SETI Public Mailing List: SETI public: The Planetary Society speaks out on saving the Voyager probes

Some scientists -- including Voyagers' own -- were incredulous on hearing the news. "At first, I thought it must be a misunderstanding, because it couldn't possibly be true," Stamatios M. (Tom) Krimigis, principal investigator on the low energy charged particle instrument on board both spacecraft told The Planetary Society in an interview last week. "We're leaving the neighborhood, and Voyager is the first and only human-made object to cross this boundary. It's like Columbus seeing the shores of America and saying, 'Well, time to turn around and go home.' The absurdity of this is that for the past three years Voyager has been exploring a new frontier, and if there is an exploration initiative as NASA and the President have proclaimed, then Voyager is one of the finest examples, if not the finest example of exploring the frontier. It's so mind-boggling, I said to myself, 'rational people would not arrive at this kind of a decision.' Then I found out otherwise."

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Voyager is not the only extended mission that was erased from the space agency's proposed FY06 Budget. The first and only planned mission to orbit over and explore the polar regions of the Sun, Ulysses, a joint project with the European Space Agency (ESA), has also been targeted for cancellation, as have Wind and Geotail, which are studying the near space environment of Earth, and FAST, Polar, and TRACE, which are continuing to contribute to the coordinated study of geospace.

It's all about money, like most things these days, and the sequence of events that led to the sudden, proposed mission erasures began with NASA's new Vision for Space Exploration set forth by President George W. Bush in January 2004, according to Ghassem Asrar, deputy associate administrator of the science mission directorate, which oversees the Earth-Sun System division through which Voyager is funded these days.

http://planetary.org/news/2005/voyager-update_t-shock-termination_0524.html