Can there anything be sadder than this recent Twitter cover of NASA? Instead of celebrating its 55th anniversary with a bang, the government shutdown instead turned everything into one sour party.

According to CBS News, just 549 NASA employees are officially at work while the rest have been furloughed. In a memo, NASA CFO Elizabeth Robinson explained how the agency would continue to support and protect its astronauts that are currently on mission. "If a satellite mission is in the operations phase, we will maintain operations that are essential to ensure the safety of that satellite and the data received from it," Ms Robinson said in the memo that is not available anymore.

NASA's Web site is not available, too, due to "lapse in federal government funding." Prior to the shutdown, NASA updated its official site with list articles titled "Top 10 Things Done" and "Things To Come."

NASA, being a prestigious and highly credible space agency, still has many huge plans in the coming future. However, this all depends now on how soon the government would be able to rise back from such a "shutdown" mess.

It can be recalled a government shutdown started on Tuesday since the members of the House of Representatives were not able to agree on the federal budget. It is unfortunate that NASA is one of the agencies that have been hit by its consequences, NPR stated.

Due to this unfortunate event, NASA is worried that it may miss its target launch, especially for the MAVEN mission to Mars. The mission can only push through once Earth and Mars are aligned with each other. If the government shutdown continues for long, the mission may miss on its launch window from Nov 18 to Dec 7. The next Earth-Mars alignment will be three years from now, in 2016, according to the lead in charge of the mission, Bruce Jakosky.

Despite such hardships, NASA still deserves congratulations for its 55th birthday. In the last 50 years, NASA sent a total of 12 astronauts to the Moon and ran 16 satellites that are constantly observing the Earth and seven satellites observing the sun.

Due to the gov't shutdown, all public NASA activities/events are cancelled or postponed until further notice. Sorry for the inconvenience.

— NASA (@NASA) October 1, 2013

Sorry, but we won't be tweeting/responding to replies during the government shutdown. Be back as soon as possible. http://t.co/qIx8cigrnb — NASA (@NASA) October 1, 2013