NASA Astrophysics Roadmap

An Astrophysics Roadmap will be developed by a task force of the NASA Advisory Council’s Astrophysics Subcommittee (APS) during 2013. The Roadmap team is tasked with creating a compelling, 30-year vision for astrophysics at NASA, taking the recent decadal survey as the starting point and building upon it. The Roadmap team membership and charter are available at http://science.nasa.gov/science-committee/subcommittees/nac-astrophysics....

To accomplish its task, the Roadmap team is inviting contributions from the broader astrophysics community in the form of one-page (including graphics) abstracts of papers to be considered for presentation at a workshop to be held in early May 2013. This is the initial call for innovative ideas that address current and future scientific and/or technology challenges over the next 30 years, with way stations identified at 10 and 20 years out. A subset of the authors will be invited to present their ideas at the May workshop. The task force will take all submissions into account when drafting the 30-year vision and identifying the relevant scientific questions and technological challenges that the astrophysics community should work to address in the future. All contributions will be made available to the public, unless the submitter requests that they are kept confidential if not selected for presentation at the workshop.

Note that the goal of the Roadmap team is to provide a very long-range science vision with a broad scope of options and possibilities. As such, the team is not poised to repeat or revise the efforts of the New Worlds New Horizons decadal survey and does not, therefore, solicit suggestions or recommendations for specific missions or implementation plans.

To submit an abstract, please go to http://science.nasa.gov/science-committee/subcommittees/nac-astrophysics...

The deadline for submissions to this initial call is Monday, 25 March 2013 at 5pm Eastern time.