Citing Cost, NASA Bows Out Of Two Astrophysics Projects, Including Building the Largest Scientific Instrument Ever
LISA Laser NASA/ESA A gigantic laser experiment intended to study the nature of gravity and an x-ray telescope designed to look at black holes are being swept into the dustbin of history, too big and too expensive to survive the federal budget ax. NASA is skipping out on LISA, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, and the International X-Ray Observatory. Astrophysics is a fertile field these days, but there's just not enough funding to go around. As physicist Sean Carroll points out over at Discover, the James Webb Space Telescope is gobbling up most of it. NASA announced the decision to abandon LISA and IXO in a conference call earlier this month. LISA would detect ripples in space-time proposed by Einstein's theory of general relativity. Gravitational waves flow outward from collisions of huge celestial bodies like black holes and binary systems, but there is no way to prove their existence or study them....