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[Excerpt]
Feb 20, 2018
Forbes
Cancelling WFIRST Will Permanently Ruin NASA
by Ethan Siegel
Last week, the White House released their plans for the 2018 fiscal year budget. Across many metrics and departments, it was a bloodbath, gutting about $50 billion from agencies focused on science, health, food, arts, humanities, the environment, and education, among many others. But among the reductions was one murderous stroke to NASA: the elimination its flagship mission of the coming decade, WFIRST. The Wide-Field Infrared Space Telescope was chosen by NASA to be the single most important astrophysics mission of the 2020s, and has been in the early planning stages for nearly 20 years. Countless astronomers and astrophysicists have spend their entire professional lives working to make this mission happen, and teach us things we'll never know, otherwise, about the Universe. Cancelling it is a decision that must be revoked, or NASA will cease to be the leading science and space agency for planet Earth.
While it's disastrous for the agency to consider the loss of five of its Earth science missions and the elimination of its office of education, the loss of WFIRST would be an incomparable disaster for the agency.
According to Thomas Zurbuchen, Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate of NASA:
What we learn from these flagship missions is why we study the Universe. This is civilization-scale science... If we don't do this, we aren't NASA.
This was a statement he made just last month at NASA's Town Hall at the American Astronomical Society's annual meeting. WFIRST was selected as the #1 overall mission for the 2020s back in 2010; it's a mission that takes approximately 15 years to design, contract, execute, build, deliver, and launch. In terms of science, it planned to primarily serve a number of major communities within astronomy and astrophysics: supernova research, extragalactic astronomers, exoplanet researchers, studies of the galactic center, and wide-field studies that focus on gravitational lensing and properties of the cosmic web.
The way it's poised to do this is by taking a telescope that's similar in optical properties to Hubble, but by outfitting it with all-new instruments optimized for a wide-field view of the Universe. Instead of being limited to a narrow slice of the Universe, WFIRST could image it just as deeply as Hubble, except 60 times as quickly. The "WF" stands for Wide-Field for a reason; the amount of Universe it can image is huge! And as a result, the amount we can learn about the Universe is huge as well.
Some of our greatest existential questions would be answered by WFIRST. How does dark energy behave, for example? Does it evolve over time? Is it uniform in all directions? Do the results from supernovae, the cosmic web, and extragalactic signals all point to the same set of properties? WFIRST would answer all of these questions as no other mission, past, present, or even proposed, would be capable of.
In 2010, the National Research Council's Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey made WFIRST the top priority recommendation in the large space mission category. They also made a recommendation that they add on significant capabilities for exoplanet studies, including a state-of-the-art coronagraph, and those are being implemented. By monitoring a large sample of stars in the Milky Way's center, WFIRST will allow us to detect, via subtle changes in brightness, the presence of exoplanets that NASA's Kepler could never have seen. We will learn how common Earth-like planets are around a wide variety of stars and over a very large range of orbital parameters.
In addition, like all such flagship missions, including Hubble and James Webb, there will be a guest observer program. Not only will research in galactic, extragalactic, exoplanet, gravitational lensing, baryon acoustic oscillation and supernova sub-fields be considered, but any astrophysical topic that could take advantage of WFIRST's unique capabilities can propose. This is poised to be the leading observatory for a wide slew of purposes for not just a few years, but — like Hubble — potentially for decades.
It was the top choice out of all the missions that the entire astronomy and astrophysics community proposed. It represented a huge effort in collaboration between groups with widely disparate interests and passions, and allowed cosmologists and exoplanet scientists to work together on putting together a mission that these non-overlapping communities could both benefit from. It included the possibility of a starshade, which would enable planet-finding and measurement to an unprecedented level.
And with a nuclear stroke from the Trump administration, it all threatens to crumble away.
We absolutely cannot let this project go down without a fight. If WFIRST gets cancelled, it's a sign that even the most important NASA project, as determined by internal, external, and independent reviewers, is subject to political whims. These projects take more than a single presidency to design, approve, build, and launch. Federal funding for these vital missions that enhance all of society must not be allowed to disappear because one human — even if it's the president — wills it. The joys, wonder, knowledge, and benefits that come from exploring and understanding the Universe are greater than any individual.
25 years ago, the Superconducting Supercollider (SSC) was cancelled, and today, the United States doesn't even have a major particle physics facility in the same league as the LHC at CERN, which is itself a vastly inferior machine to what the SSC would have been. The United States must not cede leadership in the space and science arena to Japan, Russia, Europe, China, India and Canada in the same way. Humanity's capability of understanding the entire Universe is at stake.
