Sorry to bump Julianne’s fun post further down the page, but lots of news today. This particular piece of news is not fun: NASA is abandoning LISA, the planned Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, as well as IXO, an X-ray satellite observatory (formerly “Constellation X”). Steinn has some of the ugly details. Short story: money is tight, and the James Webb Space Telescope is taking all of it. (Not that JWST is completely immune from danger itself…)
LISA is not completely dead: the European Space Agency will keep the planning alive. But this is a serious step, not just a feint in a budget negotiation; the LISA International Science Team is being disbanded, told to pack up and go home. Hopefully the ESA will continue to push forward, and individual researchers in the US can somehow find money to still think about gravitational-wave astrophysics from space. It’s possible that a smaller mission could be put forward, but it’s not as if NASA has extra money they’re looking to spend right now.
Of all the concepts for big astrophysics missions in space, LISA is my favorite. Unlike LIGO, which strains as hard as possible and hopefully will detect something once its upgraded, LISA would be bombarded with gravitational waves, and the trick will be picking out the interesting signals from above the ambient noise. (That’s a problem we don’t mind having.) I was part of the original Beyond Einstein roadmap team (pdf) that packaged LISA and Constellation-X together with a dark energy mission to create an ambitious but realistic plan for NASA cosmology that Congress and the OMB could get behind. That was in 2002, before wars and tax cuts and financial catastrophes sapped the government of its ability to pay for anything. The best-laid plans of mice and men and NASA panels, as the saying goes.
LISA’s science is not just achievable, it’s incredibly interesting. It would detect thousands of binary systems within our galaxy, as well as numerous inspirals of middleweight black holes into supermassive ones in other galaxies, giving us incredibly detailed access to the spacetime metric near a black hole. As a side benefit, the wavelength is just right for looking at gravitational waves that might be produced in the early universe if the electroweak phase transition is especially violent. I remember giving a talk to particle physicists planning the International Linear Collider (another possibly doomed endeavor) back in 2003. It was great to see their eyes light up when I told them about this connection between satellite observatories and particle accelerators — at a meeting dominated by budget worries, it was a tiny oasis of actual science.
Hopefully things will somehow work out, but there’s not a lot of reason for optimism at the moment. We’ll see how things go.
If you think the cancellation of the LISA is bad, can you believe that while scouting talent for a science documentary I want to make explaining my theories about time displacement.
I was arrested and put on trial for child molestation. (Los Angeles County).
Regardless, I ‘am still going forward.
Okay people, just thought I’d point out that LISA isn’t cancelled, for a few reasons, starting with the fact that it was never guaranteed in the first place by NASA or the ESA, and ending with the fact that essentially the ESA dumped NASA because of how tiny NASA’s budget is. And if you bother to properly read the President’s budget request for NASA for the last couple of years along with this year’s, you’ll see that JWST isn’t actually sucking up all the money. Blame Wall Street/Afghanistan/your money-sucking economy-destroying cause of the week. The entire agency is being shrunk to the tune of about $2.2 billion over the next few years. That’s not JWST. That’s some people thinking that we can “win the future” by defunding pure science. (Thankfully the people who funded CERN when the WWW was invented were not this stupid.)
The headline of this blog entry significantly exaggerates what is going on. The real facts of what happens next are here: http://lisa.nasa.gov/
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it is sad. LISA is one of the ambitious project. Crunch of money should not stop the project. If the same was the case with some of the ambitious project of earlier times – building of accelerators, sending men to moon, launching of various space crafts, establishing Hubble, Chandra and other powerful telescopes, sequencing genes … , we the mankind would be the looser. Let Obama and his men stop funding heavily on defence and divert them to Science projects like LISA so that our understanding of the universe and nature to reach new frontiers.
Krishna
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Wow, there’s some pretty apocalyptic talk on this thread! The US is finished, humankind is a writeoff, my dreams of greatness by proxy are irrepairably damaged, etc.
We are going through a temporary financial problem. Most likely. It’s not like the world hasn’t faced problems before and considerable numbers of those were far, far worse than now. All we have to do is exile all the irresponsible financial types and hope there are more than a dozen left to keep the system running (hah!).
If LISA has merit it will be back, though perhaps in a different form.
Meanwhile I maintain that proven successful and productive projects are what need to be protected and nurtured at this time. Bleeding edge projects with a 50-95% chance of failing are a waste of time and political capital during a financial pinch. Especially if they are expensive to begin with and very likely to overrun their initial budgets. By a lot!
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Just as I was thinking we might really do something new and significant … another sign of America’s decline slaps me in the face.
LISA won’t go away, it’s too important to science and our future. It will just go elsewhere; to other countries and private contractors, (maybe even American ones, but that’s probably too much to hope for).
I hope all you extremely wealthy Americans are thoroughly enjoying those beautiful homes, private jets, fancy cars, massages, gourmet meals and other perks that the Bush tax cuts and a total lack of fiscal restraint and regulatory oversight have helped to finance.
I’ve lost all respect for you.
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