Pre-election New York Magazine Article, image.
There’s not much more to this story than it tells us what we already know. He’s all for short-term gratification, whether it comes to sexual assault or getting a rally crowd to cheer “lock her up.”
Unfortunately for science, trying to cancel this program shows he has no concern, and no conception, about what it could mean to our understanding of the universe.
A star-crossed mission nearly 20 years in the making that was intended to seek an answer to the most burning, baffling question in astronomy — and perhaps elucidate the fate of the universe — is in danger of being canceled.
The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope, or Wfirst, was being designed to investigate the mysterious force dubbed dark energy that is speeding up the expansion of the universe and search out planets around other stars.
In 2010, a blue-ribbon panel from the National Academy of Sciences charged with charting the future of space-based astronomy gave the mission the highest priority for the next decade. Under the plan, it could have launched in mid-2020s with a price tag of $3.2 billion.
But it was zeroed out in the NASA budget proposed by President Trump last week.
In a statement accompanying the budget, Robert M. Lightfoot Jr., the agency’s acting administrator, called the deletion “one hard decision,” citing the need to divert resources to “other agency priorities.” NASA is shifting its focus back to the moon. NEW YORK TIMES
To Trump, I suppose the moon is sexy. Dark energy, not so much.
Tuesday, Feb 20, 2018 · 6:55:17 PM +00:00 · HalBrown
More science from Scientific American
WFIRST’s heart is a gigantic camera with 18 detectors, each capable of capturing a 16-mega-pixel shot—giving it a field of view 200 times Hubble’s. “When you have this enormous field of view you can address scientific problems that really are not practical with missions like Hubble or Webb,” says Jeffrey Kruk, the WFIRST project scientist at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Those include a survey to measure how the structure of the Universe evolved over time, which will shed light on the nature of dark energy. WFIRST’s data should complement the observations of several other dark-energy explorers set to come online in the early 2020s, such as the European Space Agency’s Euclid probe, says Rachel Mandelbaum, an astrophysicist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. READ ENTIRE ARTICLE