U.S. astronomers discover it, then it's outsourced
Published 4:00 am, Sunday, June 10, 2012
When three U.S. astronomers won the Nobel Prize in physics last year, for discovering that the expansion of the universe was speeding up in defiance of cosmic gravity - as if change fell out of your pockets onto the ceiling - it reaffirmed dark energy, the glibly named culprit behind this behavior, as the great cosmic surprise and mystery of our time.
And it underscored the case, long urged by U.S. astronomers, for a NASA mission to measure dark energy - to determine, for example, whether the cosmos would expand forever or whether, perhaps, there might be something wrong with our understanding of gravity.
In 2019, a spacecraft known as Euclid will begin such a mission to study dark energy. But it is being launched by the European Space Agency, not NASA, with U.S. astronomers serving only as very junior partners, contributing $20 million and some infrared sensors.
For some scientists, this represents an ingenious solution, allowing U.S. astronomers access to the kind of data they will not be able to obtain on their own until NASA can mount its own more ambitious mission in 2024.
But for others, it is a setback. It means that for at least the next decade, U.S. astronomers will be relegated to a minor role in following up on their own discovery.
"While it's great to support other missions," said Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins and the Space Telescope Science Institute, who shared that Nobel last year, "it would be disappointing to see the U.S. lose or outsource its own leading role in one of the hottest areas of research."
For Riess and his colleagues, this turn of events is another example of a worrying trend in which U.S. scientists, facing budget deficits and political gridlock, have had to pull back from or delay promising projects while teams based in Europe hunt down the long-sought Higgs boson or rocket scientists in China plan a moon landing in 2025.
"We predicted and discovered dark energy," he said. "We have the biggest dark-energy community and the best ground game; we have been designing a space mission since 1998; and now the Europeans will fly it with our minor participation. Something is wrong with this picture."
Saul Perlmutter, of the University of California, Berkeley, another of the dark energy Nobel Prize winners, said, "The danger, of course, is that we will watch the science (and scientists - and good students) move on to other countries and continents, where projects are being begun and completed."
With them, scientists say, could go the cultural excitement and innovative spark that invigorates the economy. The World Wide Web, for example, was invented at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (home to the world's most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider), to help particle physicists communicate.
By contrast, the U.S. flagship lab for high-energy physics, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, known as Fermilab, had to close down its accelerator, the Tevatron, last fall. And it learned from the Energy Department in March that the agency could not afford to follow through for now on a $1.3 billion underground experiment to study the spooky shape-shifting properties of particles known as neutrinos in an effort to investigate why the universe is made of matter and antimatter.
At the same time the department also canceled money for studies for the world's next big physics machine, the International Linear Collider, which would be the successor to CERN's giant collider. U.S. scientists are resigned to the likelihood that it will not be built in the United States.
U.S. physicists are now rethinking how to carry out the neutrino experiment, which was to have been the centerpiece of a plan to convert the old 8,000-foot-deep Homestake gold mine in Lead, S.D., into a national laboratory for underground science.
Similar facilities in Italy, Canada and Japan have become centers in the search for dark matter, neutrino experiments and other delicate work that requires shelter from cosmic rays. But in 2010, the federal National Science Foundation walked away from the $875 million project, citing unease about safety and "stewardship" of the old mine, which is half full of water. Meanwhile, with support from a local philanthropist, T. Denny Sanford, the state of South Dakota has reopened parts of the mine for a pair of physics experiments.
Of course there is no achievement of modern U.S. science - from the Manhattan Project to the Hubble Space Telescope to the decoding of the human genome - that does not owe a debt to hard and even heroic bargaining in the formerly smoke-filled rooms of Congress and the White House. Complaints and grim prognostications about the federal research budget are part of the background music of science. The situation is always fluid.
Given all that, other scientists say that basic research is doing as well as can be expected given the severe budgetary restraints the nation is forced to operate under. Among other things,@NASA's Webb telescope, the successor to the vaunted Hubble telescope, is on target for launching in 2018, at a cost of $8 billion.
The science office in the Energy Department actually got an increase in the budget released by President Barack Obama in February, but the money went to more applied research, into areas like energy and scientific computing.
Only last month, Congress added more money to the neutrino experiment, although not enough to get the whole project back on track, said Katie Yurkewicz, Fermilab's spokeswoman. The Association of American Universities issued a statement applauding congressional appropriators "for their bipartisan actions thus far to sustain the nation's investment in scientific research" so far.
But all bets could be off if the automated budget cuts, called "sequestration," decreed by the failure of the deficit reduction negotiations last summer, go into effect this January. A certain amount of gloom has reached the most prestigious levels of U.S. science. Writing in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books, Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate at the University of Texas in Austin, decried the fact that science was increasingly having to compete with other worthy causes, such as health care and education for money. The solution, he said, was to raise taxes.
Frank Wilczek, a Nobel laureate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, described himself as "less gloomy" than Weinberg but nonetheless concerned that, with the end of the Cold War and bad economic times, the traditional political bases of government support for basic research had dwindled, leaving only "curiosity and desire to participate, even indirectly, in doing something great."
He added, "We should be doing that anyway, of course."
"This is all a great pity, because tremendous scientific opportunities are available," Wilczek said.
The United States gave up its leadership in high energy particle physics 20 years ago, when Congress canceled the Superconducting Supercollider, a giant particle accelerator that was under construction in Waxahachie, Tex. That move cleared the way for CERN's eventual supremacy.
Could the same thing happen in space? Those fears were aroused two years ago when NASA announced that the James Webb Space Telescope project needed $1.6 billion more in financing and several years to complete. It was canceled by the House Appropriations Committee last summer but later restored. The price of that rescue, however, was to delay NASA's dark energy mission and to withdraw from a couple of upcoming joint Mars missions.
The travails of the dark energy researchers provide a window into the labyrinthine process by which big projects live or die. Whether you find the story hopeful or depressing, depends on who you are.
Dark energy is, according to Wilczek, "the most mysterious fact in all of physical science, the fact with the greatest potential to rock the foundations."
The discovery that the cosmos' expansion was speeding up came from observing exploding stars known as Type 1A supernovas, luminous and uniform enough to serve as cosmic distance markers. Realizing that only a telescope in space could find and measure supernovas distant enough to shed light, so to speak, on the genesis of this behavior, Perlmutter early on urged the construction of a specialized space probe.
Two years ago, after a decade of wrangling between astronomers and NASA and the Energy Department, a blue-ribbon panel from the National Academy of Sciences charged with determining astronomical priorities endorsed a version of this idea as the highest priority space science mission for the coming decade. The billion-dollar mission, called Wfirst, for Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope, would search for exoplanets as well as measure the effects of dark energy on the history and evolution of the universe. The academy's deliberations were sandbagged, however, by the subsequent announcement of the Webb telescope's problems, which have pushed the Webb launch all the way back to 2018.
Lia LaPiana, a program executive at NASA, said that, from 2013 to 2018, there is "zero money" in the president's budget for the mission.
As a down payment on an eventual mission, NASA suggested spending about $200 million for a 20 percent stake in Euclid, the European Space Agency's mission. The academy rejected that idea, saying that Euclid, which would not measure supernovas at all, did not meet the academy's requirements and could undermine the possibility of an eventual Wfirst project.