As you may have heard, the Obama administration has released its proposed budget for FY 2016. Unfortunately, it has some problems with its support for NASA [1] (see below the fold for details), most notably in that it calls for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and the Mars Opportunity rover, two very successful ongoing missions, to be summarily defunded, despite strong support for their continuation from NASA. LRO has returned more data than all of NASA’s other planetary missions combined, at a yearly cost of just $13 million (~7-8 cruise missiles [2]), and Opportunity is still exploring new territory on Mars 11 years into its 3-month mission, at a similar cost.
The budget explicitly acknowledges that LRO is an extremely successful mission and ranked very highly in NASA's last internal review of its ongoing planetary science missions [3] (only lower than the Cassini Saturn orbiter, and tied with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Opportunity rover). Despite this, the budget states that LRO should be cancelled, with no justification given.
LRO is an enormously scientifically valuable mission. It's given us a ton of useful data, and it's continuing to do so. For example, LRO researchers recently published a groundbreaking discovery that widespread lunar volcanism ended as recently as 50 million years ago, rather than one billion years ago, as was previously thought. This substantially changed our understanding of the thermal history and potential for recent and current geological activity on the Moon. How cool is that? We still know so little about the Moon, but LRO is steadily changing that. But still, the proposed budget calls for it to be axed entirely, and I for one am simply not okay with that.
What can we do about this? Well, like so many other things, responsibility for the funding ultimately lies with Congress. I need you to call, write to, and otherwise bother your Congressfolks, urging them to make sure that LRO continues to be funded. The more noise we make about this, the more likely it is that we can save the LRO mission. (If you happen to live in Arizona, you might mention that LRO is based out of Arizona State University and therefore benefits Arizona constituents, but no matter where you live, please contact your Congressfolks about this—NASA's research benefits everyone, after all!)
As is always the case when contacting Congress, physical letters tend to carry more weight than emails do, but however you choose to contact your Congressfolks, it's all going to help. I can't figure out why the President's budget would just abruptly cut all the funding for such a great mission, but whatever the reason, LRO needs your help to stop the cuts.
If you'd like some details from the budget (available as a PDF at my first link, or right here), go ahead and dive below the fold. Either way, your mission remains the same: please contact Congress and tell them to save the LRO mission. I don't know how much pressure it will take to solve this problem, but the more people we get making noise about this, the more likely it is that we'll get the funding restored. Tell your friends, too—this is important!
(Full disclosure: My roommate, who happens to be one of my closest friends, works for LRO. That's how I found out about this in the first place. Still, it's an enormously valuable mission, and I would think it deserves to be saved even if it didn't so directly affect a personal friend of mine.)
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