7 ms·
NASA Gives Up on LISA
- juiceandjuice 15y agoThis has been feared for a while in that community. There's quite a bit of animosity towards the JWST for soaking up NASA's budget in recent history, and JWST is trying to do some serious damage control because they're too far along and too big to fail. I saw John Mather (Nobel prize winner) give a talk recently that was basically "Look how far we are, and we're sorry for soaking up the budget."
- mturmon 15y agoMore on the JWST overrun: http://www.spacenews.com/civil/101112-jwst-cost-imperils-priority-projects.html http://www.spacenews.com/civil/101112-jwst-cost-imperils-pri...
- d2 15y agoCanceling the JWST will be a catastrophe for NASA.
- mturmon 15y agoThey're not proposing to cancel JWST. It's just that its $6.5B price tag is overwhelming the whole astrophysics science effort. The original design was supposed to come in around 0.5B. See http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/71607/title/Star_Cents http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/71607/title/Star_...
- gammarator 15y agoUnfortunately, with JWST sitting out there as its own line-item in the NASA budget (as opposed to rolled in with the rest of Astrophysics), there's concern in the community that it will be a tempting target for a Congress anxious to cut anything that moves.
- OstiaAntica 15y agoTo be fair to the cutters in Congress, running a government that borrows 40 cents of every dollar it spends is going to lead to a catastrophe.
- OstiaAntica 15y agoTo be fair to the cutters in Congress, running a government that borrows 40 cents of every dollar it spends is going to lead to a catastrophe.
- robryan 15y agoGiven the amount spent a launch failure would be pretty catastrophic for the JWST.
- mturmon 15y agoA launch failure is always catastrophic for the onboard instrument ;-)
- harshpotatoes 15y agoYes, this is true. But unfortunately, if LISA were allowed to be completed, LISA would be in the same situation soaking up all of the budget. LISA was expected to cost more than a billion dollars. As is true for any project of that size, there would be overages.
- ars 15y agoThat's too bad. Gravity waves are one of the last unknowns in science that we also know how to study. (Most other unknowns we don't know how to study.) I've always wondered, we have rich foundations doing all kinds of good - do any of them try to step in and fill budgets of this sort?
- hugh3 15y agoWell, we've still got LIGO carefully looking for gravity waves. So far we haven't detected any. Maybe it'd be a good idea to make one hundred percent sure that they actually exist (or else that they're definitely below the limits of LIGO) before building another expensive instrument. There's no real hurry. Gravity waves will still be there in twenty years time if we feel like building LISA.
- archgoon 15y ago>Maybe it'd be a good idea to make one hundred percent sure that they actually exist (or else that they're definitely below the limits of LIGO) before building another expensive instrument. Hmm. I'm not too familiar with that research area. Isn't the point of detectors like LIGO is that we don't know how big they are typically? How do we make one hundred percent sure that gravity waves exist? What do you propose as a way that would convince ourselves that they do (or don't), and how do we estimate their size? Has the research community done this already?
- juiceandjuice 15y agoexperiment -> theory rinse, repeat.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- cynest 15y agoWe have significant evidence to believe that gravitational waves do exist. By measuring the energy of Hulse-Taylor Binaries, we can show that the expected energy loss is there. This was the basis for the 1993 Nobel in physics.
- helwr 15y agoA question to all the billionaires watching this thread: Why would you give away money to charity while you could sponsor LISA?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- gammarator 15y agoMany (most?) ground-based telescopes are funded by private donors: e.g., the Keck Telescopes, the Allan Telescope Array, etc. Space missions, not so much. My guesses for why: the costs are significantly higher, and NASA isn't set up bureaucratically to work with private capital. That said, private money for technology development efforts or data analysis could likely be well-used.