NASA ’s Far-Flung Space Fleet Is Getting a Few Extra Years to Explore the Cosmos

It’s not hard to keep track of NASA’s big-ticket items—the high visibility spacecraft that generally carry equally high price tags and make very big headlines. There’s the $150 billion International Space Station; the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope; the $2.4 billion Perseverance Mars rover; and then, of course, the trouble-plagued, $4.1 billion-per-flight Space Launch System moon rocket. That’s an impressive handful for any national space agency.
But NASA is more than its marquee missions. Much less discussed by most folks is the flock of spacecraft the space agency is operating throughout the solar system at any given moment. At last count, NASA was managing no fewer than 14 active non-Earth orbit missions—from the Parker Solar Probe, which is studying the sun; to the Voyager 1 and 2 missions, which are reconnoitering the outer solar system; to the Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter; to the fleet of ships on or orbiting Mars; to the various spacecraft studying various asteroids—and more. The missions range from the relatively young —Perseverance landed on Mars just over a year ago—to the very old: Voyagers 1 and 2 were launched in 1977, when President Jimmy Carter was in the White House and the first Star Wars movie was the nation’s number one box office hit.
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This week, NASA doubled down on no fewer than eight of its deep space probes whose futures had been in doubt...

Source: TIME: Science - April 29, 2022 Category: Science Authors: Jeffrey Kluger Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Source Type: news