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?

[MrKaos]

But how will we listen out for illegal aliens?

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?

[ROMRIX]

Create an account on the SETI forum and get to know those guys that run the place. They do squat there for what they're paid. I wish I could take a vacation like those guys. They're biggest decision is "What country do you want to go spend a month at?" Shit I'd be playing WOW all day too! Get to know them before you wish them (mine and your) millions.

Re:What?

[JebusIsLord]

Are you saying that it isn't worthwhile, or that it should be done by the private sector? Because I just don't see how it could exist without government funding given there is no realistic potential for a monetary return on investment.

Re:What?

[Scott Ransom]

As an honest question, what useful things has Aricebo produced?

How about a Nobel prize? (Amongst a bunch of other excellent bits of radio astronomy, aeronomy, and planetary science).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSR_B1913+16

Re:What?

[Enderandrew]

I agree. I read a while back that SETI went through their entire spectrum twice and hasn't found anything yet.

I've also read how over the years, despite the fact that we have begun broadcasting more signals over the years, the Earth has gotten "quieter" in that our signals are more focused and don't travel as far. Even if there was intelligent alien life out there, and even if they broadcast radio signals, it seems unlikely they'd broadcast them far enough for us to pick them up.

I don't want tax dollars going to SETI either.

Re:What?

[budgenator]

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.

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?

[History's Coming To]

LGM1, LGM3 and LGM5 in fact. Why no 2 or 4? Well, they were all very odd signals...

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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?

[novakyu]

Because I just don't see how it could exist without government funding given there is no realistic potential for a monetary return on investment.

Philanthropy. There are whole organizations pouring money into Africa. What's their expected return?

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.

Re:What?

[bschorr]

So are you suggesting that just because we have few practical options for dealing with a dangerous NEO that it's better that we not even know about them at all? Perhaps we could spend our research dollars on peril-sensitive sunglasses? :-) -B-

Perspective

[nicklott]

To put this into perspective, $6m is about the cost of the seat in a single F-22.

Many supporters of the SETI@home project have....

[Nudo]

Seeing the phrases "SETI@home" and "receiving messages..." made me jump to some obvious conclusions...

It has produced massively distributed computing

[spineboy]

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.

Well - kinda

[spineboy]

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

DANG IT!

[Illbay]

I read:

"Many supporters of the SETI@home project have recently received a message..."

And my heart leapt into my throat!

The rest of the article was REALLY a big let-down after that, let me tell you.

Or better yet, don't write Congress

[Einer2]

The ground-based astronomical budget is finite, and the only way we're going to finance 50 shiny new programs is by shutting down the old ones that aren't scientifically competitive. Arecibo hasn't been scientifically competitive in a decade, and it won't ever be competitive in the era when we want to build LSST, PANSTARRS, TMT, ATA, ATST, and a dozen other acronyms.

We've already had one near-miss, when Hillary Clinton tried to force some budget language funding Arecibo in the weeks before the Puerto Rico primary. She didn't earmark new funding, she just added a mandate that existing funding go there. Oddly enough, the legislation didn't mention which other ground-based program would be cut to free up the funds...

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.

Re:Or better yet, don't write Congress

[Einer2]

Hubble: Weak lensing. Reionization. Exoplanet transit characterization. Directly-imaged protoplanetary/debris disks.

Spitzer: Transitional disks. ULIRGs. Exoplanet secondary transits. Star formation, period. Direct imaging of free-floating planetary-mass objects.

See? It's not that hard, even if you don't stray too far outside your (or your colleagues') field of specialization. There really are a lot of important (and sexy) science cases floating around, they just don't really require Arecibo.

Re:Or better yet, don't write Congress

[Scott Ransom]

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.

Sorry, but that is not true. Radio astronomy needs improvement in a wide variety of areas in order to tackle the tremendously wide variety of science that is done at radio bands. Examples include sensitivity, field-of-view, dynamic range, image fidelity, resolution, and wavelength coverage. But sensitivity is one of the most important. That is why the SKA is on the table to be the world's next generation decameter/centimeter wave radio telescope. The most important thing it provides is sensitivity (i.e. SK = square km = sensitivity). And Arecibo is already a 5-10% SKA.

For my own research (pulsars), Arecibo's sensitivity is what sets it apart. Although, truthfully, the fact that it can't observe any of the southern sky (where most of the pulsars are) is a definite downside.

Finally, you mention surveys and imply that because Arecibo is doing a larger percent of them now that that means it is washed up. However, that also isn't true. Modern astronomy is driven by large surveys (including several of the instruments that you mention, for example, Sloan, PANSTARRS, LSST) as they dramatically increase our discovery space.

