Plan to Close Telescopes Appalls Astronomers
Several telescopes atop Arizona’s Kitt Peak, including a giant 4-meter telescope that is the crown jewel of the historic observatory, will be closed under a plan quietly being circulated among the nation’s astronomers.
The closures--scheduled to take place over the next three years--would be a blow to hundreds of astronomers who use the federally-funded observatory. Kitt Peak is unique in that it offers astronomers from colleges and universities that do not own telescopes an opportunity to carry out research.
Scientists at schools such as Caltech and the University of California have access to telescopes owned by their institutions, but many astronomers depend on public facilities--mainly at Kitt Peak--for viewing opportunities.
The plan to close five of Kitt Peak’s remaining six telescopes has hit the astronomical community like a thunderclap. A seventh telescope was closed a year ago.
“I am totally stunned,” Vassar College astronomer Debra Meloy Elmegreen told the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, which runs Kitt Peak for the Assn. of Universities for Research in Astronomy. Like many astronomers responding to the association’s call for input, Elmegreen said she would be unable to carry out her research if Kitt Peak “as we know it ceases to exist by 1999,” the year the 4-meter telescope is scheduled to close.
The Kitt Peak National Observatory, near Tucson, has been at the forefront of astronomy for the past few decades. Scientists there have discovered the gravitational lens, in which clusters of stars bend light in much the same manner as a lens, and measured the timing of pulsars that spin like supercharged radio beacons.
But in recent years, focus has shifted away from Kitt Peak to places such as Mauna Kea in Hawaii, considered the leading astronomical facility in the Northern Hemisphere, and to the Andean foothills of Chile, rapidly becoming the place to go to observe the southern sky.
Officials at Kitt Peak’s Tucson headquarters blame the decision on the National Science Foundation’s projected flat funding of $26.7 million annually through 2000.
“We’ve already cut our budget by 30% over the last decade,” said Sidney C. Wolff, director of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory. “You cannot pretend to do everything with some reasonable semblance of quality” without adequate funding.”
The association has decided to put its funds into “unique” and “state of the art” observatories that are under construction, many of which will be located in Chile, she added.
Wolff said she expects two of Kitt Peak’s telescopes to be closed later this year. Two others are slated for closure in 1998 if the funding crisis continues, but she held out some hope for saving the 4-meter.
“It’s unthinkable to me that you would close the 4-meter telescope,” she said. “I think that’s one of the two or three most productive telescopes in the world.”
Even if that telescope survives, it will leave Kitt Peak with only two telescopes, including a 3.5-meter telescope completed last year.
Many astronomers see the planned closures as a “cynical” attempt to squeeze more money out of the National Science Foundation, but officials deny that.
What rankles the astronomers is the clear intention by the association to favor newer facilities over existing “heavily used” telescopes at Kitt Peak, a charge that Wolff concedes is true.
Current priorities, she said, favor the international Gemini project, which will consist of twin 8-meter telescopes in Hawaii and Chile, plus a preference for the lesser explored Southern Hemisphere over the North, and larger telescopes over smaller ones.
Many astronomers say they will have little chance of winning time on the big new telescopes of the future, especially if they cannot do preliminary research with facilities like those now available at Kitt Peak.
“I am appalled,” University of Arizona astronomy professor William Keel told The Times. He called the plan “reprehensible” and said it would lead to a greater division between the “haves and the have-nots.”
San Diego astronomer Andrew Young said he does not view the threat to close most of Kitt Peak as an idle one.
“Astronomy is really in trouble in this country,” Young said.
Many astronomers said it would not be economically possible, for example, to send undergraduates as far away as Chile to do their research, thus denying “hands-on” experience.
“The effect on undergraduate education would be tragic,” said Frank Winkler of Middlebury College.
What it will lead to, said Richard Pogge of Ohio State University, is “fewer astronomers going to fewer telescopes.”
Wolff does not fully disagree.
“I think [the closures] will leave many without access to ground-based facilities,” she said.
Most of the facilities at Kitt Peak are quite old, and although many have been updated with the latest in technology, some people contend that the observatory is less important than such projects as the Gemini.
