Prospects of a $1 billion cut from NASA’s budget next year has forced
space scientists to take sides in the increasingly heated debate over the
space station. The cuts mean that NASA will have to cancel or delay either
the space station or major space science programmes, says John Bahcall of
the Institute for Advanced Studies.
The House Appropriations Committee was due to start work on the NASA
budget this week, and cuts seem inevitable. Last week, Bahcall broadcast
a letter via electronic mail, urging astronomers to phone or write to the
committee to urge it to preserve space science.
Bahcall suggested that the Space InfraRed Telescope Facility – which
the National Research Council made the top priority for astronomy in the
1990s – and the Advanced X-ray Astronomy Facility, already in development,
are at risk. Also under threat are the Earth Observing Satellite, the Orbiting
Solar Laboratory, the Comet Rendezvous and Asteroid Flyby (CRAF) mission,
and the Cassini mission to Saturn. Delays in funding could kill off CRAF
altogether, because its launch must be timed to match the orbits of the
target comet and asteroid.
Bahcall told New Scientist he was not against the space station: ‘We’re
not opposing anything’, he said, just trying to persuade Congress of ‘the
advantages of space sciences’. However, his letter leaves no doubt that
the space station is low on his list of priorities. Other scientists are
convinced that NASA Administrator Richard Truly, a former astronaut, considers
the space station ‘sacrosanct’, and are ready to criticise the space station
directly.
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Earlier this year, a review panel headed by Norman Augustine, president
of the Martin Marietta corporation, urged NASA to emphasise space science
rather than manned missions. In January, the American Physical Society said
that ‘scientific justification is lacking for a permanently manned space
station in Earth orbit’.
Nicolaas Bloembergen, president of the Physical Society, said that the
new, smaller design of the space station made it ‘even less likely than
the earlier version to make a significant contribution to science’. Brent
Dalrymple, president of the American Geophysical Union, said unmanned satellites
can study the Earth and its atmosphere ‘better, less expensively, and with
far less risk to human lives’ than a space station.
![Astronomers have long known that understanding how star clusters come to be is key to unlocking other secrets of galactic evolution. Stars form in clusters, created when clouds of gas collapse under gravity. As more and more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet radiation and the supernova explosions of massive stars eventually disperse the cloud, and their light can bear down on other star-forming regions in the galaxy. This process is called stellar feedback, and it means that most of the gas in a galaxy never gets used for star formation. Researching how star clusters develop can answer questions about star formation at a galactic scale. Now, the state of the art has been further developed with both Hubble and Webb working together to provide a broad-spectrum view of thousands of young star clusters. An international team of astronomers has pored over images of four nearby galaxies from the FEAST observing programme (#1783), trying to solve this mystery. Their results show that it is the most massive star clusters that clear away their gaseous shroud the fastest, and begin lighting their galaxy the earliest. The team identified nearly 9000 star clusters in the four galaxies in different evolutionary stages: young clusters just starting to emerge from their natal clouds of gas, clusters that had partially dispersed the gas (both from Webb images), and fully unobstructed clusters visible in optical light (found in Hubble images). With Webb???s ability to peer inside the gas clouds, they were able to then estimate the mass and age of each cluster from its light spectrum. This image shows a section of one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51), one of the four galaxies studied in this work, as seen by Webb???s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The thick clumps of star-forming gas are shown here in red and orange, representing infrared light emitted by ionised gas, dust grains, and complex molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Within these gas complexes, each tens or hundreds of light years across, Webb reveals the dense, extremely bright clusters of massive stars that have just recently formed. The countless stars strewn across the arm of the galaxy, many of which would be invisible to our eyes behind layers of dust, are also laid bare in infrared light. [Image description: A large, long portion of one of the spiral arms in galaxy M51. Red-orange, clumpy filaments of gas and dust that stretch in a chain from left to right comprise the arm. Shining cyan bubbles light up parts of the gas clouds from within, and gaps expose bright star clusters in these bubbles as glowing white dots. The whole image is dotted with small stars. A faint blue glow around the arm colours the otherwise dark background.]](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/13114322/SEI_296271016.jpg)
