US administration looking to slash NASA science budget

[Robin Leadbeater]

https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/04/trump-white-house-budget-proposal-eviscerates-science-funding-at-nasa/
Imagine a world without resources like ADS, NED, Horizons etc.
I also hear that the NIST Atomic Spectra Database is scheduled to go dark

Robin

[David Arditti]

European institutions including British will need to step up to fill some of these gaps. We’ve relied on the Americans too much to provide important parts of our infrastructure, in science as in other areas.

[Robin Leadbeater]

David Arditti wrote:

European institutions including British will need to step up to fill some of these gaps.

There are other important resources like this in Europe like CDS (SIMBAD etc) for example, and others which form a global “astro-ecosystem”. This is less to do with money and more to do with politics and cultural shifts in the US though of course.

• This reply was modified 1 week, 5 days ago by Robin Leadbeater.

[Grant Privett]

Is there anything like JPL Horizons anywhere else?

[Dr Paul Leyland]

Grant Privett wrote:

<p class=”wp-dark-mode-bg-image”>Is there anything like JPL Horizons anywhere else?

Some of us have been discussing the provision of globally distrubuted backups on https://bsky.app/ where you may like to subscribe to #astronomy.

It’s not actually that difficult to store relatively static data like the abstract service. With my resources alone I could contribute a terabyte of storage and half a gigabit per second bandwidth. Dynamic data such as provided by the JPL and MPC sites are harder because of the need to install the requisite software.

[Alex Pratt]

The US administration is led by bellicose businessmen who have, at best, an ambivalent attitude towards science and academic rigour. Fields such as climate studies and climate change are ‘fake news’ so it was no surprise that the chainsaw-wielding FRS would slice through NOAA.

NASA was bound to be next and I hope funding isn’t withdrawn from the MPC which punches above its weight in solar system studies. Pro-Am collaboration feeds astrometry and occultation data into refining the orbits of comets, minor planets, TNOs, etc. enabling the ephemerides in Horizons. There’s other ephemeris services, such as IMCCE’s Miriade.
The MPC manages the naming of minor planets, let’s hope this doesn’t attract a DEI-related tirade from the White House.

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