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Astronomy

Is WFIRST Learning The Wrong Lessons From JWST?

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
June 6, 2017
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Is WFIRST Learning The Wrong Lessons From JWST?

NASA’s Dark-Energy Probe Faces Cost Crisis, Scientific American
“Above all, the agency wants to keep WFIRST from following the path of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a successor to the Hubble telescope that is scheduled to launch in 2018. That project’s cost spiralled from $1 billion in the early 2000s to $8.8 billion–and nearly exhausted NASA’s astrophysics budget. The WFIRST review is meant to stave off that kind of meltdown. “This is a good time to take a look at the scale and scope of the mission,” says Jon Morse, a former head of NASA’s astrophysics division who is now chief executive of the BoldlyGo Institute, a non-profit space-exploration organization in New York City. “Nobody wants this thing to double in cost.”

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4 responses to “Is WFIRST Learning The Wrong Lessons From JWST?”

  1. SouthwestExGOP says:
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    NASA has learned from many projects – first make it a program that the Administration can claim is their own. Then spend freely because the Congress will send more money – as long as the Administration supports it.

  2. cb450sc says:
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    Part of the problem with WFIRST (the long descendant of SNAP and JDEM) is that it lacks a clear and concise science goal, the equivalent of a “killer app”, so to speak. It’s a space telescope that many want because it would be cool to have a wide-field near-IR camera in space. But it’s hard to point to a specific science question that it uniquely enables. The dark energy component will be substantially beaten to the punch by Euclid, barring some catastrophic failure on that mission’s part. The NRO “gift” added new capability but at the same time inflated the price tag. So what exactly is it for? What’s the elevator speech? Is it a general purpose observatory (it’s grown a GO program). Is it an exoplanet hunter? It’s not surprising the budget has blown up, or that it’s hard to identify what to cut, since the science priorities are really unclear.

    • fcrary says:
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      I don’t see the NRO hardware as inflating the price, and I don’t see a lack of focus as the main problem. The problem is that someone wanted to do more than was originally planned.

      According to the Scientific American story, the coronagraph wasn’t part of the original design. Nor was the ‘starshade’ (a free-flying occultation thing.) That’s a huge development effort by itself. At some point, possibly to take full advantage of that donated NRO hardware, they decided to build a significantly more capable telescope than originally planned. If they need to cut something to stay within their budget, I’d say the obvious choice would be those later additions and enhancements. The descope option could be returning to the originally planned capabilities.

      • cb450sc says:
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        The NRO telescopes (we were required to call them “national assets” provided by “another agency”, no seriously, we were not allowed to say it was a telescope or that it came from NRO) definitely helped blow up the cost. These were not finished telescopes or satellite busses: one was a mirror and tilting secondary with some support structures, the other wasn’t even that. They were part of a canceled project, and they were happy to unload them rather than continue to pay to keep them in storage. Anyway, the much larger primary and different optical design meant that a whole new satellite and hence mission had to be redesigned around them. I doubt the second one will ever see the light of day. I actually designed an astrophysics mission for the second one. To say the “gifting” of those was awkward is an understatement.

        You can’t ditch the coronagraph. Lose that, and you lose your exoplanet component, and much of the real science WFIRST will actually end up doing.

        The starshade isn’t really even a thing or part of the budget as far as WFIRST goes. I guess it’s TRL is now greater than zero (some ground-based demonstrations were done a year or two ago), but that sort of long distance formation flyer is a long ways out. A group has been pushing that starshade for years, and they are looking for a technology demonstrator. There has been talk about WFIRST having some such capability, but I would take that about as seriously as the manned repair capability for JWST.