NASA’s proposal to mothball the Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) is not being well received in Congress or the astrophysics community.  The proposal is part of NASA’s FY2015 budget request.

SOFIA is a modified 747 aircraft that carries a 100-inch (2.5 meter) diameter infrared telescope. It is a joint project between NASA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR).  About $1 billion has been spent on the project over many years and it is just at the point of being fully certified as operational.   NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center (formerly Dryden FRC) in California is its home port, but it can also fly from other locations around the globe.  SOFIA reaches an altitude of about 43,000 feet, above much of the atmosphere that absorbs infrared light, so the higher the better.  Educators designated “Airborne Astronomy Ambassadors” often join astronomers aboard the plane for hands-on experience.

SOFIA’s international collaboration and appeal to educators in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields make it appealing to a much broader community than astrophysicists.

NASA’s FY2015 budget request proposes placing the airplane in storage until and unless a better budgetary situation arises.  The $84 million in FY2014 would drop to $12 million in FY2015 and to zero in FY2016, giving the agency little time to plan.

Republicans and Democrats on the House Science, Space and Technology (SS&T) Committee grilled Presidential Science Adviser John Holdren about the decision to mothball  SOFIA at a hearing this morning.  At the very same time a few blocks away, members of the NASA Advisory Council’s Astrophysics Subcommittee were asking similar questions of NASA officials.

The hearing broadly addressed President Obama’s FY2015 budget request for science and technology, but the questions focused on two topics:  climate change and SOFIA.  Holdren was the only witness.  NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden is scheduled to testify to the committee tomorrow morning (March 27).

A surprising number of House SS&T committee members from both parties made clear their disagreement with the proposal to mothball SOFIA.   Some argued in favor of the program on STEM grounds, others because of its impact on international partnerships and the large investment already made in the program.  Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) summed it up by saying “I do not believe that the Congress is going to accept the elimination of SOFIA … there will be a bipartisan effort to change that and I hope and plan to be part of that bipartisan effort.”

Among those in favor of SOFIA was Rep. Steve Palazzo (R-MS) who chairs the committee’s Space Subcommittee.  He asked Holdren why SOFIA no longer is important and what kind of message the United States is sending to its European space partners at a time when China is trying to make inroads there.  He also asked if there had been an independent review of the program.

Holdren replied that it was not a matter of importance, but that the operating costs were too high for today’s budget environment, but if Congress approved the President’s Opportunity, Growth, and Security Initiative (OGSI), the SOFIA decision would be revisited.   As to whether there had been an independent review, he deferred to NASA Administrator Bolden.

OGSI is the President’s request for $56 billion across the government in FY2015 above the budget caps that he and Congress agreed to in December.   NASA would get $885.5 million of that amount.  The “base” FY2015 budget request that mothballs SOFIA, however, adheres to the budget caps.  The OGSI represents the additional funds the President would like to allocate to agencies like NASA if the money were available.

Later in the hearing, however, Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY) challenged Holdren on his statement about revisiting SOFIA if Congress approves the OGSI.  He held up a copy of a document explaining how the OGSI funds would be spent and noted that SOFIA was not included.  “SOFIA is not listed there … why have you left this committee with the impression that SOFIA is a priority of the administration when clearly it is not?”  During the tense exchange, Holdren conceded that SOFIA is a “lower priority than other things we are funding.”

Overall, the congressional committee members wanted to understand the process by which the decision was made to terminate funding for SOFIA.

That was the same question being asked at a meeting of the Astrophysics Subcommittee (APS) of the NASA Advisory Council that met at NASA Headquarters today.  The meeting continues tomorrow.

APS members asked many of the same questions – basically, what was the process for determining that SOFIA would be mothballed just as it was being certified as operational and the impact on future international space science collaboration.

Paul Hertz, Director of NASA’s astrophysics division, answered that the budget simply did not support SOFIA.  Describing the intricacies of how budgets are developed, he explained that the December agreement on budget caps for FY2014 and FY2015 in the Bipartisan Budget Act (BBA) changed the dynamics of the FY2015 budget request with sudden alterations to his budget profile.  To meet the new budget caps, SOFIA needed to be defunded.   He noted that a joint NASA-DLR working group has been established and is on a tight schedule to make recommendations on a path forward.  Its final report is due on April 25.

