Statement on NSF Record of Decision on Arecibo Observatory, NSF
“On Nov. 15, 2017, the National Science Foundation (NSF) signed its Record of Decision for the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. This important step concludes the agency’s decision-making process with respect to the general path forward for facility operations in a budget-constrained environment and provides the basis for a future decision regarding a new collaborator.”

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6 replies on “NSF Decides Not To Shut Down Arecibo”

  1. Did anyone think this would really happen?

    I’m guessing there was some backroom politics in this.

  2. The decision still requires that some other agency or organization be found that is willing to pick up a large share of the budget, but there’s little information on who this would be, or how much they would contribute. Who is interested? What happens if the money does not materialize? Is the facility still productive or obsolete?

    1. I wouldn’t say obsolete, but it’s certainly less productive than it was fifty years ago. A significant amount of astronomy is about phenomena that don’t change much over the course of a century. Once you’ve a given telescope has observed them, over all of the sky and all the wavelengths it can access, It’s productivity is limited to the more time-variable phenomena. (Or new, relatively static phenomena made visible by upgraded electronics and detectors.) At the same time, maintenance on existing facilities cost more and more as they age.

      The question isn’t whether or not not Arecibo is productive, it’s whether or not it’s sufficiently productive to justify the operating costs. Or, more properly, whether we could get better results by spending the money on something else ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) was a $1.4 billion, international project. It’s produced some very impressive results, but the money for things like that has to come from somewhere. Unfortunately, that’s also about _different_ science. That makes it hard to compare apples to apples, and identify which science is “better.”

      1. There may be no other practical choice but demolition, still it would be a powerful transmitter for METI if we have the nerve to transmit…

      2. Never considered that point of view— that a telescope could become obsolete because it its job.

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