It’s always aggravating when politics interferes with science. Usually it’s in the form of some sort of direct attack by anti-science forces — I hardly need to belabor them here — but sometimes it’s even more pernicious. 

Politicians control the wallet for a lot of big scientific projects, and when these politicians start playing with the Federal budget, they can put science in harm’s way. 

Such is the case now with the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. This is one of the original NASA Great Observatories; big ‘scopes designed to push back the cosmic frontier and answer some of the biggest questions we have. Hubble is another of these Great Observatories, to give you a sense of their importance, and in fact Hubble and Chandra are the only two still intact and operating.

But maybe not for long. Chandra is being threatened by the budget caps imposed by Congress. The politics are complicated, but a spending cap put into place last year means a lot of agencies have to cut their budgets. This includes NASA, which is seeing a 2% cut across its general budget compared to the fiscal year 2024 request.

This is causing a lot of grief, of course, and Chandra is particularly hard-hit. The FY ’25 budget is calling for a massive cut to Chandra funding, so much so that — should it go into effect — it won’t be possible to operate Chandra any longer.

This is a grievous mistake. Chandra is still doing cutting-edge X-ray science, even after 25 years. It’s still operating well, and can continue to reveal the hidden high-energy Universe for years to come. We’ve learned so much from it: What happens to matter as it falls into a black hole, galaxy evolution from the dawn of time, how stars explode, and it even provided amazing evidence for the existence of dark matter. Chandra and Hubble were the top two ranked missions in the 2022 NASA Senior Review.

Losing it would be a terrible blow, and, rubbing salt in the wound, there’s no need for this. It’s all politics.

So what can you do?

Astronomers have put together a website called Save Chandra which has everything you need to understand what’s going on and what you can do. There’s a FAQ and details on why all this is happening which will get you up to speed on the situation. Even better, they have an Act Now page that gives details on what you can do to save this beloved observatory. It has a ton of info on exactly what you can do to contact Congress and tell them to save Chandra. 

There’s a community letter being drafted now that will be sent to NASA, Congress, and so on; when that goes live I’ll link to it in a future newsletter. It will be available for anyone to virtually sign. I imagine I will, enthusiastically.

You can read more about this from astronomer Ethan Siegel and the folks at Chandra who wrote an open letter about it. The Planetary Society also has an overview of the NASA budgetary cuts.

I’ll be contacting my representatives about this, and if you’re a US citizen I hope you do too. We cannot let shortsighted politics cut off our view of the cosmos. Thanks.

[Since it’s April 1, this seems appropriate.]

I get email.

Normally my spam filter is pretty good about catching the BS, but sometimes a bit slips through. Usually it’s irritating nonsense with clear subject lines intended to install malware (“Hey here are some photos from the other night”), or lascivious calls to booty (I’ll let you imagine those subject lines).

But sometimes, just before I flush the spam folder, I get one that catches my eye. I almost always regret opening them, but this one at least made me chuckle evilly. 

Heh. If they actually read what I’ve written about astrology (or this or this) I bet they wouldn’t say they enjoyed my posts.

My favorite part of any anti-science nonsense is when they self-debunk. After all, if they have a “precise forecasting app” you’d think they’d know not to email me in the first place.

A new space mission joins the fleet of current gamma-ray burst detectors: BurstCube, a tiny Cubesat small enough to sit next to you in a car. Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are intense cosmic explosions that occur when neutron stars collide or very massive stars undergo core collapse and become supernovae. Gamma rays don’t penetrate our atmosphere, so observatories need to be in space. Several exist, like Swift, Fermi, and INTEGRAL, but it’s always nice to have more, and BurstCube will test new technology that can make detection cheaper. Cubesats are small — BurstCube is 10 x 10 x 30 cm… yes, centimeters, so they’re cheaper and in many ways easier to build and launch. BurstCube launched to the space station on March 21, and will be deployed to orbit soon. The plan is to build 10 of them, so they can have complete coverage of the sky at any one time. GRBs only take seconds (some milliseconds!) to minutes to come and go, so you need rapid full-sky response to find them. They also have one of the coolest histories of any kind of astronomical event, so take a look at my episode of Crash Course Astronomy to learn more! And congrats to the BurstCube crew for a successful launch.

You can email me at [email protected] (though replies can take a while), and all my social media outlets are gathered together at about.me. Also, if you don’t already, please subscribe to this newsletter! And feel free to tell a friend or nine, too. Thanks!