Posted: Fri, Nov 7, 2003, 8:40 AM ET (1340 GMT)
Citing budget problems, the European Space Agency announced Thursday that it was canceling one mission to search for extrasolar planets and scaling back another mission to Mercury. ESA said its current budget problems forced it to cancel Eddington, a mission that had been scheduled for launch in 2008 to look for Earth-like planets around other stars as well as perform helioseismological studies of those stars. ESA also announced it was descoping its BepiColombo mission to Mercury, scheduled for launch in 2011, by removing a lander than was going to accompany two orbiters to the innermost planet. ESA said trying to design a lander that could land and survive on the planet's surface "was a bridge too far in present circumstances", and conceded that Europe will probably lose the opportunity to be the first to land on the planet. The agency blamed the cuts on budget problems dating back to early this year when problems with the Ariane 5 booster forced a 13-month delay in the launch of ESA's Rosetta comet mission and strained budgets for that and other missions. ESA's science program did receive a €100 million (US$114 million) loan in June, but must be paid back by 2006. The cuts announced Thursday allow ESA to bring its "Cosmic Vision" program to "a level that necessarily reflects the financial conditions rather than the ambitions of the scientific community." ESA did announce it was starting work on one new mission, LISA Pathfinder, a prototype of a space-based gravity-wave detector that ESA will build in cooperation with NASA.

Related Links:

•  ESA press release
•  BBC article