Ten year plan for dark energy and other research

[sjastro]

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/43475

Regards

Steven

[CraigS]

:eyepop:
HTH #1 !!

[renormalised]

Very interesting article. To be able to work on any one of those proposed missions/research projects would be great. I hope that they can get them all off the ground (no pun intended for the space based projects:)).

The research I'm eagerly anticipating is when they turn these megascopes towards looking for Earth like worlds. That's where a comprehensive survey of possible planet bearing stars will come into its own. Hopefully GAIA will be in orbit about that time and be able to contribute to the search. I hope they reconsider building the OWL at some stage soon. Imagine having a 100m scope to play around with for this research!!!. With its light gathering power and resolving capabilities, taking snapshots of Earth like worlds will be routine. Any other planets, especially the larger gas and ice giants, will be like amateurs taking happy snaps of Jupiter or Saturn today.

Just as an aside, isn't funny how the Americans have this penchant for acronyms. They just love to reduce something down to a series of letters that hopefully sound cool or have some sort of punch:). Anyone else, like the ESA, would name their missions or observatories after famous scientists and whatever (e.g Huygens, Darwin, Herschel etc), for the most part. Historians in the future will probably look back to now and call it the "Era of the Acronym"...EA for short:):P

[CraigS]

A quote:

"Two projects that will study dark energy – a mysterious substance that accounts for 74% of the total mass-energy of the universe and is causing its rate of expansion to increase – are given the highest priority in the large space-based and the large ground-based categories."

"They are:
1) the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), which has an estimated cost of only $1.6bn and;
2) the top priority for large ground-based missions is given to another telescope that will attempt to study the nature of dark energy and dark matter. The $465m Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), which when complete in 2015 will survey the entire sky every three nights with an 8.4m optical telescope in Chile."

Interesting to see how much actually gets funded. 'Twill be a good 'empirical test' of the credibility of the 'darkness theories' ... all up the entire program comes to about $13.8b over 10 years !

Cheers

[renormalised]

Out of those two programs, the one most likely to get the funding (because it's the cheapest) is the LSST. But I hope they all get the funding to go ahead.