — have put in time on the mission.
But a dark development has tempered the euphoria.
President Barack Obama’s $17.7 billion budget request for NASA for the 2013 fiscal year includes a $300 million cut to planetary science, the very work JPL specializes in.
That could mean a 20 percent reduction in NASA’s planetary science budget and, at JPL, job losses in the hundreds. What’s more, say proponents of robotic space exploration, the cuts would imperil the search for extraterrestrial life, one of the most vexing and enchanting questions faced by science, at the very moment answers seem tantalizingly near.
“We’re on the verge of finding evidence of life as we know it,” said Jim Bell, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University who has worked with JPL on Mars missions.
With the Space Shuttle retired, many hopes rest on the proposed Space Launch System — a megarocket that could require $40 billion and 10 years before it’s ready to take anyone up.
Robotic space exploration, on the other hand, has quietly entered a gilded age. Space telescopes are peering into distant pockets of the universe in search of planets like our own. A probe en route to Jupiter is searching for the recipe that created our solar system. And JPL’s Mars missions have become perhaps the brightest jewel in NASA’s crown.
“In terms of damage to the effort to search for life in the universe, it’s enormous,” Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society, a nonprofit group that urges the exploration and settlement of the planet, said of the proposed budget cut.
The White House did not make the cut unilaterally. Beth Robinson, NASA’s chief financial officer, called the decision a “joint enterprise” between the White House, the Office of Management and Budget, and NASA.
Although that may not be a source of comfort at JPL, NASA officials insist that the government is not moving away from robotic planetary exploration but merely recalibrating expectations in a time of austerity. That is particularly true of Mars, said former astronaut John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
NASA is studying how best to examine Mars down the road, with an eye toward sending astronauts there in 2030.
“NASA is not backing off from Mars exploration,” he said. “We’re pacing our Mars exploration.”
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