Cuts in the US ground telescope budget. Facilities will be closed

The member of the committee that decided on the cut warns: the American scientific leadership is in danger * The National Science Foundation was forced to propose painful cuts, including the closing of the radio telescope in Green Bank and 4 facilities at Kit Peak Observatory in Hawaii

The astronomy budget in the US will soon suffer from sharp cuts and the risk of closing some of the facilities. This is according to a new report of the Astronomical Sciences Division of the National Science Foundation. According to the report, the funding available for ground-based astronomy facilities will decrease by 50%.
The report recommends the closure, which it calls divestment, of the famous Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) facility as well as the Green Bank radio telescope, as well as the closure of four different telescopes at Kit Peak Observatory in Hawaii by 2017.

"The demise of successful, long-running facilities will be difficult for the entire astronomy community," said the report, Advancing Astronomy in the Coming Decade: Opportunities and Challenges.
http://www.nsf.gov/mps/ast/ast_portfolio_review.jsp
"However, we must consider the scientific alternative between closing existing facilities and the risk of cuts in individual research grants, medium-sized projects and new initiatives."
The National Science Foundation is the main funder of the ground-based telescopes and research facilities in the USA. Every ten years, the American astronomy community prepares a decade review in which the highest priority research in the fields of astronomy and astrophysics in the coming decade is examined and identified, along with recommendations for important scientific goals and the facilities that will provide them.

Due to the budget problems the USA is suffering from, starting with the 2010 report titled "New Worlds, New Horizons", the allocations of the National Science Foundation have shrunk. Experts say that in fiscal year 2012, the budgets are already 45 million below the model outlined in the decade report, and the forecast is that the gap will reach 75-100 million dollars in 2014. As a result of this forecast, the astronomical community appointed a committee that will examine the goals of the 20120 report and recommend how to live with the existing means in the reduced budget - that is, what to keep and what to cut.

"The federal budget did not resemble today's budget at all when the report was written," says Dr. Debra Elmegreen of Vassar College in New York, and a member of the evaluation team since 2010. "I hope that the civil budgets will not be cut beyond the capacity of rehabilitation. Congress is required to understand that the leadership of the USA in the field of science is in danger if the science budget does not remain at a reasonable level". But Almagreen told Universe Today that she was impressed by the new panel's review.

"The committee was faced with a very difficult task in its attempt to enable the implementation of the decade's recommendation and also to maintain strong programs and the facilities that the NSF supported, in the face of difficult budget estimates," she said. "The committee paid a lot of attention in its consideration of what resources - grant programs, facilities, devices, technological and computer development - would be required to achieve progress in each of the main science fields outlined in the decade report."

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