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" Last February, NASA quietly dropped from its mission statement the phrase &amp;quot;to understand and protect our home planet.&amp;quot; But should Earth scientists actually be worried? According to the National Research Council, that answer is a resounding &amp;quot;yes.&amp;quot; In a report released this week, a committee appointed by the Council&amp;#039;s Space Studies Board warns that a number of measurements providing critical information about Earth processes will cease to be made over the next few years. By 2010, it says, the number of Earth-observing missions will drop dramatically, and the number of operating sensors and instruments on NASA spacecraft will decrease by 40 percent. &amp;quot;The United States&amp;#039; extraordinary foundation of global observations is at great risk,&amp;quot; the report&amp;#039;s authors write. PM spoke with Carl Wunsch, a professor of physical oceanography at MIT, to find out how Earth scientists view the agency&amp;#039;s shifting priorities--and how those may affect the study of the planet. Wunsch has been involved with three reviews of NASA&amp;#039;s science plan, including this most recent report. The phrase excised from NASA&amp;#039;s mission statement only dates back to 2002. Has Earth science always been a priority for the agency? If you look at the satellites NASA has flown over the years, much of that activity was directed at measuring the Earth--its land surface, biosphere, atmosphere and oceans. NASA had a real interest in Earth science. And it had scientists who really badly wanted to make these measurements. The reason the change in mission statement is troubling is because NASA has started chopping Earth missions. If it hadn&amp;#039;t done that, people probably would have just shrugged. But the change seems to be more than symbolic. These days, it isn&amp;#039;t clear why a good engineer or scientist interested in the Earth would want to work for NASA. What missions has NASA cut? There&amp;#039;s a very long list. One example that comes to mind is something called Landsat, which started 35 years ago. Data from these satellites have proved extremely useful to people who study things like deforestation, urban sprawl and changing crop types. NASA has made no provision to continue it. The Earth Observing System is a series of satellites launched in 1999 for making long-term global observations. It has yielded valuable information about changes to the Earth, such as shifts in sea level and ground-water content. It&amp;#039;s not been renewed. The GRACE satellites are attempting to determine, among other things, if the ice sheets are growing or shrinking. The five-year mission will end this year, and there&amp;#039;s no plan at the moment to fly a second one. Why is it important to make observations over many years? Long-term research is critical because the Earth changes comparatively slowly. If you live in New York and get three cold winters in a row, you might say, &amp;quot;Oh, the world is cooling off.&amp;quot; But that would be a very foolish conclusion. The system fluctuates and in order to see trends you need very long records. Do you use satellite data in your own research? I&amp;#039;m an oceanographer. I study primarily the way the ocean affects climate. You can&amp;#039;t put enough instruments in the ocean to get the kind of global coverage provided by NASA satellites. If they stop measuring the ocean, we won&amp;#039;t be able to predict what&amp;#039;s going to happen when we get events such as El Ni\u00F1o. Have NASA&amp;#039;s plans for a permanent lunar base caused concern among Earth scientists? Of course. It is going to cost billions of dollars and it&amp;#039;s not clear what the scientific utility is. For 2007, astrobiology programs such as the Terrestrial Planet Finder also were cut or deferred indefinitely. Is there room for both astrobiology and Earth science in NASA? I think most scientists, including me, would say yes. The country can afford both an Earth-oriented program and a planet and exobiology program. The trouble comes when you get crazy things like the space station, which has cost billions of dollars and seems increasingly pointless. It&amp;#039;s not astrobiology that&amp;#039;s the issue, it&amp;#039;s the manned program that is eating the national budget--the space station, the shuttle, neither of which seems to make any sense. But couldn&amp;#039;t political momentum just as easily shift back to funding Earth-oriented programs? It is important to understand that NASA is, in large measure, a way the government funds the aerospace industry. Enormous companies such as Lockheed Martin get contracts that are worth billions of dollars to build vehicles to go to the moon. They&amp;#039;re not going to just sit there if scientists come along and say we ought to be funding less expensive Earth-looking satellites instead. The lobbying that goes on around NASA is intense. Why do you think we fly the shuttle? "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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