WASHINGTON – NASA has selected four small astrophysics missions for further study, although the agency warns that not all may eventually be flown.
NASA announced on January 7 that it had selected three smallsat missions and one high-altitude balloon mission as the first in its new Astrophysics Pioneers program. The program, established last year, is intended to support small astrophysics missions, including smallsats and balloons as well as International Space Station payloads. The agency selected the four from 24 proposals it received in the fall.
“Each of the proposed experiments will do something that no other NASA telescope or mission can do, which could fill important gaps in our understanding of the universe as a whole,” Thomas Zurbuchen, a NASA associate in science, said in a statement. said about the Astrophysics Pioneers choices. . He praised the scientists who proposed the missions for applying ‘innovative, out-of-the-box thinking’ to the problem of how to do high-impact astrophysics experiments on a small budget.
One selected small set, Aspera, will study the evolution of the galaxy by observing hot gas between galaxies at ultraviolet wavelengths. A second, Pandora, will observe 20 stars known to have exoplanets at visible and infrared wavelengths. A third small star, StarBurst, will detect gamma rays from neutron star mergers and work with gravitational wave observations on the ground. The Payload for Ultrahigh Energy Observations (PUEO) is a balloon-transferable instrument that measures ultra-high-energy neutrinos from mergers of neutron stars and the creation of black holes.
Each mission has a $ 20 million cost cap, which they find at the bottom of what Paul Hertz, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, described at a January 8 meeting of various astrophysics advisory groups as a “logarithmic distance” from mission classes. ranging from $ 5 million cubic feet to billion-dollar flagship missions. Astrophysics Pioneers is intended to accommodate missions that are too large to fit into the cubesat program, but does not require the size and complexity of larger satellite programs such as Explorer.
The four missions received funding for a six-month draft review, after which they will go through what Hertz called ‘gateway’ reviews. “They are not competing with each other, but they are competing with their $ 20 million cost,” he said.
Hertz said he expects one or more of the Astrophysics Pioneers concepts, based on experience with previous NASA smallsat missions, to not fit into the cost limit. “It’s really hard to keep these little missions in their little cost boxes,” he said. “We think it’s likely that some of these missions will not get through the gate.”
By choosing four, he said, it is likely that at least one or two will make it through the gateway review and be approved by NASA for full development. “We will be better able to predict the cost of smallsats as we go further,” he said.
If all four missions were to pass the gate rating, NASA would face another challenge. “We did not budget for all four to flee,” Hertz said, based on the assumption that some would not succeed. ‘If we’re wrong, we’ll try to find the money’ to fly all four.