Sky and Telescope - September 2017 - 84

FOCAL POINT by Martin Elvis

The Crisis in Astronomy

One NASA ﬂagship mission at a time hurts astrophysics and planetary science. Here's a solution.

NEXT YEAR NASA will launch the big-

Great Observatories - they are a great
team. In the Webb era, we must wait a
decade or more to do that. That won't
be a fun game to watch. Our long
golden age of astronomy will be over.
What can we do? Asking to double
our budget would be as unsuccessful as
Oliver Twist asking for "some more." The
only way out is to make observatories
cheaper. New rockets, from newcomer

Big missions do fantastic science.
But are we getting the most science for the buck?
they will, and we must capture their
messages, whatever the wavelength.
That makes 21st-century astronomy
a team sport: All of our observatories
must play together, passing the ball
rapidly to the best-positioned player.
Today, if you make an ultravioletband discovery with Hubble, within
a year you can check it out in X-rays
with Chandra and in the infrared with
Spitzer. That's why they are called the
84

SpaceX and traditional players, are slashing costs to orbit by two-thirds or more.
That lets us consider how we can build
spacecraft and telescopes cheaper, too.
But to take advantage of the savings
we must choose wisely. Every ten years
astronomers from the National Academies perform a "decadal review." Their
task is to make a wish list of large- and
medium-size missions, in priority order.
So far, so good. But once a list reaches

S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 7 * SK Y & TELESCOPE

the decision makers, it becomes a way
of selling "astronomers' #1 priority"
- and only that. After all, who wants
second best?
So we go heavily for "one big mission." Of course, these big missions do
fantastic science. But are we getting the
most science for the buck? Could two or
three less expensive missions do more
in aggregate?
To ﬁnd out, we must pit one choice
against another. And there are many
great ideas for breakthrough missions
costing far less than Webb. So I suggest
that NASA ask the next decadal review
not for a wish list but for a complete
program of spectrum-spanning missions, at the same total cost. Then
our golden age will thrive for another
generation.
¢ MARTIN ELVIS is a senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center
for Astrophysics. He has worked on quasars and now on near-Earth asteroids.
All opinions expressed here are his own
and not those of the Smithsonian.

DAVIDE BON A Z ZI / SA L ZM A N A RT

gest, most expensive space observatory
it has ever built. The James Webb Space
Telescope will be a wonder of its age,
promising to reveal secrets of exoplanets, the deep universe, and much more.
But Webb's launch will also mark
the end of an era. For three decades,
astronomers have had deep access to
the entire spectrum: from X-rays and
gamma rays through the ultraviolet,
optical, and infrared bands. But Webb,
an infrared telescope, is so big a step
that no instrument in other bands of
the spectrum can match it.
Surely we should be patient and wait
a few years while NASA builds amazing telescopes for other wavelengths?
Not this time. Webb cost NASA almost
$8 billion. That's a lot. The agency's
Astrophysics Division has about half a
billion dollars a year for new, big space
observatories. So at Webb's cost, we will
have matching X-ray, ultraviolet, and
far-infrared observatories in 50 years!
This is a crisis. Why? Because, as the
band Nada Surf's 2012 album has it,
"the stars are indifferent to astronomy."
Stars don't care about the limits of our
telescope technologies. They shine as

Sky and Telescope - September 2017

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