DLR told NASA that it cannot increase its 20 percent contribution to the program’s roughly $100 million per year operating budget.  Hertz said NASA will seek other international partners.

John Grunsfeld, head of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD, of which astrophysics is part) joined the APS discussion later.  He agreed with sentiments expressed by APS members that a preferable scenario would allow SMD to phase out SOFIA on a longer time scale, giving it time to go through a Senior Review.   NASA’s Senior Review process assesses operating science missions on a competitive basis and determines which should continue to be funded.  Grunsfeld said the science case for SOFIA is better than it has ever been, but “this isn’t a science discussion, it’s a budget discussion,” adding that “Hopefully we’ll find a path forward.  If you’ve got better ideas, I’m all ears.”

Experts are still analyzing why the third engine burn of the Soyuz TMA-12M spacecraft did not take place as scheduled last night, but two more engine burns were conducted today and systems appear to be operating normally.  The crew is fine and the rescheduled docking with the International Space Station (ISS) remains on track for 7:58 pm EDT tomorrow night (March 27).

Soyuz TMA-12M lifted off from its pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan as planned at 5:17 pm EDT last night on its way to dock with the ISS just under six hours later.  The Soyuz must complete a series of engine burns to put the spacecraft onto the right trajectory to reach the ISS and the third burn did not occur.  

The six-hour (four orbit) approach to the ISS is new.  Typically, the Soyuz takes 34 orbits over a two-day period to reach the ISS.  Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, and NASA designed this shorter, expedited trajectory so the crew does not need to remain in the small spacecraft for longer than necessary and can begin work on the ISS as quickly as possible.  They began using it last year and it has been used successfully four times.  They are still diagnosing what went wrong last night.

The Soyuz still needs to execute engine burns to reach the ISS and the fact that two were successfully completed today indicated that the engine itself is in good working order.  NASA’s ISS Mission Integration Operations Manager Kenny Todd sounded confident in an interview on NASA TV that the rest of the trip to the ISS will go smoothly.  He repeated what NASA posted on its website last night that the burn did not take place because the attitude (orientation) of the Soyuz spacecraft could not be confirmed.  The question they need to answer is why that happened.

Todd also said that SpaceX’s cargo mission to the ISS, planned for Sunday, will not be affected by the delayed docking.

The three crew members aboard the Soyuz TMA-12M are Russia’s Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev and NASA’s Steve Swanson.

Russia’s Soyuz TMA-12M spacecraft launched on schedule this evening at 5:17 pm EDT, but instead of docking with the International Space Station six hours later, it will be stretched out to two days because an engine burn did not take place as planned.

Two Russian cosmonauts and an American astronaut are aboard the spacecraft.  They are fine.   Until quite recently, Soyuz spacecraft always used the two-day rendezvous profile to reach the ISS and Russian space stations before that.    The new, shorter 6-hour rendezvous was introduced just last year and was used successfully four times.  The Soyuz is a small spacecraft and the shorter trip was proving a much more comfortable start to these space missions, but the traditional two-day rendezvous remains a back-up procedure.

The crew now is scheduled to dock with the ISS at 7:58 pm EDT on Thursday, March 27.   The Soyuz TMA-12M crew consists of Russians Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev and NASA’s Steve Swanson.  Skvortsov and Swanson are veteran space travelers; Artemyev is a rookie.

Russian flight controllers do not know what went wrong with the third of three engine burns needed to put Soyuz into the right orbit for the docking.   NASA is standing up ground stations at Wallops Island, VA, White Sands, NM, and Armstrong Flight Research Center (formerly Dryden), CA to aid in communicating with the spacecraft during the two-day rendezvous period to enable better communications with the crew and hopefully in diagnosing what went wrong.  NASA states on its space station website that initial indications are that the Soyuz spacecraft was not in the proper attitude for the burn.

