NSF astronomy seeks to cut spending to afford future projects

After scrutinizing NSF’s ground-based astronomy portfolio for more than a year, on 3 November a “senior review” committee released its recommendations for saving $30 million annually—one-quarter of the foundation’s combined budget for the four national observatories.

NSF called for the review “to look at our own program and see what we could wring out [of it]” to invest in new projects, the foundation’s astronomy division director Wayne Van Citters said at a news conference. “We realized there was a considerable mismatch between the ambitions of the community and our ability to respond.” Two areas were off limits for potential cuts: the Gemini twin telescopes, because of international agreements, and NSF’s grants program, which funds individual researchers. (See Physics Today October 2005, page 30 .)

The recommendations include:

• ▸ NSF’s astronomy division should anticipate intensifying pressure from the community on its grants program over the next five years and should increase the level of support to reflect the quality and quantity of proposals.

• ▸ Partners should be found by 2011 to pay at least half the cost of running the Arecibo radio telescope and the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), or else the facilities should be shut down.

• ▸ The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) should reduce the cost of its administrative and scientific staffs and of running the Green Bank Telescope.

• ▸ The National Optical Astronomy Observatory should trim its administrative and scientific staffs and reduce its instrumentation development program. NOAO should focus on providing the US astronomy community with access to optical and IR telescopes with apertures from 1 m to 10 m.

• ▸ As soon as funding begins for the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope—expected in 2009, with operations to start in 2014—the National Solar Observatory should start closing its other facilities or find new funding sources to keep them running. The NSO should consolidate its headquarters to a single site.

The observatories have said they will work with NSF on the implementation of the recommendations. NRAO director Fred Lo says his observatory will “solicit support from stakeholders of the unique VLBA in the US and abroad” and define the most important science “so that if we do have to shut it down, at least we get those projects done.”

How much money the measures will actually free up remains to be seen. “By economic shenanigans I can find you $10 million in our recommendations, or $60 million,” Stanford University’s Roger Blandford, who chaired the senior review, said at a presentation of the recommendations. The cost of closing facilities can also be high, the senior review report notes, and “in many cases, the greatest savings…and the best service to the astronomical community will be found in keeping the facilities operating at higher efficiency and with external contributions.”

The recommended cuts were “extremely painful,” Blandford said. “We are dealing with a set of telescopes that are all productive and good for another decade or so.” But, he noted, “our charge was to balance the cost of running existing facilities against a very ambitious and exciting new program.”

The Giant Segmented Mirror Telescope, Large Survey Telescope, and participation in the Square Kilometer Array are among the projects on the astronomy community’s wish list. Savings of $30 million a year is “only a down payment on the total demand we see in front of us,” Van Citters said. Next month NSF will start a round of town-hall meetings and consultations with the astronomy community to figure out how to implement the senior review’s recommendations.