{"id":1187,"date":"2007-04-05T09:01:05","date_gmt":"2007-04-05T14:01:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2007\/04\/05\/to-infinity-although-beyond-might-be-too-expensive\/"},"modified":"2007-04-05T09:01:05","modified_gmt":"2007-04-05T14:01:05","slug":"to-infinity-although-beyond-might-be-too-expensive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2007\/04\/05\/to-infinity-although-beyond-might-be-too-expensive\/","title":{"rendered":"To Infinity, Although Beyond Might Be Too Expensive"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steinn has a great report up from his recent visit to a Beyond Einstein Town Hall meeting<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Beyond Einstein program<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

We highlighted five missions. Two had well-defined mission concepts: LISA<\/a> to search for gravitational waves and Constellation-X<\/a> to look at X-rays. Three probes<\/a> 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>: 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.<\/p>\n

Beyond Einstein<\/p>\n

Subsequently, of course, NASA has decided that it has other priorities; primarily, visiting the Moon and Mars<\/a>. That is too expensive to undertake while we’re squandering money on actual “science,” so some tough choices<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

So a high-powered National Academy committee<\/a> is examining everything closely, deciding what to keep and what to kill. I’m sure that’s not a fun job. Steinn’s report<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-and-politics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1187\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}