NASA Shutdown

[icytailmark (Mark)]

just heard on the news that NASA will shutdown. Can anyone confirm this?

[Shark Bait (Stu)]

I heard the same during a TV interview with Pres Obama. Mission Control will still operate to service the ISS.

[gary]

Hi Mark,

It is part of a potential greater US Govt shutdown crises should Congress not pass the budget.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_...utdown_of_2013
See http://www.news.com.au/business/mark...-1226730724779
See http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-1...ss-flails.html

The funding of NASA is just one tiny part of a much larger calamity. The US Govt has had partial shutdowns before but talks have
stalled this time around.

[JB80 (Jarrod)]

That was my understanding, all but essential services like air traffic control, etc are taking leave. National Parks will shutdown and that type of thing.
Depending on who you listen too between 600,000 and 800,000 people will be out of work until it's sorted.

[GrahamL]

Mission Control will still operate to service the ISS.

Thank goodness for that I read they were down to there last 3 rolls of dunny paper

[ourkind (Carlos)]

partly, their website is down ... www.nasa.gov

"Due to the lapse in federal government funding, this website is not available.
We sincerely regret this inconvenience."

[Suzy]

NASA, as President Obama put it in his afternoon remarks, will "shut down almost entirely" if a faction of congressional Republicans succeeds in preventing a clean continuing resolution to keep the government open from coming to the House floor for a vote.
According to The Washington Post, just 549 of NASA's 18,250 employees will be expected to work if the government shuts down. The remainder -- 17,701 people -- will be furloughed
Even Curiosity, our rover on Mars, will face its own little robot furlough: The explorer will "be put in a protective mode" for the duration of the shutdown, and will not collect any new data during that time.

http://www.spacenews.com/article/civ...-love-congress

I guess Curiosity won't be taking pics of comet ISON scheduled for the 1st of October.
I've been counting the minutes away the last few days in excitement of the pics. Nooooooo

I wonder if the same applies to the Mars orbiters too.
But seeing comet ISON thru Curiosity's eyes on the surface of Mars would have been very special IMO.

[ourkind (Carlos)]

http://www.universetoday.com/105143/...mean-for-nasa/

[multiweb (Marc)]

NASA website shut down?... right.... I think every public service in the US is making a point and chucking a hissy fit. It will be business as usual in a week or two tops as soon as they get some or all of of their yearly budget back. It happened before and will happen again. No big deal.

[Barrykgerdes]

The poor old US government has run out of money some time ago and no one will lend them any more. They have been trading while insolvent too long why not put them all in jail like any other bankrupt who trades while isolvent

Barry

[jjjnettie (Jeanette)]

All the different NASA presences of the social media have apologised, saying they won't be responding to any questions or replies.
Curiosity has been put into "safe mode".

[Suzy]

JPL and APL missions will still be operating, phew!

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."

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

[icytailmark (Mark)]

thank you to all the people volunteering their unpaid time to keep an eye on all the current missions in space at Nasa. If that isnt love for their work what is? Also Happy Birthday NASA it is 55 today!!!