Got glass?

A decade before Lyndon Johnson declared his war on poverty, a small group of US astronomers gathered in Flagstaff, Ariz., to declare war on a different kind of poverty - a poverty of glass.

Giant telescopes of the day - the Palomar Observatory's 200-inch Hale Telescope, the 100-inch telescope on Mt. Wilson above Pasadena, and the 120-inch telescope at the Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton - belonged to schools and research institutions that jealously hoarded access for their own astronomers.

To narrow the gap between the haves and have-nots in this burgeoning field, the group pressed for a federally funded, cutting-edge observatory that would give time on the sky to any astronomer with a sufficiently excellent research idea.

Forty-eight years later, the glistening domes that dot Kitt Peak stand as monuments to that vision of merit-based access.

Some of these monuments, however, have been closed; others have been sold. The vision is under assault. Unless the US astronomical community begins to treat its optical telescopes as a nationwide system rather than competing, exclusionary fragments, some researchers say, the long-term vitality of the US astronomical enterprise could be threatened.

"A healthy astronomical community that can extend across disciplines and across geography is good for the country," says John Gallagher, astronomy professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. "The more subtle question is: ... How much do you want to pay for it?"

"This is a critical time," adds Wendy Freedman, an astronomer with the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, Calif.

Several factors have brought US astronomy to this point, researchers say.

The field itself has grown. According to a report last year by the National Academy of Science, during the past two decades the number of students earning PhDs in astronomy nearly doubled. The report calls astronomy "the most vibrant of the physical sciences in the United States."

As the population of astronomers has grown, sources for research money have changed. The National Science Foundation, which bankrolls the broadest range of astronomical research, once paid to individual astronomers 60 percent of the federal money going for research grants. That share has fallen to 30 percent. Much of the balance has shifted to NASA, which has launched several large orbiting observatories and numerous smaller science missions. Meanwhile, during the past 20 years, the NSF's astronomy budget has remained flat.

Public-private competition

That money not only must support National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO), the Tucson-based agency that runs Kitt Peak and its South American counterpart, the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. It also has caught the eye of privately held observatories, which have successfully attracted donors to pay for new, enormous telescopes over the past four decades (see map), but not the more mundane instruments these telescopes need to allow astronomers to make sense of the light gathered from distant objects. So private observatories are turning to the NSF for instrumentation grants.

Meanwhile, the astronomical community has outlined an ambitious research plan for the next decade, driven by a range of stunning discoveries during the past decade - from planets around distant stars to the possibility that the universe has begun another epoch of rapid expansion. Astronomers say larger ground-based telescopes are needed to complement studies done with NASA's Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST), to be launched by 2009. Current designs call for an orbiting observatory with an 8-meter mirror.

To support NGST research, as well as conduct other studies, astronomers are calling for a mammoth optical telescope whose mirror would reach 30 meters across - three times that of the largest telescopes today. The community also hopes to build a 6.5-meter telescope with instruments capable of imaging the entire night sky every few days. The telescope would provide the precise maps required for larger telescopes to conduct detailed follow-up studies of faint objects. And it is working toward establishing a National Virtual Observatory, where data from all-sky surveys could be archived.

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