NASA has no business in ground-based astronomy. That sentiment, repeated often by Edward Weiler, the agency’s associate administrator for space science, is nothing new. But it’s getting stronger, say some US planetary astronomers, and despite the first budget hike in a decade, they fear for the future of their field.
Their fears were triggered by Weiler’s rebuff this past fall of a recommendation, in the first-ever Solar System exploration decadal survey, that NASA be a key partner in the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. High on the wish lists of the planetary and astrophysics communities alike, the roughly $170 million LSST would scan the same large swath of sky to 24th magnitude every five days or so. The telescope would be a dark-matter probe and a data trove of dynamic bodies such as supernovae, Kuiper Belt objects, and asteroids. “We’ve never looked at the sky in this way,” says David Jewitt...
