Pathways to Discovery in Astronomy and Astrophysics for the 2020s (2023) / Chapter Skim
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4 Optimizing the Science: Foundations
4 Optimizing the Science: Foundations
Pages 128-156
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From page 128... ...
Over the past two decades, private foundations are increasingly playing a key role supporting individual researchers, either directly through grants programs or through institutional support (e.g., the Kavli centers, Carnegie Observatories, and the Simons Center for Computational Astrophysics)
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From page 129... ...
and the enabling foundation or infrastructure that supports research. The data produced by the aforementioned facilities would be lost without investment in this foundation: support for processing and archiving these data, analyzing and interpreting the data, theoretical modeling and simulations, and in many cases carrying out the laboratory and computational analysis of the atomic, molecular, and chemical signatures and diagnostics of the emitting processes.
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From page 130... ...
Having these data would have better informed this report. onclusion: The lack of publicly available data on proposal success rates by program and on aggregated C metrics for who and what type of research is being supported (theory, facilities, laboratory investiga 1 National Science Board, 2018, Study of Operations and Maintenance Costs for NSF Facilities, NSB-2018-17, National Science Foundation, Alexandria, VA, https://nsf.gov/pubs/2018/nsb201817/nsb201817.pdf.
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From page 131... ...
Preparing proposals for individual investigator grants is extremely time consuming, and -- given the large impact a successful proposal has on a scientist's output and career -- the stakes are typically high. NSF AAG proposal success rates averaged 30–50 percent in the early 1990s through the early 2000s (Figure 4.2)
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From page 132... ...
This work was supported by NSF AST individual investigator grants. These improved mass and distance estimates were crucial for cementing the black hole explanation for Sgr A*
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From page 133... ...
There is a rise in the number of proposals submitted over this decade and a half, while the number of awards has not increased concomitantly. SOURCE: Cushman et al., 2015, Impact of Declining Proposal Success Rates on Scientific Productivity,˝ arXiv, https://doi.org/10.48550/ arXiv.1510.01647, reproduced with permission.
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From page 134... ...
Over the entire foundation, roughly 30 percent of proposals are ranked highly meritorious, and recent initiatives by the NSF director are focused on achieving a grant proposal success rate of 30 percent.5 Other NSF divisions that share common features with astronomy, such as physics and oceanography both being heavy users of the MREFC line, have higher proposal success rates than the astronomy division and devote a larger fraction of their budget to supporting individual investigator grants (Figure 4.4)
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From page 135... ...
The Enabling Foundation report suggested a 20 percent increase in funding above inflation for all individual investigator grants programs to restore success rates to a healthy competitive environment. This underfunding has also impacted equity within the field.
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From page 136... ...
Low funding rates at both NASA and NSF have affected the ability to carry out theoretical investigations. For NASA's ATP program, which funds theory relevant to NASA's missions, proposal funding rates dropped FIGURE 4.5 LIGO gravitational wave data from its two observatories at Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, from the first gravitational wave detection of merging black holes.
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From page 137... ...
8 decadal survey recommended that funding for NASA's Astrophysics Theory Program be increased by 25 percent, but instead the budget remained flat, and the calls for proposals slowed to a 2-year cadence. When coupled with current extremely low proposal success rates, these changes have particularly hurt the career development of pre-tenure theorists.
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From page 138... ...
Even with higher AAG proposal funding rates, the time delay and gauntlet of multiple proposal reviews add significant inefficiencies that hamper the scientific output of the most powerful facilities. F inding: Associating research funding for data analysis and production of high-level data products with awarding of observing time ensures that observers have the resources they need to accomplish the proposed science.
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From page 139... ...
Initiative (which jointly reviews proposals between NSF's physics and astronomy divisions) or like the TCAN theory program recommended in the 2010 decadal survey (Section 4.2.2)
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From page 140... ...
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also oversees space weather prediction capabilities and is another federal agency relevant to the subject. The direction for investments in space-based assets is prioritized by the solar and space physics decadal survey process, while this astronomy and astrophysics decadal survey committee advises only the division of Astronomical Sciences at NSF about ground-based solar physics.
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From page 141... ...
Advancing these myriad scientific goals is most efficiently done utilizing a comprehensive approach. onclusion: The most appropriate role for future astronomy and astrophysics decadal surveys is to comment C on the value of ground-based solar physics projects for astronomy and astrophysics scientific priorities.
