The first in a new class of space telescopes is on track to reach the launch pad in the early 2030s, NASA announced this week. The PRIMA mission will be the first of NASA’s Probe Explorers, a new line of observatories intended to do more science for less money. The agency’s space telescopes typically fall into lower-cost “Explorer-class” missions, with cost caps in the range of a few hundred million dollars, or flagship observatories like the recently launched Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which came with a price tag of some $4.3 billion.
With the Probe Explorers, NASA officials seek to find a better balance between the smaller Explorer missions and multibillion-dollar flagships. NASA has studied potential Probe Explorer mission concepts for several years after an independent panel of scientists recommended the new mission category. But it wasn’t clear until recently whether NASA’s science budget, which is under pressure from the Trump administration, would be sufficient to actually start developing one.
NASA announced Wednesday it will move forward with PRIMA, short for the Probe far-Infrared Mission for Astrophysics. PRIMA was the sole finalist for the first Probe Explorer mission after NASA disqualified a competing mission, an X-ray observatory known as AXIS, earlier this year. NASA said a concept study for AXIS indicated it would not meet the agency’s schedule and budget constraints.
The scientist leading the AXIS concept study blamed disruptions and mismanagement at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the NASA location charged with leading the AXIS mission if it moved forward into development. PRIMA will be led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, which has also found itself in an institutional crisis, with few missions in development and a series of layoffs.
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