stars and nearby habitable planets?

Is it possible that the astronomers are assuming that nearby terrestrial planets will take care of themselves, or get done by planetary science money, or are not otherwise worth spending 'real' astronomy $$ on?

It is also not true that the word "galaxies" was never mentioned during the panel presentation. We need to find the "fist galaxies" along with the "first star."

The science topics stressed are cosmic dawn, exoplanets, and fundamental physics. As a friend of mine said, the universe starts at the Big Bang, ends at z=6, and starts up again at distances close enough to detect exoplanets. So no star formation or galaxy evolution, for example. No one can deny that exoplanets are one of the hottest topics of the coming decade and should be on the list. But griping that they didn't get their own very expensive mission risks not getting any sympathy from vast swaths of the community whose science didn't rate mentioning.

The topics are prescriptive, but the list of projects is not exhaustive. For example, there seems to be some angst that radial velocity planet searches weren't emphasized, but even a very ambitious RV search probably fits into the category of midsize projects that they recommended finding a way to fund (Mid-Scale Innovations Program) - bigger than an MRI and smaller than an observatory. It's not a competitor to WFIRST.

Probably, it was written by a cosmologist who thinks that 4 kpc is "nearby"!

Seriously, I think that it is simply a case of the committee being honest. They decided on the science goals before deciding on the priorities, and then they had to chose between SIM and JDEM. They picked JDEM, so SIM and the nearby Earths wait until the next decade. It is too bad that they couldn't do both.

I'm glad, however, that they didn't then try to readjust the science goals to fit the program they recommended. Often, review committees do this to avoid second guessing of their choices, and it is refreshing to see that they didn't in this case.

Hopefully, NASA will try to rectify things by picking an exoplanet mission in the next explorer round.

@LL - the exoplanets are firewalled from planetary science.
It is conceivable to piggyback some exoplanet stuff on a planetary science mission, as secondary science, but Astrophysics would be expected to chip in on that, and it can't jeopardize the primary science.

@Dave - I don't think SIM ever got a look in.
WFIRST can't have that much pre-phase A from SNAP - a lot of that was detector development and SNAP was blue CCD WFIRST is HgTe IR detectors. So WFIRST is really going back to the drawing board for a flagship as reflected by the timeline.

Y'all did a very good job getting the microlensing opportunity across to people, but there will be a huge gap following through on Kepler, and my sense is a lot of momentum will be lost.
Maybe something can be done in the Explorer class but that slot also has to keep alive high energy and CMB efforts, and respond to new opportunities.
A "big planet imager" with a corongraph as a TPF pathfinder could be very interesting.

On the ground side there is a lot of push, of course, but I didn't get the sense of urgency on what to do with there for exoplanets - there is discussion of use of GSMT, but that is really beyond this decade - and the discussion of high contrast imaging and spectrographs for current or new non-giant facilities seemed a bit terse. For something identified as an overall priority.

I worry about over-literal program officers, sometimes.

WFIRST is based on the JDEM-Omega proposal which has superseded SNAP, Destiny, and ADEPT. They'd be ready to go if the decadal survey hadn't added more science.

Raises the question of whether the galactic bulge is an environment that would support habitable planets, I suppose...

andy, the planets are not detected around the lensed buldge stars, they are detected around the intermediate distance stars lensing the buldge stars.

Just outta curiosity, though, How does this lensing survey improve on what ground based surveys (or Kepler, by accident) can do?

Lab Lemming: as far as I am aware there seem to be about 3 microlensing events listed at the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia which are consistent to some degree with the lens star being in the bulge (MOA-2007-BLG-400, MOA-2008-BLG-310, OGLE-2005-BLG-390). That's about a third of the listed microlensing planet detections, so I'd guess a fair few bulge planet hosts may be detected in such a mission.

Lab Lemming: Microlensing finds planets both in the galactic bulge and in the foreground disk, and so the prevalence of planets as a function of galactic position can be measured. A space-based microlensing survey can find planets down to the mass of Mars (0.1 Earth masses) at all separations > 0.5 AU. This includes free-floating planets ejected from their host stars during the formation process by close encounters with a more massive planets. These could be more common than planets still orbiting stars.

Already, the statistical calculations based on 10 microlensing discoveries indicate that the cold Saturns and Neptunes found by microlensing are more common than the hot-planets and cold Jupiters found by other methods.

Kepler doesn't observe enough stars to see planets by the microlensing method, but they will find all types of hot planets that are invisible to microlensing.

To invert the issues, is anybody using the big Kepler image for weak lensing studies?

The Kepler data is unsuited for uses beyond monitoring specific targets for a number of reasons, including:
- field's in the Galactic plane
- 4 arcsec pixels and deliberate defocus to make PSF better suited to photometry
- they don't usually return images of the whole CCD array, just postage stamps around selected targets, due to memory and data rate limitations