Tag: NSF

Trump fires the entire governing board of the National Science Foundation

2:38 pm

In a move that should surprise no one at this point in Trump’s second term, yesterday President Trump informed all 24 members of the National Science Board, the committee that runs the National Science Foundation (NSF), that they have been fired.

“On behalf of President Donald J Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as a member of the National Science Board is terminated, effective immediately,” reads a 24 April email from Mary Sprowls of the presidential personnel office to each NSB member. “Thank you for your service.”

The article at the link, from the journal Science, takes the typical one-sided propaganda press anti-Trump view, interviewing only those who oppose Trump and spending most of its time screaming “He’s destroying science!”

A wider view would ask this: Is there a reason that the president of the United States, elected by the American people, might have reasons to question the management of this board? At the moment the federal government is running a deficit that is back-breaking, and this board publicly criticized Trump’s effort to rein in spending when he proposed a 55% cut in NSF’s budget. If they are not going to cooperate with their boss, then maybe they should leave, and not let the door hit them as they head out.

The Science article also included this howler: “the mass firing is the latest indication that the White House is ignoring the board’s authority and dictating policies at NSF.” Um, who elected them? No one. In fact, they were appointed by the president himself, and he is the only one with the constitutional authority to decide these matters.

Expect court suits of course, with some lower level unelected judge somewhere attempting to take over running the executive branch by demanding these board members remain in power, defying the elected president of the U.S.

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NSF punts on its two big telescope projects

10:50 am

Because it presently does not have sufficient funds to build both the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) in Chile and the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) in Hawaii, the National Science Foundation (NSF) asked an independent panel to look at both projects and give recommendations on which project it should go with.

That report [pdf] has now been released, and its conclusions essentially take the advice of former Yankee catcher Yogi Berra, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” From the report’s executive summary:

Both GMT and TMT have strong leadership, partnership and financial commitments but require $1.6 billion in NSF funding to proceed. Without this support, significant delays or project cancellations may result. The panel emphasized the critical need for congressional support, noting that without additional appropriations, NSF may face challenges balancing these projects with other national priorities, risking U.S. competitiveness in fundamental research. [emphasis mine]

If you dig into the report however you find that TMT is a far more uncertain project. GMT is already being built, while TMT is stalled because it has been unable to get political approval to build in Hawaii on Mauna Kea, even though it initially wanted to start construction almost a decade ago.

Clearly, this report was created simply as a lobbying ploy by the NSF to Congress. NSF didn’t want the report to make a choice. It wanted it to endorse both telescopes so that — rather than bite the bullet and fund one telescope with the money it has already been given by Congress — NSF could use the report to demand more funding so that it can fund both.

Though Congress is now controlled by more fiscally-minded Republicans, don’t expect them to be anymore responsible on this issue than Democrats. These guys really don’t understand basic economics, and think they have a blank check for anything they wish to do. I anticipate Congress will give NSF the extra cash for both telescopes.

The problems for TMT remain, however, and even with that cash it remains very doubtful the telescope will be built. But gee, that won’t be a problem for NSF. Who wouldn’t like getting an extra billion or two to spend as one wishes?

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Ten stupid academic studies funded by the federal government

9:18 am

Campus Reform last week posted a list of ten academic studies funded by federal government that any sane person would not only consider stupid, but an utter waste of money.

Number 1 on the list was a grant of almost a half million dollars to researchers at Reed College in Oregon to study the gambling habits of pigeons. The researchers claimed the study would shed light on human gambling behaviors, but if you believe that then you would likely also fork over your life savings to buy the Brooklyn Bridge.

Of the ten studies listed, the National Institute of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded four each, while the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Cancer Institute funded one each.

National Cancer Institute’s study is surely going to help cure cancer, as it gave $7 million to the con artists faking as researchers at Stanford University to build an AI toilet equipped with cameras to scan the user’s waste and backside.

The studies were done at a range of other major universities, including Cornell, the University of California, the University of Illinois, and the University of Connecticut. Most are publicly funded institutions.

