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Brian,
Do you think its a straight forward issue of slashing budgets or maybe a change in the way those budgets are directed ?
Each year we see new satellites being launched that are producing results that were barely even dreamt of prior to the results being available.
We all know of Hubble and the Stereo satellites
It is a fairly obvious fact of life that we all have to live with, that terrestrial observing is severely limited when compared to satellite imagery, due to the earths rotation, relative positioning of observatories on our blue sphere, the atmosphere and the many sources of noise and aberrations.
Its not just that they are so much better because they can operate in near perfect conditions, get all the spectra that we cant even get to detect, look at objects with subexposure times of literally weeks if they need to compared to a few hours on earth.
If you can afford to put up a satellite that can get such good data, why keep spending money sustaining "old technology" on earth ?
I realise there will always be a place for observatories, and the competitive demands for observation time will ensure that existing observatories probably are still a cheap option.
I guess if they can ever stick some radio arrays on the moon that will be the end of radio telescopes on earth ?
But I do wonder if the total budget for astronomy hasn't actually increased overall - just that now NASA is getting a big slice of it in the launches and capital costs rather than all the government owned and university owned observatories.
Anyone seen any numbers floating around ?
The billions spent just on Hubble and the Webb Telescopes not to mention all the others must represent a huge chunk of astronomical budget.
I think there also must be a lot of professional astronomy that has shifted away from observation time to data mining time.
There is now more data available from these systems than can probably ever be fully investigated and its about to get bigger.
Something to think about
Rally
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