A question to all the billionaires watching this thread: Why would you give away money to charity while you could sponsor LISA?
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NASA Gives Up on LISA
11–20 of 52 posts
Re: NASA Gives Up on LISA
#12Re: NASA Gives Up on LISA
#13That's too bad. Gravity waves are one of the last unknowns in science that we also know how to study. (Most other unknowns we don't know how to study.) I've always wondered, we have rich foundations doing all kinds of good - do any of them try to step in and fill budgets of this sort?
Well, we've still got LIGO carefully looking for gravity waves. So far we haven't detected any. Maybe it'd be a good idea to make one hundred percent sure that they actually exist (or else that they're definitely below the limits of LIGO) before building another expensive instrument. There's no real hurry. Gravity waves will still be there in twenty years time if we feel like building LISA.
We have significant evidence to believe that gravitational waves do exist. By measuring the energy of Hulse-Taylor Binaries, we can show that the expected energy loss is there. This was the basis for the 1993 Nobel in physics.
Re: NASA Gives Up on LISA
#14This has been feared for a while in that community. There's quite a bit of animosity towards the JWST for soaking up NASA's budget in recent history, and JWST is trying to do some serious damage control because they're too far along and too big to fail. I saw John Mather (Nobel prize winner) give a talk recently that was basically "Look how far we are, and we're sorry for soaking up the budget."
More on the JWST overrun: http://www.spacenews.com/civil/101112-jwst-cost-imperils-pri...
Canceling the JWST will be a catastrophe for NASA.
Re: NASA Gives Up on LISA
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
More on the JWST overrun: http://www.spacenews.com/civil/101112-jwst-cost-imperils-pri...
Canceling the JWST will be a catastrophe for NASA.
They're not proposing to cancel JWST.
It's just that its $6.5B price tag is overwhelming the whole astrophysics science effort. The original design was supposed to come in around 0.5B. See
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/71607/title/Star_...
Re: NASA Gives Up on LISA
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Maybe it'd be a good idea to make one hundred percent sure that they actually exist (or else that they're definitely below the limits of LIGO) before building another expensive instrument. Hmm. I'm not too familiar with that research area. Isn't the point of detectors like LIGO is that we don't know how big they are typically? How do we make one hundred percent sure that gravity waves exist? What do you propose as a…
experiment -> theory rinse, repeat.
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Re: NASA Gives Up on LISA
#17That's too bad. Gravity waves are one of the last unknowns in science that we also know how to study. (Most other unknowns we don't know how to study.) I've always wondered, we have rich foundations doing all kinds of good - do any of them try to step in and fill budgets of this sort?
To me (as an outsider) it looks as if the USA, en masse, doesn't believe in science anymore.
So many interesting research projects have been stopped lately, education is being crippled, and other avenues of education and research are being killed for religious reasons.
We owe so much to science in our daily lives, why are (common) people so reluctant to see that?
Or is the issue deeper. Do people hate the current, fast, technological era on some level and hope that stifling science will bring back older, more gentle times somehow?
I don't get it anymore, honestly.
Re: NASA Gives Up on LISA
#18That's too bad. Gravity waves are one of the last unknowns in science that we also know how to study. (Most other unknowns we don't know how to study.) I've always wondered, we have rich foundations doing all kinds of good - do any of them try to step in and fill budgets of this sort?
Well, we've still got LIGO carefully looking for gravity waves. So far we haven't detected any. Maybe it'd be a good idea to make one hundred percent sure that they actually exist (or else that they're definitely below the limits of LIGO) before building another expensive instrument. There's no real hurry. Gravity waves will still be there in twenty years time if we feel like building LISA.
It's not surprising that LIGO and VIRGO (the European analogue) haven't seen signals, given the expected sources. Both observatories are currently being upgraded to more sensitive versions which will begin operations ~2015. The Advanced versions should see sources.
However, LIGO/VIRGO aren't a replacement for LISA, as they look at gravity waves of different frequencies: the sources they'd expect to see are different.
Re: NASA Gives Up on LISA
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
More on the JWST overrun: http://www.spacenews.com/civil/101112-jwst-cost-imperils-pri...
Canceling the JWST will be a catastrophe for NASA.
Unfortunately, with JWST sitting out there as its own line-item in the NASA budget (as opposed to rolled in with the rest of Astrophysics), there's concern in the community that it will be a tempting target for a Congress anxious to cut anything that moves.
Re: NASA Gives Up on LISA
#20A question to all the billionaires watching this thread: Why would you give away money to charity while you could sponsor LISA?
Many (most?) ground-based telescopes are funded by private donors: e.g., the Keck Telescopes, the Allan Telescope Array, etc. Space missions, not so much. My guesses for why: the costs are significantly higher, and NASA isn't set up bureaucratically to work with private capital.
That said, private money for technology development efforts or data analysis could likely be well-used.