NASA telescope chopped in budgeting
Funding not enough for normal Chandra X-ray Observatory operation
The Chandra X-ray Observatory, one of four great space telescopes NASA launched in the 1990s, revolutionized our understanding of the universe from the moment it first began recording Xrays – the energy emitted by extremely hot objects, like the matter swirling into black holes. Now 25 years old, scientists involved with the telescope believe it can last another decade.
But the president’s budget for next year sliced almost $1 billion from NASA’s funding request, a roughly 12% cut. The space agency then allocated only a fraction of what’s needed to keep Chandra going each year, slating $41 million for the upcoming year and $25 million for the year after. It needs about $70 million annually for normal operations. The shortfall would shut down the telescope and leave the project adrift, without enough to even wind it down properly, astronomers say.
“This is a challenging budget environment, and that means we need to make difficult decisions,” Mark Clampin, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters, said in an email. “NASA has to balance investments in future missions against some of our larger missions in extended science operations.”
Of the four great telescopes NASA launched in the 90s, two have aged out. One, the Hubble, needed glasses, but has been going strong since. The agency will hold a review this spring for both the Hubble and Chandra to reduce the “cost of science operations for both observatories” before determining how to proceed, Clampin wrote.
Astronomer David Pooley, whose research depends on the Chandra, disagrees with the idea that the telescope has outlived its usefulness. He compared NASA’s logic to deciding against sending your child to college because you don’t have the money for the plane ticket to get them there.
The loss of Chandra, said Pooley, a professor of physics and astronomy at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas,
“is going to be disastrous for X-ray astronomy.”
Chandra has offered many insights, including how supermassive black holes can co-exist in the same galaxy, that Einstein’s theory of general relativity holds, so space-time is a continuum, and the first direct proof that most of the matter in the universe is “dark” – unable to be seen but still exerting a gravitational pull on galaxies and gas.
X-ray astronomy uses the same kind of light to explore the cosmos that doctors use to look inside the body.
“The X-ray sky is incredibly dynamic,” Pooley said. Unlike the sky we see, which looks the same night after night, “the X-ray sky is just violent and variable and exciting.”
The next X-ray telescope won’t be ready to launch until 2032, according to NASA’s current timetable. And if there’s a gap until then, there won’t be anyone still around with expertise in X-ray astronomy, Pooley said.
If the mission is cut now, about 50 astronomers will lose their jobs this year, but even more importantly, students will stop training in the field of X-ray astronomy because they know they won’t have a telescope to use for at least a decade.
“This is the existential crisis we face,” Pooley said. To have a vibrant field of Xray astronomy requires both a mission and astronomers, he said, and with these budget cuts, “there are just simply not going to be people who can do this.”
When NASA designs missions, it considers anything that lasts longer than five years a success.
The Chandra, launched aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia on July 23, 1999, will turn 25 this summer.
A review in 2022 recommended keeping Chandra going through 2025 but noted doing so was becoming more complex as it aged, given the difficulties of managing in the temperatures of space. As NASA’s Clampin noted, “Space is a harsh environment that eventually limits mission lifetimes.”
Hubble, likely because of its early problems, has its own line item in the federal budget, apart from NASA’s and is apparently not targeted with budget cuts at this time.
Chandra’s staff cannot speak publicly about the telescope. As federal employees, any comments they make could be considered lobbying, which would be illegal.
Last month more than 700 astronomers worldwide, including Nobel laureate Rainer Weiss, signed a letter defending the telescope and Pooley said the field continues to need what it has to offer. They hope their lobbying and public support will encourage Congress to restore funding.
“I strongly disagree with the idea that Chandra is old news,” Pooley said. “It is our flagship and it is cutting edge still.”
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, deployed in 2022, was designed to work in concert with the Chandra. Space telescopes from the U.S. and other countries work together to create a combined picture of the universe.
Together, the Webb and Chandra have located extremely distant, massive black holes, Pooley said, which is “a fundamentally exciting result that has a lot of astronomers scratching our heads and realizing that we have a lot of work to do to understand our early universe.”
In his own research, Pooley said, he uses optical telescopes from the ground and space in collaboration with the
Chandra to understand quasars – extremely bright, supermassive black holes in the distant universe – and dark matter, whose presence is determined by its gravity rather than the light it emits.
“If we can understand dark matter distribution, that can help inform ideas about what it is made of,” he said.
“It’s all this amazing information and it’s absolutely reliant on something as powerful as Chandra, with that kind of resolution,” Pooley said. “This is impossible to do any other way.”
NASA’s Clampin said other current and planned telescopes will compensate for the loss of Chandra.
But researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, some of whom have been involved in Chandra and others who have not, wrote a joint statement saying it will be decades before another telescope has the resolution and X-ray capability of Chandra.
“The astronomical community certainly hasn’t run out of ideas for using (Chandra),” scientist Catherine Grant said.