Re:Or better yet, don't write Congress

[Tom Womack]

What is Arecibo's credible competition in the radio-bucket field, and particularly in the radio-transmitting field for planetary radar?

You've listed a load of optical instruments, including ATST which is explicitly to study the Sun; the only radio one is the ATA whose area is about a sixth of Arecibo's and who can't benefit from elaborate ultra-low-noise receiver technology unless you want to build 350 dilution refrigerators to cool 350 copies of your instrument.

The Square Kilometer Array isn't built yet, and I can't think of a radio-telescope array which has comparable collecting area to Arecibo; LOFAR's not built yet and is running at lower frequencies anyway; Goldstone _can_ do planetary-radar stuff, but I get the impression Arecibo does it better.

I've argued the other side for some of the British funding withdrawals - there was someone adamant about keeping the UKIRT open to complete a survey, where the UKIRT is a poor survey instrument and the VLT Survey Telescope could do a better job and is already built - but Arecibo is much more credibly a unique facility.

Re:Or better yet, don't write Congress

[Einer2]

In an era where every telescope or survey has lifetime costs of tens to hundreds of millions, do you really think we can afford to slice up the pie by wavelength and not pit wavelengths against each other? Some fields naturally rise while others fall (just ask the solar people!), and it doesn't make sense to maintain the same fractional allocation of money.

My argument, which also applies to Scott Ransom's post, is that there are so many science cases that are truly transformative, just doing reasonable science shouldn't be enough to guarantee funding out of the relatively flat NSF pool. We have to be active in examining existing programs to determine which are still contributing as much (per dollar) as a new telescope or survey would. Most of the results I've heard coming out of Arecibo lately seem to fall in the reasonable category, not in the transformative category. I'm certainly willing to be persuaded otherwise, though.

Finally, my list was largely optical/IR because those are what I'm most familiar with, but I'm certainly willing to include the new radio/mm/submm initiatives. For example, ALMA is obviously going to be huge, and I would happily kill a number of optical telescopes if it were necessary to keep ALMA alive.

"Scientific hedonism"

[Tweenk]

In times of recession the lawmakers get allergic to basic research, which they think is a kind of scientific hedonism. The thought pattern here seems to be that science is a shabby garden run by elitist weirdos. You water this garden with money and then you can pick the new drugs, weapons and consumer electronics growing on its trees. The lawmakers attempt to tidy up this garden in order to improve the yield of goodies by cutting down the trees that don't bear fruit. This can only be harmful in the end, because they don't have a faintest idea about gardening...

Profitability of the war in Iraq

[tjstork]

Meanwhile, the Iraq War has cost the average taxpayer about $12,000 each over the last five years.

If we assume a baseline 100M taxpayers, and an Iraq war cost of 100B a year, then, we're really talking only about $1000 a year on average. Notice, though, that 90% of the taxes in the USA are paid by people making over $250,000 a year, so really, we average stiffs are probably not even paying for the war at all.

Now, let's say that the Iraqis come through and increase their oil production to first 3m bbls/day, and then to 5m / bbls a day, and the benefits of this production increase result in additional 50 billion a year in profits to American companies, PLUS, a reduction in gasoline costs. We can calculate the ultimate profitability of the war based upon a reduction in the price of gasoline per person, knowing that in the USA the per capita consumption of gasoline is about 10 barrels per person per year. Source , and thus, about 30 barrels per taxpayer per year. So we say at 30 x 45 gets us about 1200 gallons of gas per year per taxpayer. We can thus calculate that if the war in Iraq is victorious, AND, nets a global price reduction of about a $1 / gallon, then, each taxpayer would come out ahead about $200 per year, even if the cost of continuing the war is born indefinitely. If, on the other hand, the USA wins the war and a stable semi-US-friendly government emerges and thus we can withdraw the troops, and Iraq still pumps enough to lower the price of gasoline by a $1 a gallon, then the war would basically pay for itself in about 5 years, and then after that, it would be pure profit for the USA. Hey, imperialism can be profitable, which is why countries do it!

Re:Good!

[budgenator]

Seti@home was started for several reasons

1. SETI researchers were passionate about there work.
2. the idea of SETI is inherently romantic insureing some success
   

3. the SETI project was interesting and computationally amenable to distributed processing

Originally the SETI@home was intended more as a proof of concept rather than the finally goal and it popular success surprised even the SETI team.
boinc was a restructuring of the 1st gen SETI@home software and is designed to be much more modular and versatile framework than its predecessor. Because the framework is more versitile the other projects can spend their time writing their specialized software and not re-inventing the wheel.

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?