Despite losing two of its four reaction wheels, NASAs Kepler spacecraft has found new lifeand new planetswith its K2 mission. (credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T Pyle )

For all the challenges involved in flying a space astronomy mission, from the technical issues during its development through launch, scientists want to ensure that the missions work as long as possible when (and if) they start operating. In many cases, it may be scientists only opportunity in their professional careers to carry out these observations, and use them as the basis for later missions.

Two missions in NASAs portfolio of astronomy missions, though, recently faced untimely ends, albeit for different reasons. The Kepler spacecraft ran into technical problems in 2013 when the second of four reaction wheels, used to accurately point the spacecraft at a specific region of the sky, failed. Last year, the Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA)not a space mission per se, but an airborne observatory carrying out observations not possible from the groundwas facing cancellation by the agency as a cost-cutting measure.

Today, though, both Kepler and SOFIA have survived their brushes with programmatic death. SOFIA got mostbut not allof its funding back in the final fiscal year 2015 spending bill, enough to keep the airborne observatory flying. Kepler, meanwhile, has found success in an alternative mission, even as scientists continue to analyze the data it collected in its four-year original mission.

SOFIA was in the process of being declared operational last year when it was hit with a budgetary surprise. The Obama Administrations 2015 budget request slashed the projects budget from $87.4 million it received in 2014 to only $12.3 million. NASA said constrained budgets forced it to make the decision to cut SOFIA funding. It turned out that we had to make very difficult choices about where we go with astrophysics and planetary science and Earth science, and SOFIA happened to be what fell off the plate this time, administrator Charles Bolden said last March (see Aborted takeoff, The Space Review, March 17, 2014).

A few months later, SOFIAs fortunes were changing. The House of Representatives passed an appropriations bill in late May that largely restored the projects budget, back to $70 million. A bill under consideration (but never passed) in the Senate offered $87 million for the project. However, those involved with SOFIA had to wait until Congress passed the omnibus spending bill last month to officially be out of the woods. That bill, like the House version, provides $70 million for SOFIA.

That amount is enough to allow SOFIA to resume science observations later this month (it had been undergoing maintenance for the second half of 2014), although project officials said last week theyre still working to determine the effect the lower funding levela 20-percent cut versus 2014will have on operations.

There will be some impacts due to the cut for this year, SOFIA project scientist Pamela Marcum said at a SOFIA town hall meeting last week at the 225th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Seattle.

Marcum said the project is assuming that the 2015 funding level is a transient dip that will be restored to the earlier, higher level in future budgets. Therefore, the decisions we are making to address the budget challenge for this year should not have permanent ripple effects for the duration of the program, she said, although she did not disclose the options under discussion to implement that cut.

Read more:

Two astronomy missions back from the brink