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WASHINGTON — NASA’s planetary science program, while spared steep cuts proposed last year, is still facing a funding shortfall that requires “strategic choices” about which missions to continue.
Speaking at a town hall during the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference on March 16, Louise Prockter, director of NASA’s planetary science division, said funding for fiscal year 2026 is about $200 million below what her division received in 2025.
An appropriations bill passed in January provided the planetary science division with $2.54 billion in 2026. While that was much higher than the administration’s original proposal of $1.89 billion, it is less than the $2.72 billion the division received in both fiscal years 2024 and 2025.
“We can’t continue everything from the past,” she said. “We are about $200 million below where we were last year, and that means that not everything can continue forward or continue forward in the same way.”
That will mean what she called “some hard strategic choices” about which programs to alter or terminate. Those decisions will be articulated in an operating plan for fiscal year 2026 that NASA is developing and will send to Congress in the near future.
With that plan still in development, Prockter did not go into details about missions that might be in jeopardy. She suggested, though, that one area could be missions to Venus. NASA selected two Venus missions, DAVINCI and VERITAS, as part of its Discovery program in 2021, but both have suffered delays. NASA is also providing an instrument for EnVision, a European Space Agency mission to Venus.
“It is going to be a challenge to get all three Venus missions to continue,” she said. The 2026 appropriations bill, she noted, included $99 million to continue DAVINCI while work is “ramping up slowly” on VERITAS and discussions continue with ESA on EnVision.
“We are doing our best by Venus, but it is a tough environment and not everything can move forward,” she said.
There is also some uncertainty about extended missions, those that have completed their prime science missions but continue to operate. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been approved for another three years, but the agency has not made decisions on other extended missions, including several at Mars.
“Right now, we do anticipate that they’re likely to go forward,” she said of the other extended missions, but they may receive only one-year extensions because of budget uncertainty.
Further complicating matters is the status of one of those extended Mars missions, the MAVEN orbiter. NASA lost contact with MAVEN in early December and has yet to restore communications, with limited telemetry suggesting the spacecraft is spinning and not in its planned orbit. Prockter said in mid-January it was “very unlikely” NASA would be able to recover the spacecraft.
At the town hall, she provided few updates about MAVEN beyond noting that NASA has convened an anomaly review board to assess what went wrong and the likelihood of recovery. She did not say how long NASA would continue recovery efforts before declaring the mission over.
“We haven’t officially said MAVEN is lost yet,” she said. “We’re still looking for it.”
MAVEN has been part of a network of orbiters that relay communications between rovers on the surface and Earth. A budget reconciliation bill passed last year provided $700 million for a dedicated Mars Telecommunications Orbiter, and some scientists have pushed for that mission to include a science payload.
Prockter declined to say whether an upcoming call for proposals for that orbiter will include options for science payloads. “Nothing’s been decided yet,” she said.
Also uncertain are future plans for the Mars Sample Return program after Congress declined to fund it in the 2026 appropriations bill.
“We know it was a top priority in the most recent planetary decadal survey,” she said. “At this time we are standing by for future budget guidance and direction from the agency as to how we might proceed.”
Proposals for future missions are also being pushed back. She said NASA expects to release an announcement of opportunity for the next New Frontiers mission in 2027, while the smaller Discovery program will not seek proposals before 2028.
In her presentation, she emphasized support for missions in development, such as the Dragonfly mission to Titan and the NEO Surveyor space telescope to search for near-Earth asteroids, as well as missions in their prime phases.
“We can continue almost everything we have been doing,” she said.
