The astrophysics decadal survey recommended a scaled-down version of a space telescope concept called LUVOIR as the first in a line of flagship space observatories to be developed over the next few decades. (credit: NASA/GSFC)
by Jeff Foust Monday, November 29, 2021
For much of this year, the biggest puzzle for astrophysicists had nothing to do with dark matter, dark energy, or discrepancies in the value of the Hubble Constant. Instead, the question at the top of their minds was: when was Astro2020 coming out?
Astro2020 was the shorthand for the latest astrophysics decadal survey, the once-a-decade review of the state of the field and recommendations for both ground- and space-based projects to pursue to answer the top scientific questions. The final report by the decadal survey’s steering committee, once expected in late 2020 as the name suggests, had slipped to some time in 2021 because of the pandemic, which forced a shift from in-person to virtual meetings just as work on the survey was going into high gear.
The decision to pick a concept between LUVOIR and HabEx was driven by science and budgets: big enough to do meet key science objectives like characterizing exoplanets, but also small enough to fit into a reasonable cost and schedule.
The committee itself kept quiet about its work, providing little specific guidance about when to expect the final report. At a meeting of NASA’s Astrophysics Advisory Committee in October, Paul Hertz, director of the agency’s astrophysics division, presented the results of an office pool from earlier in the year predicting when the report would be released. All but two thought the report would have already been released by the mid-October meeting of that committee; those two predicted it would be released the week of Thanksgiving.
Fortunately, they and the rest of the astrophysics community did not have to wait until last week’s holiday to get their hands on the report. The document, released November 4, provided astronomers with a long-awaited roadmap for not just the next decade but arguably through the middle of the century, endorsing a set of observatories that can peer back into the distant early universe and also look for habitable worlds close to home.
While the decadal survey makes a series of recommendations for smaller missions and ground-based telescopes, what gets the most attention is its recommendation for a large strategic, or flagship, space mission. That recommendation is just that—NASA isn’t bound to accept it—yet the agency has adopted the top-ranked flagship missions of previous decadals. That includes the one picked in the previous decadal in 2010, which became the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), renamed by NASA to the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope last year.
NASA, in preparation for Astro2020, commissioned detailed studies of four proposed flagship observatories, operating from far infrared to X-ray wavelengths (see “Selecting the next great space observatory”, The Space Review, January 21, 2019.) These studies offered detailed technical, scientific, and budgetary information for the concepts, which were effectively finalists for the being the next flagship mission—although the decadal survey was not under any obligation to pick one.
And, in the end, they didn’t pick one of the four. Instead, the recommended flagship mission was something of a compromise between two of the concepts. One, the Habitable Exoplanet Observatory, or HabEx, proposed a space telescope between 3.2 and 4 meters across optimized to search for potentially habitable exoplanets. The other, the Large Ultraviolet Optical Infrared Surveyor, or LUVOIR, proposed a large space telescope between 8 and 15 meters across for use in a wide range of astrophysics, from exoplanet studies to cosmology.
What the decadal recommended was a telescope six meters across capable of observations in ultraviolet, visible, and infrared wavelengths: similar to LUVOIR but scaled down to a size between the smaller version of LUVOIR and HabEx.
The decision to pick a concept between LUVOIR and HabEx was driven by science and budgets: big enough to do meet key science objectives like characterizing exoplanets, but also small enough to fit into a reasonable cost and schedule. “We thought that six meters provides assurance of enough target planets, but it’s also a big enough gain in capability over Hubble to really enable general astrophysics,” said Robert Kennicutt, an astronomer at the University of Arizona and Texas A&M University who was one of the two co-chairs of the decadal survey committee.
“We realized that all of these are visionary ideas but they require timelines that are pan-decadal, even multi-generational,” said Harrison. “We really think a different approach needs to be taken.”
That telescope—not given a name by the decadal survey—will still be expensive and take a long time to build. The decadal’s estimates, which included independent cost and schedule analyses, projected the telescope would cost $11 billion to build, in line with the James Webb Space Telescope when accounting for inflation, and be ready for launch in the first half of the 2040s. But the original LUVOIR concept would have cost $17 billion and not be ready until the 2050s, according to those same analyses. HabEx, the decadal survey concluded, would have been cheaper but too small to meet many of those science goals.
