Astronomers Set Sights on Maintenance of Facilities : Science: Report on funding priorities says aging equipment cannot function fully. Upkeep often loses out to new showcase projects.

Many of the nation’s premier astronomical facilities have deteriorated to the point that they are unable to function fully and their maintenance must become a high priority if they are to live up to their potential, according to a report released Tuesday.

The report, which lays out what the country’s astronomical community would most like to see accomplished during the 1990s, surprised some experts by emphasizing the need to take care of matters on the ground before reaching farther into the heavens.

It calls for spending $3.02 billion over the next 10 years on projects ranging from completion of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s orbiting observatories program to construction of two giant telescopes, one on Mauna Kea in Hawaii and the other in the Southern Hemisphere.

The report, compiled by astronomers and experts from related fields for the National Research Council, research arm of the National Academy of Sciences, emphasized the need to maintain a balanced program with more funds for educational facilities and maintainence of existing observatories.

“The facilities are beginning to approach the state of the bridges and tunnels in New York City,” said Stephen Maran, astronomer and spokesman for the American Astronomical Society.

Each decade, astronomy, alone among the sciences, sets priorities for the goals it would most like to achieve, thus giving funding agencies and the federal government a blueprint for action. That strategy has been credited with the success that astronomers have had in achieving some of their most cherished goals.

“The 1990s will be chock-full of astronomical discoveries,” said John Bahcall of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., chairman of the study group, in releasing the report in Washington. “New instruments will reveal previously unimagined aspects of the universe and will lead to new questions about objects that we do not yet know exist.”

Of nearly equal importance, astronomers say, is support for existing facilities. It is sometimes easier to get funds for new, showcase projects than to come up with money to keep older facilities in top form, scientists contend, and that problem is having an effect on astronomical observatories across the country.

For example, the pride of radio astronomers is the Very Large Array, a series of radio telescopes in the New Mexico desert. The 27 telescopes are mounted on platforms on railroad tracks, and it is crucial to be able to move them in order to focus the instruments on a wide range of targets. In recent years, the tracks have deteriorated to the point that it is no longer possible to make full use of the complex.

Similar problems have reduced the effectiveness of other facilities, and the report contends that the National Science Foundation’s support for ground-based astronomy programs “has deteriorated seriously in the last decade.”

As a result of the decline in support, the report said, there has been a loss of staff, limits on research by young scientists, a delay in critical maintenance and failure to replace old and obsolete equipment. The report also emphasizes the need for a balance between major and smaller programs.

Charles Kennel, a physicist at UCLA who worked on the report, said that astronomers, like scientists in other fields, have been swept up in major showcase projects at the expense of more modest programs.

“The criteria for getting a mission through the scientific community seems to be that the mission should be of undeniable technical excellence,” Kennel said. “In order to achieve technical excellence the projects have grown to enormous scale.”

That, to a large degree, has left universities unable to participate as fully as they would like. As a result, many young scientists are unable to get the grants they need to do research, robbing science of some new ideas that young people could bring into the field, the report said.

“The stuff that used to fertilize the community has gone away,” Kennel said.

“The amount of money per astronomer has gone down by a factor of two over the past few years,” said Wallace Sargent, a Caltech astronomer who worked on the report. “There are more astronomers, and the amount of real money has whittled away. As a result, individual scientists, particularly young people, find it very hard to get grants to finance their research.”

The report calls for some new projects, but all of them have been discussed for years and there are no surprises among the candidates.

Most of the cost of new major facilities advocated by the committee would go to NASA’s space infrared telescope facility, which would allow astronomers to study the universe at all wavelengths. The cost of that orbiting telescope is expected to be about $1.3 billion. That amount dwarfs the $80 million sought for a complementary eight-meter infrared telescope atop Mauna Kea.

SEARCHING THE SKIES

Astronomers say major repairs must be made to deteriorating facilities but their report outlined these new ventures: Space infrared telescope: $1.3 billion

Eight-meter infrared telescope on Mauna Kea: $80 million

Eight-meter telescope in the Southern Hemisphere: $55 million

Telescopes that operate at wavelengths of one millimeter: $115 million