Every ten years, US astronomers set research priorities for the following decade. The latest cycle to pick projects for the 2020s has just started. In July, the US National Academy of Sciences launched the seventh Astronomical Decadal Survey (Astro2020) with a call for proposals for future telescopes and space missions. Over the coming year, these will be collected, assessed and discussed in open meetings. A ranked list of priority projects will be released in 2021. Funding permitting, those at the top will be built over the next decades.
The two-year process is widely viewed as a gold standard for building consensus — many other fields have adopted it, from Earth sciences to solid-state physics1. It carries weight with policymakers and funders. But as astronomy firmly enters the ‘big science’ era, we think that the decades-old system for funding federal astronomy needs debating and updating.
The science has never been so exciting. Earth-like planets have been found orbiting other stars2. Cosmologists are quantifying mysterious forces of ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’3. Completely new windows have been opened onto the cosmos thanks to facilities such as the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile and the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), in the states of Washington and Louisiana.
But large facilities that can explore these frontiers cost billions of dollars and take decades to design, build and operate. ALMA was proposed in 1990 and became operational in 2013. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was approved in 2000 and will be launched in 2021. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, recommended in 2010 and under construction in Chile, will begin to map the sky in 2023. The fruits of the 2020 Decadal Survey won’t see light until the 2030s.
The US community faces a daunting task. Each generation of facilities is getting more expensive and harder to build. Operational costs are mounting. Meanwhile, the research budgets of the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and NASA have remained more or less flat since the 1990s (see ‘Astronomical costs’). Hard decisions have been made to close old but still-productive telescopes, which has proved insufficient to pay for new ones. And these pressures will only get worse as more big projects come online.
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