That selection of a flagship mission was, alone, not that different than past decadal surveys. Even that compromise pick is not unprecedented, as the previous decadal’s recommendation of what would become Roman emerged from combining several concepts. What was different, though, was the realization that, after the delays and cost overruns suffered by past flagships, notably the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA needed a different approach to developing such missions.
“We realized that all of these are visionary ideas but they require timelines that are pan-decadal, even multi-generational,” said Fiona Harrison of Caltech, the other co-chair of the steering committee, referring to the four flagship concepts studied for the decadal. “We really think a different approach needs to be taken.”
What the decadal survey recommended was that the space telescope it recommended be just the first mission to emerge from a new Great Observatories Mission and Technology Maturation Program at NASA. That program would mature technologies for a series of flagship missions in a coherent fashion.
“The survey committee expects that this process will result in decreased cost and risk and enable more frequent launches of flagship missions, even if it does require significantly more upfront investment prior to a decadal recommendation regarding implementation,” the committee concluded in the report.
Specifically, it recommended that, five years after starting work on the large space telescope that was the report’s top priority, NASA begin studies of two other flagship missions, a far infrared space telescope and an X-ray observatory, at estimated costs of $3–5 billion each. Both are similar to the other two flagship mission concepts studied by NASA for this decadal survey, the Origins Space Telescope and Lynx X-ray Observatory.
Setting up studies of those future mission concepts, without committing to them, allows NASA to adapt if both technologies or science goals change, another member of the decadal survey steering committee noted. “If the progress appears to be stalled or delayed, then we can rapidly onramp another one of the compelling, exciting ideas,” said Keivan Stassun of Vanderbilt University. “We can be phasing in multiple great ideas.”
“We were tasked and encouraged by the funding agencies, including NASA, to really think big, bold, ambitious, and long-term,” Stassun said.
The idea that it takes a long time to develop flagship space telescopes is not new: the first studies of JWST, originally called the Next Generation Space Telescope, predate the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope more than three decades ago, and that spacecraft is only now about to launch. But the study’s proposal recognizes that the problems experienced by JWST and, to a lesser extent, Roman, require a different approach to managing such complex, expensive missions.
It also reflects the realization that some of the questions that astrophysics is seeking to answer can’t be easily fit into decade-long timeframes. “We were tasked and encouraged by the funding agencies, including NASA, to really think big, bold, ambitious, and long-term,” Stassun said. “We took that to mean that we should not be thinking only about that which can be accomplished in a ten-year period.”
NASA’s Hertz had, in fact, urged the decadal survey to be bold on many occasions before and during its deliberations. “I asked the decadal survey to be ambitious, and I believe they are certainly ambitious,” he said at a November 8 meeting of the Committee on Astronomy and Astrophysics of the National Academies’ Space Studies Board.
NASA is only starting to review the overall recommendations of the decadal, he said. That includes not just its analysis of flagship missions but endorsement of a new medium-class line of “probe” missions, with a cost of $1.5 billion per mission and flying once a decade. Such missions would be analogous to the New Frontiers line of planetary science missions that fall between planetary science flagships and smaller Discovery class missions.
The delay in completing the decadal means it won’t have an impact on NASA’s next budget proposal for fiscal year 2023, which is already in active development for release in early 2022. Hertz said he’ll provide some initial comment on the decadal at a town hall meeting during the American Astronomical Society meeting in early January, particularly any recommendations that can be accommodated in the fiscal year 2022 budget. A complete, formal response will come later next year after a series of town hall meetings.
Those plans will depend on budgets. The first views Congress has on the decadal, including its flagship mission plans, will come Wednesday when the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee holds a hearing on the report.
Hertz was optimistic in general about the state of NASA’s astrophysics programs, citing the impending launch of JWST and Roman passing its critical design review. “I’m really excited. This is a great time for astrophysics,” he said. Astronomers hope the decadal’s recommendations, if implemented, can make it a great few decades for the field.
Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.
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More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.
That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.
“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”
The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.
Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.
Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.
Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.
Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.
“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”
The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.
North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.
Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”
Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.
Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.
For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.
“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”
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It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.
On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.
They call it “Big Sam.”
The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.
It didn’t die alone.
“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.
She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”
“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.
The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.
The discovery was a long time coming.
The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.
“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.
When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”
“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.
Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.
About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.
Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.
“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.
“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”
The genders of the two adults are unknown.
Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.
The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.
She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.
“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.
“It’s pretty exciting.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
