(Curiosity remains in good health otherwise, he stressed.) For starters, the 2021 federal budget request zeroes out the mission in 2022, projecting no money for the mission that year or in any future years.Īnd, even if funding does eventually come through, the output of the rover's RTG - which converts to electricity the heat generated by the radioactive decay of plutonium-238 - will likely have declined enough by 2022 to start taking a significant toll on science work, Vasavada said. That's because Curiosity's outlook gets far more uncertain after next year. But enactment of the 2021 budget request would probably force the mission team to push one of those two activities beyond 2022, he said - and such a delay might end up consigning the unlucky objective to the dustbin. Vasavada said that Greenheugh and the clay-sulfate transition zone are the mission's two major exploration objectives for the near future. "This is just a huge climate signature that we want to be able to explore," he said. Just atop Greenheugh is a ridge that may have been formed by debris-carrying liquid water that originated higher up on Mount Sharp, long after Gale's lakes dried up, Vasavada said in his MEPAG presentation. In addition to the clay-sulfate boundary region, the Curiosity team wants to spend some time studying a nearby formation called the Greenheugh Pediment. "The team feels a bit under a crisis now because of the funding situation," Vasavada said on April 17 during a meeting of NASA's Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG), which aids agency efforts to explore the Red Planet. Running the mission with just $40 million in 2021 would leave unused about 40% of the science team's capability and 40% of the rover's power output, which comes from a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG), Vasavada said. If the 2021 request is passed by Congress as-is, Curiosity's operations would have to be scaled back considerably. And that current funding is 13% less than Curiosity got in the previous year, said Curiosity project scientist Ashwin Vasavada, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. The White House's 2021 federal budget request allocates just $40 million to the mission, a decrease of 20% from the rover's current funding. But the funding situation may make exploring this new and potentially revelatory region tougher and more time-consuming than the Curiosity team had thought.
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