Arecibo Observatory is the world's most sensitive radio telescope--but NSF funding cuts may put it out of business

By Beth Saulnier

it has listened for signs of life in outer space, sent a historic greeting to a star cluster 25,000 light years away, served as a setting for "The X-Files" and James Bond.More important for Cornell, it has made significant contributions to astronomy and other scientific fields for nearly a halfcentury. But does Arecibo Observatory have a future?

The question has been vexing the astronomy community at Cornell and beyond for nearly a year--ever since a senior review committee of the National Science Foundation (NSF) prescribed radical funding cuts that could lead to the facility's closure. In October 2006, the committee-- charged with trimming $30 million for redistribution to new initiatives, though it ultimately came up with only $14 million in cuts--recommended reducing the agency's annual contribution toward Arecibo's radio astronomy efforts from its present $10.5 million to $8 million in fiscal 2009 and just $4 million in 2011. (The $2 million a year that another NSF division contributes for atmospheric sciences would be unaffected.) Although the NSF is not condemning Arecibo outright--rather, mandating that it get the bulk of its funding from other sources--the proposed cuts have Cornell astronomers up in arms. "I think the decision is just wrong," says Cornell vice provost for physical sciences and engineering Joseph Burns, PhD '66, a professor of theoretical and applied mechanics who specializes in planetary sciences. At such a reduced budget, he adds, "we don't feel that we can do the kind of science Cornell is interested in."

Located in an isolated, mountainous region of Puerto Rico fifty miles west of San Juan, Arecibo is a federal facility; the NSF contracts with Cornell to administer it, and many astronomy faculty use it for research. Built in 1963 to take advantage of the region's sharply sloped karst landscape, it's the world's most sensitive radio telescope, and its 305-meter-wide dish (made up of nearly 39,000 perforated aluminum panels) is the planet's single largest. Although the dish itself can't be moved--it's fixed to the ground, and you can walk under it--the instruments suspended above it from a trio of towers can be reoriented, allowing the telescope to observe some 40 percent of the sky. The receivers have been upgraded several times over the years, including the recent installation of a new detector that increased data collection fourteen-fold. Researchers compete for telescope time via a peer-reviewed process, with some 300 scientists from 150 universities worldwide using the facility each year. "The fact that it's the largest collecting-area telescope, it has more users than it has ever had, and it's doing forefront science that no other facility on Earth can do--to think that it would close seems to me outrageous," says Martha Haynes, the Goldwin Smith Professor of Astronomy. "If you close this facility, you shut down areas of science, and I don't think that was the committee's intention. In some senses, it boggles the mind."

For Cornell, Arecibo is more than just another research facility; like the medical college's branch in Qatar, it's a symbol of the University's international scope and global mission.When visitors arrive at the observatory after a drive up a winding mountain road, they're greeted by three flags: those of the U.S., the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and Cornell University. "It's an icon for astronomy, and to be associated with such an icon is important to Cornell," Burns says. "It speaks to Cornell's expansiveness--to be able to go to a distant place and use the special geography there to look out at the universe."

The telescope has been a longtime contributor to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), which scans the skies for evidence of alien life. On November 16, 1974, the dish was used to broadcast a message of interstellar greeting designed by Carl Sagan and famed astronomer Frank Drake '51, among others; it included ordinal numbers, a graphic of our solar system, and the structure of DNA. The facility has a three-part mission: radio astronomy, planetary radar (used to examine nearby celestial bodies), and atmospheric sciences, which study Earth's own gaseous layers. (The observatory was originally built to use radar to study Earth's ionosphere, or upper atmosphere; Arecibo's planetary radar, the world's most powerful, is considered the best early-warning system for tracking asteroids that could collide with Earth.) And Hollywood has come calling more than once: portions of the film version of Sagan's novel Contact were shot there, and the dish doubled as the villain's lair in the James Bond adventure GoldenEye, with special effects allowing it to emerge from under a lake.

Recently, the telescope has made possible a number of discoveries in astronomy and planetary sciences, including Mercury's molten core, highly sensitive detections of pulsars, and what appears to be a "dark galaxy"--one with a great deal of mass but no stars. "We are doing the best science we've ever done," Burns says. "We've been on the cover of Science and Nature three times in the last year.We've been ranked by the NSF, as far as atmospheric sciences, as the best facility they've got. In terms of planetary radar, we're twenty times more sensitive than anything else in the world. And we're doing the best educational and public outreach effort in the NSF--we have more than 100,000 visitors annually, more than all the other observatories combined."

C.Wayne Van Citters, director of the NSF's Division of Astronomical Sciences, says Arecibo's scientific merit was never in question. In fact, he says, the agency doesn't want to see Arecibo closed. "The senior review itself said that none of the facilities for which they were recommending reduced funding--or even possibly closure-- should be regarded as redundant to the scientific enterprise," he says. "They're all exceedingly productive facilities that could keep doing good science for the next couple of decades. It's just a question of scientific priorities and having to withdraw funding from some things to do new things that are extremely exciting too."

