The National Research Council's Assessment Committee for the Beyond Einstein program had a townhall meeting here in the Windy City.
Much to my surprise, I was there also.
The Beyond Einstein program at NASA is in trouble. With cuts and squeezing by the Exploration Development effort, the original plan for two major missions (Con-X and LISA) and three medium missions (JDEM, BHFP and CIP) combined with an integrated effort in research and EPO is out the door.
At the request of the DoE, the NRC is doing a priority ranking, a funding wedge is opening in 2009, one mission can get a startup, the others, not so much.
Realistically, a second mission will probably be named as a ranked priority, then the rest will get bounced to the decadal survey that will start in a couple of years, and we start all over again. If there is any funding for new starts again (we're looking at maybe 2022-2025 at current budget profiles).
Harsh.
There are O($billion) at stake. Or 5000-10000 science man years.
Here's the lineup:
Con-X: large scale x-ray spectroscopy mission. Services a large community, big at the NASA centers. Solid technologically, 5+ year development time because of hardware bottlenecks.
LISA: low frequency gravitational radiation detector. Joint with ESA, under a formal agreement. Pathfinder mission (ESA) to test technology due to fly in 2009.
JDEM (Joint Dark Energy Mission): mission concept to be competed. Look for type Ia supernovae at z > 1, with weak lensing as secondary mission. SNAP is one of the competing concepts (but not the only one), and has DoE backing with 5 years of lab tech development.
BHFP (Black Hole Finder Probe): mission concept to be competed: main entry is EXIST - hard x-ray sky monitor. Find accreting black holes and transient high energy events. Complementary to existing x-ray missions. Sounds ready to go technologically. Likely to be cheap.
CIP (Cosmic Inflationary Probe): mission concept to be competed. Microwave background polarization. Test inflation models. Post-Planck mission. My impression is technology is at early ill defined stage but known to be doable in principle.
So... how did it go?
There were about 50 attendees, plus another 12-20 committee and staff.
Meeting in a small hotel conference room. Very top heavy. Lots of senior people, some of whom flew in from far away. ESA group here for a separate presentation tomorrow about state of the Cosmic Vision and how it fits in.
There were 23 pre-registered speakers; they got 5 mins each, plus 3 mins max for questions from the committee.
8 people made short (2 min) statements at the "open mike" session at the end.
It was the quietest room I have ever been in. There was absolutely no chatter in the back at all, and very little clicking on laptops or rustle of papers. For 3.5 hours (with 10 min coffee break) every person sat and listened closely.
The speakers had a very hard task: 5 mins is too little time to say much and no slides or projection were permitted. No one applauded, which increased the tension for the speakers.
There were a couple of muttered "that is NOT what it says", but not much audience reaction.
A majority read prepared statements, which comes across very stilted for most speakers. Most of us who tried to wing it ended up hum-hawing and being flustered by the time constraints and ambiance.
Not a great moment in public speaking for most of us, despite the assembled experience.
Most speakers stayed on or under time, which was impressive.
Only 4 committee members showed up, which surprised me. We were told to expect 7. Some I gather were delayed by weather.
The committee is very, very sharp. Any weakness or opening and they pounced, and the questions hit pretty hard at conceptual weaknesses in the presentations. Some were obviously rehash of previous townhall meetings or raised in written questions.
Ok, Rocky Kolb was supposed to open up but was delayed and ended up speaking last.
He gave a very good ad lib speech on the program concept, and ended up with a soft pitch for JDEM.
We had one speaker advocate any or either of the high energy missions; then we had 3 EXIST proponents; 8 Con-X proponents!; 4 LISA proponents and 6 SNAP proponents.
No one was there for the other BHFP or JDEM concepts. The SNAP people are making a good case for creating a reality where they are the JDEM mission, even though it is an open competition with some good concepts competing. I've heard of competing concepts for BHFP but the EXIST group seems to be the only one with very hard plans, and they probably own that slot for real.
No one showed up to advocate microwave background missions!
This area has a lot of major players in the microwave background game, for no one to show up and make a pitch is very strange. If they have given up on this, it is still a mistake not to make a case, because the NRC report will feed into future rankings.
Ok, so how did it go: there was some sniping between Con-X and SNAP. I won't say who started it...
Con-X was given a hard time for being "too astrophysical", not focused enough on new science goals.
SNAP was hit hard by a cruel question (re-asked): which is what will we learn if dW/dt =0 within measurement errors. Also concern over how much the ground based efforts will overtake them and cherry pick the key results. Apparently the French space agency may become a SNAP partner.
LISA mostly stayed above the fray, minor skirmish over who could better constrain nuclear high density equations of state, LISA or Con-X; main criticism of LISA is whether it has to wait for the Pathfinder (hey, having tech development is supposed to be a plus!) and whether the Black Hole fundamental physics will be cleaned up by aLIGO.
The committee made a short presentation to the audience at the beginning. The most interesting slide was their summary of the leadup to their charge - congressional committee directions to DoE to explore SNAP as a single agency mission (as opposed to joint with NASA), White House impatience with Congressional "meddling" and the power play to revisit the BE priorities (at DoE's request).
Went by too fast to take it all in.
What is my personal sense?
I hear buzz that SNAP is prepared to go it alone, they want closure and think they can get international partners (Russia for launcher? France for instruments?) and do a quick development without NASA.
The most ironic outcome would be for JDEM to be ranked, and SNAP then not selected. The competing concepts are actually very strong also. The particle physicists like Dark Energy.
Con-X has the advantage of a very large constituency in a mature well established field. It is insane to cut-off the high energy community just as all that expertise has been built up.
LISA is sexy, ESA is going ahead, and it has the cleanest case for truly opening new science fields and going "beyond Einstein" in the physics it explores.
