Thunderbolts Forum v3.0

Two giant US telescopes threatened by funding cap

US astronomers might have only one huge ground-based telescope in their future, rather than the two that many had hoped for.

They have been planning for years to build the Giant Magellan Telescope on a mountaintop in Chile, and the Thirty Meter Telescope on the Hawaiian mountain Maunakea. … snip … Both projects are backed by international groups of funders, but neither has the estimated US$3 billion needed to fully fund its telescope.

Many astronomers had hoped that the US National Science Foundation (NSF) would contribute money to cover the funding shortfall. But last week the National Science Board, which oversees the NSF, recommended that the agency cap its giant-telescope contributions at $1.6 billion. The board also signalled that it was reluctant for the NSF to spend even that much, citing the need to build other facilities “across a wide range of science and engineering fields”.

Falling behind

Looming over both telescope projects is the fact that the European Southern Observatory is ahead of them, quickly building the 39-metre-wide Extremely Large Telescope in Chile.

To some US researchers, the idea of losing access to one of the two planned telescopes could represent a major blow to US leadership in astronomy. “Great vision should drive great budgets, not vice versa,” says John O’Meara, chief scientist at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Kamuela, Hawaii.

‘Follow the Science’ Leads to Ruin

What are the fastest routes to fusion energy?

In recent years, the effort to develop practical fusion energy has rapidly evolved from a focus on only tokamak and laser inertial devices to include a wide array of approaches. We survey this increasingly diverse set of routes to fusion to assess what approaches are likely to lead to practical fusion with the least outlay of resources and thus are potentially the fastest routes. While a conclusive answer can only be determined once some approach actually succeeds in producing a practical fusion-energy generator, and the speed of advance depends on the allocation of resources, it is possible to arrive at tentative conclusions now. We find that basic, long-standing obstacles make the path to practical fusion more difficult, and more resource-intensive, for all approaches using deuterium fuels (DT, DHe3) as well as for approaches with low-density plasma.

Fusion research long emphasized deuterium–tritium (DT) fuel, as this fuel achieved significant fusion reaction rates at lower ion temperatures (Ti) than any other fuel. However, the DT reaction releases most of its energy in the form of a 14 MeV neutron. Since the early days of fusion energy work, researchers have been aware that this situation generates barriers to rapid deployment of any DT-based fusion generators and, conversely, puts a floor on the capital cost of such generators.

This is because there is no known way to convert neutron kinetic energy into electricity except by a conventional thermal generation system, as has been used in electric systems for well over a century. In existing fossil fuel generation plants, the energy conversion system, such as a steam turbine and generator, constitutes 80% or more of the capital cost. The conversion technology is by now extremely mature, and capital costs for these systems alone are in the area of $1–1.5/W of installed capacity.

These two considerations mean that it is practically impossible for any DT system to have capital costs less than existing fossil fuel plants. This, of course, does not mean that the delivered cost of electricity, which includes the fuel price, could not be less for DT fusion plants. However, it sets a floor on the minimum capital cost of a transition from fossil fuels to DT fusion generation.

Since about 50% of all energy use is for heating and would not necessarily require conversion to electricity, a complete conversion to DT fusion would require, at 2023 levels of energy consumption of 20 TW, a minimum of $10 trillion for energy conversion equipment alone. In itself, this is not a prohibitive amount over a 15-year transition period, as compared with fossil fuel costs in the area of $75 trillion over the same period at present prices.

Last September, researchers at Commonwealth Fusion Systems slowly charged a 10-ton D-shaped magnet, pushing up the field strength until it surpassed 20 tesla—a record for a magnet of its kind. The company’s founders say the feat addressed the major engineering challenge required to develop a compact, inexpensive fusion reactor.

Fusion power has been a dream of physicists for decades. At temperatures well above 100 million degrees, as in the sun, atomic nuclei mash together, releasing a massive amount of energy in the process. If researchers can bring about these reactions in a controlled and sustained way here on Earth, it could provide a crucial source of cheap, always-on, carbon-free electricity, using nearly limitless fuel sources. 

David Harding, the founder of two investment management firms who has holdings worth an estimated £27 million, is one of Tokamak Energy’s key backers. He said that he had long been attracted to the idea of “cheap unlimited energy through scientific wizardry” but that now the “whole impetus of global warming makes it seem even more of a no-brainer.”

the approaches that combine hydrogen–boron (pB11) fuel with high-density plasma have an easier, less resource-intensive path. At present, only a few private companies have joined the government projects in actually publishing fusion yield results. However, so far these results reflect the basic advantages of high-plasma-density approaches.

pB11-fueled generator would produce energy almost entirely in the form of either charged particle kinetic energy or x-rays. In both cases, several direct conversion schemes have been proposed or developed for other applications. These include photoelectric conversion for x-rays and both electrostatic and electromagnetic deceleration for charged particle beams. In the case of many of these technologies, no secure cost estimates can be obtained. However, an idea of the cost advantage over thermal conversion can be obtained by looking at one-of-a-kind or low-unit costs of direct energy conversion technologies such as gyrotrons, which convert electron beam energy into microwaves. One-of-a-kind or small numbers, <20, of 1 MW gyrotrons typically have prices of around $1/W. With reasonable scaling for mass production in thousands or millions of units that would be needed for a full transition to fusion, cost reductions to the area of $0.1/W are to be expected, reducing the minimum energy conversion costs for such a transition to the region of $1 trillion.

