The Interwebs are all a-Twitter about Mars Firster Robert Zubrin's op-ed yesterday in which he claims to have obtained "leaked" information that the Obama Administration's Office of Management and Budget plans to "terminate" NASA's planetary exploration program.
But Zubrin's claim is not true. Zubrin seems to have done himself no favors with his essay.
Zubrin wrote:
After 2013, America’s amazing career of planetary exploration, which ran from the Mariner probes in the 1960s through the great Pioneer, Viking, Voyager, Pathfinder, MarsGlobalSurveyor, MarsOdyssey, Spirit, Opportunity, MarsReconnaissanceOrbiter, Galileo and Cassini missions, will simply end.
Furthermore, the plan from the OMB also leaves the space astronomy program adrift and headed for destruction. The now-orbiting Kepler Telescope will be turned off in midmission, stopping it before it can complete its goal of finding other Earths.
The adminstration's decision to derail planetary exploration and space astronomy is shocking and portends the destruction of the entire American space program.
Nancy Atkinson at the Universe Today writes that:
This would all be horrible if true, but the director of NASA’s Planetary Science division, Jim Green assured members of the NASA Advisory Council’s Planetary Science subcommittee that it is not. “It is not true the planetary program is being killed,” Green told members during a teleconference, according to Space News.