Enduring Quests Daring Visions: NASA Astrophysics in the Next Three Decades

** Premium Paperback - 110 Pages - Printed in Full Color **Enduring Quests Daring VisionsNASA Astrophysics in the Next Three DecadesThe past three decades have seen prodigious advances in astronomy and astrophysics. We have discovered thousands of planets around other stars, revealing a startling diversity of planetary systems and demonstrating that our own solar system is one of many billions across the galaxy. We have mapped the life cycle of stars from their formation in nearby stellar nurseries to their sometimes explosive deaths. We have tallied supermassive black holes weighing millions to billions of times the Sun’s mass, finding them in the centers of most big galaxies, where they gorge on gas and stars and blast superheated material into their environments.We have traced the growth and transformation of galaxies from young chaotic shreds a billion years after the Big Bang to the majestic forms they display today. We have established, using precision cosmological measurements, a well-tested account of the Big Bang model’s underlying physics. The current picture points to a universe where an early epoch of inflation established uniformity over a vast horizon, where dark matter dominates the gravitational forces that provide the underlying framework of cosmic structure, and where dark energy drives expansion at an ever-accelerating rate.NASA missions have made essential contributions to all of these dramatic developments.This roadmap presents a science-driven 30-year vision for the future of NASA Astrophysics that builds on these remarkable discoveries to address three defining questions:Are we alone?How did we get here?How does the universe work?Seeking answers to these age-old questions are Enduring Quests of humankind. The coming decades will see giant strides forward in finding earthlike habitable worlds (exoEarths), in understanding the history of star and galaxy formation and evolution, and in teasing out the fundamental physics of the cosmos.Different astronomical phenomena are typically most prominent in distinct regions of the electromagnetic spectrum: young, dust-enshrouded stars in the far-infrared; older stars and galaxies in visible and nearoptical wavelengths; star-forming regions in the ultraviolet, and the million-degree gas of galaxy clusters and black hole accretion disks in X-rays.In addition to spanning the electromagnetic spectrum, the roadmap missions will open a revolutionary new window on the cosmos by detecting gravitational waves, ripples of space-time that emanate from colossal events like the merging of two black holes. These scientific investigations and their enabling space missions are described here in three broad categories of time: the Near-Term Era, defined by missions that are currently flying or planned for the coming decade; the Formative Era, with notional missions (referred to here as “Surveyors”) that could be designed and built in the 2020s; and the Visionary Era of technologically advanced missions (referred to as “Mappers”) for the 2030s and beyond.While future plans are necessarily built on current knowledge, the most important results to come from these missions are likely beyond the edge of present imagination. Thirty years from now, these investigations may show that life arises frequently on planets orbiting other stars, or that fundamentally new states of matter arise in the cores of neutron stars, or that the first stars in the cosmos were unlike any that exist today, or that there are dimensions of space-time beyond the four of our everyday experience. In their compelling science objectives and their extraordinary technical ambitions, the research programs and missions of this roadmap are Daring Visions for the future of NASA Astrophysics. Read more