EXIST is a safe bet and probably cheapest.
If Chandra and XMM extent their mission lifetimes a lot, then it completes the high energy field, especially with GLAST up there as well (well, not totally, there are other windows to look out...).
So, darned if I know. I think the microwavebackground mission is out of the picture, unless they made such a good case on previous rounds that they have already won; and that is not my sense.
I would not presume to double guess the committee at this stage, but I am very reassured that they are on the ball on this and will make a correct choice, if a very difficult and unpleasant choice.
No one is going to win this, only lose. It should never have come to this.
The stakes are high; literally thousands of scientists are looking at the core science activity they have chosen to work in being annihilated for 10-20 years, a lot of junior people could be dumped from science, a lot of senior people could look at having the field they worked to build being shut down.
It is an indescribably waste, for what is a surprisingly small amount of money on the scale of the US economy. The funding gap that is squeezing the Beyond Einstein Program out of existence is about 2-300 million dollars per year - that, over ~ 15 years is what it would take to do 3-5 of the missions in quick overlapping succession.
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Does DOE have a stake in any of these other than JDEM? If no, why can't one solution be for DOE to go it alone on JDEM, and NASA to pick up one of the others?
Nobody from UChicago came to argue for CIP? Seems surprising.
DoE's only stake is in SNAP - I don't think they would like it if JDEM were selected but one of the other concepts, like ADEPT, was selected.
Last I heard DoE does not have the budget to do SNAP on their own, a launcher and some instrument support would help, but I don't know if even that'd be enough.
I also don't know how data downlink would be handled if NASA is not on board.
A further issue is whether the DoE groups have the expertise for autonomous space operations, I've heard that one argued either way. I suspect it is not an insurmountable issue, but harder than some people appreciate and therefore could be a cost driver if DoE went without a NASA center onboard.
I echo Steinn's comments about the wastefulnes of this ordeal. It's like having to choose whether you want to eat apples vs oranges vs grapes (and giving up the other fruits) for the rest of your life.
I am wondering if the NRC cmtte will be forced to make a choice on just one, or if they can come out with a very strong statement that, say, 3 of these experiments are absolutely essential and we must do all 3 in order to learn about the universe and to stay strong in basic research. Committees can and should overlook their charges and make such statements if indeed it is the best thing to do. Jan 2009 is not that far away and I would guess we will no longer have to go to Mars at that point, so if this cmtte could keep 3 of the projects alive...
Regarding SNAP, the DOE funding comes out of the High Energy Physics budget. My take on the situstion is: the HEP budget profile does not have the funds to do SNAP alone. If another country provides a launcher, then the HEP budget profile could incorporate SNAP, at the expense of other programs such as particle accelerator physics (which means the neutrino program and the ILC R&D) and dark matter searches. In other words, particle physics would have to forfeit some experiments.
Does anyone know if any organized activity exists to lobby Congress to do something about this ridiculous situation? Find senators and congress people to support some of these projects? Start a petition drive maybe? Persuade science bloggers to squawk about the issue? It's beyond pathetic about how the country's money is actually spent (like handing out $billions as bribes in Iraq) instead of this science.
To say DOE is SNAP is a bit overstating things. There was a recent call for proposals for 1 year worth of exploratory funding for dark energy missions (both JDEM and nearer-future ground based ones like DES and LSST). The other JDEM mission concepts were not only encouraged, but, I would say, actively lobbied by DOE to submit proposals. So while SNAP is being led by people at DOE labs, the DOE management wants to have at least the appearance of being open as to the final mission (no clue of course whether they actually are).
The AAS does some quiet lobbying, include "meet your Congresscritter" days.
On JDEM vs SNAP - one outcome that NASA might like, if JDEM is ranked and goes into competition, is a "forced marriage" - it has been done before. Basically they'd ask 2-3 teams to merge aspects of their mission into a single hybrid mission picking the best aspects of each.
That can work, or it can be a disaster. It'd be an elegant way to preserve the SNAP technology heritage and also get in some of the different ideas from DESTINY or ADEPT.
Or not.
SNAP has already become friendly with the weak lensing (specifically, cosmic shear) crowd—dark energy and dark matter!
Did you attend the next day where the Cosmic Visions relationship was addressed? it's very important for both LISA and JDEM, since LISA will be competed in Cosmic Visions, and a different, French-led Dark Energy mission (DUNE) will also be part of Cosmic Visions. It is Weak Lensing measurement primarily (rather than DUNE, which is supernova focused), and would/could play into the decisions for JDEM (and hence, SNAP).
No, I was giving a talk today and it would have been hard to make the ESA presentation; also talking to them it was clear the focus would be programmatic not science issues, so I decided it was not worth my while to make the effort to attend.
I may hear from someone what was said, but can't be sure.
I heard a rumor following one of the earlier townhalls that the committee would disregard its charter on the grounds that some of the proposed missions can be characterized as "experiments" and some as "observatories" and these are not directly comparable. Make of that what you will.
Incidentally, can we kill the meme that NASA science is being done in by the program to go back to the Moon and Mars. NASA won't be spending serious money on the Moon and Mars until well into the next decade. At the moment NASA science is being squeezed by the political necessity of building a replacement for the shuttle that preserves jobs in Florida, Texas, and Alabama. If we were really spending money on going to the Moon and Mars I'd feel a lot better about it but as it is all we are likely to end up with is another very expensive way to get a few people into LEO.
The other immediate problem is that we are still spending a lot on HST at the point where JWST costs hit their peak - which was never the intention.
Again your reporting on this important issue is appreciated. I attended a Town Hall meeting at Newport Beach in February. Your description sounds very similiar, with the addition of the Europeans. I am thankful for my BEYOND EINSTEIN pen, which is all a physicist really needs.