Congress Wants To Make It Harder For The President To Alter Nasa's Long-Term Plans.

[Fweethawt]

Fuckin' yay!

 

http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/25/11116386/nasa-space-leadership-preservation-act-science-comittee-hearing

[bornagainathiest]

As someone with a lifetime interest in astronomy, astronautics and space exploration I applaud this move and hope to see it go thru.

What's not readily appreciated by the general public (or certain politicians) is the sheer amount of dogged persistence and hard work over decades that's required to see a proposed mission or experiment thru to it's completion.  The recent success of the LIGO project in discovering gravitational waves wouldn't have been possible without 40 (Yes, 40. Not 14.) years of continuous funding and support from the National Science Foundation.  

 

http://www.nsf.gov/

 

Long-term space projects are particularly vulnerable to interference from those who can only see the importance of short-term goals.

So anything that can help keep these multi-decade efforts going has got to be a good thing in my book.  Interestingly enough, another excellent example of such long-sighted scientific vision and long-term effort can be found, not here in the US, but in the European Union.  Their space agency, the ESA, together with Russian cooperation, was responsible for lofting the Gaia satellite into orbit in 2013.  It's five year mission is to (Boldly go where no man has gone before... Sorry! Couldn't resist that one. ) perform a hyper-accurate survey of the positions and movements of a billion (not a million) stars in the Milky Way galaxy.  This probe is also tasked with discovering between 10 to 50 thousand exoplanets, 10's of thousands of asteroids and as many as 100,000 supernovae in distant galaxies.  As well as performing ultra-high precision tests of General Relativity to compliment the work currently being done by LIGO and the LISA Pathfinder satellite.

 

http://sci.esa.int/gaia/

 

http://sci.esa.int/lisa-pathfinder/

 

Such a sophisticated and capable machine as Gaia is not planned and built over a weekend.

One of the lead scientists, Doctor Michael Perryman, began laying the groundwork for the complex optics of this satellite's telescopes in 1982.  He did so as the project scientist for the Hipparcos mission, which was a proof-of-concept probe, launched by the ESA in 1989, the success of which became the foundation upon which much of the Gaia project was built.  Even though that satellite is due to complete it's mission in 2018, so much raw data will have been gathered by it that a large team of data analysts and computer programmers will spend a further four years simply reducing that data into a form that can be used by the wider scientific community.  This data release is scheduled for 2022/23.

 

So, a proper overview of the Gaia mission (factoring Hipparcos and Perryman's ground-breaking optical research) shows that like LIGO, it will be a four-decade effort.

Neither LIGO nor Gaia could have come to fruition in a political climate of budget cuts, funding caps, bean counting and short-term thinking.

And this is why, if America want to continue leading the world in scientific research and exploration, continuity is vital!

 

Thanks,

 

BAA.