Some personal news: it took way too long I think I finally understand "the deal" with compression fittings.
10.03.2026 15:25
👍 0
🔁 0
💬 0
📌 0
Some personal news: it took way too long I think I finally understand "the deal" with compression fittings.
Email from Chris Reynolds to the AXIS Team. Subject is disappointing AXIS news. Text of e-mail reads: Dear AXIS Friends, The AXIS team has received some very disappointing news – we have been informed by NASA HQ that AXIS is not eligible for selection and hence the Concept Study Report (CSR) will not be subjected to the full review process. AXIS represents the scientific aspirations of a large international community. As a member of one of the AXIS science working groups, you deserve a candid explanation from the PI of what happened and why. That is the purpose of this note. NASA’s decision was programmatic and not based on a review of the technology or science; the mission profile described in the submitted CSR was over the allowed budget and schedule. How was such a thing possible? In short, with NASA-GSFC as the AXIS managing center, the mission formulation process was critically compromised by the seismic shifts occurring in NASA and the Federal government. The AXIS study team was hit hard by three unprecedented challenges: NASA’s Deferred Resignation Program (DRP) and the pressure at GSFC to resign/retire created a rapid and uncontrolled loss of over 20 personnel with key expertise during a critical mission formulation period, including the main GSFC Project Manager (Jimmy Marsh) and the X-ray mirror lead (Will Zhang) and many discipline engineers.
GSFC priorities rapidly realigned to the FY2026 President’s Budget Request (PBR) that eliminated the Probe program, further reducing the availability of GSFC engineering and mission formulation personnel (incl. cost analysts and schedulers) over the critical Summer and Fall months. Key work was halted for almost seven weeks when the core GSFC AXIS study team, dominated by NASA civil servants, was furloughed during the government shutdown. NASA HQ’s extension to the CSR submission deadline (from 18-Dec-2025 to 29-Jan-2026) was inadequate compensation for the disruption and lost time. Taken together, these factors disrupted the basic grass-roots costing process (which requires extensive “reach back” to the discipline engineers to assess labor requirements) as well as the cost-design iteration process that is central to the formulation of a cost-capped and schedule-constrained mission. While the mission design was finalized in April, our initial grass-roots costing (which was ~10% over budget) could only be completed in September due to the lack of assigned resources. With the subsequent government shutdown and then “pens down” in early-December forced by the GSFC Executive Review process, there was no opportunity to work through the set of cost/schedule savings that had already been identified by the AXIS team. Ultimately, the GSFC executive council gave AXIS leadership the choice of submitting a CSR with a non-compliant schedule and cost, or not submitting a CSR at all. We of course proceeded with the submission, including a narrative that we understood the path to a cost-compliant profile (that we would have discussed with the review panels during the Site Visit). NASA HQ has ruled this stance to be unacceptable. It is important to stress that NASA’s programmatic decision was before any technical review had been conducted. The decision was NOT due to any concerns about AXIS technology. Indeed, the AXIS Phase A work had major successes with furthering
Indeed, the AXIS Phase A work had major successes with furthering the key technologies. GSFC’s Next Generation X-ray Optics (NGXO) team successfully demonstrated iridium-coated, stress-compensated mirror segments that meet AXIS baseline requirements (i.e. segment-level performance at sub-arcsecond level). NGXO also built the first AXIS demonstrator mirror module, learning critical lessons about mirror alignment, mounting and bonding. On the detector side, MIT quickly moved to fabricate AXIS-like CCDs and, working with our colleagues at Stanford, recently demonstrated that they achieve the required readout rate and spectral resolution. Similarly, NASA’s decision was NOT a judgment of the importance of AXIS science. The AXIS science case was rated excellent in the Step 1 review, and it only became stronger during our Phase A study. The AXIS Community Science Book, which many of you contributed to, is an extremely powerful demonstration of the relevance and importance of high-resolution X-ray observations to all areas of astrophysics. The Science Book is one of the most important legacies of the AXIS Phase A study and, I believe, will help define future mission concepts for many years to come. I thank you all from the bottom of my heart for all of your work on this. AXIS has been a long journey; we started under the leadership of Richard Mushotzky more than nine years ago. During that time, it’s been an enormous privilege to work with amazing people; the AXIS science team, the incredible/brilliant GSFC and Northrop Grumman engineers, and the wider astrophysics community. I am, quite frankly, livid that AXIS ultimately fell victim to the programmatic chaos of 2025. The astronomical community deserves better. I hope that NASA leadership, especially at GSFC and HQ, can have an honest discussion about how to better support and protect programs during extraordinary times.
