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.
Hi Sean,
thanks. I would go for grav. lensing. What is the timescale for this experiment to be planned and scheduled? Best,
B.
#19 this is all about coming up with a TOE, but a Theory Of Everything is the biggest paradox there is, there should be a 50% chance that you prove that everything does not exist, what then? Then everything will come up with the simplest solution to that! Prevention is better than a cure! Are there any more gremlins at the LHC? Maybe the earth will throw in a couple of earthquakes, just to set them back 5 years Maybe then a couple of carefully placed asteroids, hitting major cities, all by chance of course or not as may be the case!
Billions of people, with no land to live on, Plagues, Terrorism (am I still allowed to say that?), floods and wind speeds exceeding the speed of sound? What does happen to a storm that does that?
Creation of plagues that are nano in nature and use entanglement to its perfect super partner, can’t kill a virus if you don’t know were it is? If science can do it, nature will as well.
Ten years is not that long, nothing will have change by then, man will still be polluting more than ever. Science needs to make a choice; Red pill see how far the rabbit hole goes, stay here and never get out of that hole. Or blue pill forget the rabbit hole and save the planet! But make sure all our eggs are not in one basket, we need another planet and we need it yesterday! Space is the most unforgiving environment there is and the earth is in it! For the last 100,000 years man has been lucky! Very lucky!
Are you saying that there is no scientific purpose for going to Mars? I agree that a return trip to the moon is useless, but I thought that further study of Mars could yield data about the formation of our solar system?
There’s lots of science to be done by going to both the Moon and Mars, but not by sending human beings there. The return per dollar, given the current state of the art, is enormously larger for robotic missions.
B (to answer your somewhat old question) — that’s exactly what this panel is trying to decide; which of any of the missions should even fly. The timeline will depend on which is chosen.
Paul: At the rate things are going, we are in danger of doing neither exploration nor science. Then everyone will be unhappy.
With any luck the Asian economies will lose interest in financing our federal debt and will push the government into default. Then the aerospace and defense contractors will have to find some other trough to feed at. Of course, we’ll all be in the midst of a full-scale depression, and science will revert to the status it had in this country around, say, 1850…
(Of course, said Asian countries don’t really want to deal with the worldwide economic blowback of this scenario…at least, I don’t think so.)
Lisa is my favorite Beyond Einstein project. Is there a chance that Europe might do the whole project without us or with minimal participation from us?
From the other side, I hope the next president will be a bit less clueless. Maybe NASA’s direction can be changed in a couple of years.
Chris:
I agree with Sean’s response about robots exploring Mars. I actually believe that if there are difficult tasks that cannot be done by robots, it would still be cheaper to spend tens of billions of dollars to make better robots that can do such tasks than send humans to Mars.
Our desire to explore the Solar System will thus lead to better and better robots until they replace us, as I explain
here. 🙂
Lisa is my favorite Beyond Einstein project. Is there a chance that Europe might do the whole project without us or with minimal participation from us?
It’s not inconceivable … but I doubt it. They’ve made noises about doing it alone before (indeed, it was a European-only project in one of its early proposals), and I suspect would like to find a way to be European-only again, but the costs are large enough that a partner of NASA scale makes the project more palatable to ESA member states.