JDEM Dark Energy Mission is a Go
[Quick note: It looks like the tech guys at b5Media have been having server issues for the past couple of days. My apologies if you couldn’t get to the blog. I’ve gotten a couple of posts written that I’ll post over the course of the day to kind of catch up. Anyhoo, sorry for the inconvenience.]
The latest issue of the Planetary Exploration Newsletter issued last Tuesday included a budget message from Alan Stern, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD). In it, he outlined that even though everyone else’s budget (e.g. NSF) sucked, NASA’s is doing pretty good. They got a 1.8% increase and all of NASA’s major programs are intact.
As for the SMD divisions, here’s what caught my eye:
The 7 new missions to be initiated by the President’s FY09 budget request span all four of SMD’s Divisions; they are:
- The Earth Science Division’s SMAP soil moisture mission for launch in 2012 and IceSat II decadal survey mission for launch in 2015. Three additional Earth science decadal survey missions will be enabled by this budget request as well.
- The Heliophysics Division’s new, lower cost Solar Probe mission for launch in 2015.
- The Planetary Science Division’s long awaited Outer Planets Flagship for launch in 2016 or 2017, depending on the mission target and trajectory.
- The Astrophysics Division’s highly anticipated JDEM dark energy mission for launch by 2015.
- And two new lunar robotic missions - a small science orbiter to launch by 2011 and a pair of mini-landers for launch by 2014; these lunar missions are to be developed in SMD’s Planetary Science Division. (Full Text)
Check out number 4. The Joint Dark Energy Mission is expected to launch in 2015 but what actually gets put on the rocket is still up for grabs. My vote (as if I get one) goes to Destiny, the Dark Energy Space Telescope, mostly because they already have an artists rendition of what it’ll look like.
Cool Image Credit: NOAO
MMMMM pretty… It’s hard not to get a better understanding of the universe when you look soooo gooood.
Known as Destiny, the Dark Energy Space Telescope, the small spacecraft would detect and observe more than 3,000 supernovae over its two-year primary mission to measure the expansion history of the Universe, followed by a year-long survey of 1,000 square-degrees of the sky at near-infrared wavelengths to measure how the large-scale distribution of matter in the Universe has evolved since the Big Bang. Used together, the data from these two surveys will have 10 times the sensitivity of current ground-based projects to explore the properties of Dark Energy, and will provide data critical to understanding the origin of Dark Energy, which is poorly explained by existing physical theories. (Full press release)
Sure, it looks like there’s some good science behind it, but that’s nowhere near as important as drawings.
Technorati Tags: dark energy, JDEM, Joint Dark Energy Mission
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