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Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey
The Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey is a review of astronomy and astrophysics literature produced approximately every ten years by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States. The report surveys the current state of the field, identifies research priorities, and makes recommendations for the coming decade. The report represents the recommendations of the research community to governmental agencies on how to prioritize scientific funding within astronomy and astrophysics. The editing committee is informed by topical panels and subcommittees, dedicated conferences, and direct community input in the form of white papers summarizing the state of the art in each subdiscipline. The most recent report, Astro2020, was released in 2021.
[...] The seventh report, released to the public at 11am ET on Thursday, November 4, 2021, recommended scientific priorities and investments for the next decade to help achieve the following primary goals: search for habitable exoplanets and extraterrestrial life, study black holes and neutron stars and study the growth and evolution of galaxies.
Astrophysics decadal survey recommends a program of flagship space telescopes
[The] report recommended NASA establish a Great Observatories Mission and Technology Maturation Program that would oversee initial studies of large "flagship" astrophysics missions as well as invest in the technologies needed to enable them.
"The survey committee expects that this process will result in decreased cost and risk and enable more frequent launches of flagship missions, even if it does require significantly more upfront investment prior to a decadal recommendation regarding implementation," the committee concluded in the 600-page report.
Pathways to Discovery in Astronomy and Astrophysics for the 2020s. The 589 page report is paywalled.
Also at NPR.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 08 2021, @01:29PM (3 children)
If you haven't built it before, and it hasn't been built before, you don't order up a dozen of them. Space-qual hardware is expensive and long lead time, and the component testing is long as well. They will build two or three copies, which serve as the engineering models and flight spares, and they'll often keep a fully functional version in the lab (in this case, without the optics) to serve as a "flat sat" for testing and troubleshooting problems on orbit. It has nothing to do with cynical profit margins. It is also the reason that they fly on 10-year-old hardware/electronics. If it was pure profiteering, they'd keep upgrading it before launch a la the Microsoft model.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Monday November 08 2021, @03:44PM (1 child)
Because? When will they ever get stable enough scopes to build a dozen of them? To the contrary, I think they were ready to build multiple copies when they built Hubble back in the 80s. Maybe not a dozen, though with what has been spent on Hubble and James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), they might have built a couple dozen.
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by aristarchus on Tuesday November 09 2021, @05:42AM
The obvious rebuttal is, well, it is a khallow objection, so really requires no rebuttal. Maybe just some subtle mockery?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 09 2021, @12:10PM