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How to respond to this? Yes, it's a very elegant argument, couched in somewhat nationalistic-altruistic terms. On the other hand, NASA projects seem to be financial Black Holes these days. Just refer to the preceding article regarding the bending launch tower dedicated to the SLS for the counterargument.
As a dedicated amateur astronomer, the Wide Field Infrared Space Telescope (WFIRST) would undoubtedly be a magnificent research tool for the astronomical community, but the nail in it's coffin was the price tag which was undergoing price creep. A project of this type should be started and finished in less than 10 years, or it's subject to cancellation as was the continuation of the Apollo missions. Was what ultimately sank the SCSC 25 years ago was the congressional cost/benefit analysis; the money to be spent would have been a financial windfall for a single state, and not spread around to a variety of constituencies (the way SLS is kept afloat).
The argument that China, Russia, Japan, or some other wannabee superpower will fund something like this is ludicrous. The USA is at this juncture the ONLY country even capable of doing this.
Last edited by Oldfart1939 (2018-02-20 21:27:19)
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If cancelled plan to send the instruments to HUbble and keep it up there a little bit longer....
Sounds like a good proving ground mission for the deep space habitat.. out fit it with a service bay to pull the aging telescope into and pressurize it for retrofitting.....
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Discussion of this instrument has all but disappeared from the more "newsy" websites. It makes me wonder: how deep was support for this instrument in the first place? My post #2 was somewhat mealy-mouthed, but the cost associated was mind-boggling. If NASA had a much larger budget to begin, I would definitely support another space observatory. I couldn't find anything as whether or not this has progressed beyond the "study" stage regards any hardware construction. Seems "the jury is still out," on this project?
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It appears now the JWST is in some jeopardy of possible cancellation due to unconscionable delays and cost overruns; I hope not. So I'm now an enthusiastic supporter of WFIRST. Not so much on technical grounds but mere practicality. This telescope doesn't have all the bells and whistles of JWST, and does NOT require any unfolding and realignment of the telescope mirror segments. It more or less fills my KISS requirement.
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Commenting about JWST in its topic....
It appears now the JWST is in some jeopardy of possible cancellation due to unconscionable delays and cost overruns; I hope not.
Now onto the WFIRST and like any cutting edge design and implementation the bucks are usually in the unobtainium draw as flagship projects go. That is suggested by:
NASA to be the single most important astrophysics mission of the 2020s, and has been in the early planning stages for nearly 20 years. Countless astronomers and astrophysicists have spend their entire professional lives working to make this mission happen
Last month What Would It Mean for Astronomers If the WFIRST Space Telescope Is Killed?
Other NASA flagship missions include the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Telescope, and the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope. April 2017, NASA assembled an independent review panel to investigate the WFIRST cost overruns.
WFIRST funding will be redirected to "exploration activities," according to Hunter, which include efforts to send humans back to the moon. Money was also diverted to lunar exploration activities from Earth science and education
The science will be there and hopefully the design would be altered to make use of newer technology at a lesser cost....
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Political winds can blow the other way when the political climate changes. We just need for folks to retain the records of cancelled items so the restart doesn't have to be completely from scratch.
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As for ruining Nasa permanently quuestion well it is past that and it maybe to late to get the lead out when they have been pork fed for so long with no direction or demand for an output.
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We just need for folks to retain the records of cancelled items so the restart doesn't have to be completely from scratch.
That's more important than you realize. Historians tried to find what happened to the original Apollo tapes. Apollo 11 had custom video cameras, high definition, a unique technical format. Television at the time could not transmit that format. To ensure the Apollo 11 landing was presented to the public, live as it happened, a Deep Space Network station in Australia received the data, presented on a custom monitor, and a TV camera with standard NTSC format (North American TV Standard) pointed at the monitor. That TV camera was re-broadcast to TV networks around the world. Presenting high definition on a tube monitor, then a 1969 vintage TV camera recording the monitor? That definitely produced low quality. That low quality recording is what we all remember, and what has been preserved. But the original high definition signal was recorded on wide magnetic tape at the DNS station in Australia. There was also telemetry, recorded on another tape. Those tapes were preserved in the national archives.
Historians tried to get those tapes. In 1969 they didn't have any way to directly convert format, but we do today. So these historians thought they would transcribe the original tapes to something modern, which could be uploaded to YouTube, and made available to current TV programs. However, they found a NASA probe needed tapes to record their data. Those tapes were difficult to acquire, so the manager of the program requested the Apollo tapes from the archive, then erased them and recorded over them. So the original high definition video of Apollo 11 is lost forever.
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