Astronomy and Astrophysics for the 1980's, Volume 2 Reports of the Panels (1983) / Chapter Skim
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V. Projections into the Future
V. Projections into the Future
Pages 178-187
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From page 178... ...
A Management Considerations The 1970's witnessed the concentration of most new, ground-based observational capabilities into a few National Astronomy Centers and the decline, in absolute terms, of the health and vigor of major university and private observatories.
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From page 179... ...
In the past, the existence of numerous independent observatories ensured a balance of style and programs in astronomy. As the National Centers grow in power at the expense of private and university facilities, it is important that the appropriate review committees and time-assignment committees appreciate and support the need for diversity.
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From page 180... ...
As astronomy moves increasingly into a national-facility mode, with observing time on forefront facilities increasingly allocated by committees, it is essential that these committees have the wisdom to support long-term survey programs in addition to those that promise immediate results. By making national facilities open to all qualified users, it should be possible to implement a program incorporating observations at the National Centers, support observations using state and private observatories, and instrumentation development in both the universities and at the National Centers that would ensure the health of university science while at the same time providing the powerful facilities that will be needed at the end of the century.
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From page 181... ...
Yet it seems clear that these developments will proceed for other reasons, and astronomy may benefit from these technical developments. The present experience in the astronomical community with space astronomy through IUE, Copernicus, and the HEAD series of satellites has been outstanding e The relatively high efficiency of use of observing time, absence of weather problems, and high equipment reliability, combined with the reduced background, better seeing, and lack of atmospheric absorption (thus extended wavelength coverage)
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From page 182... ...
It may be possible to exploit the darkness of the sky in space to devise survey instruments that could automatically, using optical techniques, detect unusual objects. An objective-prism survey using a large, advanced COD array is a simple example of a possible instrument.
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From page 183... ...
Looking forward to the 1990's, we should consider novel ways of obtaining astronomical information not possible from the ground or even from Earth orbit. For example, studies suggest that it may be feasible to launch an instrumented spacecraft into an eccentric orbit about the Sun with perihelion near 4 solar radii and that the experiments on this proposed "Star Probe" mission should be able to survive encounter and transmit back data.
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From page 184... ...
The improvements in angular resolution can have major impact on three fundamentally different fields of astronomy: positional astronomy for measurements of the spatial relationship of (usually unresolved) astronomical objects; the mapping of previously unresolved objects that happened to lie just below our current resolution capability; and the separation and detailed study of phenomena that are now blended into confusing background sources.
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From page 185... ...
High-spatial-resolution imaging and spectroscopy of the Sun during the 1980's has the potential of resolving the fundamental structures defined by the filamentary but strong magnetic fields. When this occurs, the Sun will indeed become a plasma astrophysics laboratory, in which we will see for the first time how magnetic fields and plasmas interact to yield such phenomena as heating on slow and rapid time scales, flares, and wind acceleration.
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From page 186... ...
By increasing the lightgathering power of a telescope, we are able to study sources that are increasingly faint, either because they are only weak emitters of light or because they are veiled by interstellar dust clouds. Spectroscopic studies of such objects probe the very frontiers of the physical Universe, the birth and death of stars, the evolution of galactic systems, and the physical conditions that lead to the phenomena we call quasars, pulsars, x-ray binaries, and black holes.
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From page 187... ...
as to be virtually undetectable, it seems a hopeless task to obtain slit spectra of them; however, it would be useful to obtain broadband colors. The spectral range free of terrestrial atmospheric emission is quite narrow, extending only from about 4500 to 6500 A
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