Re: Mars Insight
It's hard to say. It could be that the lander isn't going to do well through a Martian winter or that all of the other science is done and keeping a staff and facilities dedicated to this one last experiment isn't a good use of funds. I'm sure they've learned a bunch of lessons on how to get it to work the next time. You don't get a hit every time you go to bat and doing stuff on Mars is tough.
The MER rovers were awesome and just kept going and going. Since they were mobile, they could do the same science over and over, just in different places. In their case it was useful to keep funding the program until they finally wore out.
