JPL and APL missions will still be operating, phew!
Quote:
|
n brief: All of NASA's missions that are operated out of JPL and APL are continuing to operate normally today and for at least a week. At JPL, that includes: Curiosity; Opportunity; Odyssey; Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter; Cassini; Dawn; Juno; Spitzer; the Voyagers; and WISE, among many others. At APL, that includes MESSENGER and New Horizons. It also includes the Deep Space Network, which JPL manages but which is subcontracted out to other entities for actual operation.
|
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily...operating.html
Not good news for the Mars Maven mission....
Phil Plait reports, "17,500 NASA employees are staying home today. Out of 18,000 NASA employees."
Quote:
|
This may severely affect future missions. Any mission not already underway will have its work halted. As an urgent example, up until today NASA scientists and engineers were busily preparing the Mars MAVEN mission for its scheduled launch on Nov. 18. That work must cease, and the ramifications are not good: Launching a probe to another planet is beholden to the laws of physics as much as to those of Congress. Mars and Earth must be in the right positions for the spacecraft to launch, and those windows only occur every 26 months. If MAVEN doesn’t launch, it’ll be 2016 before worlds align again. The cost for this will be large; people will have to find other work (where it’s unclear if and when they can go back to the old mission and how much time it will take to get back up to speed). It’s a physical risk to wait as well; the spacecraft will have to be transported and stored, and every trip on Earth increases the chance of a problem. The critical malfunction of the NASA Galileo probe was almost certainly due to a delay in launch.
|
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astro..._grounded.html