World-class radio telescopes face closure

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Two of the world's best-known radio observatories – the 305-metre Arecibo dish in Puerto Rico and a widespread collection of telescopes called the Very Long Baseline Array – face the budgetary axe.
Despite rising budgets, the astronomy division of the US National Science Foundation realised it could not afford to continue operating all its existing instruments while also building the new cutting-edge telescopes requested by astronomers, division director Wayne Van Citters said at a press conference on Friday.

So the agency commissioned a committee of leading astronomers headed by Roger Blandford of California's Stanford Linear Accelerator Center to slash $30 million from its annual operations budget, amounting to about a quarter of the budget now spent on facilities. Their proposals cut across all of astronomy, and Blandford told the press conference "they were all extremely painful". But those in radio astronomy are likely to be the most controversial.

The panel told the NSF it should shut down Arecibo and the VLBA by 2011 if it cannot get other organisations to share their operating budgets of about $8 million and $10 million, respectively.
"We're quite disappointed in that recommendation," says Joe Burns, a professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, US, who helps manage Arecibo. He says astronomers ask for four times more observing time than Arecibo can offer, making it the most oversubscribed telescope supported by the NSF.

Unique capabilities

Built in the 1960s and upgraded in the 1970s and in 1997, Arecibo is the world's most sensitive radio telescope. The giant antenna is fixed in place, but the Earth's rotation on its axis and movement of a receiver suspended above the reflective dish allow it to scan about 40% of the sky over the course of a year.

It is famed for discoveries including the first binary pulsar. It also offers unique capabilities for radar observations of near-Earth asteroids, which Van Citters said could not be done elsewhere because of Arecibo's sensitivity.
But funding for its operation has been a political football – a few years ago NASA pushed the NSF into paying about $500,000 a year for the asteroid radar observations requested by Congress (see NASA budget fiasco reaches new depths).

Finding outside support for the telescope is expected to be difficult. But because Arecibo does research on the Earth's ionosphere, Burns hopes to garner support from the NSF's atmospheric sciences division.
The VLBA is a network of 10 radio dishes, each 25 metres wide. Stretching more than 8000 kilometres from Hawaii to the Virgin Islands in the Caribbean, it offers unmatched resolution at radio wavelengths.
First operated in 1993, it is famed for discoveries of cosmic jets and studies of bright galaxies powered by colossal black holes. Fred Lo, director of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), which manages the VLBA, said in a written statement that the NRAO would "aggressively pursue international assistance" to save the telescopes. The statement also quoted the new report's observation that "if the VLBA is closed, a unique capability would likely be lost for decades."


The 305-metre Arecibo dish is the
world's most sensitive radio telescope
(Image: NAIC/Arecibo Obs/NSF)

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