NASA has cancelled work on a troubled radioisotope power system intended to help the next generation of spacecraft reach the planets, moons and comets of the outer Solar System.
In a blog posted on 15 November, NASA’s planetary science division director Jim Green said that NASA is ending work on two Advanced Stirling Radioisotope Generators (ASRG) being built by the US Department of Energy (DOE).
“Our decision is based purely on budgetary constraints,” Green tells Nature. The move will save NASA $170 million over three years; the planetary science budget was cut by $300 million to $1.2 billion in fiscal year 2013.
Planetary scientists say that the systems would have enabled groundbreaking missions to parts of the Solar System where the Sun does not deliver enough energy for solar-powered spacecraft. The cancellation is a frustration for Jessica Sunshine, a planetary scientist at the University of Maryland in College Park who worked on the Comet Hopper, a proposed ASRG-powered mission to visit a comet. “We spent a lot of money and time on ASRGs and there was incredible new science they were going to enable,” she says. The Comet Hopper was a runner-up in a 2012 NASA competition that awarded a mission to a Mars lander that did not rely on an ASRG and is now due for launch in 2016.
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