Decadal survey

In conference news, a second two-day workshop, Identifying and Bridging Gaps in Laboratory Astrophysics, Part 2, will be held January 9th and 10th in 2027 ahead of the Winter AAS meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah.

This workshop directly addresses a key recommendation from the Laboratory Astrophysics Task Force convened by the AAAC in response to the 2020 Decadal Survey.

The group held their first meeting at the Summer AAS in Alaska and would like additional input from the broader astronomy and astrophysics community.

Registration for the workshop is separate from AAS but requires AAS registration as well.

The planetary science community has recognized this.

In 2022, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine released its Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey for 2023 through 2032.

This document, produced roughly once per decade through an exhaustive process involving hundreds of scientists across multiple institutions, identifies the highest priority missions for the coming years.

For the first time, the Decadal Survey named a Uranus orbiter and probe as the top-priority flagship-class mission for NASA, not second, not an honorable mention.

The single highest priority for the next major planetary science mission, it ranked above the Enceladus orbillander, above a Neptune orbiter, above every other proposed flagship concept, The mission concept that emerged from this process envisions a spacecraft carrying a suite of instruments designed to address the fundamental questions that the Voyager 2 flyby left unanswered.

An orbiter would enter a long-term orbit around Uranus, spending at least four and a half years studying the planet, its rings, its moons, and its magnetic environment from close range.

You know? Like, so, okay, l- let's say there is, like, we put a great science instrument suite on this, right? And it's like, okay, so then the, you know, the role of this is actually to do valuable science, and we create a great traceability matrix.

I mean, the Decadal Survey had a rover for the, for the moon to support Artemis, right? We had the Endurance mission concept.

So-

Yeah.

I was wondering, maybe a good thing for us to do would be if you could tell us a bit about Roman, because I'm gonna be honest, I'm more of a rocks guy, and you're more of a look through a telescope guy.

[laughs]

So I, I, uh, this is an exciting mission, I know, and maybe you could, uh, help us kind of understand some of the, like w- the why, right? What, what, what does the decadal survey say about Roman? Why, why are we doing this, right? [laughs]

So, so in many ways, I would say Roman brings big data to astrophysics in space, to space astrophysics.

... gamut of theories.

So Jason, like the James Webb Space Telescope, which was tuned for the infrared and conceived, 'cause I remember when we were speccing that telescope in the Decadal Survey now three decades ago.

We wanted it to be able to specially get access to the early universe where galaxies were being born.

It just so happens that same designed telescope can probe nearby gas clouds and observe stars and planets being born, which is a fun sort of duality of that telescope.

We say, "Well, we're gonna have to build another telescope, uh, to, to study this new thing that we found." Uh, and you know, one of the, one of the fields where that is, uh, becoming

becomingYou know, more and more apparent is, is exoplanets because if you look at, uh, Hubble Space Telescope, that wasn't really built and designed to study exoplanets, but it's done amazing work in exoplanets.

And Neil, you mentioned your work on the decadal survey, uh, you know, developing the James Webb Space Telescope, and I don't think when that was happening, uh, understanding exoplanets was a big part of what people were talking about.

But some of the most amazing discoveries of the James Webb Space Telescope have been, uh, discoveries about exoplanets.