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."

Comments

What?

[ScrewMaster]

This is insane. We're throwing untold billions of dollars away on useless, inconsequential or outright stupid things every year, and we can't afford a few million for something like Aricebo? Are we nuts?

Re:What?

[dreamchaser]

I support funding Aricebo for use to search for NEO's, but I don't want my tax money going to SETI. I'm sorry, but as cool as it would be to either confirm the 'WOW' signal or find a signal from an ET, it shouldn't be a priority for using tax dollars.

Re:What?

[CRCulver]

Yes it is wonderful for tracking NEOs and providing quality information to astronomers, but what has the return been for ME on MY tax dollar?

Anything that tracks NEOs gives you a return on your tax dollar in that it keeps you aware of any catastrophic threats.

Re:What?

[amccaf1]

Ensuring that there's no imminent repeat of this on a more populated area?

That implies that humanity has the ability to take some kind of preventative action if a collision is imminent. As far as I know, we do not.

Well, we probably couldn't shoot down an incoming meteoroid, but given enough warning time, we could at least begin an evacuation of the impact zone. Additionally, knowing that a sudden, shock explosion was due to a natural occurrence rather than a terrorist or "rogue state" could help prevent WWII being touched off...

Re:What?

[TheOnlyJuztyn]

To put this in perspective, this $6m cut will save the average US taxpayer about $0.024/year. Meanwhile, the Iraq War has cost the average taxpayer about $12,000 each over the last five years. With that money, you could fund Arecibo at its current level for more then 300,000 years.

Re:What?

[wizardforce]

you can't make nearly as much money/trade with people in complete poverty, you can with people who get out of that kind of poverty so it isn't even a matter of ethics/morals/philanthopy, it's one of long term economics.

Well - kinda

[spineboy]

The F-22 does stuff TO people, Aricebo does stuff FOR people.

Re:Or better yet, don't write Congress

[Einer2]

There is no compelling science case for Arecibo that can't be pursued with other telescopes, especially since the frontier of radio astronomy has mostly moved from sensitivity (requiring big apertures) to resolution (requiring long-baseline arrays), or to shorter mm/submm wavelengths that Arecibo can't handle.

They've actually moved a large fraction of Arecibo's time over to survey efforts: "We'll do the same piece of sky, but with a flux limit 3 times deeper!" Sorry, but there are too many programs with the potential for transformative new discoveries to keep a major observatory open purely for incremental science.

Mod parent and grandparent down...

[SETIGuy]

What makes you think SETI is being federally funded, or that it represents a significant portion of what Arecibo does?

SETI@home is at the present time entirely funded by donations. Any time SETI@home uses at Arecibo is piggybacked on searching for pulsars or mapping the Galaxy in the 21cm line.

Or are you suggesting that because Arecibo spends any effort on a project you dislike it should be shut down?