This list demonstrates clearly the bankruptcy of the government agencies involved and justifies any effort to slash their budgets by significant amounts. It does more however. It shows us the bankruptcy of the academic community as well. If scientists at major universities think this drivel is valid research, then we know they are teaching their students garbage as well. The public funding to these colleges should be slashed also.

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Scientists: Biden has infused DEI and racial quotas throughout the entire federal science bureaucracy

1:39 pm

Joe Biden, allied with Hamas
Joe Biden, like the KKK in love with racist quotas

A new research paper just completed by a international group of scientists details at length how the policies of critical race theory and its “diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)” philosophy has been infused deeply into all levels of the entire federal science bureaucracy, influencing grant awards and hiring at the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institute of Health (NIH), the Department of Energy (DOE), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in ways that warp science and research and make good research impossible..

You can read the paper here [pdf]. From the press release:

The paper exposes how DEI has spread much further and more deeply into core scientific disciplines than most people, including many scientists, realize. This has happened, in large part, by presidential executive order (specifically, EO 13985 and EO 14091), implemented through the budget approval process.

The two executive orders listed were issued by President Biden in 2021 and 2023 respectively, with the first issued on his very first day in office. If you have the patience, it worth reading both, since they outline in great detail the goals of this administration to favor the hiring and promotion of “underserved communities,” which the first order lists as follows:
» Read more

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National Science Foundation decides to fund only one giant telescope

8:56 am

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has decided that its astronomy program does not have sufficient funds for building both the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) in Hawaii and the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) in Chile, and will decide in May which one it will choose.

The GMT and TMT—both backed by consortia of universities, philanthropic foundations, and international partners—set out to build their next generation instruments in the early 2000s. But this privately funded approach, which during the 20th century produced the twin 10-meter Keck telescopes in Hawaii and the two 6.5-meter Magellan telescopes in Chile, stumbled when it came to multibillion-dollar projects. Although design work and mirror casting forged ahead, both projects failed to amass enough funding to complete construction. (A dispute with Native Hawaiians over the Hawaii site has also slowed the TMT.)

I predict that this decision puts the final nail in TMT’s coffin. That telescope was on schedule in 2015 — when construction was set to begin — to be already operational now, well ahead of GMT. The opposition in Hawaii by a minority of leftist protestors, who also had the backing of the state government (run entirely by the Democratic Party), blocked that construction even as the building of GMT’s mirrors proceeded.

Almost a decade later, while TMT sits in limbo, unbuilt, GMT is nearing completion, with its last mirror presently being fabricated and construction at its site now more than half done. It is expected to be finished by 2028, and is almost certainly going to get that NSF funding.

As I noted however in July 2023,

Not that any of this really matters. In the near term, ground-based astronomy on Earth is going to become increasingly impractical and insufficient, first because of the difficulties of making good observations though the atmosphere and the tens of thousands of satellites expected in the coming decades, and second because new space-based astronomy is going to make it all obsolete. All it will take will be to launch one 8-meter telescope on Starship and [GMT] will become the equivalent of a buggy whip.

The great tragedy of TMT is that the astronomers themselves at the project were not willing to fight that tiny minority of protesters, whose protests were based on the essentials of critical race theory that makes whites the devils and all other minorities saints. As academics trained in these insane ideas, the astronomy community accepted this bigoted premise, and out of guilt allowed those protesters to rule.

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Final close-out of all science research at Arecibo

9:38 am

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is proceeding with the final close-out of all science research at the now shuttered Arecibo radio telescope, ending all funding for the remaining science instruments that still function and letting go all scientists on staff as of August 14th.

In October 2022, NSF announced it would not rebuild the giant telescope, saying it was following community recommendations for the best use of scarce research dollars. It is now shutting down most of the smaller instruments as well. As scientists depart, “all the expertise associated with instruments is leaving,” Brisset says. Olga Figueroa-Miranda, director of the observatory, says people from UCF, Puerto Rico’s Metropolitan University, and Yang Enterprises, an engineering firm, will be let go, including herself. She has yet to find a new position.

The NSF has budgeted money to turn the telescope’s visitor center into a science education facility, but this is not likely to be very successful, as there will be no scientists at this somewhat remote location, which will in itself discourage any traffic.

