coronavirus-interruptus

The Maunakea Observatories on the Big Island of Hawaii are currently closed due to concerns about COVID-19. The summit of Maunakea is ideal for ground-based astronomy given its dark skies, low humidity, generally great weather, and high elevation (nearly 14,000 feet) above the clouds that together provide excellent seeing conditions.

Dr. Rachel Smith, head of the Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Lab at the North Carolina Museum fo Natural Sciences is waiting to see how her observations of massive forming stars at NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility at Maunakea planned for June and July might be impacted.

Even telescopes which are capable of being remotely operated remotely are affected by stay-at-home orders. “You still need staff on the mountain to run them and provide maintenance and technical support” explains says Dr. Chris Mihos, an astronomer at Case Western Reserve University.

When we are able to get back to whatever a new “business as usual” ends up looking like, the impact some sciences will be greater than the time lost during stay-at-home orders.

“My biggest research project has now been delayed by a whole year,” says Mihos “The target galaxies we are studying are only visible in the spring.”

Some researchers worry about lost “once-in-a-lifetime” moments at abandoned field sites.

Researchers studying chimps at Kibale National Park in Uganda and how they interact have stopped their investigations and left the country. The beginnings of an event similar to one Jane Goodall described as a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” were observed at the Kibale site two years ago.

The greatest long term impact may be in widening gaps in data.

”There’s never been another time in history where we’ve seen an essentially global cessation of surveys and data collection about species and ecosystems,” says Ben Halpern, an ecologist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the University of California, Santa Barbara.