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Engadget
5 days ago
- Politics
- Engadget
Trump's defunding of NASA would be catastrophic
"This is probably the most uncertain future NASA has faced, maybe since the end of Apollo," Casey Dreier tells me over the phone. Dreier is the chief of space policy at The Planetary Society, a nonprofit that advocates for the exploration and study of space. On July 10, the Senate Appropriations Committee met to discuss the proposed federal Commerce, Justice and Science budget for 2026. While on average, funding for NASA has accounted for about 0.3 percent of total yearly spending by the federal government since the start of the 2010s, President Trump has called for a 24 percent cut year over year to the agency's operating allowance. By any metric, his plan would be devastating. Adjusted for inflation, it would leave NASA with the smallest operating budget it has had since Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel to space in 1961. In the process, it would eviscerate the agency's science budget by nearly half, resulting in the termination of 55 ongoing and or planned missions. It would also leave NASA with its smallest workforce in 70 years. All this, at a time when the agency has been tasked with returning to the Moon and bringing the first humans to Mars. "There's no historical precedent to this level of single year, functionally indiscriminate and dramatic cuts. You lose, in one year, a third of all active science projects. [The Trump administration is] proposing to turn off missions that are performing not just good science, but unique and irreplaceable science. This isn't so they can reinvest the money in some radical new science efforts. No, the money is gone," said Dreier. "It's almost certainly the greatest threat to NASA science activities in the history of the space agency." Dreier isn't exaggerating when he says some missions would be impossible to replace. One of the casualties of Trump's cuts would be the New Horizons probe. In 2015, New Horizons gave us our best look at Pluto ever. Four years later, it performed the farthest flyby in human history. As things stand, it's the only active spacecraft in the Kuiper belt, a region of our solar system that is not well-understood by scientists. Even if NASA were to start working on a replacement today, it would take a generation for that vehicle to reach where New Horizons is right now. It costs NASA about $14.7 million per year to continue operating the probe, a fraction of the $29.9 billion in additional funding Congress allocated to fund ICE enforcement and detainment operations in the president's recently passed tax bill. Another mission that would be impossible to replace is OSIRIS-APEX. If the name sounds familiar, it's because OSRIS-APEX is a continuation of NASA's incredibly successful OSRIS-REx flight. In 2020, the spacecraft visited 101955 Bennu, an ancient asteroid about the size of the Empire State Building, and collected a sample of regolith (rocks and dirt) from its surface using a never-before-tried technique. After OSRIS-REx successfully returned the sample to Earth, NASA decided to extend the spacecraft's mission and fly to another asteroid, 99942 Apophis. In 2029, Apophis will pass about 19,600 miles from Earth. It will be the closest approach of any known asteroid of its size. NASA said the extension would add $200 million to a mission that had already cost it an estimated $1.16 billion. "This project is a pennies on the dollar repurposing of an existing spacecraft. It's the only American spacecraft that will be at Apophis for a once in a generation opportunity to study an asteroid that will just barely miss us," said Dreier. "That seems important to know." At a time when nearly every facet of American life is being upturned, the potential cancellation of dozens of NASA missions might seem a distant concern, but the gutting of the agency's science budget would have a ripple effect on communities across the US. "NASA is an engine for jobs in the country, and for every NASA job, there are many more that are created in the private workforce," said Bethany Ehlmann, Professor of Planetary Science at the California Institute of Technology. She also serves on the board of directors for The Planetary Society. Professor Ehlmann's claim is supported by NASA's own data. In 2023, the agency employed 17,823 full-time civil servants nationwide. With NASA's private sector support factored in, that year the agency's missions were responsible for sustaining 304,803 jobs across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Put another way, for every full-time equivalent job at a NASA facility, NASA supports at least 16 private sector jobs. "Space science has been broadly supported and impacts roughly three quarters of every congressional district in the country," said Dreier. "It's not just a red or blue state thing." Following last week's Senate meeting, policymakers from both parties said they would push back on President Trump's NASA budget cuts. On Tuesday, the House Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies passed a funding bill that would provide NASA with a total budget of $24.8 billion for 2026, or the same amount it was allocated this year. The week before, the corresponding subcommittee in the Senate passed its own NASA funding bill. The two versions differ on one critical