Проблемы бюджета NASA

NASA budget fiasco reaches new depths

13:19 21 December 01
Jeff Hecht

NASA's budgetary fiasco has reached the stage where
researchers are squabbling over amounts that are "not even
peanuts, but the salt on one peanut" compared to the
multi-billion dollar overruns on the International Space Station.

The flash point was a NASA decision to stop spending
$550,000 a year to run a deep-space radar system at the
305-metre Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. That radar
discovered ice at the poles of Mercury and revealed the first
double asteroid, but its funding comes from NASA's program to
survey potentially hazardous objects approaching the Earth.

Earlier in December, NASA quietly said it would stop radar
funding from 1 January 2002, but on Thursday the space agency
backtracked, and said it would spend a total of $400,000 during
this fiscal year, which ends 30 September 2002.

The U-turn came a day after the NASA Advisory Council
endorsed the recommendations of an independent task force to
scale back the ISS program. The Advisory Council said the
huge cost overruns "cannot be excused and must not be
ignored".


Dangerous asteroids

The $400,000 now pledged to Arecibo is a tiny sum compared
to the overall NASA budget of about $14 billion. However,
asteroid researchers consider it a crucial element in NASA's
annual $3.55 million program to hunt for dangerous asteroids.

"One single radar measurement can increase the precision of
an orbit by a factor of 10 to 1000," helping scientists predict the
paths of objects for centuries into the future, says Richard
Binzel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The
funding required for proper asteroid hunting is "not even peanuts,
but the salt on one peanut", he says.

Other observations include high-resolution studies of asteroids
passing close to the Earth, and studies of the surface of
Saturn's moon Titan, says Don Campbell, head of the Arecibo
radar astronomy group. Both the Division of Planetary Sciences
of the American Astronomical Society and the Planetary
Society spoke out against the proposed cuts.


Error corrected

In a teleconference, NASA chief scientist Ed Weiler said
low-level NASA officials had decided to cut the radar operation
budget in order to leave more money for research grants.

"An error was made, and the error was corrected at higher
levels," he said. Early next year NASA will try to get the
National Science Foundation to agree to pick up the Arecibo
radar budget, says Colleen Hartman, director of solar system
exploration at NASA's office of space science. NSF already
provides $9.5 million a year to operate the Arecibo facility.

The root problem is that gave NASA no extra money in 1998
when it asked the space agency to track down 90 percent of all
potentially hazardous objects in the decade through to 2008.
NASA officials had to fund the asteroid hunt by cutting other
space science projects. Although NASA funds four major
ground-based asteroid surveys, the asteroid budget remains tiny
compared to the cost of even small space missions