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Starlink and National Science Foundation sign deal coordinating spectrum use

9:10 pm

SpaceX and the National Science Foundation (NSF) today signed an agreement coordinating the use of radio spectrum so that Starlink satellites will not interfere with radio astronomy.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) and SpaceX have finalized a radio spectrum coordination agreement to limit interference from the company’s Starlink satellites to radio astronomy assets operating between 10.6 and 10.7 GHz. The agreement, detailed in a statement released by NSF today, ensures that Starlink satellite network plans will meet international radio astronomy protection standards, and protect NSF-funded radio astronomy facilities, including the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and the Green Bank Observatory (GBO).

This deal was part of a larger negotiation with the entire astronomy community to limit the problems caused to astronomy by the 3,000-plus Starlink satellites presently in orbit. These other actions include

…continuing to work to reduce the optical brightness of their satellites to 7th visual magnitude or fainter by physical design changes, attitude maneuvering, or other ideas to be developed; maintaining orbital elevations at ~700 km or lower; and providing orbital information publicly that astronomers can use for scheduling observations around satellite locations.

This agreement demonstrates again that SpaceX has tried hard to be a good citizen in this matter. It also illustrates once again that ground-based astronomical observations is becoming increasingly impractical. Astronomers have to go to space, and if Starship flies as SpaceX desires, the company will provide them a way to do it.

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Final decision: Arecibo will not be rebuilt

3:34 pm

The National Science Foundation has made it official: It will not rebuild the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, though it will fund the facility as an education center instead.

Now, the National Science Foundation (NSF), which owns the site, has determined that despite scientists’ pleas, Arecibo Observatory won’t be getting any new telescope to replace the loss. The new education project also doesn’t include any long-term funding for the instruments that remain operational at the observatory, including a 40-foot (12 m) radio dish and a lidar system.

…Instead, the NSF intends to build on the observatory’s legacy as a key educational institution in Puerto Rico by transforming the site into a hub for science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education, due to open in 2023, according to a statement. The observatory is also home to the Ángel Ramos Foundation Science and Visitor Center, which opened in 1997.

It seems unclear how this education center will function. Will it be a school that students attend? Or simply a type of museum with a visitors center? This new plan appears to call for about $2 million per year in funding, which does not appear enough to do much of anything, other than to keep the lights on and hang some pretty astronomy pictures on the walls.

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Starlink being tested in Antarctica

9:33 am

Capitalism in space: The National Science Foundation (NSF) has begun testing a single Starlink terminal at its McMurdo station in Antarctic, with the hope that the service can improve communications at the station significantly.

Everyone at the base shares a 17 Mbps link, according to the United States Antarctic Program, which severely limits what people can do. The station actually blocks people from using high-bandwidth apps like Netflix, cloud backups, and video calls, with the exception of once-weekly Skype or FaceTime sessions at a public kiosk or mission-critical communications.

The addition of Starlink probably doesn’t mean that McMurdo residents will be able to hold a Netflix movie night or anything — the terminals can handle around 50-200 Mbps, which still isn’t a ton to go around, even during the winter when far fewer people are at the base — but it could help make transferring important scientific data off of the icy continent easier.

According to SpaceX’s plans, this new service in Antarctica means that by year’s end Starlink will be available on all seven continents.

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NSF to do environmental impact statement on TMT

8:48 am

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has suddenly announced that it plans to complete a full environmental impact statement on the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

The National Science Foundation plans to host four meetings on the Big Island of Hawaii in August. It said it won’t decide on whether to fund the telescope until after it considers public input, the environmental review, the project’s technical readiness and other factors.

…The National Science Foundation must conduct a new study under U.S. law to invest in the project because it is part of the federal government. A report from the U.S. astronomy community last year said TMT planned to obtain 30% of the project’s estimated construction costs, or $800 million, from the U.S. government.

The timing of this announcement is most interesting, coming more than a year after NSF had decided to partly fund TMT and just shortly after the passage of a new law in Hawaii taking control of telescopes on Mauna Kea away from the University of Hawaii and giving that control to some of the activists protesting TMT. Why is this study suddenly necessary when it hadn’t seem necessary before?

