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Unfortunately for astronomers who love Chandra, her future is bleak. If Congress approves the Biden administration’s fiscal year 2025 budget request for NASA science missions, the Chandra mission will effectively end, they say.
The uncertain status of older telescopes is part of a serious budget problem at NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. There is hardly enough money to fund all the planetary probes, Mars rovers, and space telescopes already built or planned.And officials have made it clear to everyone that additional funding is unlikely. It magically descends from the sky.
Taxpayers provide resources for NASA’s science missions, including about $7.5 billion annually. But the budget has not been able to keep up with scientific ambitions, including costly attempts to recover samples from Mars.
NASA’s strategic vision may also be influenced by foreign competition. China and other countries are launching spacecraft from right to left. China could land astronauts on the moon within just a few years. The military and national security community is discussing Space Race 2.0 and space as a combat domain.
In tight budget situations, there are winners and losers. Chandra may be just one of several missions that fall into the latter category.
NASA has not said it will cancel the Chandra mission. However, the language in NASA’s March 11 budget request did not sound promising. “Reductions to Chandra will begin an orderly mission reduction to minimal operations.”
The telescope is funded at just under $70 million a year, but the 2025 budget request cuts that to $41 million. It then increased to $26.6 million the following year and dropped to $5 million in fiscal year 2029.
“We had to make some difficult choices to maintain a balanced portfolio across the Science Mission Directorate,” said Nicola “Nicky” Fox, NASA’s top science administrator. “Chandra is very, very precious…but sadly it’s an old spaceship.”
Flat budget vs. high ambitions
Last spring, after a bloody budget fight on Capitol Hill, President Biden signed the Fiscal Responsibility Act, which increases the federal debt ceiling while mandating limits on federal spending. Despite inflation making everything more expensive, many government agencies are coping with flat budgets at best.
Casey Dreier, director of space policy at the Planetary Society, wrote in a recent column that even if the 2025 White House request increased NASA’s overall budget by 2%, inflation would still cost $2 billion in purchasing power after 2020. He said that .
With the Artemis program, the United States is committed to landing astronauts on the moon again. The Artemis mission includes lunar science. But most of that money goes to rockets, spacecraft, orbital refueling stations, lunar landers, and the complex costs of keeping humans alive in places without air or other comforts.
Budget Reality Check: Human spaceflight will beat agency budgets in an internal wrestling match.
And then there’s the Mars sample return. This is NASA’s most ambitious and expensive planetary science program. The aim is to bring some of the Martian soil back to Earth for laboratory research, a priority for the scientific community, which believes Mars was once a warm, humid habitat for life in its youth. I suspect that it was. The Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars in 2021, had already dug up and hidden samples.
But getting them to Earth isn’t easy or cheap. An independent review board said last year that the mission was expected to be over budget and would not meet its launch schedule. The reviewers estimated that sample return would cost between $8.4 billion and $10.9 billion over the duration of the mission.
NASA responded by establishing a team to study the mission’s architecture and schedule. Mars sample return has been stalled for months, but that difficult period may soon be over. On Monday, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Foxx are scheduled to hold a conference call with reporters to announce the results of the mission review at a NASA Town Hall. to obey.
Meanwhile, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the mission, laid off about 8 percent of its workforce.
Across the scientific community, people are asserting their mission, meeting with legislators on the Hill and trying to explain why research that seems arcane to the public deserves support.
And there are tough debates within the scientific community about which missions are worth investing in given limited resources. The most expensive “flagship” missions often threaten to eat the lunch of smaller missions. Although the Webb telescope was a great success, it cost about $10 billion and earned it the unforgettable label of “the telescope that ate astronomy.”
As an X-ray telescope, Chandra is not as versatile as the Hubble Space Telescope or the Webb Space Telescope in terms of producing poster-worthy images, so it does not have the celebrity status of those observatories. But it has amassed a long list of discoveries, some of them in conjunction with telescopes observing at different wavelengths. Chandra observations in 2015 captured a black hole tearing apart a star. In November, Chandra’s observations were key to the discovery of a supermassive black hole in a galaxy 13 billion light-years away.This black hole is claimed to be the oldest and most distant black hole of its kind. I’ve seen it till now.
About 80 people are expected to lose their jobs if Chandra is reduced to bare-bones operations.
“I started working on Chandra right out of graduate school in 1988, and that’s been my entire career,” says Pat Slane, 68, director of the Chandra X-ray Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, wistfully. Told.
“We just received proposals for next year’s Chandra observations last week, and we were over five times oversubscribed,” Slaine said. “We maintain that it is still a viable observatory.”
Grant Tremblay, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, is one of the scientists arguing for Chandra’s survival. He said the telescope’s retirement won’t end X-ray astronomy, but the United States will lose its position as a leader in the field.
“I support scientists all over the world. I don’t care what flag they fly,” Tremblay said. “But it is true that the United States will cede leadership in space discovery.”
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