Slashdot Mirror
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."
The article doesn't say how much funding it takes to operate Arecibo. If everyone who runs the SETI@HOME screensaver kicked in a couple of bucks, I wonder if it would make a difference.
[Insert pithy quote here]
As a radio astrophysicist, I have to chime in to say that the Senior Review by the NSF (and the associated potential close of Arecibo) is a ballsy move and absolute the right thing to do. This is good governance. In response to the first post, the operating cost of Arecibo is $12M per year. The basic problem is that there are a number of very exciting new projects people want to build, but in an era of flat funding profiles you have to make hard decisions and close something before you can open something else. The Senior Review is made up of senior astronomers, and is how the NSF makes these decisions. The Senior Review also recommended cutting back a number of other facilities, including the Very Long Baseline Array (world's highest resolution images, but only of bright objects), and Kitt Peak, Sacramento Peak and GONG++ on the optical side. The full text of the Senior Review is available at the NSF astronomy website (includes some neat stuff about the science). So what are radio astronomer planning to do instead? As mentioned in the first post there is the SKA, but the real motivation is to clear up money to finish and run ALMA which works at 100s of GHz (top near 700 GHz) and is at 17,000 feet in Chile. The cool thing about ALMA is looking at planet formation and being able to do chemistry in star forming regions, because you can see all the molecular line transitions you can figure out the amino acids etc. in these very young stellar systems (it also does a lot of other things). There are also a number of smaller and very neat projects coming along. One I am working on is called the Mileura Widefield Array - Low Frequency Demonstrator (MWA-LFD). The MWA works down at TV and radio frequencies (80-300 MHz, FM radio is 88-106 MHz), and is in the western Australian desert to avoid earth based transmissions. We have three cool features, we can make an image of the radio sky that is 30 degrees across (a significant fraction of the visibile sky) every few seconds (transients), see the magnetic fields in coronal mass ejections from our sun (space weather), and my piece which is looking at the very first galaxies as they formed 12 billion years ago so we can understand how the galaxies and clusters formed (the latest Scientific American has a neat article by Avi Loeb about this science in the current issue). So in short, radio astronomers want to do new things, and unfortunately that means hard decisions about what to keep and what to close. The NSF is making these hard decisions with the help of the community. And while it saddens me that this needs to be done, the NSF should be commended for doing it. This is good government and the public should be proud. -Miguel F. Morales
The short term cause is the Director of the National Radio Astronomy Observatories (NRAO) convincing a senator to earmark a significant portion of the NSF astronomy funding for NRAO. Since most of that money is going to be spent in the home state of that senator, he earmarked 20% more than NRAO requested. Of course these earmarks don't change the total funding for astronomy. They just restrict how it can be spent. In other words, the director of NRAO and the senator from New Mexico joined forces to fsck over the rest of the astronomy community.
It is possible that the senior review chose Arecibo for the cuts because of the public outcry that might result could cause an increase in the total astronomy budget.
Support SETI@home
The answer is really simple.
Don't buy 1 F-22 Raptor.
Seriously. Shave one off of the list of aircraft to buy. From what I'm seeing, the per-unit cost of those aircraft is in excess of $100M. Bam, funding for the next five years (or more) is done. I'm doubting we'll really notice the difference, militarily.
Or here's another idea: We could cut some of the rediculous spending elsewhere. Most of it is military, yeah, but I'm sure if we look hard enough, there are more bridges to nowhere that can be cut instead.
FFS, stop cutting science spending. Spending money on research is almost always a good idea, even if it doesn't pay off immediately. It's not that difficult, really. Learning = good. Duh.
Fill in your four or five-letter word of wisdom here _ _ _ _ _.