Other inherent aspects of DT devices also will increase cost and slow rollout. Neutron damage to structures, not present with pB11, will shorten generator lifetime and produce radioactive materials that will need to be disposed of. The essential tritium-breeding blanket is an additional cost not needed in pB11 devices. Thus, exclusive of the actual design of the fusion generators, a transition to DT fusion energy will require considerably more resources than one to pB11 fusion, or equivalently will take longer for a given level of investment.

little or no government funding has been provided for approaches using this fuel.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. senators from both parties introduce legislation on Thursday to accelerate development of power plants run by nuclear fusion reactions, an emerging technology that one day could help fight climate change.

The next generation of extremely large telescopes will have 100 times the light-gathering power and 10 times the image quality of the Hubble Space Telescope. However, they’re running into serious funding problems. There are two American-led projects with international partners. The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project uses a design with 492 mirror segments. It faces headwinds from the opposition of native Hawaiians to construction of another large telescope on Mauna Kea, which they consider to be a sacred site. Another project, the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), is combining seven 8.4-meter mirrors to make an effective 25-meter aperture.

The TMT project is stalled as it negotiates a way to begin construction in Hawaii. The GMT and another large telescope being built in Chile, the Rubin Observatory, are facing escalating costs. The pandemic, inflation, and supply chain problems are to blame. TMT and GMT will each cost around $3 billion. Both have philanthropic support, but they also rely on federal funding. For a while, the National Science Foundation (NSF) supported both projects. But recently, the National Science Board set a cap of $1.6 billion on federal support for large telescopes and gave the NSF until May to decide which project to support. One large telescope will be left out in the cold.

… snip …

Space telescopes cost a thousand times more per kilogram than ground-based telescopes, but they're worth their high price. These telescopes gain the benefit of the total darkness of a space environment, and many forms of radiation that these telescopes can observe such as gamma rays, ultraviolet light, and infrared radiation cannot penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere to reach ground-based telescopes. 

One such instrument, the Hubble Space Telescope has run up a total cost of $16 billion since the U.S. Congress approved its mission in 1977. Another, NASA’s James Webb Telescope, faced delays and technical challenges, and its budget ballooned to $5 billion. Its price tag helped it earn the nickname “the telescope that ate astronomy” — and that was in 2010. By the time of its launch in 2021, the price tag had doubled to $10 billion. 

NASA has other exciting missions in the pipeline. The Roman Space Telescope, with a 2.4-meter mirror but a hundred times Hubble’s field of view, is likely to cost over $3 billion, and the Habitable Worlds Observatory, designed to “sniff” the atmospheres of Earth-like planets for traces of biology, will come in around $11 billion.

NASA is in Trouble! And Why Does it Affect the Future of Humanity?

For 2024, the White House requested $27.2 billion for NASA, but Congress approved only $24.875 billion, an 8.5% reduction from the requested amount . This discrepancy marks the largest gap between requested and appropriated funding for NASA since 1992, forcing the agency to navigate a challenging fiscal environment.

The budget cuts have already led to significant layoffs and delays in crucial projects. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, responsible for the Mars Sample Return mission, announced it would dismiss 530 employees due to funding reductions . The Mars Sample Return mission, initially planned for 2033, now faces a delay until 2040, with its 2024 funding slashed from $949 million to $300 million . This delay is compounded by technical challenges and budget overruns, casting doubt on the mission's feasibility.

Other missions affected include the Chandra X-ray Observatory, which faces budget cuts reducing its funding to below 8% of 2023 levels over the next five years, despite its continued operational functionality . The ambitious James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), although a recent success, exemplifies the financial strain of flagship missions with its costs ballooning to nearly $10 billion from an initial half-billion estimate .

Reason 1: The Burden of Flagship Missions NASA's flagship missions, while groundbreaking, often suffer from significant budget overruns and delays. The JWST is a prime example, with its development costs increasing from an initial estimate of $500 million to nearly $10 billion. This escalation was due to technical challenges, rigorous testing requirements, and multiple errors during the project's development . Such cost overruns have a ripple effect, diverting funds from other critical projects and delaying subsequent missions.

Similarly, the Hubble Space Telescope, proposed in 1977 with a budget of $400 million, was not launched until 1990 at a cost of $1.5 billion. Even then, it required an additional $1.5 billion for in-orbit repairs . These budgetary challenges forced NASA to make severe cuts to other programs, delaying missions like the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) and impacting the overall funding landscape for astronomy .

