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Astronomycast episode 198 from Monday, September 13, 2010, how is a space mission chosen?

Welcome to Astronomycast, our weekly facts-based journey through Cosmos to help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know.

My name is Fraser Kane, I'm the publisher of University Day, and with me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a professor at Southern Illinois University, Evertsville.

Hi Pamela, how are you doing?

I'm doing well, how are you doing Fraser?

Great, it was great to hang out with you at DragonCon 2010 and do the live episode of the show, so I hope all of everyone's had a chance to listen to that.

What a party.

It was definitely an amazing, I guess, four days all put together, and hopefully next year we'll get to see everyone who didn't have a chance to go out and see us this year.

Already looking forward to DragonCon 2011, and go get your hotel rooms, they're already starting to sell.

Yeah, absolutely, it's unbelievable how fast these hotel rooms book out, they've already started.

They were starting to take reservations like the last day of the con for the next year.

Yeah, you can start any time, and I think you can cancel, so there's nothing, no problem to reserving now.

So this week, space missions are expensive to build and launch, so there's a lot of planning that goes into choosing exactly what's going to be shot into space.

Space scientists and engineers recently went through the process of deciding on their science goals.

So we thought we'd spend an episode explaining how this works and how the next generation of spacecraft and telescopes will be selected.

So Pamela, this is kind of close to your heart, you were a member of the Decadal Survey, so what is that?

It's a project that every basically 10 years, the entire astronomy community and separately, the entire planetary science community, sits down and figures out,

well, what are our big science questions? What are our big technological needs?

How can we take our entire field and come up with a few goals that, as a field, will allow us to fundamentally change how we understand the universe if we can just accomplish these goals?

And in astronomy, we sat down and we didn't just look at the science and the telescopes and galaxies and that sort of stuff,

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