It also sets out the deliberate steps NASA should take to develop technology for its ambitious space missions. For instance, Astro2020 describes how the NSF could consider withdrawing its support from either of the large ground-based telescopes if they fail to reach certain milestones. Astro2020 is “imposing order on the field in a way that probably hasn’t been done before”, says Matt Mountain, president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington DC. US astronomy has sometimes taken a haphazard approach to building research facilities. How the fight over a Hawaii mega-telescope could change astronomy The plan, released on 4 November, attempts to capitalize on some of those opportunities while also being realistic about budget and schedule constraints, she says. “There are tremendous scientific opportunities before us - twenty-first-century astrophysics is incredibly rich,” says Fiona Harrison, an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and co-chair of the steering committee that wrote the report, known as Astro2020. And for the first time, it issues recommendations for how federal agencies should fight systemic racism, sexism and other structural issues that drive people out of astronomy, weakening the quality of the science. It suggests that the US National Science Foundation (NSF) fund two enormous ground-based telescopes in Chile and possibly Hawaii, to try to catch up with an advanced European telescope that’s under construction. It recommends that NASA coordinate, build and launch three flagship space observatories capable of detecting light over a broad range of wavelengths. Credit: Stan Honda/AFP via GettyĪ long-anticipated road map for the next ten years of US astronomy is here - and it’s nothing if not ambitious. With input from many astronomers, ‘decadal surveys’ periodically help to set the priorities for US astronomy.
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