Dreams of exploring the cosmos have crashed up against the harsh reality of budget cuts in the United States. Congressional approval of the 2024 federal budget earlier this year left NASA with roughly half a billion dollars less than the agency had in 2023 — and Mars science has taken the biggest hit.
Engineers are scrambling to figure out how a long-planned mission to bring samples back from the Red Planet might still be accomplished. Probes intended for other planets and moons are delayed, and the venerable Chandra X-ray Observatory, which launched in 1999 and has transformed our view of energetic phenomena in the universe, is potentially on the
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