Once a decade, NASA and the NSF charter a study to look at the needs and priorities of astronomy as a whole; the most recent one, in 2000, sketched an ambitious program requiring the construction of several cutting-edge facilities--with big price tags. They include the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, now being built in a remote area of Chile, and the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope, which may begin construction on a mountaintop in Maui, Hawaii, as early as 2009. According to Van Citters, the 2006 senior review committee "looked at the science program that the astronomy community wanted to do--looked at capabilities, output, number of users, and so forth, and ranked things that way. So in large measure it's a scientific judgment call, but that's why we convene committees to do that sort of thing."

Some at Cornell are more skeptical; they say that the decision was made without full consideration of Arecibo's capabilities. Burns and Haynes point out that the senior review committee didn't include representatives from radar astronomy or atmospheric sciences, which make up 30 percent of the work done at Arecibo. "In some sense, we went in with our maximum grade being 70 percent," Burns says, "so at the end of the day we're told that we are the one place that can take a big hit." Burns and Haynes both charge that the funding cuts are more political than scientific: Burns points out that two facilities that emerged unscathed have powerful friends in Congress. Robert Byrd, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, is from West Virginia, home to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank; Pete Domenici, another veteran senator, represents New Mexico, where the Very Large Array is located. "Also, from a political standpoint," Burns says, "it's probably not insignificant that Puerto Rico has no representatives in Congress."

Van Citters, though, flatly denies any political motives or back-room deals. "The best I can do is to assure folks that it was a scientific--not a political--decision," he says. "Actually, one of the first questions the committee asked us was, ‘Do we have to take political considerations into account?'And I said, ‘Absolutely not--if you did try to second-guess political interests, we'd get so tied up in knots you couldn't make any decisions.'We were very careful to keep Congress briefed on the process while it was being carried out, and I've had no ‘protection moves,' so to speak."

Will there be an Arecibo Observatory a decade from now? The question remains open--though Cornell's astronomy community doubts the worst will happen. "I am 100 percent confident that it will still be there and still be operating," says Robert Brown, director of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center (NAIC), the entity Cornell created to oversee Arecibo. Says Haynes: "People keep talking about how the telescope is going to shut down, but I don't believe it. I don't believe that the United States or the NSF would ignore the benefits, the scientific capabilities, that Arecibo has." Supporters point out that the NSF just funded a $5.3 million project to repaint the facility's detector, basic maintenance necessary to prevent corrosion and protect workers. Haynes compares it to repainting your house even though you're planning to demolish it. "We're getting an incredibly mixed message," she says. "I like to think of that as a positive sign, that they're going to let this report play out but they're going to ignore it."

Cornell and the NAIC have begun seeking alternative funding sources to keep Arecibo open; one possibility includes a partnership with the government of Puerto Rico, which relies on the observatory not only for employment and tourism but as a symbol of pride and scientific possibility." Half of the students on the island have visited the observatory," Burns says. "Puerto Rico is very poor, and to have this iconic technology sitting in its backyard is important." Another potential funding source, Brown says, could come from projects such as the Very Long Baseline Interferometry program, in which a dozen or more telescopes around the world look at the same object at the same frequency and combine their data to get a highly detailed image. "We will go through a phase where we actively seek sponsors for the observatory, and those new programs will necessarily be implemented at the expense of some of the research that is going on right now," Brown says. "Eventually, it will be clear whether the observatory is headed in a favorable direction. So I think we're engaged in something close to an experiment."

The NSF cuts have already prompted the observatory to tighten its belt: a quarter of its 150 positions have been eliminated through layoffs or attrition. Observations have been limited to night-time hours and the scope of investigation redirected to favor sky-wide surveys rather than examinations of individual objects. "In forty-two years the observatory had never had a cutback, ever, and so people who take jobs there do not expect to see the staff trimmed," Brown says. "It had a pronounced effect on morale." Still, he and his colleagues are hoping for a reprieve. Perhaps, they say, through political support or a twist in the labyrinthine budget process--as funding recommendations make their way through the NSF hierarchy to the National Science Board to the Office of Management and Budget to Congress-- something will give. "To a different audience with a different perspective, Arecibo can do very well," says Haynes. "I think there's a lot of sympathy out there beyond this one committee."

Burns points out that closing the facility is much more complicated than it sounds. The University can't just padlock the gates and walk away--the dish would have to be dismantled, buildings demolished or repurposed, and the site returned to something resembling its natural state. Van Citters says the NSF is in the process of assessing the cost of decommissioning, which Burns estimates at upwards of $100 million. "If it turns out that we can't possibly afford to close it, then we want to know that now,"Van Citters says, "so we can make a plan that removes uncertainty about what's going to happen."