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WASHINGTON — Facing rising costs, the European Space Agency is looking at ways to revise the design of a large X-ray space telescope, an effort that could have implications for NASA’s own astrophysics program. ESA selected the Athena mission in 2014 as one of the two flagship astrophysical missions, along with the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). Athena — the name comes from the Advanced Telescope for High-Energy Astrophysics — will launch in the mid-2030s to study supermassive black holes, supernova explosions, and other X-ray sources using large X-ray mirrors. At the time of the election, each mission had an estimated cost to ESA of 1.05 billion euros ($1.07 billion), or about 1.17 billion euros today, said Paul McNamara, ESA’s astronomy and astrophysics coordinator, during a July 21 presentation to NASA astronomers and astrophysicists. committee. However, in 2019, the combined price of Athens and LISA has grown to 2.5 billion euros. As of May 2022, LISA had an estimated

“One strike can reshape our world, and the only thing that can stop it is science.” Credit: IMAX Those are the opening lines of “Asteroid Hunters,” an IMAX film narrated by Daisy Ridley of Star Wars fame. If the June 17 screening near NASA’s Ames Research Center is any guide, “Asteroid Hunter” achieves its goal of highlighting the threat asteroids pose and the opportunity to veer dangerously toward Earth. At the end of the film, an audience consisting mostly of people from NASA Ames and related organizations discusses the ongoing efforts to search for near-Earth objects (NEOs), asteroids, or comets within about 45 million kilometers of Earth’s orbit. In particular, they expressed concern over the fate of NASA’s NEO Surveyor space telescope. NASA’s 2023 budget proposal released in March called for a cut in the NEO Surveyor space telescope budget from about $143 million in 2022 to less than $40 million in 2023. The budget plan, which would delay the launch of the space telescope by two

WASHINGTON — NASA has selected SpaceX to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope with Falcon Heavy, but at a much higher price than the agency’s previous contract. NASA announced July 19 that it awarded SpaceX a contract to launch Roman on the company’s Falcon Heavy rocket in October 2026 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The contract is worth $255 million for launch and other mission-related costs. Roman is the next major astrophysics mission after the James Webb Space Telescope. The spacecraft has a 2.4-meter main mirror, donated to NASA a decade ago by the National Reconnaissance Office, with wide-field instruments and a coronagraph to conduct research in cosmology, exoplanets, and general astrophysics. The spacecraft with a mass of about 4,200 kilograms will operate from the Earth-sun Lagrange L-2 point, a space region about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth in the direction away from the sun. It is the same location that JWST and several other astrophysical mission