Feb 7 2007
From The Space Library
The National Research Council (NRC) published a report, Performance Assessment of NASA’s Astrophysics Program, examining how well NASA’s Astrophysics Science Division had addressed the strategies, goals, and priorities identified in previous NRC reports. The NRC focused, in particular, on its previous reports Astronomy and Astrophysics in the New Millennium (2001) and Connecting Quarks with the Cosmos (2003). Noting that, over the past decade, the Astrophysics Science Division had made remarkable progress in meeting its goals, the authors of the new NRC report expressed concern that the division would likely produce far fewer discoveries after 2010. The NRC noted that NASA had based its recent discoveries on missions that it had developed during the previous decade. However, at the time NRC was examining NASA’s astrophysics program to prepare the new report, NASA had no small-scale, low-cost missions in development. The report warned of a four-year gap in NASA’s missions between 2009, when NASA had scheduled the launch of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), and 2013, when NASA planned to launch the JWST . According to the report, NASA had skewed its astrophysics portfolio in favor of the largest missions, at the expense of smaller missions that could launch more frequently, such as the Explorer program missions. The report recommended that NASA restore funding for Explorer missions, even if funding those missions required that NASA scale back larger programs already in development.
National Research Council, National Astrophysics Performance Assessment Committee, A Performance Assessment of NASA’s Astrophysics Program (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2007), http://books.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11828#toc (accessed 5 March 2010); National Academies, “Cost Overruns, Cancelling of Small Missions Have Led to Lost Science Opportunities at NASA,” news release, 7 February 2007, http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=11828 (accessed 10 December 2009); New Scientist, “Report Slams NASA’s Neglect of Small Missions,” 7 February 2007.
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