What Comes Next For NASA After Juno? Not Much_University of Idaho[아이다호대학교,대입정보포털]
• This article was written by Nell Greenfieldboyce and aired on NPR's "All Things Considered" on July 5, 2016. Listen to the broadcast here.
The exploration of our outer solar system is about to hit a real slump.
NASA is celebrating Juno's arrival at Jupiter, but in less than two years, Juno will be gone — it's slated to plunge into the gas giant and burn up. The Cassini spacecraft, now orbiting Saturn, will meet the same fate next year.
"It'll be the first time since the 1970s that there will be no NASA presence in the outer planets," says Casey Dreier, director of space policy at The Planetary Society. "For the first time in 40 years, the lights will go out in the outer solar system."
NASA does have some upcoming missions closer to home. In September, one mission will go off toward an asteroid, aiming to return a sample to Earth. And there are a couple of missions that will go back to Mars: a big rover in 2020, and a lander that was supposed to launch this year but got delayed until 2018.
"The only reason we have any mission between now and the next four years, essentially, is because one mission missed its launch window," says Dreier. "So there is a real precipice that we're approaching."
Usually NASA has one or two launches of planetary missions a year, says Jason Barnes of the University of Idaho, who chairs the division for planetary sciences of the American Astronomical Society.
"Basically we're suffering now from what were budget cuts to the planetary budget that started in 2013 with the sequester," Barnes says.
NASA's planetary science budget got slashed by about 20 percent, and managers scrambled to save missions that were already underway. Barnes says almost all planning for future missions was put off.
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