The University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Professor of Astronomy Alexandra Pope is the ‘Science Team Lead’ for NASA’s recently announced new space telescope, PRIMA (Probe far-Infrared Mission for Astrophysics). PRIMA, whose concept development was led by Jason Glenn, professor of astronomy at the University of Virginia, will be probing currently unobserved parts of the universe’s infrared spectrum, and is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (managed for NASA by Caltech). 

“PRIMA is the ultimate tool that can help us understand the relationship between galaxies and black holes so we better understand why the universe looks the way it does,” said Pope, who has devoted her career to studying the co-evolution of cosmic systems and dense regions of space.

PRIMA is the first in a new class of NASA astrophysics missions, called Probe Explorers, within the agency’s longstanding Explorers Program.

“With the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope almost five years ago, we’ve pushed our understanding of the universe,” said Pope. “But we’ve also uncovered all sorts of mysteries and questions that Webb can’t solve because it can’t see the far-infrared part of the spectrum. That’s where PRIMA comes in, and for the first time, we’ll have complete infrared coverage.”

NASA selected PRIMA to move into Phase B, the stage of development that advances the preliminary design and technology development for the mission. The mission is subject to a confirmation review, based on technical, programmatic, and cost performance, to determine its readiness to begin implementation in Phase C. If confirmed, PRIMA’s project cost is capped at $1.2 billion, not including launch and other non-project costs. The observatory will be targeted to launch in 2033, for a planned five-year mission.

The PRIMA proposal includes three core science questions, which were developed by the PRIMA science team with Pope as the Science Team Lead.
 

Primarily, the team will seek to understand how planets form their atmospheres, and, in particular, how water finds its way to a planet. IR spectroscopy will allow astronomers to trace cool water, a prerequisite for life as we know it, in planet-forming disks as they coalesce into planets. The second theme will explore the co-evolution of supermassive black holes and galaxies.

Third, the team wants to understand how the universe built up the more complex elements of the periodic table beyond the initial two released by the Big Bang: helium and hydrogen. There are various ways to do this, and with PRIMA’s IR sensors the science team aims to examine cosmic dust in different environments and at different times across the universe. By measuring different samples’ properties, the team hopes to be able to understand how the elements evolved.

Pope said she plans to bring her students along with her on the journey. 

“My lab will be working on the tools to analyze the data that PRIMA will send back, and my students will be trained on the techniques so they will be ready to work with real data once the telescope launches,” she said. “We will have to staff up for this for the next decade: we’ll add a few postdoctoral researchers and grad students, and I’ll be able to hire a small army of undergrads who can work on bite-sized pieces of the PRIMA science analysis.”