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Old March 25th, 2008
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Re: [News] Water 'flowed recently' on Mars

The team running the two extremely successful Mars rovers faces budget cuts and may be forced to suspend at least one of them to save on costs:

SPACE.com -- Budget Cuts Could Shut Down Mars Rover

This sounds very sad, especially, because the cost effectiveness of this project is incredible - the rovers were planned to work 100 days, but are now in their fifth year of operation and still delivering very valuable data.

Even sadder is that only $4 millions are missing in the budget for this year - in comparison it is the cost of 16 minutes of the Iraq war! According to sources based on Congressional information, the war costs $341.4 million per day. According to other sources who include also other indirect costs, not officially accounted, the cost is around 600 millions per day. So it would make the missing budget equivalent to less than 10 minutes of war
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