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From page 142... ...
astronomers in the 5 years since the first data release. In the coming decade, the Vera Rubin and Nancy Grace Roman Observatories, the highestpriority ground and space projects in the 2010 decadal survey, respectively, will provide comparably rich data sets, which promise to revolutionize time-domain astronomy and promise breakthrough discoveries across a wide range of astrophysical disciplines.
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From page 143... ...
NSF supports data curation at its national observatories and mandates a plan for managing data and sharing the products of funded research in individual investigator programs through its general AAG program. The vast network of private ground-based facilities have much more variable levels of archiving and accessibility.
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From page 144... ...
The effort put in by the ALMA Observatory to create data reduction and calibration pipelines has the result that currently 95 FIGURE 4.9 Graph of the growth of refereed papers using archival data from the European Southern Observatory's (ESO's) La Silla Paranal Observatory, as a percentage of the total number of papers published that year.
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From page 145... ...
ground-based observatories are financially positioned or structurally incentivized to provide fully reduced data products, and for older public facilities like the VLA or Very Long Baseline Array with complicated data processing, such a goal may simply not be possible for all data in spite of best efforts (see Figure 4.11 for the increasing trend in archival usage from the VLA)
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From page 146... ...
Novacescu et al., 2019, "Robust Archives Maximize Scientific Accessibility," APC white paper submitted to Astro2020: Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics, https:// arxiv.org/abs/1907.06234.
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From page 147... ...
The system as envisioned by the Enabling Foundation panel could also address cross-agency strategic planning in the related areas of software development, high-performance/high-throughput computing, archiving and curating data from theoretical simulations, and community training in related areas. An important component of creating effective archives is coordinating with cross-agency and international archiving services to develop best practices and interoperability.
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From page 148... ...
As discussed in the Open Source Software Policy Options for NASA Earth and Space Sciences report, funding for software maintenance and for open source software projects, which have been transformative for astronomical science over the past decade, could pay major dividends in the future.22 F inding: Software development has become an essential part of every sub-field of astronomy. However, software developers and large software development efforts are not adequately funded or supported by existing structures.
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From page 149... ...
NSF computing resources are also available without NSF support, but this is not true for NASA computing resources. Just as Section 4.3 emphasized the need for interagency funding opportunities to support science that transcends agency boundaries, it is essential for agencies to provide opportunities for access to HPC/HTC computing resources for crosscutting projects.
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From page 150... ...
and are part of an emerging new area spanning machine learning and the physical sciences. Data science offers powerful new tools for studying astronomical data and astrophysical systems.
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From page 151... ...
NOTE: See Ntampaka et al., 2019, "The Role of Machine Learning in the Next Decade of Cosmology," APC white paper submitted to Astro2020: Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.10159.pdf. SOURCES: Space Telescope Science Institute, https://frontierfields.org; courtesy of NASA, ESA, and J
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From page 152... ...
While these fundamental parameters are crucial for stellar astrophysics, they are also important in a wide range of astrophysics ranging from exoplanet science to galaxy formation. The availability of relevant laboratory atomic, molecular, and optical data, such as highly accurate wavelengths, transition probabilities, photoionization cross sections, line-broadening parameters, and collisional cross sections, will be critical for maximizing the scientific return of these surveys, observatories, and missions, which together represent a significant investment of U.S.
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From page 153... ...
et al., 2019, "Confirming interstellar C60+ using the Hubble Space Table Telescope," Astrophysical Journal Letters 875:L28, 1. Properties of C60 features in XX Oph; wavelengths of gaseous and solid C60 features from https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/ab14e5, © AAS, reproduced with Frumpermission.
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From page 154... ...
Chatzikos et al., 2019, section 4 of "Atomic Data for Astrophysics: Needs and Challenges," white paper submitted to Astro2020: Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics, https://baas.aas.org/pub/2020n7i001/release/1.
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From page 155... ...
Last, for large flagship missions and MREFC-scale NSF facilities that rely heavily on laboratory data, including provisions for these essential activities in the project budgets could be very cost effective and would naturally focus the laboratory work on the most urgent scientific needs for those facilities. onclusion: Laboratory astrophysics is essential to the interpretation of astrophysical data from facilities C such as JWST and ALMA and future facilities such as the extremely large telescopes.
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From page 156... ...
Last, support for big machines and big projects needs to be balanced with support for the individual researchers, who are the wellsprings of scientific creativity and discovery. A few well-targeted, modest investments in the enabling research foundation will restore a healthy balance to the overall portfolio and maximize the scientific return.
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