11 NASA astrophysics missions face risk of cancellation | by Ethan Siegel | Starts With A Bang! | May, 2025

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posted on May. 19, 2025 at 2:52 pm

To learn how galaxies grow and evolve over cosmic time, including an understanding of how gas infalls and gets expelled from galaxies, we will need to develop a suite of multiwavelength observatories, missions, and facilities. All of this is possible in the plan laid out by the Astro2020 decadal survey. However, all of this relies on NASA Astrophysics and NSF’s ground-based facilities being fully funded throughout the 2020s and beyond. (Credit: National Academies/Astro2020 decadal survey)

NASA astrophysics, which gave us Hubble, JWST, and so much more, faces its greatest budget cut in history. All future missions are at risk.

NASA’s mission isn’t merely space exploration; it includes scientific discovery.

This “fleet chart” catalogues every NASA science mission across the four main subdivisions — Earth science, heliophysics, planetary science, and astrophysics — that is active as of July 2024. Many more planned, future missions are in various stages of development. (Credit: NASA Science Fleet Chart)

NASA science includes Earth science, heliophysics, planetary science, and astrophysics.

This color-coded map of missions either conducted or co-sponsored by NASA Astrophysics shows several past, many current, and a large number of future missions that are anticipated to become part of the NASA astrophysics fleet, assuming that it doesn’t have to withstand a more than 50% budget cut in 2025 and beyond. (Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center)

NASA astrophysics observes all forms of light, particles, and even gravitational waves.

Along with ground-based facilities, which can only observe a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, space-based observatories, such as the multiwavelength fleet of observatories launched and maintained by NASA’s astrophysics subdivision of the Science Mission Directorate, can reveal the Universe in spectacular fashion, often as never before. (Credit: eCUIP/University of Chicago)

It now faces its greatest budget cuts ever.

Both Hubble (top) and JWST (bottom) are reflecting telescopes. Light from distant objects enters the telescope, reflecting off of the large primary mirror sending it to the smaller secondary mirror. The secondary mirror reflects that light back through a hole in the primary mirror where it comes to a focus and enters each of the telescope’s many instruments located behind the primary mirror. Telescope diagrams are not to scale, but JWST’s position 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, as opposed to Hubble’s ~500–600 km distance from Earth, represents a huge difference in the temperatures the observatories can operate at. (Credit: NASA-GSFC, STScI)

MarylandDigitalNews.comMay 19, 2025

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