NASA pulls out of astrophysics missions

Science News : Recent cuts to NASA’s budget mean that the European Space Agency (ESA) will have to scrap or scale down proposed space missions to study supermassive black holes and other high-energy phenomena. One of those missions, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), would have been the first dedicated space mission to search for gravitational waves—ripples in spacetime predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity—generated by sources such as merging supermassive black holes. LISA was estimated to cost $2.4 billion; NASA’s share would have been $1.5 billion. The other mission, the International X-ray Observatory, was originally going to use a large x-ray mirror to examine some of the universe’s earliest supermassive black holes. The cost of that project was approximately $5 billion, with NASA’s share being $3.1 billion. ESA is considering going forward with a revamped gravitational-wave mission, and smaller scale versions of other missions.