The giant Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico was completed in 1963. Eleven years later, it provided the first indirect evidence of gravitational waves. In 1992, it discovered planets outside the solar system. In 1995, it was in the Bond movie Goldeneye. But now, the future of the largest radio telescope in the world is in doubt.
The iconic radio telescope could have its funding stripped by the National Science Foundation (NSF) so that the resources can be used for other, newer projects, according to Scientific American. The NSF released an announcement two weeks ago that outlines five different courses of action that will be considered during multiple meetings held tomorrow, June 7. Comments on the issue will continue to be accepted in writing until June 23.
Among the options: The telescope could retain its $8.2 million-a-year funding with operations unchanged. The NSF could focus on finding a third-party investor to continue science operations, or to transition to educational programs. The telescope might be mothballed (shut down with the intention of resuming operations in the future). Finally, the NSF will also consider tearing down Arecibo and restoring the area to its condition before the telescope was built.
"I am afraid that NSF has already made up its collective mind to reduce their support to much less than the current $8 million per year or so to perhaps nothing," Ellen Howell, a former scientist at Arecibo, told Scientific American. "I think this is an embarrassment after so many years of scientific achievements when so little could continue the productivity."
There were plans to use the massive radio telescope to study pulsars, black holes, comets, asteroids, exoplanets, and continue efforts to understand elusive gravitational waves, recently detected for the first time by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). But now Arecibo is one of a number of telescopes around the world that is threatened by the need to allocate funding to the science being done at more modern facilities like the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in northern Chile. The Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, the Very Long Baseline Array (ten radio telescopes spread across the U.S.), and the Parkes radio telescope in Australia are also struggling with funding reallocation.
As Scientific American points out, the NSF budget has been essentially the same since 2010. With new, expensive science facilities operating around the world, the money has come from somewhere.
Source: Scientific American