World-class radio telescopes face closure

00:46 04 November 2006

NewScientist.com news service

Jeff Hecht

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.

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