Dr. Deep Anand

Getting A NASA Grant Just Became Overtly Political White House Executive Order "Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking" dropped today

Getting A NASA Grant Just Became Very Political
nasawatch.com/trumpspace/g...

- "Discretionary awards must, where applicable, demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities."

NASA Goddard is in real jeopardy!!! Employees received a memo that center is closing the cafeterias, vending, visitor center, rec center, etc. Oct 1, which is start of the fiscal year.

HQ Cheeto lackeys trying to kill NASA before Congress can act.

🚨🚨🚨 Jeffrey Epstein during a 2010 deposition:

Q. Have you ever socialized with Donald Trump in the presence of females under the age of
18?
A: Though l'd like to answer that question, at least today l'm going to have to assert my Fifth, Sixth, and 14th Amendment rights, sir.

A Top NASA Official Is Among Thousands of Staff Leaving the Agency Makenzie Lystrup’s departure from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center comes soon after the resignation of the director of JPL.

Makenzie Lystrup’s departure from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center comes soon after the resignation of the director of JPL. www.wired.com/story/a-top-...

Final CBO score of the "big beautiful bill" is out

Largest Medicaid cuts ever - in fact, at least 4 times the size of the previous largest; $894-$990 bn cut

Kicks 10 million off health insurance

Largest SNAP cuts ever, $197 bn cut

Still increases the deficit by $3.4 trillion from huge tax cuts

Dr. Makenzie Lystrup, director of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, announced that she will leave NASA, effective Friday, Aug. 1. As center director of Goddard since April 2023, Makenzie also was responsible for guiding the direction and management of multiple other NASA field installations including Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, Katherine Johnson Independent Verification & Validation Facility in West Virginia, the White Sands Complex in New Mexico, and the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Texas. Having served in a variety of science and aerospace civilian and government roles in her career, Makenzie contributed to a variety of NASA's priority science missions including successful operations of our James Webb Space Telescope and Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer, as well as development of the agency's Roman Space Telescope, and more. As a planetary scientist and astronomer, Makenzie's scientific work has been in using ground- and space-based astronomical observatories to understand the interactions and dynamics of planetary atmospheres and magnetospheres - the relationships between planets and their surrounding space environments. We're grateful to Makenzie for her leadership at NASA Goddard for more than two years including her work to inspire a Golden Age of explorers, scientists, and engineers. Following Makenzie's departure, Cynthia Simmons will serve as acting center director Cynthia is the current deputy center director. She previously served as the Director of the Flight Projects Directorate at Goddard and has extensive experience supporting missions for NASA, DoD and commercial space and science missions. We are confident Cynthia is prepared to guide Goddard through this transition. Before joining the agency, Makenzie served as senior director for Ball's Civil Space Advanced Systems and Business Development, where she managed new business activities for NASA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and …

Goddard Director resigned…

U.S. abandons hunt for signal of cosmic inflation Now-canceled CMB-S4 project would have searched the afterglow of the Big Bang for signs of cosmic exponential growth spurt

Breaking news: The U.S. government has canceled a proposed $900 million project to study in unprecedented detail the afterglow of the Big Bang, the cosmic microwave background radiation. scim.ag/4eIo0m4

NASA started in 1958, so to cut it to early 1960s levels is back to an era when NASA was just beginning.

It is so alarming seeing many senior colleagues at NASA, international scientific leaders and innovators, saying their goodbyes on social media and e-mail.

arxiv paragraph about the new interstellar comet that ends in “perhaps by technological design”

oh come on lmao

Every living NASA science chief unites in opposition to unprecedented… The entire past leadership of NASA’s science activities have released a joint statement condemning the proposed 47% cuts proposed to the agency’s science…

Today, *every* living prior leader of NASA's science directorate have released a joint letter condemning the proposed cuts to NASA science. These individuals every administration from Reagan to Biden, and all believe these cuts are insanely destructive: www.planetary.org/press-releas...

This is Figure 1 of the paper. Caption reads: Main panel: false-color HST imaging of IC 4040, a spiral galaxy in the Coma Cluster at 100 Mpc. The upper inset panel zooms in on a small region of the HST image, showing that individual stars cannot be resolved. The lower two panels show a simulation of the same scene imaged with a 6m version of HWO, which resolves the galaxy into stars. The center panel shows a luminous Cepheid at maximum light (MV = −6.5), and the lower the same Cepheid at minimum light (MV = −5.1).

in the #arXiv

Envisioning the Distance Ladder in the Era of the Habitable Worlds Observatory

by Gagandeep Anand @styrofoamplates.bsky.social and co-authors
arxiv.org/abs/2507.02056 #HWO #Cosmology 🧪

White House works to ground NASA science missions before Congress can act “We would be turning off some fabulous missions that are doing extremely well.”…

NASA appears to be pressuring mission leaders to think of the White House's FY26 budget proposal as an operating plan (i.e., work to close out missions even though Congress hasn't decided on the budget yet): arstechnica.com/space/2025/0...

