House SS&T Dems just issued a report re NASA and the FY2026 budget: "Mission Aborted: How NASA Illegally Implemented the President's Budget Request Without Congressional Approval." Calls on Isaacman to "defend" NASA and not do the same w/FY2027 request.
democrats-science.house.gov/imo/media/do...
Science Committee Democratic Staff Report Reveals Details on NASA’s Illegal Implementation of Trump’s FY2026 Budget Request Without Congressional Approval. democrats-science.house.gov/news/press-r...
The FY 2027 NASA budget request hides its science cuts by omitting mission names instead of explicitly zeroing them out.
We did the work and found 54 missions cancelled in this proposal.
This is another extinction-level event for NASA science.
Full list: planetary.org/save-nasa-science
I meant to post this at the LOS moment but baby duties got in the way. Just imagine this post like an hour ago...
"David Copperfield has about 40 minutes to pull off the funniest magic trick of all time"
One thing that amazes me is that two of the three American astronauts on board Artemis II graduated from public universities: Christina Koch earned three degrees from NC State, and Victor Glover was a defensive back on the Cal Poly football team.
We are not going anywhere without public education.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center: NASA-JAXA’s XRISM Telescope Clocks Hot Wind of Galaxy M82 science.nasa.gov/missions/xri...
I saw the dress as white and gold
I heard Laurel, not Yanny
and .0026 is my best result (average of several tries probably .0032 or so).
I'm almost 44
What's My JND? 0.0026
Can you beat it? www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd...
Email from Chris Reynolds to the AXIS Team. Subject is disappointing AXIS news. Text of e-mail reads: Dear AXIS Friends, The AXIS team has received some very disappointing news – we have been informed by NASA HQ that AXIS is not eligible for selection and hence the Concept Study Report (CSR) will not be subjected to the full review process. AXIS represents the scientific aspirations of a large international community. As a member of one of the AXIS science working groups, you deserve a candid explanation from the PI of what happened and why. That is the purpose of this note. NASA’s decision was programmatic and not based on a review of the technology or science; the mission profile described in the submitted CSR was over the allowed budget and schedule. How was such a thing possible? In short, with NASA-GSFC as the AXIS managing center, the mission formulation process was critically compromised by the seismic shifts occurring in NASA and the Federal government. The AXIS study team was hit hard by three unprecedented challenges: NASA’s Deferred Resignation Program (DRP) and the pressure at GSFC to resign/retire created a rapid and uncontrolled loss of over 20 personnel with key expertise during a critical mission formulation period, including the main GSFC Project Manager (Jimmy Marsh) and the X-ray mirror lead (Will Zhang) and many discipline engineers.
GSFC priorities rapidly realigned to the FY2026 President’s Budget Request (PBR) that eliminated the Probe program, further reducing the availability of GSFC engineering and mission formulation personnel (incl. cost analysts and schedulers) over the critical Summer and Fall months. Key work was halted for almost seven weeks when the core GSFC AXIS study team, dominated by NASA civil servants, was furloughed during the government shutdown. NASA HQ’s extension to the CSR submission deadline (from 18-Dec-2025 to 29-Jan-2026) was inadequate compensation for the disruption and lost time. Taken together, these factors disrupted the basic grass-roots costing process (which requires extensive “reach back” to the discipline engineers to assess labor requirements) as well as the cost-design iteration process that is central to the formulation of a cost-capped and schedule-constrained mission. While the mission design was finalized in April, our initial grass-roots costing (which was ~10% over budget) could only be completed in September due to the lack of assigned resources. With the subsequent government shutdown and then “pens down” in early-December forced by the GSFC Executive Review process, there was no opportunity to work through the set of cost/schedule savings that had already been identified by the AXIS team. Ultimately, the GSFC executive council gave AXIS leadership the choice of submitting a CSR with a non-compliant schedule and cost, or not submitting a CSR at all. We of course proceeded with the submission, including a narrative that we understood the path to a cost-compliant profile (that we would have discussed with the review panels during the Site Visit). NASA HQ has ruled this stance to be unacceptable. It is important to stress that NASA’s programmatic decision was before any technical review had been conducted. The decision was NOT due to any concerns about AXIS technology. Indeed, the AXIS Phase A work had major successes with furthering
Indeed, the AXIS Phase A work had major successes with furthering the key technologies. GSFC’s Next Generation X-ray Optics (NGXO) team successfully demonstrated iridium-coated, stress-compensated mirror segments that meet AXIS baseline requirements (i.e. segment-level performance at sub-arcsecond level). NGXO also built the first AXIS demonstrator mirror module, learning critical lessons about mirror alignment, mounting and bonding. On the detector side, MIT quickly moved to fabricate AXIS-like CCDs and, working with our colleagues at Stanford, recently demonstrated that they achieve the required readout rate and spectral resolution. Similarly, NASA’s decision was NOT a judgment of the importance of AXIS science. The AXIS science case was rated excellent in the Step 1 review, and it only became stronger during our Phase A study. The AXIS Community Science Book, which many of you contributed to, is an extremely powerful demonstration of the relevance and importance of high-resolution X-ray observations to all areas of astrophysics. The Science Book is one of the most important legacies of the AXIS Phase A study and, I believe, will help define future mission concepts for many years to come. I thank you all from the bottom of my heart for all of your work on this. AXIS has been a long journey; we started under the leadership of Richard Mushotzky more than nine years ago. During that time, it’s been an enormous privilege to work with amazing people; the AXIS science team, the incredible/brilliant GSFC and Northrop Grumman engineers, and the wider astrophysics community. I am, quite frankly, livid that AXIS ultimately fell victim to the programmatic chaos of 2025. The astronomical community deserves better. I hope that NASA leadership, especially at GSFC and HQ, can have an honest discussion about how to better support and protect programs during extraordinary times.