I think this decision is another example of the Biden administration allowing the bureaucrats in the federal government to exercise their power. I also think it is linked with the new bigoted effort in government to always put racial concerns first — in this case tribal Hawaiians. It signals a decision by these federal bureaucrats to team up with those tribal Hawaiians that oppose TMT because it is “white” and “a symbol of colonialism” to kill it.

As I have been predicting for years, TMT will never be built.

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NASA/NSF express collision concerns for SpaceX’s Starlink constellation

10:00 am

Capitalism in space: In a February 8th letter to the FCC, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and NASA expressed their concerns about the collision possibilities of SpaceX’s full 30,000 satellite Starlink constellation with other spacecraft.

The letter raised several issues about the proposed constellation, primarily because it would increase the number of tracked objects in low Earth orbit by more than a factor of five. “An increase of this magnitude into these confined altitude bands inherently brings additional risk of debris-generating collision events based on the number of objects alone,” the agency stated. “NASA anticipates current and planned science missions, as well as human space flight operations will see an increase in conjunctions.”

The letter did not oppose the constellation, but simply outlined issues that the agencies thought SpaceX needed to address before the constellation’s full deployment. It also noted that these concerns apply to other planned large satellite constellations.

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Puerto Rican government commits $8 million to rebuild Arecibo

8:16 am

The government of Puerto Rico earlier this week announced that it has allocated $8 million to rebuild the Arecibo Observatory.

Via an executive order, Gov. Wanda Vazquez made reconstruction of the observatory public policy. In a ceremony at La Fortaleza, the seat of the island’s government, Vazquez said that the Puerto Rican government believes that the telescope’s collapse provides a great opportunity to redesign it, taking into account the lessons learned and recommendations from the scientific community so that it remains relevant for decades to come.

…Vazquez said that she and her administration want the scope to once again become a world class center and the $8 million being allocated for reconstruction includes funds to repair the environmental damage caused by the collapse, something that has already begun under the supervision of the National Science Foundation (NSF).

We shall see what happens. $8 million is not really enough to rebuild Arecibo. And the NSF has been trying to unload it from its budgetary responsibility for almost a decade. I would be shocked if that agency now suddenly decided to fund its reconstruction.

Only if Congress gets involved will this likely change, and that wouldn’t surprise me, considering how nonchalant our present Congress is about spending money that doesn’t exist.

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Arecibo gets $12.3 million NSF grant

8:40 am

The National Science Foundation has awarded the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rica a $12.3 million grant to pay for needed repairs and upgrades following the hurricane damage from 2017.

The money will pay for the following work:

  • Repairing one of the suspension cables holding the primary telescope platform, ensuring long-term structural integrity of one of the main structural elements of the telescope.
  • Recalibrating the primary reflector, which will restore the observatory’s sensitivity at higher frequencies.
  • Aligning the Gregorian Reflector, improving current calibration and pointing.
  • Installing a new control system for S band radar, which is part of the microwave band of the electromagnetic spectrum.
  • Replacing the modulator on the 430 MHz transmitter, increasing consistency of power output and data quality.
  • Improving the telescope’s pointing controls and data tracking systems.

Most of this looks to be very basic maintenance, which suggests the telescope is still very starved for funds.

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Two giant U.S. telescope projects team up

9:21 am

The two consortiums building the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) and the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) have teamed up in order to coordinate their research as well as encourage increased government funding for both.

The partnership, approved by the GMT board this month and by the TMT board last month, commits the two projects to developing a joint plan that would allow astronomers from any institution to use the telescopes; under previous plans observing time was available only to researchers from nations or institutions that had provided funding. The projects are discussing awarding at least 25% of each telescope’s time to nonpartners through a competitive process to be administered by the National Center for Optical-Infrared Astronomy—an umbrella organization that will replace the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO), based in Tucson, Arizona, sometime in fiscal year 2019. Telescope backers hope the public access plan will help persuade the federal government to pay for at least 25% of the total cost of the two facilities, which could total $1 billion. (Cost estimates for the GMT and the TMT are $1 billion and $1.4 billion, respectively, but astronomers expect both numbers to grow.) “There are many science projects that are $1 billion class projects,” says David Silva, NOAO’s director. “The investment that we would want is of a similar size.”

