  A convincing identification of dark matter (DM) particles can probably be
achieved only through a combined analysis of different detections strategies,
which provides an effective way of removing degeneracies in the parameter space
of DM models. In practice, however, this program is made complicated by the
fact that different strategies depend on different physical quantities, or on
the same quantities but in a different way, making the treatment of systematic
errors rather tricky. We discuss here the uncertainties on the recoil rate in
direct detection experiments and on the muon rate induced by neutrinos from
dark matter annihilations in the Sun, and we show that, contrarily to the local
DM density or overall cross section scale, irreducible astrophysical
uncertainties affect the two rates in a different fashion, therefore limiting
our ability to reconstruct the parameters of the dark matter particle. By
varying within their respective errors astrophysical parameters such as the
escape velocity and the velocity dispersion of dark matter particles, we show
that the uncertainty on the relative strength of the neutrino and
direct-detection signal is as large as a factor of two for typical values of
the parameters, but can be even larger in some circumstances.
