IOWA CITY — It’s like launching an Apollo program every 10 years, and a University of Iowa professor who was an adviser to the U.S. Census Bureau thinks that despite political and pandemic challenges, the 2020 census landed successfully.

“It is a big deal,” Juan Pablo Hourcade said of the recently completed 2020 census that’s estimated to cost $14 billion, and “it takes a whole decade to plan.”

That speaks to it being “super important for the democratic processes,” said Hourcade, an associate professor of computer science at the UI. [...]