Funding Cut For Arecibo Observatory

satorchi writes "In a recent Senior Review conducted by the National Science Foundation, a panel of experts recommended the reduction of funding to Arecibo Observatory, the world's largest radio telescope. Unless other sources of funding are found, Arecibo faces severe cuts in its program, with the prospect of closure around the year 2011. Development of the global project called the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) is cited as a reason to decommission Arecibo, but with the SKA coming online around the year 2020, closure of Arecibo in 2011 is some ten years premature. Until SKA is up and running, Arecibo remains the world's most sensitive radio telescope."

Comments

useless article

[dotancohen]

I'm as sensitive as any other Star Trek fan to the closure of any important scientific instrument, but the article is nonsense. It doesn't describe the benefits of the telescope. It's as if "yeah, well, no harm done" in a kind of way. Don't reporters learn _anything_ about the subjects they write about, or do they suspect that the public is as ignorant as they are?
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No offense...

[tomstdenis]

but if you want to spend millions upon millions of dollars looking up at the sky, then do it with your own damn money.

It's bad enough to bleed money into the military to fight random wars, we need not lose it in other ways. Especially since there is more vital science to be had.

The likelyhood that simple RF is how advanced cultures communicate is ludicrous. I don't want to get all sci-fi on this thread, but chances are something like subspace (e.g. faster than light) communication is required to really be effective. Otherwise you'll have years and years to wait for a reply from anything, especially given the nearest possibly populated planets are what, hundreds of light years away?

Now granted, radio telescopy is used for more than just audio/video. They use it to take pseudo-colour images of things like x-ray and gamma-ray bursts . cool stuff, but honestly not really a priority. On the one hand we can learn to grow better crops, treat diesease and advance physics, on the other we can build really large [brute force] radio telescopy to take better pictures of things that were going on, supposedly, billions of years ago.

And that's just it, a lot of this "science" is just a hypothesis. The beginings, yet when trying to get funding they state it as fact. As in, WE KNOW that this is a blackhole or dwarf star and that we KNOW it's 4.3 billion years old, etc...

In short, it's monday and I want a cookie.

Tom

Re:No offense...

[tomstdenis]

I wasn't trying to say all money spent on the space program (and related) was wasted. Quite a few scientific discoveries that have made it back to life on Earth are because of it.

I'm just trying to say that radio telescopy on it's own is a fairly benign study. About the only useful things it can tell you is

1. An asteroid will hit Earth [*]
2. There are a billion trillion stars out there.

[*] We lack the bruce willis team to divert asteroids anyways.

I mean honestly. Suppose we did discover life 100 LY away. First, the discussions would be GENERATIONAL. That is, your grand father would say something and your GRAND CHILDREN would listen to the reply (200LY round trip). Not much use to that.

Second, suppose we find life in say 10LY, the first thing we'd do is find their natural resources, declare them an enemy of the state and send Patriotic missles at them. In short, doing nobody a favour there either.

Tom