NASA administrators dodged direct questions about the effect on JPL during Monday’s budget press conference. When asked specifically how the budget cuts will affect the mission to Mars and those working at JPL, Bolden responded simply, “We are having to make tough decisions.”

Bolden will visit the Pasadena facility on Wednesday, Feb. 22, where he is scheduled to meet with the team of the Mars Science Laboratory. NASA’s largest, most ambitious Mars mission ever, is currently en route to the Red Planet and many of the scientists and those involved with the project work at JPL.

Accompanied by JPL Director Charles Elachi, Bolden will address the mission’s flight team inside the Space Flight Operations Facility, commonly known as Mission Control. He will also talk with the surface operations team in the Mars In-Situ Lab, where Mars rovers are tested.

President Obama’s proposed 2013 federal budget was released in full on Monday. Although it keeps NASA funding at about the same level next year, it cuts deep into the agency’s robotic Mars mission and is directly affected by employees at JPL. According to experts, NASA’s 2013 budget request calls for a $226 million decrease in funding for Mars exploration.

During a stop at JPL’s mission control, Bolden is expected to answer questions about NASA’s proposed 2013 budget. What is unclear, however, is what he will tell employees at JPL about their future with NASA since much the robotic exploration projects will not be funded in the new budget.

As NASA Administrator, Bolden has held the post since July 2009. He is a former astronaut and a retired Marine Corps Major General. Elachi has served as JPL director since 2001 and is also a vice president of Caltech, which manages JPL for NASA.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory is located at 4800 Oak Grove Drive in Pasadena. JPL’s website is www.jpl.nasa.gov.

Some say the future of space exploration hangs in the balance.

President Obama’s 2013 federal budget request is set to be released today (Feb. 13), and will likely include cuts in space exploration. As a result of cuts in the federal budget, NASA officials will unveil what some say are drastic cuts which will likely affect programs and employees at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

Astronomers are worried. Budget cuts may force NASA to withdraw from planetary exploration and other projects which have popular support. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg and other experts predict dire results.

“We may see, in the next decade or so, an end to the search . . . which will not be resumed again in our own lifetimes,” warned Weinberg during meetings of the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas.

Some experts believe that Obama’s budget request will allocate only $1.2 billion to the program, compared to the $1.5 billion that planetary exploration will receive this year. That’s a 20 percent cut and would make it tougher for NASA implement exploration projects, including the robotic exploration of Mars. That’s a real problem.

According physicist Paul Goldsmith chief technologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, part of the solution could come from emerging technologies.

“The exoplanet community and the deep-universe community each want something very different and are pulling NASA in opposite directions,” said Goldsmith. “But if we can get them together, we all win.”

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden will brief reporters about the agency’s fiscal year 2013 budget at 11 a.m. PST today. NASA Chief Financial Officer Elizabeth Robinson will join in the news conference and will be broadcast on NASA Television. Pasadena Now will cover the event and give readers the results of the conference.

Why stop, so close to the finish line? “Because I was knee- and sometimes waist-deep in snow,” Beeby laughs. “I’d gotten a late start; I’d had a little thing called my Ph.D. to finish up.”

Now a postdoctoral scholar working with Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Grant Jensen at the Pasadena campus, walking is just a part of his native culture.

“The British are a nation of walkers,” he says. “That’s the case for a number of peoples—the English, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Germans, the Austrians. I was brought up walking the hills near my home, in a town just south of Gloucester.”

Perhaps that’s why Beeby seems bemused by the interest shown in his ramblings, reacting as if he were being given a standing ovation for using a knife to cut his food into bite-sized pieces. To him, walking is neither vocation nor avocation, neither sport nor relaxation. It just is.

“Walking is a process,” he says. “It’s nice that it’s incidentally exercise, and it’s convenient that it’s also transportation, but that’s not the point of it. It’s something to be enjoyed in and of itself, a fantastic way of getting perspective.”

Although the time spent on the Pacific Coast Trail was by far Beeby’s longest trek, it was by no means his only one. He and a friend trudged nearly 120 miles across some of Australia’s least-hospitable terrain as part of an assignment for a magazine. He also hoofed 70 miles through Tasmania. And one summer he walked for five days from the university he attended in Birmingham, England, to his home in Gloucester. “I camped in fields wherever I could pitch a tent.”

Don’t count on Beeby for training tips or a discussion of the best walking shoes on the market, however. “I don’t train, and I almost never get blisters,” he says with a half-sheepish grin. “I think it’s because I’ve always walked and spent a lot of my childhood barefoot.”

These days, most of Beeby’s trips are short weekend jaunts when his research permits. He studies flagellar motors, the molecular machines that power the whip-like appendages that allow bacteria to travel—or, more precisely, to glide or swim—through their environment.

The only link between his work and his pastime is the process. “It’s not the surface similarity that I move and bacteria move,” he says. “It’s the pleasure and involvement I have with the process of research and development of an idea. Being able to get out and see the world is invaluable to me,” he adds. “Who can think at a desk?”