…In making their case, the teams will argue the benefits of having telescopes in both the northern and southern hemispheres. “When you are covering the whole sky, you have greater scientific reach,” says Wendy Freedman, an astronomer at The University of Chicago in Illinois who was the founding leader of the GMT. The teams will also argue that the telescopes have complementary strengths. The design of the GMT, for instance, makes it ideal for a high-resolution spectrograph designed to probe the atmospheres of exoplanets. The TMT, which has more light-gathering power, could host a multiobject spectrograph to quickly gather demographic statistics on the universe’s first galaxies. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted sentences explain everything. First, government funding for both projects has been weak, partly because the National Science Foundation (the funding agency) has not been able to make up it mind which of these two U.S. projects to back. By teaming up as one project building two telescopes, the builders hope they will grease the wheels of the federal funding machine.

Second, by selling these two telescopes as covering both the north and south hemispheres, they indicate that the TMT is now almost certainly going to abandon its Hawaii location and move to the Canary Islands. GMT will be built at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, located at 29 degrees south latitude. By placing TMT in the northern hemisphere at 29 degrees north latitude in the Canary Islands, rather than Mauna Kea’s 19 degrees north latitude, they better compliment GMT in the southern hemisphere.

In other words, this partnership strengthens the case for TMT to abandon Hawaii. Not only will construction begin sooner (as the Hawaiian government has shown no interest in approving the project), the higher latitude as part of this partnership better justifies funding.

And the odds of getting that funding have apparently increased, as the chair of the House appropriations panel that funds the National Science Foundation has just shown himself to be very willing to give telescope projects a lot of money, more in fact than they even request.

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New backers to run Arecibo

8:27 am

The National Science Foundation this week revealed the make-up of the consortium that is taking over the operation of the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico.

The new agreement is valued at $20.15 million over five years, subject to the availability of funds, and is scheduled to begin April 1, according to the statement.

The new partnership represents a mixture of academic and corporate interests. The Universidad Metropolitana in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Yang Enterprises Inc. in Oviedo, Florida, will partner with [the University of Central Florida] to manage the observatory. The team plans to expand the capabilities of the telescope, officials said.

This relieves the National Science Foundation (and the taxpayers) of the the cost burden for this facility, at least directly.

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Arecibo gets a backer to keep it running

10:59 pm

The National Science Foundation has found at least one backer to pick up the majority of the cost for running the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, thus keeping it operational.

For about a decade, the National Science Foundation, which owns the observatory and supplies about two-thirds of its $12 million budget, had been mulling downsizing or even shuttering the telescope to free up funds for other projects. Instead, the NSF will continue scientific operations at the facility in collaboration with an unnamed partner organization, according to a Record of Decision signed this week.

Arecibo sustained $4 million to $8 million in damage during the hurricane, according James Ulvestad, acting assistant director for the agency’s mathematical and physical sciences directorate. Some scientists worried that would weaken the case for keeping the observatory operational.

But Ulvestad said the agency’s Record of Decision reflects that it has received viable partnership proposals from one or more collaborators — though he would not provide details about those proposals. This announcement allows the NSF to move forward with negotiations on a new management contract.

Under the new plan, the agency will reduce its annual contribution to the observatory from about $8.2 million to $2 million over the next five years. It is also committed to funding any repairs required to restore Arecibo to its pre-hurricane condition, Ulvestad said.

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Status of Arecibo radio observatory

9:16 am

It appears that, while Puerto Rico itself suffered devastating damage from Hurricane Maria, the Arecibo Observatory came through relatively unscathed.

The surface of the dish was largely unscathed, and the observatory’s most vulnerable component, the instrument platform suspended high above the dish by cables strung from three towers, each more than 80 meters tall, was still in place and seemed undamaged, says Schmelz. She is based at the Columbia, Maryland, headquarters of one of Arecibo’s operators, the Universities Space Research Association, and spoke with staff in Puerto Rico who first used a ham radio and then a single working satellite phone. But the roofs on some observatory buildings were blown off, the sinkhole under the dish was flooded, and other equipment was damaged by rain and fallen trees. Most significantly, a large portion of a 29-meter-long antenna—the 430-megahertz line feed used for studying the upper atmosphere—appears to have broken off and fallen from the platform into the dish. Mathews estimates a bill of several million dollars to replace the line feed alone.