Yet again: Managers do not have to follow illegal executive orders.

White House works to ground NASA science missions before Congress can act “We would be turning off some fabulous missions that are doing extremely well.”…

ughhhhh. what pieces of shit.

arstechnica.com/space/2025/0...

#astrosci 🔭🧪

Audio from today's #NASA Town Hall: soundcloud.com/keith-cowing...
Speakers
- Janet Petro, Acting NASA Administrator
- Brian Hughes, NASA Chief of Staff
- Vanessa Wyche, Acting NASA Associate Administrator
- Casey Swails, Deputy Associate Administrator

I think at least some of you follow because of NASA flavored things. And I am hearing some VERY bad things that are getting memory holed as quickly as they occur.

Not only that, but significant chunks of leadership at NASA Centers have been taking early retirement offers, leaving staff unprotected

Cosmic conflict continues: new data fuel the Hubble tension debate – Physics World New measurements of the universe’s expansion using James Webb Space Telescope appear to resolve the Hubble constant conflict – or do they?

My latest for @physicsworld.bsky.social explores the deepening mystery of the Hubble tension, as new results – with one exception – emphasise how local measurements of the Universe's expansion rate differ from the value predicted by the CMB. Is new physics needed? physicsworld.com/a/cosmic-con...

NASA begins push to slash workforce with more staff buyouts, early retirements as budget cuts loom NASA employees have until July 25 to decide if they'll stay or go.

NASA Goddard is pushing through a 48% staff reduction!!! This could impact the upcoming Roman Space Telescope and many other future Astro missions. News coverage seems not sensational enough. Are we really going to let NASA (as we know it) die quietly? www.space.com/space-explor...

Ask Ethan: Is the Hubble tension a real problem? Is the Universe's expansion rate 67 km/s/Mpc, 73 km/s/Mpc, or somewhere in between? The Hubble tension is real, and not so easy to resolve.

Is the Hubble tension a real problem?

#AskEthan

Famed astronomer Wendy Freedman claims (including in an interview with me) that the Hubble tension may not be real.

A large suite of evidence, rebutting many of her claims, suggests otherwise.

bigthink.com/starts-with-...
#space #astronomy #astro

A spiral galaxy, showing a thousand different colours that indicate the regions of different stars, gas and dust. The centre of the galaxy has more golden and orange light, while the outer edges fade into a deep blue that further fades into the black of the universe. Speckled across the galaxy are portions of bright pink light, along with patches of brown and black.

Astronomers have created a galactic masterpiece!

Using our VLT, they observed the Sculptor Galaxy in thousands of colours simultaneously 🌈

The more shades of colour there are in an image of a galaxy, the more we can learn about its inner workings.

Read more: www.eso.org/public/news/...
🔭 🧪 ☄️

About to lose my job I spent a decade in school for cause the orange man hates science and this once-in-a-lifetime Pacers run has been giving me hope, but now that’s going south too. shit sucks.

I think you spelled push-off and travel wrong

I mean, they’re averages, not cumulative.

Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: NASA Budget Briefing. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar. Join The Planetary Society's Space Policy & Advocacy team for a community briefing on the FY 2026 President's Budget Request for NASA. Participants will be able to submit questions during the briefin...

The Planetary Society will provide a NASA budget briefing on Thursday, June 12, at 12pm ET! We'll answer the top-rated scientific community questions, share everything we know, and give you our expert perspective on what's going on. Register for free here: us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

NASA's disastrous 2026 budget proposal in seven charts The White House has put forward a radical, wasteful proposal for NASA. We have the data to prove it.

Seven charts that show the perilous situation NASA is facing.

www.planetary.org/articles/nas...

excellent transition defense by the Pacers

Rick Carlisle, the showman. “In 49 states, it’s just basketball. But this is Indiana.”

20+ years as a pacers fan, and it’s so good to finally watch this team go to the finals. So unbelievably happy. LETS GO ‘CERS

NASA's detailed FY 2026 budget documents are now posted: www.nasa.gov/fy-2026-budg...