NASA is canceling all work on a new X-ray telescope which was to be designed to study black holes and other cosmic mysteries, due to soaring development costs, the space agency said. However, pulling the plug won't come cheap - Space.com reported that it will cost NASA $13 million to cancel the project, which includes contract cancellation fees with the companies hired to build the observatory.
The mission, called Gravity and Extreme Magnetism Small Explorer (GEMS) was "engendered under a very well-defined cost cap," NASA Astrophysics Division director Paul Hertz said. "As they approached their confirmation review, it was clear they would not be able to complete it within their cost capital. It was then when NASA made the very difficult decision not to push GEMS into the implementation phase."
An independent review team estimated GEMS was going to exceed its $119 million budget by 20 percent to 30 percent, Paul Hertz, NASA's astrophysics division director, told reporters on a conference call before few days. The telescope was still in the design stage and no hardware had been built when the space agency pulled the plug on the GEMS mission. The agency already has spent about $37 million on the project. It will cost about $13 million more to cancel agreements with telescope builder Orbital Sciences Corp and other contractors.
In the past, the U.S. space agency has faced massive budget overruns in some of its flagship programs, including the James Webb Space Telescope, the planned successor to the Hubble Space Telescope that is now estimated to cost almost $9 billion.
A black hole is a region of space so dense with matter that not even light can escape its gravitational power. Black holes are studied indirectly by measuring how they disrupt and affect the space around them and any nearby objects. Neutron stars are the collapsed remains of extremely massive stars. These are the areas for which the project was initiated.
Although NASA has no other observatories in the works that are similar to GEMS, Hertz said some of the mission's science goals can be tackled by alternative approaches and instruments. These include NuSTAR, a high-energy X-ray telescope scheduled to launch next week.
