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The Beyond Einstein program began with funding in President Bush's 2004 budget and represents the combined effort of the particle physics and astronomy communities. The National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies has now formed a committee at the request of NASA and the Department of Energy to conduct an assessment of the Beyond Einstein program. The committee is charged with making a recommendation on which of the Beyond Einstein missions should be developed and launched first. The committee will hold a series of meetings to hear from the projects and the science community. The committee's report is expected to be released on Sept. 8, 2007.
For more information on this study, including a list of the NRC review committee members and to obtain a schedule of future meetings, please visit http://www7.nationalacademies.org/ssb/BeyondEinsteinPublic.html.
Several prior studies and reports have endorsed the Beyond Einstein program. The Beyond Einstein science questions and flagship missions have been consistently rated as among the most important priorities for this decade.
 | In 2001, the National Academy of Sciences published the decadal survey establishing scientific community consensus on the most important science questions and funding priorities for this decade. The report, "Astronomy and Astrophysics in the New Millennium" recommended both Constellation-X and LISA as high priorities. |
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 | This was followed by a 2003 National Academies report, "Connecting the Quarks with the Cosmos: Eleven Science Questions for the New Century", that highlighted how the study of the very large (cosmology) and the very small (elementary particles) are coming together. Much of what is proposed by this report -- solving the mysteries of dark energy, dark matter, black holes, neutrinos, extra dimensions, and cosmic particle accelerators -- is captured in NASA's Beyond Einstein program. |
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 | In 2004, the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy responded to the National Academies report with a pledge to combine efforts from NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy. The subsequent report, "A 21st Century Frontier for Discovery: The Physics of the Universe", issued by the Interagency Working Group on the Physics of the Universe, again recommended the Beyond Einstein missions as high priorities. |
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