Because of the significant infrastructure damage across the island, there will be significant delays in getting any of this fixed. Since the telescope is already being considered for shut down due to budget issues, these delays could lead to that shut down.

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NSF voids punishment of scientists who committed plagiarism and data fabrication

10:34 am

An inspector general report has found that the National Science Foundation has routinely cancelled or reduced the punishments of scientists who had committed either plagiarism or data fabrication, allowing them to continue to get grants and advise the government.

The inspector general for the National Science Foundation identified at least 23 instances of plagiarism in proposals, NSF-funded research, and agency publications in 2015 and 2016. It found at least eight instances of data manipulation and fabrication in those years. NSF officials disregarded recommended sanctions against some of the scientists and academics implicated in those findings. Though many were temporarily barred from receiving additional federal funding, nearly all will be eligible for taxpayer support and official roles in NSF-funded research in the future.

In one investigation that concluded in Nov. 2015, the IG found that an NSF-supported researcher had “knowingly plagiarized text into five NSF proposals.”

“These actions were a significant departure from the standards of the research community, and therefore constituted research misconduct,” according to a report on the investigation’s findings.

No wonder the public has become very skeptical of government science. Worse, by turning a blind eye to this bad behavior the National Science Foundation ends up giving a black eye to all science.

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The status of telescopes the NSF is getting rid of

9:08 am

Back in 2012 the National Science Foundation (NSF) proposed that it cease funding a slew of older, smaller telescopes in order to use that money to fund the construction and operation of newer more advanced facilities. This article, focused on the fate of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, provides a nice table that shows the status of these telescopes.

The options were either to find new funding, be mothballed, or even demolished. It appears that most of the telescopes in question have found new funding and will remain in use in some manner. The one telescope that has apparently failed to obtain any additional funding from others is the McMath–Pierce Solar Telescope on Kitt Peak in Arizona, which when built in 1962 was the world’s largest solar telescope, an honor for which it is still tied.

In 2015 I had written an article for Sky & Telescope about how these budget cuts were effecting the telescopes on Kitt Peak. At that time the people in charge of McMath-Pierce were hunting for new support but were coming up short. Almost two years later it appears that their hunt has been a failure, and the telescope will likely be shut down, and possibly demolished.

It will be a sad thing if McMath-Pierce is lost, but I am not arguing to save it. If its observational capabilities were truly valuable and needed by the scientific community than someone would have come forward to finance it. That no one has suggests that the money really can be spent more usefully in other ways.

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National Science Foundation considers shuttering Arecibo

9:33 am

Faced with tight budgets, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is considering several options for the future operation of the Arecibo Observatory, the world’s largest single radio telescope dish, including its complete removal.

[T]he NSF could mothball the site, shutting it down in such a way that it could restart (sometime in the future). Or it could dismantle the telescope altogether and restore the area to its natural state, as required by law if the agency fully divests itself of the observatory and closes it. Previous studies have said such a process could cost around $100 million—more than a decade’s worth of its current funding for telescope operations. Jim Ulvestad, director of the NSF Division of Astronomical Sciences, says the agency is still investigating, not concluding. “No alternative has been selected at this juncture,” he says. And much consideration will go into the final financial decision, whatever it may be. Some outside the agency see writing on the wall. “NSF is dead serious about offloading Arecibo funding to someone else—anyone else,” says Ellen Howell, a former staff scientist at Arecibo and now a faculty member at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL) in Tucson, Arizona.

The article spends a lot of time talking about how wonderful Arecibo is, but never tells us how many astronomers actually demand to use it. Is it oversubscribed, like Hubble, where five times the number of astronomers request time than can be handled, or does it often sit unused because not enough astronomers require its use? NSF and the government do not have unlimited funds, and need to focus their spending where the demand is. If Arecibo is not in demand, then they are wise to consider closing it, or handing it off to someone who wants it.

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