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Mercury, Jan/Feb 1996 Table of Contents

(c) 1996 Astronomical Society of the Pacific

Of all the questions planetary scientists could have asked NASA associate administrator Wesley Huntress Jr at their conference last October -- will NASA close its centers? will Congress support upcoming space missions? -- they asked for something basic, almost pitiable: not to be forgotten.

Ever since the Apollo program ended and NASA's budget began its long slide, scientists have complained that the agency's emphasis on human spaceflight crushes basic research. But those who spoke up at Huntress's lecture were expressing a different worry: that NASA was short-changing planetary science in favor of the astronomy and astrophysics of objects outside the solar system.

At first glance, it looks unlikely. NASA, the creator of Voyager and Viking, of Mariner and Magellan, doesn't care enough about planets? Yet this concern is only one aspect of a rift between planetary science and other branches of astronomy -- one of the fault lines in the profession which budget austerity will continue to widen, to everybodys detriment, if astronomers dont try harder to pull together.

"At one time, we were all just 'astronomers,'" said Steve Maran at the Goddard Space Flight Center, one of the few researchers who spans the rift. Planets were once lights in the sky, like the stars. Now they are worlds, like Earth. The shift in perspective has required a shift in method. The close-up pictures returned by space probes demand the techniques that geologists apply to remote-sensing of Earth. Indeed, planetary science has revolutionized Earth science by giving us other worlds to compare Earth to. Academic planetary scientists often work in geology, rather than astronomy, departments. Few planetary scientists attend the main American Astronomical Society meeting, and few stellar or galactic astronomers attend the Division for Planetary Sciences meeting.

As too often happens in academia, people see canyons between specialties when objectively there are only ditches. Said Maran: "It's inevitable, given that people are people, that as the astronomers and planetary scientists look at each others professions from across the gap... each side sees the other as working on stuff that is less interesting than their own field, and supposedly better funded."

According to planetary scientist Brian Marsden at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the prejudices have had a tangible impact: Hiring decisions at various institutions have favored astrophysicists over planetary scientists, and allocation of Hubble Space Telescope time has been biased against planetary science. NASA budget figures show that, over the past two decades, astronomy has received 80 percent more money than planetary science.

"Our astrophysicist colleagues also feel they do not have enough resources," Marsden said. "We have traditionally been an easy target, and they think we are still. Somehow we have to make it clear to our astrophysicist colleagues that solar-system problems are every bit as fundamental and exciting and difficult as those involving galaxies and stars."

The heliopause is not the only fault line in the profession. Theoretical astrophysicists feel more comfortable talking to particle physicists than to stellar spectroscopists. Among infrared and high-energy astronomers, politicking has skewed scientific priorities, as Columbia astrophysicist David Helfand discusses in this issue [see "Far From the Madding Clouds," p. 16].

To non-astronomers, the feuds must seem silly. They should seem equally silly to those in the profession. For every area of contention, there is an area of cooperation: the extrasolar planet searches, the Voyager-quality planetary images made by Hubble, the shared problems in stellar and gas-giant structure and in planetary rings and galactic discs. These, rather than the differences, should be our focus.