Welcome From Director Jon Morse

Welcome to the Science Mission Directorate's Astrophysics Division.

Here at NASA Headquarters our dedicated team of scientists and engineers administers and oversees programs that are designed to answer key cutting-edge questions in astronomy and astrophysics. We also oversee over a dozen operational missions that are currently in flight.

It is an exciting time for the Astrophysics Division. The WISE spacecraft is at the launch facility and preparing for a December launch. The WISE mission will study the sky in the mid-infrared. The SOFIA mission is preparing for its first open-door test flight. JWST has delivered hardware for integration and test.

In the recent months, our operating missions have pushed back the scientific frontier and set several new records. In October, Chandra announced the discovery of the most distant galaxy cluster to date, some 10.2 billion light years away. Swift, celebrating its 5th launch anniversary on Nov 20th, detected the most distant object ever found - a burst of gamma-rays that was emitted when the Universe was only 600 million years old and which had travelled 13 billion years to arrive here on Earth. Fermi completed its first year of operation and it is a tremendous success! Among its many discoveries, Fermi detected a multi-record breaking gamma-ray burst. The blast, called GRB 080916C, was recorded at 7:13 p.m. EDT on Sept. 15. It had the greatest total energy, the fastest motions, and the highest-energy initial emissions ever seen. Fermi has the ability to detect very high energy particles of light (photons) and this burst had the most energetic photon ever seen from a burst, about 5 billion times greater than the light we are receiving from the Sun.

On November 18 we are celebrating the 20th anniversary of the launch of the COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) spacecraft. For over four years, the spacecraft mapped the cosmic microwave background radiation, which confirmed the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. Two COBE scientists, Drs Mather and Smoot, shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for their collaborative work in understanding the Big Bang. Today, the WMAP mission and ESA’s recently launched Planck mission, are continuing to improve upon the COBE knowledge and to learn even more about the early history of star formation.

I invite you to learn more about our missions and the scientific questions they are designed to answer. I hope you will be as excited as we are to see the fascinating discoveries from such current missions as Hubble, Chandra, Swift, Fermi, and Kepler, as well as the future WISE, NuSTAR, Astro-H, and James Webb Space Telescope.

Dr. Jon Morse
Director Astrophysics Division