Nature covers the hard decisions that NASA faces in its latest budget… which may include shutting down a great space telescope (and an asteroid watchdog) to keep some other great telescopes running:
he infrared Spitzer Space Telescope, however, may be deactivated due to lack of funding. And a bid to convert data collected by the Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) into a format usable for astrophysics was also deemed too expensive.
The decisions come at a time when Congress is tightening NASA’s budget, and about half of what astrophysics funding the agency does have goes to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is being readied for launch in 2018. In 2014, for example, the total astrophysics division funding was about $1.3 billion, of which $658 million went to JWST. Spitzer received $16.5 million this year, and was requesting even less for 2015, but NASA still judged even that amount to be too costly. “To me it’s really sad that this country can’t find just a few million bucks more to throw into this to keep these things active and running as they should be,” says senior review panel chair Ben R. Oppenheimer, an astronomer at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
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Spitzer launched in 2003 as a multipurpose observatory targeted at the low-energy infrared wavelengths of light blocked by Earth’s atmosphere. Many objects, such as dim stars and planet-forming debris disks, radiate best in infrared light. Spitzer finished its prime mission in 2009 when it exhausted its supply of liquid helium coolant used to chill the instruments. The loss of the coolant left two of Spitzer’s three instruments unusable, but two of the four wavelength bands on its main camera continued to operate as the Spitzer Warm Mission.