detail. The Senate legislation maintains the agency's science budget at $7.3 billion, while the House version seeks to reduce it by 18 percent to $6 billion. Separately, the House is calling for a 23 percent cut to the National Science Foundation's budget. NSF funds much of the nation's astronomy research. "What I'm hearing from lawmakers is that they understand how important NASA is to industry. They understand how important NASA is to universities in terms of training, and providing grants that train the next generation of the space workforce," said Professor Ehlmann, who was on Capitol Hill last week. The House and Senate will need to come to an agreement for the bill to move forward. Even with many lawmakers in favor of maintaining NASA's budget, a flat budget is still a funding cut when accounting for inflation. Moreover, NASA has already been negatively affected by the Trump administration's efforts to trim the federal workforce. According to reporting Politico published on July 9, 2,694 NASA employees have agreed to leave the agency through either early retirement, a buyout or a deferred resignation. Of those individuals, 2,145 are workers in senior positions and 1,818 are staff serving in missions areas like human spaceflight and science. "Once the workforce is gone, they're gone. You lose a ton of institutional knowledge," said Dreier. The employees who have agreed to leave represent about 15 percent of NASA's 2023 workforce of 17,823. With the July 25 deadline for early retirement, voluntary separation and deferred resignations quickly approaching, that number is likely to grow. NASA's shifting priorities under the Trump administration have also created uncertainty among the agency's contractors. According to former NASA employee and NASA Watch creator Keith Cowing the workforce cuts are already affecting employees. "In the 40 years I've been involved with NASA in one way or another, I've never seen morale so bad," he said. "Is NASA bloated? Yeah, but the way you deal with bloat is to go in with a scalpel and you cut carefully. And yet you have people [like Elon Musk] standing on stage with chainsaws. That is not the way to run government, and it's certainly not the way to create the machinery needed to explore the universe." Whatever happens next, Dreier worries there's the potential for there to be an erosion in public support for NASA. He points to a survey published by Pew Research. In 2023, the organization found that monitoring for asteroids that could hit Earth and tracking changes to the planet's climate were the two activities Americans wanted NASA to prioritize over other mandates. By contrast, sending human astronauts to the Moon and Mars were the least important priorities for the public. The House version of NASA's 2026 budget would boost the agency's exploration budget by 25 percent to $9.7 billion. In Trump's tax bill, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) included language that provided NASA with $4.1 billion for the fourth and fifth flights of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket — the vehicle intended to carry the first NASA astronauts back to the Moon before before private sector alternatives like SpaceX's Starship are ready to fly. With both the Trump administration and House pushing Moon and Mars missions as priorities, Dreier says they're "ironically doubling down on the activities that the private sector is already doing — SpaceX says it's going to send humans to Mars — and abandoning the things that only NASA does. There's no private sector company doing space science." In effect, a NASA budget that sacrifices on scientific research in lieu of Mars missions would be one that invests in things the public says are the least important to it. "I worry that they're moving away from what the public expects their space agency to do, and that as a consequence, it will undermine public investment in NASA," he said. "NASA is usually tied for the number one or two most popular federal agency. People wear NASA t-shirts. No one wears a Department of the Interior t-shirt walking out of the GAP. It's a rare and precious thing to have, and they're risking it. It's not just the future of the agency that's at risk, but the future of the public's relationship with it." When asked for comment on this story, Bethany Stevens, NASA's press secretary, pointed Engadget to a letter from Acting Administrator Janet Petro NASA shared in a technical supplement it published alongside the president's budget request. "We must continue to be responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars. That means making strategic decisions — including scaling back or discontinuing ineffective efforts not aligned with our Moon and Mars exploration priorities" Petro wrote. The final NASA budget for 2026 is still months away from being finalized. After Tuesday's vote, the two funding bills will move to the full Senate and House appropriations committees for a vote and further revisions. Only after that will every member of each chamber get a chance to vote on the matter. Congress has until September 30 to complete the appropriations process before 2025 funding runs out. President Trump could also decide to veto the bill if it doesn't align with his priorities. Have a tip for Igor? You can reach him by email , on Bluesky or send a message to @Kodachrome.72 to chat confidentially on Signal.