The launch itself appeared perfect.  The Soyuz rocket lifted off from the launch pad right on schedule at  5:17 pm EDT, which was 3:17 am March 26 local time at the launch site in Kazakhstan — a beautiful night launch.

UPDATE, February 2, 2015:  After further analysis, scientists involved in this “discovery” retracted it.    The Associated Press quotes Brian Keating as saying “we’re essentially retracting the claim” in a new paper.  “It’s disappointing … but it’s important to know the truth.

ORIGINAL STORY, March 20, 2014: Scientists using a telescope in Antarctica equipped with sensors developed by NASA announced on Monday that they discovered evidence of gravitational waves produced by the Big Bang that many believe created our universe.

Understanding the origin and evolution of the universe is a scientific quest dating back centuries.  Today, most scientists believe an event called the Big Bang started it all, though what created the Big Bang is unknown and only theories exist about what happened in the first moments afterwards.

Based on observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the universe is calculated to be 13.8 billion years old and NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes have peered back through about 13.3 billion of those years.  NASA’s COBE and WMAP satellites as well as the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Planck mission have studied light – the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) – that originated from an even younger universe and began to stream through space 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

What happened before that remains a mystery.  One theory is that in the fractions of a second after the Big Bang, a period of “inflation” took place where theoretical particles called “inflatons” pushed space-time apart.  Eventually stars, galaxies, planets and the other objects and phenomena observable today formed.  Some scientists theorize that the inflatons continued to form new universes in a process dubbed “eternal inflation” with “infinite pocket universes” creating a multiverse.  Andrei Linde of Stanford was quoted by New Scientist as saying that “[i]f inflation is there, the multiverse is there.”

The findings from the BICEP2 telescope in Antarctica announced this week by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) relate to an infinitesimal period of time – a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second – after the Big Bang.  Inflation theory posits that the events occurring at that time created gravitational waves that can still be detected today.  The observations with BICEP2 support that theory.

BICEP2 found a characteristic swirly pattern in the polarization of the light left over from the Big Bang (the CMB) that could only be caused by gravitational waves. Waves of light are polarized when they tend to wiggle in one particular direction.  Gravitational waves – ripples in space-time caused by the motion of massive objects like those being flung outward during the violent expansion of inflation – would polarize light as they swept through the universe.  The Harvard-Smithsonian CfA announcement said the BICEP2 data “represent the first images of gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time.”

BICEP2 is a radio telescope funded by NSF, which also runs the South Pole Station where BICEP2 is located.  NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) developed the superconductor-based BICEP2 detectors.  Jamie Bock, who has joint appointments with JPL and Caltech, is co-director of the project and said that it already was known that the Big Bang produced density waves, but these observations are the first to show that gravitational waves were also produced.

The BICEP2 findings support inflation theory, but remain to be corroborated by subsequent studies, a sine qua non of the scientific process.  Nonetheless, the astrophysics community is energized.

In the meantime, assuming the result holds, the implications are tantalizing: it solidifies the theory of inflation and greatly narrows the pool of inflation models that can be correct. Furthermore, it again proves Einstein’s prediction of gravitational waves.

BICEP2 is not the only telescope searching for signs of inflation.  Among the others is NSF’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO), a large ground-based experiment designed to detect gravitational waves directly.  Work is now being done to upgrade the detectors in the facility and “Advanced LIGO” should begin operations this year.  The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) is a potential NASA-ESA mission that would seek to detect gravitational waves directly using three separated spacecraft.  It received a relatively low priority (priority 3) in the National Research Council’s most recent Decadal Survey for astrophysics because the technology is not mature.  ESA plans to launch a technology demonstration for such a mission, LISA Pathfinder, next year.

BICEP2 is an international collaboration involving 11 institutions: Caltech, JPL, UC San Diego, Harvard, NIST Boulder, Stanford, University of British Columbia, University of Chicago, University of Minnesota, University of Toronto and University of Wales Cardiff.  BICEP stands for Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarisation.  This was the second phase of the BICEP experiment, hence the designation BICEP2.