Newly signed funding bill gives NASA’s budget a significant boost

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After enduring the longest government shutdown in history, NASA stands to receive a big boost in funding for fiscal year 2019, thanks to a new budget bill signed by President Trump today. The legislation, which funds the federal government through September 30th, 2019, would give NASA $21.5 billion — an increase over last year’s budget of $20.7 billion and much more than the $19.9 billion the agency asked for.

Practically every major program within NASA will receive a boost. The agency’s science programs, which cover planetary missions and Earth science, will receive a total $6.9 billion, up from $6.2 billion from last year. The human exploration program will get $5 billion, while it got $4.79 billion in 2018.

And many of the NASA missions that the president tried to get rid of still live on. The most notable of these is the agency’s WFIRST mission, a new space-based telescope that NASA has been developing to look for planets outside our Solar System and search for dark energy in the Universe. The president’s request for 2019, released last February, called for the cancellation of the space telescope, citing the project’s cost overruns. Today’s bill provides $312 million for WFIRST development. However, supplemental materials for the budget warn that the project must stay within the $3.2 billion cost cap placed on it by Congress.

Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope

WFIRST is based on an existing 2.4 m wide field-of-view telescope and will carry two scientific instruments. The Wide-Field Instrument is a 288-megapixel multi-band near-infrared camera, providing a sharpness of images comparable to that achieved by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) over a 0.28 square degree field of view, 100 times larger than that of the HST. The Coronagraphic Instrument is a high-contrast, small field-of-view camera and spectrometer covering visible and near-infrared wavelengths using novel starlight-suppression technology.

The design of WFIRST is based on one of the proposed designs for the Joint Dark Energy Mission between NASA and DOE. WFIRST adds some extra capabilities to the original JDEM proposal, including a search for extra-solar planets using gravitational microlensing.[4] In its present incarnation (2015),[5] a large fraction of its primary mission will be focused on probing the expansion history of the Universe and the growth of cosmic structure with multiple methods in overlapping redshift ranges, with the goal of precisely measuring the effects of dark energy,[6] the consistency of general relativity, and the curvature of spacetime.




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But overall, the new budget promises a lot of money for NASA’s deep-space mission plans, more so than it’s received for the last decade. And it’s the sixth year in a row that NASA has received a bigger budget than it got the year before. It’s unclear if this trend will continue, but the president’s next budget request is expected to be submitted in March, after missing the deadline in February due to the shutdown. That proposal will shape the budget discussions for the year ahead, giving some idea of what NASA can expect in 2020.