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Who pays Astronomy and astrophysics projects in the United States — our collective looking for nothing, looking for cosmic answers? Well, we all do, through taxes, how the government decides what to distribute through the annual credit budget.
But how does it decide to use the funds provided by NASA — about $ 23 billion in 2021? For its scientific missions in space and on earth, the agency — and almost all of the U.S. space scientists — is based on the Decadal Survey of Astrophysics and Astronomy. Since the 1960s, groups of hundreds of experts, led by a steering committee organized by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, have produced these massive reports with the goal of recommending space exploration and research for the next decade and beyond.
This year’s survey officially “Paths to Discovery in Astronomy and Astrophysics in the 2020s”—It was released today. In short, they named it “Astro2020,” even though it was released in late 2021. It was supposed to be done last year, but the Covid-19 pandemic caused major delays in an already difficult process, with about 150 scientists completing 13 panels focused on the issues. such as cosmology, galaxies, stars, particle physics, and the state of the profession. To complete the survey, they reviewed nearly 900 white papers submitted by researchers from around the world and completed hundreds of hours of Zoom meetings.
“It’s a much more difficult process to accomplish through Zoom than previous meetings,” says astronomer Rachel Osten of the Space Telescope Science Institute, Johns Hopkins researcher and member of the Astro2020 Board of Directors. “So we had to figure out how it worked with what we had.”
These zoom meetings guided the future of science itself. “What they decide affects what scientists will do,” says Paul Goldsmith, head of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory team. A decade-long survey typically requires specific large and medium-sized missions on certain budgets; it also highlights important areas of scientific exploration for the next decade, urging researchers to fill gaps with their work. Projects are funded, or not, depending on what is in the survey.
Today’s 500-page report prioritizes three scientific areas: hunting for habitable exoplanets, studying the beginnings of the universe, and studying gases to understand the evolution of galaxies. Within these categories, it requires a number of missions, including the creation of a large infrared / optical / ultraviolet space telescope, funding for far-infrared and x-ray missions, the continued growth of important terrestrial astronomical assets, and the constant lower drum beat. missions ”and increase investment in the area’s heritage.
It also recommends reversing the way in which major mission proposals are addressed in the projects carried out, creating a $ 1 billion program that would protect the concepts from the initial stages to ensure they are met on time and on budget. Suggesting a change in the overall process, rather than choosing a top-level project or two, “is a game changer as decades of surveys have done,” Osten says. “Usually only one project selects the winner, and everyone else can go home.”
New Pipeline for Massive Missions
Surveys from the 1960s to the 1990s laid the groundwork for NASA’s “Great Observatories”: the Hubble Space Telescope, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the Spitzer Space Telescope. Over the decades, they have sent us seas and images of information about black holes, exoplanets, etc. from deep space.
These projects, while hugely important, are also known for being late and over budgeting. (Take, for example, James Webb Space Telescope, which will launch this fall after being surveyed in the 2000s.) “A decade is not the right time to think about big spectacular projects,” says Osten. It’s not long enough to see a space mission from concept to launch; so it is often almost impossible to calculate their actual cost while they are still in the early stages.
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