Obama's next budget to slash funding for Mars, Jupiter rovers

PanARMENIAN.Net - Mars enthusiasts hoping the United States will soon be exploring the Red Planet will likely get some bad news next week.

As CNET reported, citing The Washington Post, President Obama's next budget will slash funding for Mars and Jupiter rovers by as much as 20 percent. The budget is expected to be unveiled on Monday, Feb 13.

The Post said that the Obama Administration has briefed scientists on its proposed budget, which would slash funding for NASA's Mars program from $1.5 billion to $1.2 billion annually. And further cuts are proposed over the following four years.

The cuts are likely to be a big blow to researchers who have been working diligently to promote Mars missions. Over the last few years, NASA has sent a number of probes into the planet's orbit and has successfully landed several on its surface. Last November, NASA launched its Curiosity rover, a $2.5 billion project that should spend more than two years investigating a 100-mile Martian crater, looking especially for organic compounds and trying to detect evidence of past or present habitability.

In addition to the spending cuts for the rover program, Obama's budget also calls for a severing of the partnership between NASA and the European Space Agency on Mars probes that were to have been launched in 2016 and 2018.