Pith Number

pith:HNWBND3W

pith:2026:HNWBND3W4SLCQNGFOWDR56GJNC

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

Foundations for Discovery: A Coordinated Fleet Approach to NASA Astrophysics

Albert Y. Shih, Allison A. Youngblood, Amy A. Simon, Avi M. Mandell, Brian Humensky, Conor A. Nixon, David T. Leisawitz, Elisa V. Quintana, Francesca M. Civano, Georgia A. de Nolfo, Jacob Slutsky, Jennifer J. Wiseman, Jeremy S. Perkins, Joshua E. Schlieder, Judith L. Racusin, Knicole D. Col\'on, Regina Caputo, Tonia M. Venters

NASA astrophysics should pursue a coordinated fleet of one-to-two billion dollar missions to complement its flagship observatories.

arxiv:2605.02880 v2 · 2026-05-04 · astro-ph.IM

Open paper page JSON Open Graph Bundle Merged state Verified badge What is a Pith Number?

Add to your LaTeX paper

\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{HNWBND3W4SLCQNGFOWDR56GJNC}

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Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

advocating for a coordinated fleet of $1--2B missions, smaller than typical Flagship observatories, but strategically designed to complement them, i.e. a 'Next Generation Great Observatories' program

C2weakest assumption

That smaller missions can be designed and operated to provide meaningful complementarity to Flagships while achieving the stated scientific priorities, which rests on unstated details of technical feasibility, cost control, and inter-division coordination.

C3one line summary

Proposes a fleet of mid-sized, coordinated NASA astrophysics missions to maximize scientific return by complementing Flagship observatories.

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-26T01:02:34.854057Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

3b6c168f76e4962834c575871ef8c9688054d34d15301d55191371e10a53d745

Aliases

arxiv: 2605.02880 · arxiv_version: 2605.02880v2 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2605.02880 · pith_short_12: HNWBND3W4SLC · pith_short_16: HNWBND3W4SLCQNGF · pith_short_8: HNWBND3W

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/HNWBND3W4SLCQNGFOWDR56GJNC \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: 3b6c168f76e4962834c575871ef8c9688054d34d15301d55191371e10a53d745

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "ce5964d28a89bd494461da70cd347912a6e8b2544601b13234c1b5714b59b169",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "astro-ph.IM",
    "submitted_at": "2026-05-04T17:51:02Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "3d1c129cec087925302077746edda264aad53f541c34629c257060195bb89cf0"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2605.02880",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 2
  }
}