NASA has announced that after nearly a half-century of studying the outer reaches of the Solar System—and beyond—the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes will be shut down over the course of the next few years. Although both probes are still functioning perfectly, their nuclear fuel is expected toread more
In 1976, the Viking program’s orbiter and lander reached Mars, and the lander’s life experiments returned data that the scientists who had designed them had expected to see if living organisms were present in the soil. However, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, fearing that a positive finding about life on the red planet would cause their Mars funding to be diverted to the manned spaceflight program, issued various denials and succeeded in clouding the picture sufficiently to insure that robotic programs would continue.
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