For now, as a community, we must look forward. There is still one excellent mission under consideration for the Probe program, PRIMA, and we wish them a smooth and speedy path to selection and flight. In X-ray astronomy, the SMEX and MidEX programs represent concrete pathways for focused, high-impact missions, and the scientific case we built for AXIS provides a strong foundation for those concepts. The technologies we advanced in Step 1 and Phase A, particularly the NGXO mirror work and the MIT/Stanford detector demonstrations, can anchor the next generation of proposals. Most importantly, the AXIS Community Science Book, representing more than 500 scientists across, is a living document and a powerful signal to NASA leadership that this community is organized, serious, and not going anywhere. I encourage everyone to use it actively, as a resource for future concept development, for Astro2030 engagement, and for building the next mission that will deliver high angular resolution X-ray imaging to address the fundamental questions about black hole growth, galaxy evolution, and the hot universe that motivated AXIS from the beginning. This community built something remarkable over nine years and that doesn't end here. Thank you again for your support of AXIS over these times. Best Chris and the AXIS leadership team
The @axisprobe.bsky.social team learned that the phase A concept study report of AXIS (the Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite) will not be reviewed because the lost personnel at NASA Goddard and government shutdown impacted our schedule and budget. 🔭 Here is the PI's e-mail with the explanation.
There is... so much of this story to tell in time 🥸
NASA HQ has declared the AXIS Probe study ineligible for selection, and we will not proceed to the final stage of review. A letter to the community from AXIS leadership is below.
I'm sorry that this happened. The astronomical community deserves better. I hope this is the beginning, not the end.
I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.
It moves! We can watch as the Kepler supernova remnant changes over a quarter of century in X-rays from Chandra. #aas247
chandra.si.edu/photo/2026/k...
Here's the Chandra press release for this cool - and also hot - new movie. chandra.si.edu/photo/2026/k... #AAS247
This artist's impression depicts the supermassive black hole of NGC 3783. A gold-to-brown swirling disc surrounds a black ellipse-shaped area that looks like a hole in space. On the right, two very bright white spots atop the disc are connected by an arch of shining lines. From the blazing spot in the foreground, white-to-orange straight lines erupt like jets, reaching the top of the image.
🆕 XMM-Newton & XRISM observed an extraordinary blast from a supermassive black hole 💥
They spotted a bright X-ray flare erupting from the gigantic black hole lurking within NGC 3783. As it faded away, fast winds emerged, raging at speeds of 60 000 km per second 👉 www.esa.int/Science_Expl... 🔭 🧪
Good on Penn Jillette. Having to come to terms with your entire political identity and philosophy being wrong is not easy and most people could never do it.
faint spectral lines of Chlorine and potassium are visible in the X-ray spectrum of Cassiopeia A, as seen by XRISM
Cl and K lines are clearly detected (>5-sigma) in the spectra shown below, taken from our paper published today in Nature Astronomy
XRISM has made the first ever X-ray detections of chlorine and potassium in the remains of a supernova, showing that these elements critical for the formation of life are indeed spread throughout the cosmos by exploding stars
science.nasa.gov/missions/xri...
Footage from Bradenton, Florida of Starship launch
As usual with this issue, Harris is calling for a compromise that already exists. Every sporting body has standards for how long athletes must be on hormones before they can compete as women.
The problem isn’t that we’re ignoring ‘reasonable concerns,’ the problem is that republicans are lying.
Artist’s impression of the powerful winds blowing from the accretion disc in X-ray-bright system GX13+1. The focus of the image is a blue-to-pink disc of swirling material, circling around a sparkling white ball in the centre. Bright rays primarily white to pink rise towards the top of the image, like a wind blowing off the circling matter. To the left of the picture, a yellow to orange ball is partially visible, representing a star. The star appears to be feeding the disc via a stream of orangish matter that connects the two.
Cosmic wind of change
#XRISM makes an unexpected discovery: winds from neutron star discs are quite different from those around supermassive black holes.
The discovery could reshape our understanding of the most extreme environments in the Universe 👉 www.esa.int/Science_Expl... 🔭 🧪
the person behind this unhinged, anti-factual editorial is set to decide coverage at one of the nation’s major news networks
New XRISM paper published in Nature reveals that high-speed winds from supermassive black holes are clumpier and more energetic than expected, helping us learn how black holes and galaxies coevolved. Plus the spectrum is amazing 😲😲😲
www.xrism.jaxa.jp/en/topics/sc...
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
New life phase entered
*this guy* 🙄🙄🙄
The AO for XRISM Cycle 2 is now open; deadline May 15th. This is a *6-month* cycle. Proposals should assume gate valve closed. The team continues to evaluate the feasibility of another operation to open the GV. Proposals for lab astrophysics are also solicited.
nspires.nasaprs.com/external/sol...
Text
Correct. If the birthdate field contains corrupt or mismatched data, it defaults to 1875-05-20, which serves as a flag. May 20, 1875, is the day the international standards and metrics treaty was signed. Everything is a conspiracy when you don’t know how anything works.
Damn. I hope she rests in peace 😥❤️
New backdrop delivered just in time for AAS. Stop by the XRISM booth next week, and come to our Special Session Monday morning at 10:00-11:30 to see new results!