National Geographic
7 days ago
- Science
- National Geographic
The best window to see Pluto all year is closing
Pluto's thin, blue haze glows in this image from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. Though the dwarf planet is just a faint speck through a telescope, opposition this month offers skywatchers their best chance to spot it from Earth. Composite Photograph by NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute A once-a-year alignment makes the dwarf planet easier to spot—if you know where to look. Think you can spot Pluto? On July 25, the famously elusive dwarf planet reaches opposition—its best and brightest moment of the year. That makes now the ideal time to try to catch a glimpse of it from your own backyard. But be warned: Even at its brightest, Pluto is still a barely-there speck, even through a telescope. But for those willing to search, it's a cosmic scavenger hunt—and a rare chance to see a world nearly four billion miles away. What is opposition—and why is it the best time to see Pluto? In astronomy, opposition is when a celestial body lies directly opposite the sun from Earth's point of view, placing our planet squarely in the middle. That alignment means the object rises as the sun sets and stays visible all night, making it the best time to observe it. (See National Geographic's first map of Pluto.) What makes opposition so useful for stargazing is a phenomenon known as the opposition effect. 'Things tend to get brighter when they're lit at a smaller phase angle, which is the angle between the sun's rays and the target and the observer. That shrinks to close to zero at opposition,' says Will Grundy, a planetary scientist at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, where Pluto was discovered. You can see this principle in action on Earth. When the sun is low in the sky, objects create long shadows. But when the sun is directly overhead, those shadows get much smaller, and sometimes they even disappear entirely. At opposition, Pluto's terrain has the fewest shadows, making the dwarf planet appear brighter to us. Pluto and its moon Charon perform a cosmic dance in this 2015 color movie from NASA's New Horizons mission. Animation by NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute Pluto nearly fills the frame in this image from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, taken just before its closest approach in 2015. Photograph by NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute Because Pluto is so dim, you need a telescope to see it. 'A backyard telescope could do it under the right conditions,' says Grundy. Or you could visit a local observatory and use one of their publicly accessible telescopes. Lowell Observatory, for instance, has a suite of instruments on-site that the public can use six nights per week. But even with a telescope, the sky must be extremely dark to see Pluto. Light pollution, whether from artificial lights or the moon, will easily wash out the dwarf planet. (Did Pluto ever actually stop being a planet? Experts debate.) To find Pluto in dark enough skies, consult a star chart to determine its approximate location. 'It'll just look like one of many faint stars,' says Grundy. But Pluto moves slowly. 'It moves at about three arcseconds per hour, so you won't see it move unless you're willing to wait multiple hours,' says Grundy. You don't have to catch Pluto on July 25 exactly. Because it's so distant—about 3.7 billion miles from the sun—it remains near peak brightness for several days before and after opposition. 'It's a challenge, so it's kind of cool to be able to see Pluto,' says Grundy. These photographic plates helped astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discover Pluto in 1930. By comparing nearly identical images of the night sky with a device called a blink comparator, he found a tiny object (marked by arrows) outside the orbit of Neptune, which was named Pluto. Photograph by Detlev Van Ravenswaay, Science Photo Library Pluto's origin story begins with two other planets. After Uranus was discovered in 1781, astronomers realized that an undiscovered planet might be perturbing Uranus' orbit. 'Sure enough, Neptune was discovered basically bang-on where astronomers predicted it should be,' says Grady. But Percival Lowell, the founder of Lowell Observatory, believed there to be another planet affecting Uranus' orbit: a mysterious 'Planet X.' After a decade of searching, Lowell died in 1916 without finding it. (Discover seven other night sky events to see in July.) Eventually, the search resumed at Lowell Observatory, culminating in Clyde Tombaugh's discovery of Pluto in 1930. As it turns out, Pluto wasn't the gravitational culprit Lowell had imagined. It was far too small to tug on Uranus's orbit in any meaningful way. But it was still a monumental discovery: the solar system's ninth planet—at least until its reclassification as a dwarf planet in 2006. To find Pluto, Tombaugh diligently photographed the night sky, then used a machine to compare two photographic plates, looking for any tiny pinpricks that moved. That's essentially the same method Grundy suggests stargazers use in July to ensure they're looking at Pluto. Following its discovery, Pluto remained just a faint dot until the 1990s, when the Hubble Space Telescope provided some grainy images showing light and dark spots. But it wasn't until 2015 that we got a close-up look at Pluto, thanks to a flyby by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. The images showed a dynamic, geologically active planet with icy mountains, nitrogen glaciers, and even hints of a subsurface ocean. 'It could be inhabitable if there's liquid water and lots of organic materials and rocks for minerals,' says Grundy, who serves as a co-investigator on the New Horizons mission. That revelation has major implications for astrobiology. 'Pluto moved the goalpost of where inhabitable planetary settings are—much, much farther away from the sun than we ever thought possible,' says Grundy. 'And the same thing will be true around other stars, too. Basically, the inhabitable zone just expanded hugely.'