For now, as a community, we must look forward. There is still one excellent mission under consideration for the Probe program, PRIMA, and we wish them a smooth and speedy path to selection and flight. In X-ray astronomy, the SMEX and MidEX programs represent concrete pathways for focused, high-impact missions, and the scientific case we built for AXIS provides a strong foundation for those concepts. The technologies we advanced in Step 1 and Phase A, particularly the NGXO mirror work and the MIT/Stanford detector demonstrations, can anchor the next generation of proposals. Most importantly, the AXIS Community Science Book, representing more than 500 scientists across, is a living document and a powerful signal to NASA leadership that this community is organized, serious, and not going anywhere. I encourage everyone to use it actively, as a resource for future concept development, for Astro2030 engagement, and for building the next mission that will deliver high angular resolution X-ray imaging to address the fundamental questions about black hole growth, galaxy evolution, and the hot universe that motivated AXIS from the beginning. This community built something remarkable over nine years and that doesn't end here. Thank you again for your support of AXIS over these times. Best Chris and the AXIS leadership team
The @axisprobe.bsky.social team learned that the phase A concept study report of AXIS (the Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite) will not be reviewed because the lost personnel at NASA Goddard and government shutdown impacted our schedule and budget. 🔭 Here is the PI's e-mail with the explanation.
OpenAI steps into the void created by Anthropic. Their AI will be used for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons for the US government.
Boycott them now.
Now on @sciam.bsky.social: Wake up, astronomers—the sky is calling.
@vrubinobs.bsky.social has unleashed its first rapid-fire alerts of new celestial activity. 800k of 'em—a nightly number that will soon rise to a million+!
By @meghanbartels.bsky.social
www.scientificamerican.com/article/rubi...
Ever get stuck trying to write documentation for your scientific software? On March 18 I'll give a webinar on tactics based on the idea of a "minimum viable documentation product":
ideas-productivity.org/events/hpcbp...
Or go ahead and check out my advice directly: onegoodtutorial.org
This should be getting better as we leave solar maximum. Here's an update of HST altitude vs. sunspot number.
Alerts are flowing from Rubin Observatory!
There will be a proper press release in the coming hours, please see all the details then, and meanwhile, your favorite alert broker probably has public data available to peruse *now*!
We are up to well over 20k alerts after 20 min on sky 🔭
Sigh, has anyone come up with a good way to respond to these "Dear Prof. X, I am a student, please explain <ultra-basic topic in your field> to me" emails? I feel bad ignoring them, but there are also only so many hours in the day.
My only take about that hockey game: what an underwhelming goal horn.
Ahhh, thanks
I think I hear the players measuring the weight with numbers in the 10-12 range. What do those mean?
Did I mention quality control? Authors routinely misspell their own names. But authors also routinely have names that are unusual and (rightly) get very offended if you "fix" them incorrectly!
I cannot emphasize enough that any remotely competent publishing effort costs money. If you disagree I will be happy to send you a sample of 5000 pages of source documents, inconsistent in every way, and you can be responsible for turning them into a homogeneous archivable product on a deadline.
Almost all primary journals are digital only - there are no hardcopy prints of the publications. It is hard to imagine how it is justified to charge thousands of USD for a single article. Especially when considering that current peer-review journals would not exist without the main ingredient: free reviewers.
Also, this is maddening.
The authors could have *asked* why even zero-profit-margin journals is the AAS Journals cost so much to produce. No need to imagine! There's a lot more to producing a real, archived, edited, typeset, scientific article with data than peer reviewer labor.
Tightened edit, less sexism, better special effects, same sick castle on a mountain ... Box office gold, baby
Back on my bullshit that a capable modern remake of Where Eagles Dare would absolutely slap. Potential to be the new Raiders.
Happy Valentine's Day from the SciX Team to our ever expanding research community. We love you with all our heart (and soul nebulae)! Explore more about this loved up couple of nebulae in the Science Explorer platform! https://bit.ly/SciX-Heart (image is IR mosaic from NASA's WISE)
If it has White Rock and you haven't seen White Rock you should skip straight to White Rock
In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.
Now there's a name I haven't heard in a long, long time
National Treasure time. every frame of this movie is perfect.
Maybe you already know this but the voting mechanism at play turns out to be highly wack:
miketanier.substack.com/p/go-fk-your...
(Headline is aggressive but article is substantive)
Supporting the above are a number of in-depth guides giving advice on different aspects of writing documentation, liberally peppered with examples from the wild.
onegoodtutorial.org/in-depth/
Paired with the checklist is a "playbook": a suggested strategy for how to go from zero to a completed checklist. I present it as an HTML slideshow, and am curious what people think about that form-factor.
onegoodtutorial.org/playbook/
Anyway. One Good Tutorial is centered on a checklist: if your docs include all of the items, your docs are good enough. My hope is people will find it to be a nicely tangible target for an undertaking that’s often frustratingly open-ended.
Guess I'd better code up some HTML to give the site an actual social preview ...
This is what I've been working on for my Better Scientific Software Fellowship. I'm really happy with how it’s come together thus far. Blog post with a few more details: newton.cx/~peter/2026/...
I'm delighted to announce a beta-level release of One Good Tutorial, a resource aimed at people who are documenting scientific software: onegoodtutorial.org . Feedback most welcome!
Should be mandatory for all computery sci-fi movies to have Daft Punk do the soundtrack. Doesn't matter that they retired.
