Radio Telescope And Its Budget Hang in the Balance

A visit to Arecibo is in many respects a voyage through time. It's not just the jarring contrast between the high-tech receiver and the untamed jungle around it, or the fact that the signals it detects from the edges of the universe are snapshots of events that happened 10 billion years ago, not long after the big bang.

The control room that overlooks the array, built in the 1960s, still has some of its original control panels featuring black plastic knobs as big as a child's hand and gauges reminiscent of Flash Gordon movies. Yet those throwbacks are surrounded by ceiling-high banks of equipment of astonishing sophistication, including atomic clocks that measure incoming signals to the million-billionths of a second -- evidence of the upgrades that over the decades have kept Arecibo at the forefront of radio astronomy.

The primary aim is to detect radio waves from sources throughout the Milky Way and beyond.

As scientists discovered in the 1930s, atomic particles whizzing around in space can emit radio waves of various forms and intensities. Those waves -- which, unlike visible light and other kinds of electromagnetic energy, easily penetrate cosmic dust and Earth's atmosphere -- tell scientists what kinds of matter and energy are out there and how they are behaving.

That kind of information pulls the veil from how the universe matured (unevenly, with lumps of unimaginable density and vast expanses far emptier than any vacuum on Earth); what it is made of (about 95 percent is "dark energy" and "dark matter," components that scientists know virtually nothing about); and what holds it all together (nobody understands what gravity really is), even as the universe expands.

The incoming radio waves, perhaps emitted by a distant collapsed supernova or bounced off an asteroid swinging around for an unwelcome rendezvous, reflect off Arecibo's enormous bowl, made of 39,000 3-by-6-foot aluminum panels, to be detected by an array of antennas aboard a 900-ton platform suspended hundreds of feet above the dish.

With the help of laser-guided cable-tension adjusters, the entire apparatus, as big as 26 football fields, maintains its position within a millimeter or so, despite tropical winds and temperature changes.

"It's an engineering marvel," said Robert B. Kerr, the observatory's site director. "It's embarrassing to have our hand out like this."

The cash crunch stems from a "senior review" completed last November at NSF. Its $200 million astronomy division -- increasingly committed to ambitious, new projects but long hobbled by flat congressional budgets -- was facing a deficit of at least $30 million by 2010.

"The ambitions of the astronomy community for new things was far outstripping the capacity of the federal budget to cover them," said Wayne van Citters, NSF's astronomy division director, who organized the independent review. The result was a tough-love ranking of priorities that hit Arecibo hardest but also put intense pressure on the New Mexico-based Very Long Baseline Array, a collection of 10 radio telescopes, whose staff was also told to start paying for half its costs or face closure in 2011.

Many astronomers have complained that the review did not take into account several crucial factors.

One is that Arecibo is home to what is widely regarded as the world's foremost upper atmosphere and "space weather" research center. Funded at about $2 million by a separate NSF division, the center studies the impacts of solar flares on satellite and cellphone communication; evaluates climate change; and has developed methods for cleaning up the atmosphere after a nuclear attack.