On Thursday, astronomers also urged NASA to embark on a new mission to the Great Observatory and Technology Maturity Program that will develop a series of astrophysical spacecraft over the next 20 to 30 years. The first is an optical telescope that is larger than the Hubble Space Telescope and capable of detecting and studying potentially habitable Earth-like planets in the nearby universe. Only NASA can make it happen, astronomers say, noting that it may be ready by 2040 and will cost $11 billion.
Those are the two biggest recommendations in the long-awaited 614-page report, Pathways to Discovery in Astronomy and Astrophysics for the Decade 2020, released by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on Thursday.
Every 10 years for the past 70 years, the Academy has sponsored surveys of the astronomy community to prioritize expensive elements over the next decade. The decade survey is, as is well known, of interest to Congress, NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy.
This year’s effort — led by Fiona A. Harrison of the California Institute of Technology and Robert C. Kennicott, Jr. from the University of Arizona and Texas A&M University — took three years and involved dozens of meetings and discussions among 13 subgroups that included each subgroup. . Astronomy branch. In all, 860 white papers were submitted for the survey, explaining what telescopes could be built, what space missions should be launched, what experiments or observations should be made, and issues such as diversity that the astronomy community had to address.
In an interview, Dr. Harrison said their committee tries to balance ambition with the amount of time and money these projects require. For example, many ideas have been put forward for spacecraft to explore planets. Some are very large, some are very small; Some may take a century to implement. Instead of choosing one of these, the group asked the public and NASA to come back with the idea for a six-meter diameter space telescope. (Hubble’s main mirror is 2.4 meters in diameter.)
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