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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

Perspective

[nicklott]

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

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.

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...