NASA Plans To Cut Hubble And Chandra Space Telescope Budgets

The appearance of one of the telescopes, Hubble, will be cut off its budget by NASA (Photo: Doc. NASA)

JAKARTA The United States Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) is planning to cut the budget for the two largest telescopes they manage. These two telescopes are the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope.

Quoting from Space, NASA is thinking about this plan because their astrophysical program does not receive a full budget of US$1.56 billion (Rp24 billion) for the fiscal year (TA) 2024. Therefore, NASA must save their spending on other things.

"We are working with the hope that the fiscal 24 fiscal year budget will remain at the level of 2023 (invariant)," said NASA's Director of the Astrophysical Division Mark Clampin on October 13.

Although this cutting plan has been submitted to the National Academy Committee for Astronomy and Astrophysics in person, Clampin does not explain the amount of budget to be cut. NASA also does not know the specific impact of this budget cut.

The Chandra and Hubble telescopes are the two most expensive missions operated by NASA, beating the James Webb Space Telescope. Hubble took 93.9 million US dollars (Rp1.4 trillion) and Chandra needed 68.7 million US dollars (Rp1.078 trillion).

Apart from the large funding, NASA reduced the budget of the two telescopes because of their age. Chandra and Hubble are the two oldest missions that NASA is running. Hubble was launched in 1990 and Chandra in 1999.

The results of budget cuts from Chandra and Hubble will be diverted to other astrophysical priorities such as the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a smaller Exploratory class astrophysics mission, ESA's LISA Gravity Wave Observatory, and Israel's Ultraviolet Observatory.

Clampin added that this budget reduction did not only occur in Chandra and Hubble.

There will be a small reduction in several other undisclosed operations missions and a reduction in spending on technology development.