Nasa's climate science 'in moth-balls' (BBC)

By Molly Bentley

As the space shuttle Discovery prepares for launch, another Nasa spacecraft sits in storage, awaiting its own ride into space.

The Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), designed to measure the Earth's solar energy balance and which has already been built, is grounded at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, after the agency cancelled it, citing competing priorities.

The $100m (£50m) science platform is paid for, apart from the funds needed for the launch and ensuing research.

"It is, as Nasa says, 'in mothballs,'" said DSCOVR lead scientist Francisco Valero of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California, San Diego.
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As Nasa's Earth sciences have been scaled back, so too have space sciences. The agency has cancelled or deferred a number of projects designed to examine dark energy, hunt for extra-solar planets, investigate the origins of the Universe and measure gravitational waves to test Einstein's general theory of relativity.
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more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5134022.stm

Very sad reading.