National Geographic
7 days ago
- Science
- National Geographic
Pluto
The world was introduced to dwarf planets in 2006, when petite Pluto was stripped of its planet status and reclassified as a dwarf planet. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) currently recognizes two other dwarf planets, Eris and Ceres. What differentiates a dwarf planet from a planet? For the most part, they are identical, but there's one key difference: A dwarf planet hasn't "cleared the neighborhood" around its orbit, which means it has not become gravitationally dominant and it shares its orbital space with other bodies of a similar size. (Astronomers and other experts are debating this definition.) Is Pluto a Dwarf Planet? Because it has not cleared the neighborhood around its orbit, Pluto is considered a dwarf planet. It orbits in a disc-like zone beyond the orbit of Neptune called the Kuiper belt, a distant region populated with frozen bodies left over from the solar system's formation. The dwarf planet is a whopping 3.7 billion miles (5.9 billion kilometers) from the sun, and its average temperature hovers around -356 degrees Fahrenheit (-215 degrees Celsius). Pluto's surface is composed of a mixture of frozen nitrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide ices. The dwarf planet also has polar caps and regions of frozen methane and nitrogen. Pluto has three known moons, Hydra, Nix, and Charon. With a diameter of about 737 miles (1,186 kilometers), Charon is the largest of Pluto's moons. The duo's gravity puts them in a synchronous orbit, which means they face each other with the same side all the time. In January 2006, NASA launched its New Horizons spacecraft. It swung past Jupiter for a gravity boost and scientific studies in February 2007, conducted a six-month-long reconnaissance flyby study of Pluto and its moons in summer 2015, and culminated with Pluto's closest approach on July 14, 2015. As part of an extended mission, the spacecraft is heading farther into the Kuiper Belt to examine another of the ancient, icy mini-worlds in that vast region, at least a billion miles beyond Neptune's orbit. New Horizons also found Pluto to have blue skies and water ice. Pluto nearly fills the frame in this black and white image from the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) aboard NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, taken on July 13, 2015 when the spacecraft was 476,000 miles (768,000 kilometers) from the surface. This is the last and most detailed image sent to Earth before the spacecraft's closest approach to Pluto on July 14. Photograph courtesy NASA/APL/SwRI Ceres Also considered by many to be an asteroid, Ceres, like Pluto, was also renamed as a dwarf planet in 2006. Ceres was discovered by Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi in 1801. Ceres's shape resembles a flattened sphere with a diameter of about 590 miles (950 kilometers). It is by far the largest and most massive known body in the asteroid belt, and it contains about one-third of the estimated total mass of all asteroids in the belt. Ceres is made up of a rocky inner core surrounded by a mantle of water-ice. A thin, dusty, outer crust covers the dwarf planet named after the Roman goddess of grain.
