Steinn has a great report up from his recent visit to a Beyond Einstein Town Hall meeting.
The Beyond Einstein program is a comprehensive NASA vision to explore gravitation, cosmology, and fudamental physics over the next couple of decades. I was a member of the original roadmap team, and we worked hard to craft a complementary set of missions that was both amibitious yet affordable; a lot of groups took one for the team, recognizing that their favorite proposals would weigh down the final document and make it look like a wish list rather than a realistic program. Congress and OMB liked what we put together, and made it a part of NASA’s long-term budget.
We highlighted five missions. Two had well-defined mission concepts: LISA to search for gravitational waves and Constellation-X to look at X-rays. Three probes were in development and would be competed to choose a final version: a dark-energy probe (which morphed into the joint NASA/DOE dark energy mission), a black-hole finder to map the X-ray sky, and a search for polarization induced by gravitational waves in the CMB. For future possibilities we highlighted two vision missions: a Big Bang Observer to directly detect the gravity-wave background from inflation, and a Black Hole Imager to resolve X-rays from right next to the event horizons of black holes.
Subsequently, of course, NASA has decided that it has other priorities; primarily, visiting the Moon and Mars. That is too expensive to undertake while we’re squandering money on actual “science,” so some tough choices are going to be made. The current plan is to pick one of the above five missions (not including the vision concepts), and give it a budget slice. Maybe one of the others will get done, someday.
So a high-powered National Academy committee is examining everything closely, deciding what to keep and what to kill. I’m sure that’s not a fun job. Steinn’s report gives a nice informal review of what the committee is hearing, and to a lesser extent what they’re thinking. Gripping reading, in a somewhat morbid way.
We can’t afford to go back to the Moon and then Mars in the near future, given all the money wasted so far in other ways. If the GWOT is so important, we can’t spare a penny for such vain excursions, can we? I hope they continue to fund Jefferson Lab, where I consult at the ARC, and especially the FEL. It is just horrible what’s happening to basic research as the spam-in-a-can royalists of the Bushies march on for the next few years.
Why are bothering with useless, feel-good feats like going to Mars that serve no actual purpose? We could spend a tiny fraction of the money on real science! It’s infuriating.
Do you think enough NASA resources are allocated to the research of Earth-threatening asteroids?
p.s. You may appreciate this: http://urikalish.blogspot.com/2007/03/relatively-useful-relativity-tips-for.html
I view the current misuse/misdirection of NASA a model of ignorant partisan waste. I hope once sanity is returned to leadership we can use this unfortunate period to establish planning safeguards that will prevent such attacks on science from ever being repeated.
I view the current misuse/misdirection of NASA a model of ignorant partisan waste.
Then you can be absolutely certain that there is a real value to it that your fanatical self would never even dream of.
I hope once sanity is returned to leadership we can use this unfortunate period to establish planning safeguards that will prevent such attacks on science from ever being repeated.
What a coincidence, that’s the exact definition that I found in Websters for, “ANTIFANATIC”… 😉
I guess I’m an antifanatic fanatic!
Strange that I’m not more self-loathing… 😉
Exploration and Basic Science are both important. Among academics the history of thought it usually painted as some pure pursuit of truth. Einstein staring at pure light beams; Newton in garden gazing at full moon. Hence the conclusion monies spent on exploration are disjoint from science.
But the history of astronomy itself can also be understood as arising from commercial, political and (eek, yes) military explorations. The technology to explore new lands and seas right here on Earth is also what drove the “pure and basic” understanding of astronomy– even in Newton’s time. C.f., Dava Sobel’s book on the longitude problem.
To discount and minimize the impact on scientific thought of that base homo sapien instinct of exploration (be it Mars today, the Far East 100’s of years ago, or Mediterranean 1000’s of years ago) is as short-sighted as a politician ignoring the value of basic science to commerce.
At the rate things are going, we are in danger of doing neither exploration nor science. Then everyone will be unhappy.
Since tomorrow is my last day at JPL, I can probably bitch freely about the funding issues and such without being disappeared, right?
Does anyone know if any organized activity exists to lobby Congress to do something about this ridiculous situation? Find senators and congress people to support some of these projects? Start a petition drive maybe? Persuade science bloggers to squawk about the issue? It’s beyond pathetic about how the country’s money is actually spent (like handing out $billions as bribes in Iraq) instead of this science.
I don’t get it? The planet is dying and you all want to stay here and spend money on more science! I noticed that not so long ago that scientist is blaming global warming on mankind! This is not the fault of mankind; it is the fault of science!
The funding of science is purely to make money, and enormous amounts of it. The environment has been destroyed by science, the fact that there are so many people alive in the world is due to it, all the gases and pollution from our massive city’s are down to it. Not only that, the technology that produces most of the electricity in the world is over one hundred years old!!! The fact that cars pollute has been know since the day they were invented!
