NASA is scrambling to work out what to do with a US$100-million Earth-science satellite that has been sitting on a sanitized shelf in Greenbelt, Maryland, for nearly eight years. Last month, President George W. Bush signed a NASA reauthorization bill that, among other things, ordered the agency to come up with a plan for the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), which should have been launched around 2001. The space agency is now in talks with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the US Air Force about finally getting the probe off the ground. But the negotiations might mean that the spacecraft loses its Earth-observing instruments and instead goes into orbit with a remit to stare only at the Sun.
展开▼
