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Arecibo Observatory Facing Massive Budget Cuts
SirLurksAlot writes "Many supporters of the SETI@home project have recently received a message informing them of impending budget cuts for the Arecibo Observatory and asking them to show their support for the project by writing to Congress. The letter also informs supporters that there are currently two bills (Senate bill 2862 sponsored by Senator Hillary Clinton, and a similar House bill, H.R. 3737), which are intended to secure funding for the project. According to The Planetary Society, the current plan for the Arecibo Observatory involves cutting funding by more than 60% from $10.4 million to just $4 million by 2011."
Much of basic research does not always produce immediately tangible results. SETI + Aricebo have produced massive distributed computing which is widely used now by many EXTREMELY worthwhile projects (protein folding, cancer research, etc). This is a basic tool now, and I'd say that's pretty valuable and productive.
Just because it isn't directly dumping 200 MPG cars into your lap, or producing a magic fat dissolving drug, doesn't mean that it isn't helping you somehow.
..........FULL STOP.
The seti receiver is separately and primarily privately funded and operates in a tag-a-long mode so the seti operations don't interfere with other more traditional operations at Arecebo. When there is an observation going on the seti receiver just takes in what-ever the main telescope is looking at slightly off axis; very rarely is the telescope pointed at an object for a specifically seti observation. Additionaly the kinds of signals that Seti finds interesting are generally signals that when shown to be naturaly caused give astronomers decades of research material!
I remember when Pulsars were designated LGMs for litlle Green Men.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
A biggie was the radar return of the distance to Venus, which instantly corrected our measurements of the Earth-Sun distance, which then instantly changed the size of the Universe.
You could just look at http://www.naic.edu/~nolan/radar/AUSAC.html. Some big stuff there. Rotation rates of Mercury (which was in error) and Venus, for instance. Radar maps of the topography of Venus. All cheaply done. All this for twenty minutes in Iraq.