Reason 2: Climate Change: A Growing Threat The impacts of climate change present another significant challenge to NASA's future. As climate change exacerbates, its economic repercussions will increasingly strain federal budgets. The United States currently experiences an extreme weather event causing at least a billion dollars of damage every three weeks . This trend is expected to worsen, with projections estimating climate change could cost the US up to $2 trillion annually by 2100.

These escalating costs will force the government to prioritise immediate climate-related needs over long-term scientific endeavors. NASA's budget, already constrained, may face further cuts as resources are diverted to address the immediate impacts of climate change. This shift in funding priorities could stall or even halt significant scientific missions aimed at exploring the cosmos and understanding our place in it .

Beyond the numbers, these cuts threaten to stifle human curiosity and our drive to explore the cosmos.

Construction will soon commence on what it set to be the world's most powerful telescope.

The Giant Magellan Telescope is engineered with seven of the world's largest mirrors to discover Earth-like planets and search for life, study the cosmic origins of chemical elements, unravel the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, and investigate the formation of the first stars, galaxies, and black holes.

… snip …

Upon completion, the 65-meter-tall structure will be one of the largest mechanized buildings ever built.

"The Giant Magellan Telescope is a $2.5 billion scale project. When complete, it will be one of the largest public-private funded science projects in history" a spokesperson for the project told Newsweek.

Scientists have got a clue of the self-interacting matter presence in the nearby galaxy named Crater II, this is a hypothetical dark matter which particles are speculated to do interaction via unknown force named hitherto. This galaxy is located alongside of our own galaxy around 380,000 light-years away from Earth. This discovery could contribute to 90 years of research on dark matter.

Researchers in the UK have taken a major step forward toward understanding dark matter, a substance that makes up about 85% of the universe’s mass but has so far proven undetectable.

They have started work on building “the world’s largest and most advanced rare-particle detector.” This new instrument will search for dark matter particles and other new physics phenomena that have previously escaped detection.

The project is being led by Imperial College London, in collaboration with the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s (STFC) Boulby Underground Laboratory, which are part of the global Xenon Lux-Zeplin Darwin (XLZD) Consortium.

… snip …

The proposed detector is a major leap in dark matter research. It is expected to be ten times the size of the current leading experiment, known as the LZ experiment.

This increase in size will significantly enhance the detector’s sensitivity, meaning it will be able to detect a wider range of potential dark matter particles. 

… snip …

“This will allow for a definitive search for the interactions of dark matter particles with masses above a few protons, and also for evidence of particle decays that could help explain why the universe seems to contain ordinary matter but little antimatter, and other rare phenomena that could bring evidence of new physics,” highlighted the press release.

… snip …

A team at STFC is working on a new underground science facility at Boulby mine, which might host the XLZD detector.

This facility will be developed in two stages: first, a clean manufacturing facility at about 3600 feet (1,100 meters) depth, followed by a large laboratory hall at around 4300 feet (1,300 meters) depth to house the experiment.

The detector will be an extensive underground structure, similar to a giant “thermos flask,” that will hold up to 100 tons of liquid xenon.

Peter McIntyre, a physicist and particle accelerator expert at Texas A&M University, and his colleagues think there may be more particles and natural forces in the universe that, like the Higgs boson, can only be discovered through high energy collisions—bigger collisions than the Large Hadron Collider can create. Gizmodo interviewed him about his ambitious proposal for a machine that could make those discoveries: A particle accelerator 2,000 kilometers in circumference floating in the Gulf of Mexico, which McIntyre and his colleagues have dubbed Collider in the Sea.

… snip …

I’m proposing to go up to 2,000 kilometers in circumference and make a ring that would inscribe the Gulf of Mexico. I set that scale somewhat arbitrarily by what Mother Earth has sitting there available to us. That 2,000-kilometer circumference would enable you to build a collider that’s 500 tera-electron-volt collision energy. [Editor’s note: For comparison, the Large Hadron Collider produces collisions at 14 TeV.]

… snip …

I’ve presented this at international conferences of accelerator builders and no one has come up with a deal breaker in those meetings.

… snip …

Gizmodo: How much would the collider in the sea likely cost?

McIntyre: It’s very problematic to throw costs out at this stage of such a thing, but somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 to 30 billion dollars. Which is about the same as the public has spent on the entire field of high energy physics in its history in the whole world.

Gizmodo: How confident are you that there’s something else that could only be discovered with a bigger collider?

McIntyre: I would have to say I am not confident there are other point-like particles even remotely within reach of a terrestrial accelerator or collider to discover them directly. I would say I’m strongly hopeful, but I am not confident.

Gizmodo: If there’s no guarantee we’ll find a new particle, why is it worth spending tens of billions of dollars to build a collider at this scale?

McIntyre: That’s a piece of epistemology. You can’t say why it’s important until you know what it is.