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Partnership in Astronomy and Astrophysics:
Collaboration, Cooperation, Coordination
Fifty years ago, just before the first decadal survey in astronomy (the Whitford report), astronomy
and astrophysics was practiced very differently than it is today. Virtually all telescopes were in private
hands and viewed the sky in just the visible part of the spectrum using photographic plates or early
photomultiplier tubes to record data; radio astronomy was still a new technique; the great potential of
space was only beginning to be discussed. The U.S. dominated astronomical research. Federal support
was small and existed only at NSF; NASA was soon to begin its race to the Moon and consider its first
astrophysics missions. The frontiers were large and inviting. Many of the most phenomenal discoveries
of the century lay ahead. Neutron stars, black holes, quasars, exoplanets, dark matter, dark energy, and the
cosmic microwave background were yet to be found. Astronomy was a somewhat insular field and its
connection to physics, principally through atomic and nuclear physics, was just starting to grow.
Since that time, astronomy has been in a period of revolutionary discovery—from stars and
planets to black holes and cosmology—and is poised for dramatic advances in our understanding of the
universe and the laws that govern it. There are strong and growing connections to other fields, including
physics, computer science, medicine, chemistry, and biology. Few today would refer to astronomy as an
island in the world of science.
Advances in technology have propelled much of the change. Digital devices with hundreds of
millions of pixels have enabled wide-field images and massively multiplexed spectroscopy at optical and
infrared wavelengths. Radio technology has progressed to the point where sensitive, high-resolution
images and spectra are routinely available. A panoply of detectors has provided astronomers with
microwave, infrared, ultraviolet, X-ray, gamma-ray, cosmic-ray, neutrino, and gravitational radiation
eyes—allowing the universe to be observed in a rich variety of ways. Many of these new windows on
the universe were made possible by the ability to place increasingly sophisticated observatories in
space—from the pioneering COBE, IRAS, Copernicus, UHURU, SAS-3, and Compton-GRO to WMAP,
Spitzer, Hubble, Chandra, Fermi, and Swift today. Over this same period, computing power has increased
by 10 orders of magnitude in both processing speed and storage, racing through the petascale, and the
exponential growth of digital bandwidth has revolutionized communications and the way science is done.
Together, these techniques have provided new views that both solve old puzzles and uncover new
surprises.
The sociology of astronomy has also changed. The field is more collaborative, more
international, and more interdisciplinary. The style of carrying out research is different. Multi-wavelength
approaches are necessary for many important problems. Observational data often come via e-mail or the
Web, from space and ground-based telescopes alike. The secondary use of data from archives, especially
surveys, has grown in importance and in some cases even dominates the impact of a facility. In addition,
breakthroughs are still made with great, imaginative leaps from our youngest scientific minds.
Because of the strong and important connections of astronomy to other disciplines, federal
funding now involves five divisions at NSF—Astronomy (AST), Physics (PHY), Office of Polar
Programs (OPP), Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences (AGS), and the Office of Cyberinfrastructure
(OCI)—as well as the Astrophysics, Heliophysics and Planetary Science Divisions at NASA, the Offices
of High-Energy Physics (HEP) and Nuclear Physics (NP) at the Department of Energy, and the
Smithsonian Institution. At the same time that federal support has grown and diversified, private funding
of large ground-based observatories has increased as well.
Optimizing the federal investment in astronomy must take account of the changing scientific,
sociological, and funding landscape. This presents new challenges—from data acquisition and access to
interagency and international coordination. This chapter addresses the interfaces between different
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