René Doyon
The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) hosted the first Canadian
Space Astronomy workshop on November 23 and 24 2006. More than 100 participants
from academia, industry and government agencies gathered at the John H. Chapman
Space Centre in St-Hubert to exchange and discuss future space astronomy
missions and
The format of the workshop was designed to stimulate
discussions rather than have formal presentations. The morning of the Day 1 was
devoted to introductory talks. John Hutchings gave us a very interesting perspective and lessons
learned from his three-decade long experience in space astronomy.
Representatives from ESA, JAXA and NASA (represented by CSA since NASA could
not attend because of US Thanksgiving) presented their future plans. In the
afternoon, participants were invited to join five sub-groups divided by science
theme, from the Solar system to cosmology, to focus on big science questions.
On Day 2, 4 breakout sessions were held in parallel with participants from all
science themes, this time to discuss specific missions that could address the
science objectives identified on Day 1. A summary of all breakout sessions was
presented to all participants followed by a general discussion.
A “call for ideas” was issued prior to the workshop to give
participants the opportunity to present a brief written overview of their ideas
in advance (mission and/or technology development). The majority of these ideas
were briefly presented and discussed in the second breakout session; many of
them were supported by posters which stimulated further discussions during
coffee and lunch breaks. There was no shortage of ideas, big and small! Two
dozen missions were briefly presented, the majority falling in one of those
eclectic categories: solar system, exoplanets, wide
field imaging, UV, x-ray, far-infrared and cosmic microwave background. A more
detailed description of the missions/ideas presented at the workshop will be
available on the CSA web site (www.space.gc.ca/CSAW) by the end of this year.
One clear message that came out of the workshop was that
Canadians are very keen to get involved in big missions as leader and/or major partner. The mission “package” discussed at
CSAW would certainly be worth several billions of dollars; clearly, only a
small fraction of those missions could be realistically funded. A first attempt
was made to prioritize these missions but this exercise was somewhat premature
given that we have yet to learn more about the missions that were (very
briefly) presented.
CSA presented a brief overview of its nominal space
astronomy budget over the next 10 years. Simply put, except for small missions
in the $3M range and microsats in the $10M range (all
to be competed for with other space disciplines), there are no funds yet
identified that would allow Canada to either lead or be a major partner in a
big mission on the scale of the Canadian contribution to JWST (approximately
$100M over ten years). It is for the community to make the appropriate
representations to our governments in order to raise these funds and the success
of this lobbying exercise will rely much on having a well-developed plan i.e. a
“short list”. It was clear right from the beginning that such a short list
would not be the main output of the workshop but CSAW certainly unveiled
several potential “front-runners” and, more comforting, names of people ready
to go and lead these long haul projects.
What is the way forward? There is a clear path for small
missions. CSA has set up a new structure of announcements of opportunities (AOs) that should be out in the next few months to enable
such small missions. In addition there
will be AOs for technology development which will
help prepare for future missions (both large & small). For big missions, like for large ground-based
observatories, the only realistic way to get them funded is to get a
sufficiently broad community behind it, so that, as a community, we can argue
convincingly that this is part and parcel of a LRP that is simply too good not
to support. Therefore, the next step for
the community is to get organized and focus on fleshing out the details of
these big missions. CSA can help this process in many ways, for instance by
organizing other workshops like CSAW and issuing relevant AOs
like the one recently issued on Discipline Working Groups. It was apparent at
the workshop that many of these groups are being formed. Communications between
CSA and the community will be crucial to make this process as effective as
possible. To keep the obvious momentum created by CSAW, JCSA has formally
requested a special poster session and a one-hour town hall discussion on large
space missions at the next CASCA in
As expressed by many participants, CSAW was a very
successful event, in particular to make the community aware of the urgency of
planning our space astronomy program in the next two decades. CSAW was only the
beginning of a process; hopefully, within 2 years, we shall have new exciting
space projects in the executive summary of the next LRP.
René Doyon
Université de Montréal
Chair of the CSAW scientific organizing committee and member
of JCSA