Gizmodo
15-07-2025
- Science
- Gizmodo
An Iconic NASA Probe Is at Threat of Being Shut Down Due to Trump Cuts
On July 14, 2015, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto, revealing unprecedented close-up views of the complex icy world. The iconic mission is still returning data from the far reaches of the solar system, but a lack of funding now threatens to end the mission prematurely. As NASA celebrates the 10th anniversary of the historic Pluto flyby, the space agency is also bracing for budget cuts that threaten the historic New Horizons probe. The White House's budget proposal, released in May, reduces NASA's upcoming budget by $6 billion compared to 2025. Under the proposed budget, NASA's planetary science budget would drop from $2.7 billion to $1.9 billion. The severe drop in funding would kill dozens of active and planned missions, including New Horizons. New Horizons launched on January 19, 2006, and traveled 9 billion miles in nine and a half years to become the first spacecraft to reach Pluto. Its journey through the harsh space environment wasn't the only challenge; members of the space community advocated for nearly 20 years for the approval of the spacecraft, according to The Planetary Society. At the time, NASA missions to Pluto were deemed not worth the cost. As a result, New Horizons was nearly canceled on multiple occasions due to budgeting conflicts. In 2002, the White House tried to kill the mission after NASA had already started developing it, but a massive backlash forced Congress to step in and restore New Horizons' funding. Despite its rocky start, New Horizons is now hailed as one of the most successful planetary missions. Following its close encounter with Pluto, the mission revealed that the icy planet and its moons are far more complex than scientists had initially assumed. New Horizons imaged a giant, heart-shaped icy plain on Pluto, which may sit above a subsurface ocean. It also revealed cryovolcanoes, indicating a geologically active body and not a dead, frozen world. The mission also explored Pluto's icy, chaotic moons, which rotate chaotically. Beyond Pluto, New Horizons continues to explore the outer reaches of the solar system. The spacecraft is shedding light on the mysterious planets and smaller objects of the outer solar system. In January 2019, New Horizons conducted the most distant flyby of a Kuiper Belt object when it explored Arrokoth, a frozen relic in the icy region beyond Neptune. The double-lobed object serves as a relic from the early solar system. The successful Arrokoth flyby earned New Horizons a mission extension, allowing the spacecraft to continue exploring until it exits the Kuiper Belt in 2029. 'The New Horizons mission has a unique position in our solar system to answer important questions about our heliosphere and provide extraordinary opportunities for multidisciplinary science for NASA and the scientific community,' Nicola Fox, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement at the time. New Horizons has enough fuel to carry out another flyby of a Kuiper Belt object, and mission teams are currently searching for its next possible target. If the current budget proposal is approved, New Horizons will be turned off long before its expiration date, which would cost us years of valuable data. After Voyager 1 and 2, the New Horizons spacecraft is the third most distant human-built object from Earth. It would take years for another spacecraft to reach that distance. 'We're the only spacecraft out there,' Alan Stern, principal investigator for New Horizons, told The Planetary Society. 'There's nothing else planned to come this way.'
UPI
14-07-2025
- General
- UPI
On This Day, July 14: NASA's New Horizons gets closest look yet at Pluto
1 of 5 | Members of the New Horizons science team react to seeing the spacecraft's last and sharpest image of Pluto before closest approach later in the day July 14, 2015, at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. File Photo by Bill Ingalls/UPI | License Photo July 14 (UPI) -- On this date in history: In 1789, French peasants stormed the Bastille prison in Paris, beginning the French Revolution. The event is commemorated as "Bastille Day," a national holiday in France. In 1793, Jean Paul Marat, one of the most outspoken leaders of the French Revolution, was stabbed to death in his bath by Charlotte Corday, a Royalist sympathizer. The murder was immortalized in a painting by Jacques-Louis David. In 1881, outlaw Billy the Kid was shot to death at a ranch in New Mexico. In 1914, Robert Goddard, father of the space age, was granted the first patent for a liquid-fueled rocket design. His first rocket soared for about 2 seconds, flew as fast as 60 mph and landed 174 feet from the lift-off pad. File Photo courtesy of NASA In 1933, all political parties except the Nazis were officially suppressed in Germany. In 1966, eight student nurses were found killed in Chicago. Drifter Richard Speck, later convicted of the slayings, died in prison in 1991. In 1968, future Baseball Hall of Fame slugger Hank Aaron became the eighth person to hit 500 home runs for the Atlanta Braves in a win over the San Francisco Giants. In 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that his country would suspend its participation in the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty, a Cold War agreement that limited deployment of heavy weaponry. File Photo by Anatoli Zhdanov/UPI In 2009, within months after repaying bailout money supplied by the U.S. government, New York banking giant Goldman Sachs reported a profit of $3.44 billion for the first quarter of the year. JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup also reported big profits. In 2014, the Church of England's governing body voted to allow women to become bishops for first time in the church's history. In 2015, the New Horizons space probe came within 7,800 miles of Pluto, providing NASA scientists with the clearest photographs and most detailed measurements they've ever seen of the dwarf planet. In 2016, 86 people celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, France, were killed when a truck drove into a crowd. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack. In 2019, Novak Djokovic defeated Roger Federer to win his fifth Wimbledon title in a marathon five-set match that lasted nearly 5 hours.
