NSF Wants To Get Rid of Multiple Major Telescopes
NSF’s Division of Astronomical Sciences Portfolio Review Committee Submits Report, NSF
“In 2011 NSF’s Division of Astronomical Sciences (AST) commenced a Portfolio Review process in order to review the entire portfolio of AST-supported facilities, programs and other activities. The goal of the review was to recommend to AST how support for existing facilities, programs, and activities should be prioritized and interleaved with new initiatives recommended by the National Academy of Sciences decadal surveys, within the limitations of realistic future budgets.”
Report: Advancing Astronomy in the Coming Decade: Opportunities and Challenges
Initial Public Statement From AUI and NRAO on the Report of the NSF’s Astronomy Portfolio Review Committee, NRAO
“AUI and NRAO have made a preliminary examination of the report released today from the NSF Astronomy Portfolio Review Committee (PRC). Among the recommendations of that report are that the NSF’s Green Bank Telescope and Very Long Baseline Array be fully divested from the NSF Astronomy Division’s portfolio of research facilities in the next five years, with no further funding from the Astronomy Division. AUI and NRAO recognize and acknowledge the need to retire obsolete facilities to make way for the state-of-the-art. However, both the GBT and the VLBA are the state-of-the-art, and have crucial capabilities that cannot be provided by other facilities. Separately the two telescopes provide unparalleled scientific access to the universe. When their information is combined, the instruments provide the highest sensitivity and resolution available for any astronomical instrument in the world.”
Austerity inoculates societies against knowledge.
An excellent article by William Mitchell on austerity.
http://www.thenation.com/ar…
Green Bank and VLBA are still very productive but if NSF funding is cut as much as they expect they have no choice. There is an alternative. We can build public and congressional support for this work, identify other spending (not necessarily in NSF) that isn’t needed, and most important, we can make it clear that basic science is a public good and push for tax increases for those who can afford it.
Leave it to government supported agencies to screw up programs that are helping mankind through the gaining of knowledge.This is what happens when you have narrow-minded morons in charge.
I’m not sure how “government supported agencies” are screwing anything up. They are between a rock and a hard place. I have many friends at the proposed closure sites, and I don’t agree with all of them. But factually, NSF has too little money to even continue operating the facilities we have now, much less do anything new. Basically, they are looking at shutting down older facilities in support of developing newer ones. And if they weren’t “government supported” they would’t exist at all!
If you want someone to blame, go after congress. NSF’s funding is truly miniscule. Compared to the size of the federal budget, you could relieve these problems with what they lose in accounting errors.
The grousing here about these decisions is a little simplistic. The federal investment in NSF astronomy is quite stable at about $240M/yr. A large piece of this is NOAO (for optical astronomy) and NRAO (for radio astronomy). These are longstanding budget lines. But now the Astronomical Sciences Division (AST) is looking at a new, very big budget line, for ALMA operations, and the investment in Gemini operations is not quite as recent, but similarly dear. So NSF has two new big budget lines with a stable top line. They are hanging on by their fingernails.
But now we’re looking at potential for a new very large optical telescope, that NSF calls GSMT. There are independent parties who want to construct such a telescope, but the operational mode is that, once built, NSF would contribute to support operations, ensuring that the telescope would be broadly used in the U.S. science community. That would be a third, huge new budget line for AST. (Sound of fingernails breaking.)
So what is NSF to do? Well, very simply, make hard choices about what to stop doing. ALMA and GSMT are among the highest scientifically rated projects, and the idea is to make them happen. We’re talking about hard choices that allow brand new, and extraordinarily exciting science to be done. Those hard choices would close down facilities that, although productive, are not as scientifically exciting as the new stuff.
So the amount of astronomy that NSF is going to do isn’t going change. But the investment strategy is going to be biased to those projects that are most extraordinarily exciting. Sure, keep funding everything. But then you need to find a big piece of new change to land in the pocket of NSF. That’s not going to happen. It’s just dreaming to think that it will.
What you’re looking at is great new science happening, and the sacrifices one needs to let it happen. So while it’s fair to do some teeth-gnashing, this has nothing to do with the federal government screwing up science opportunity.
NASA astronomy budget is $1.5B/yr vs $248M for NSF. Should JWST and other NASA programs compete against NSF programs?
Fair question. Money doesn’t slide naturally between agencies. But maybe it should. That is, if it were simply a question of scientific priorities, money should be allocated accordingly. But this is a matter for OMB and OSTP. The presumption is that making a pitched battle between ground-based astronomy and space based astronomy just isn’t worth it.
But it isn’t simply scientific priorities. A lot of NASA’s mission is technology development, and essentially feeding aerospace industries. Those industries largely don’t build or operate ground-based telescopes. Making a big push to pull money out of NASA astronomy to NSF astronomy would thereby create a pitched battle in industry, and the aerospace industry would win hands down with their Congressional influence.
But it’s a good question, whether a tiny fraction of $8B for JWST could have made a huge difference in the hard decisions that NSF astronomy now faces. Of course, as a result of JWST, NASA astronomy now has its own very hard questions it has to face.
Legally there is a distinction between ground and space-based astronomy, but is it logical to split astronomers’ funding based on where their instruments are located? For that matter, does NASA really produce six times as much astronomical knowledge as NSF?
Conversely, if we wish to promote the development of aerospace technology, does it make sense to do this by procuring a handful of highly specialized spacecraft that are then supported through decades-long operational missions? Wouldn’t it make more sense to pay for technology development directly, as NACA did with considerable return on investment from 1915 until 1957?
As to the relative productivity, there are many metrics. By some metrics, yes, one could argue that space astronomy produces a factor of six more science than ground based astronomy. By others, perhaps not so much.
Not sure what you mean by “decades-long operational missions”. To my knowledge, there is precisely one of those in astronomy — the Hubble Space Telescope, and each servicing mission renders that observatory essentially a brand new instrument. That’s a special case.
Almost all NASA science missions have quite finite lifetimes. Rarely more than five years. They are turned off either because they are no longer functional, and have achieved their basic goals, and or because it is decided that the remaining good science achievable with them isn’t worth the operational cost. So new spacecraft are regularly procured, and technology advancements are thereby exercised.
No, just plowing money into undirected technology (as in, without a specific science goal) is understood to be programmatically risky. That’s a good way to achieve major leaps in technology that, frankly, aren’t that much needed in the near term. The best technology investments for science missions are ones that are specifically driven by current science goals.
Mercy killing of operational facilities is a frustrating and aggravating decision. But with a level budget, there is no other fiscally defensible way to move forward and reach for bigger accomplishments. That is hardly a situation that is unique to the science community. These facilities aren’t dear old grandpas or loyal pets.
“both the GBT and the VLBA are the state-of-the-art, and have crucial capabilities that cannot be provided by other facilities”
The need to phase out older programs in order to begin new ones in a flat budgeted agency (or company, for that matter) is always going to be with us, and the logical need for it is inescapable. What I wonder about, however, is the timing. GBT and VLBA are engaged in certain discoveries which, apparently, can’t be done on other facilities instead. Are the currently running projects at a point where they can be considered sufficiently complete to halt them? If we were to cut off projects that, with say another year of operation, would give us much better, more complete “answers,” then I would consider it reckless to halt them at this point to start a new program that could be started at any time in the future without loss of data or opportunity.
It has happened too often before that the budget people have cut off science projects as the knees without regard for the science lost, based solely on budget allocation timing. Has this issue been addressed with GBT and VLBA?
Steve