In ten years time, yes 10 years! This planet will not be able to sustain humanity if the current trend of warming continues. Not only that; as more ice melts on the poles, what effect will this have on the surface? There must be a lot of weight there and as that melts, the surface will lift back up. Will this change the flow of magma under the surface? Will this alter the tilt of the earth and what effect will this have on the moon? All of this will make the sea levels higher that predicted.
Spend more money on science! If mankind has no plans to go into space, then you might as well nuke the planet now! And save mankind thousands of years of suffering!!!
I will make a prediction and this is it; NOT ONE SINGLE HUMAN BEING WILL BE ALIVE ON THIS PLANET IN THE YEAR 8000! FACT!
Sean O
Jim,
Have we learned enough about astronomy and the cosmos to make a judgment as to whether greater scientific value can be generated from X dollars by including, or not including, a portion of those dollars to transport and sustain humans in space?
It seems to me that we’ve made great strides in figuring out the kinds of instrumentation and investigation that is needed to further pull back the curtain. And that we can make more progress faster by sending the instruments into space and leaving the humans here at home (for now).
Greater understanding developed from unmanned probes should make manned space exploration more effective and less risky. Given the budget constraints our science programs face the unmanned-option strikes me as the clear best choice.
take care on the next phase Allyson — too bad we didn’t run into each other more often for coffee on Lab.
Is it possible to spin any of the X-ray / Gamma ray projects as “fundamental research into space radiation hazards”, and then use Mars money to pay for them?
After all, when our boys die from leukemia on their way back from Mars, people will want to know if it was caused by a solar flare or an exploding black hole…
Aww, Jeff, if I didn’t work way up on the hill I’d have a better chance of running into people.
Maybe we can corner Sean and Jennifer into some sort of an awkward CV engagement party in Old Town.
The ISS should be discontinued immediately so as to free up funding for space science! The ISS costs tens of billions of dollars and has thus far done next to nothing to increase our understanding of the Universe. For example, compare the science per dollar done with HST with that of the space station let alone if one adds in the Mars rovers and earth science satellites. We are sacrificing a revolutionary leap in our understanding of our cosmic habitat for a hunk of orbiting metal of, at best, marginal scientific value.
There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
-John F. Kennedy
Wow. JFK really *was* full of it.
Unless that last line was a Nostradamus prediction that Condi is going to desert to the Democrats.
# 12 “The planet is dying and you all want to stay here and spend money on more science!”
I’m not sure that global warming is down to science, unless you’re arguing against all forms of technology. Perhaps scientists might come up with the solutions?
Manned exploration of Mars seems like a gargantuan waste of money, but the pure science probes like LISA are relatively cheap and should definitely go ahead.
Storming the barricades of heaven postponed once again due to funding cuts.
Damn!
The NASA administrators continue to show interest in ESA/Cosmic Vision, and the ESA administrators continue to show interest in the next NASA missions. One positive aspect I see from what NASA is doing is that there _might_ be more cooperative projects between the two agencies (and more). NASA will have to improve the ITAR situation, first, though.
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could somebody tell me what exactly they want to measure in the ‘dark energy probe’ – this website is maximally vague ? Also, what is the status on direct dark matter searches (not at the LHC), any plans on that?
B, they want to measure the dark energy equation-of-state parameter. How to measure it — supernovae, lensing, cluster counts, etc. — is not specified ahead of time. There will be a competition, and the most compelling proposal will (in principle) be chosen.
(Part of “compelling” will be a reason why this particular method requires a space mission, rather than doing it on the ground.)
If I’m not mistaken, the trip to Mars and back might take something like 2-4 years, quite a long time for a handful of scientists to survive without help or contact from Earth.
Given that enormous (and dangerous) logistical difficulty, I think any manned mission to Mars should be postponed indefinitely until it becomes more technologically feasible. Instead, the money should be spent on things like the Big Bang Observer and the Black Hole Imager.
Sean,
Are you familiar with the Dark Energy Survey (DES)? The DES will make use of an existing telescope (albeit with a sophisticated new camera) to bring down the cost. More information regarding this survey can be found at: https://www.darkenergysurvey.org/
Have you heard anything about the funding prospects for DES? The DES website says funding is still pending, but I wonder what are the chances of even this relatively inexpensive science mission seeing fruition in the age of physical science budget axing. With Beyond Einstein looking tenuous the non-CMB cosmological probes would basically stop progressing once SDSS II and other ground based supernovae searches end. Also, from the looks of the Town Meeting transcript it seems like the astro-physics community will have to be satisfied for a significant while with the Planck Surveyor and WMAP 8 year data sets. Sorry folks, CMBPOL isn’t on the horizon.
I have written my state representatives to tell them to support the Beyond Einstein program although I wonder if the public was informed of these missions it might result in a Hubble-effect. The people put pressure on NASA to fund the HST servicing mission.