#apophis — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

The White House announced a plan to cancel over 50 #space missions as part of a devastating 46% cut to #NASA #science.

The proposal would likely eliminate thousands of jobs at an agency that has just launched astronauts to the #Moon for the first time in decades, and dozens of other space missions would see their operations reduced or slowly wound down to a halt.

The following missions are to be cancelled:

1. The Habitable Worlds Observatory being built to search for #life on dozens of Earth-like planets beyond our Solar System while addressing fundamental questions about our #Universe.

2. OSIRIS-APEX capitalizes on the exceptionally rare 2029 Earth flyby of the potentially hazardous #asteroid #Apophis to advance planetary defense strategies and reveal how Earth’s #gravity alters an asteroid’s surface and interior.

3. The ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover will deliberately search for signs of life on #Mars by analyzing the composition of samples collected from as deep as 2 meters below the surface.

4. The DAVINCI mission is an atmospheric probe that will be deployed to our sister planet, #Venus, and provide the first detailed measurements of the composition and chemistry of its #atmosphere.

5. Initially focusing on #Jupiter’s interior, atmosphere, and aurora, #Juno is already orbiting Jupiter and has expanded during its extended mission to be a full system explorer capable of investigating the Galilean satellites, rings, inner moons, radiation belts, and boundaries of Jupiter’s magnetosphere.

6. VERITAS will create unprecedented, global, high-resolution datasets of Venus designed to answer a fundamental question for rocky #planets: how did Earth and her twin Venus evolve into two entirely different examples of planetary #habitability?

https://www.planetary.org/articles/meet-the-people-behind-nasas-endangered-missions