One major reason spacecraft are shut down is due to lack of fuel. However, Odyssey has plenty of fuel left in the tank, enough for 10 more years, Plaut says. “All spacecraft systems required for operations are in good health.”
Yet the mission remains on the chopping block.
Flipping the switch
Currently, Odyssey’s future remains nebulous, and President Trump’s proposed budget is just the first hurdle in a long race ahead. In July, the House of Representatives passed its Commerce-Justice-Science Funding Bill, which echoed the president’s numbers for NASA’s missions and left Odyssey at the shutdown level.
The next step is for the Senate to pass its own bill. But people familiar with the budget process say that’s unlikely to happen until after the 2020 presidential election in November — even though the new budget is supposed to kick off in October, the start of the 2021 fiscal year. After the passage of the Senate’s bill, the Senate and House of Representatives will come together to resolve their differences before voting on the newly drafted budget. Finally, after it passes, the president will sign the bill.
Right now, Odyssey doesn’t seem to have anyone advocating for it. NASA isn’t requesting an increased budget and no legislator seems particularly disturbed by the loss of the mission. It’s possible that a public groundswell of support could make a change, but the mission’s potential demise hasn’t attracted a lot of attention.
If nothing changes with Trump’s proposed budget — and Odyssey’s funding is slashed — mission controllers would likely have no choice but to permanently shut down the craft. However, the exact process for shutting down Odyssey isn’t publicly available, and Freedom of Information Act requests filed by Astronomy have been delayed, due, in part, to the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, Odyssey’s end has essentially been planned since launch.
“Whether it’s financial need to [shut down], or it reaches its end of [its] life, at some point, with a 20-year-old orbiter, you need to plan for these things,” Glaze says. “We’ve been planning this for a long time.”
According to that plan, mission controllers would turn off Odyssey’s science instruments and verify its orbit. Finally, they would tell Odyssey to dump its fuel, and sign off. Listless and silent, Odyssey would drift around Mars, its orbit decaying over the decades, until it eventually crashes down on the same martian surface that it so meticulously mapped.
The budget circle of life
Odyssey’s budgetary shakedown is part of a broader realignment of NASA’s Mars exploration strategy that focuses on bringing back samples from Mars — something for which scientists have been advocating for decades.
Returning samples from Mars “is going to change the way we think about Mars again,” Glaze says. “We are far, far closer than we’ve ever been to making this a reality.” But, although that could very well happen, it might force us to give up on a working mission. And, according to Hynek, “You’re going to lose a lot by shutting [Odyssey] off.”
Christensen and others are still considering unique ways to save Odyssey, including potentially converting it into a spacecraft for use by students and enthusiasts. There is precedent: In 2010, a class of seventh graders in California taking part in Arizona State University’s educational program discovered a martian lava tube with a skylight. After closely studying more than 200 THEMIS images of Mars, the students were then eligible to request Odyssey take a targeted image of their site. “If Odyssey just became a student camera, I think it would be worth the money to keep it,” Christensen says. “I’m a long way from giving up on this mission.”
“We’re going to do everything we can to try to keep it going,” Glaze adds. “We’re putting forth every effort to make sure we have the capability to use the spacecraft as long as we can.”