remote central: UK Astronomers Denied Access To Gemini Telescopes In Budget Cuts

Monday, January 28, 2008

UK Astronomers Denied Access To Gemini Telescopes In Budget Cuts

(updated 29/01/08)

Although 2009 is slated to be International Year of Astronomy, British astronomers look set to be forced into taking one giant leap backwards, as funding for their subscription to the Gemini North and South telescopes is set to be cut at the behest of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), in an attempt to balance out an £80 million budgetary hole over the next three years, as we see from the linked article...

The STFC's problems have emerged out of the government's latest spending round which has left the council short of £80m in the three-year budget plan to 2011.

To manage its way out of this crisis, the STFC has announced its intention to close certain programmes and cut research grants. Science societies and union officials have warned the damage to UK physics and astronomy will be incalculable and will lead to hundreds of job losses.

That's bad enough, but it looks as though they even had the gall to try and scrounge some extra time without paying the subscription...

A request was made last year to the Gemini partners to allow the UK to come out of the organisation but still maintain some access to the Frederick C Gillett (Gemini North) facility through to the end of the current contract in 2012.

This request, however, has been rebuffed by the partners; and the STFC announced on Friday that it now had no option but to seek a formal cancellation of its subscription.

Observations booked on the Gemini telescopes from 1 February will now be terminated.

It seems scarcely credible that during what has been described elsewhere as a golden age for cosmology, Britain should be downgrading its participation - if anything, we should expect to see an increase of £80 million, or preferably, much more, to signal Britain's commitment to an ongoing collaboration to projects like the Gemini Observatory. Here's some more from the article...

"While we sincerely regret the need to withdraw from Gemini, the current circumstances leave us no choice," the STFC said in a statement.

"This is particularly relevant in the context of preserving the highest priority programmes and providing headroom to pursue the next generation of scientific opportunities, for example the Extremely Large Telescope."

The ELT is a super-scope that will have a mirrored surface tens of metres across. It is still in the design phase and will not be built for a number of years.

Britain will incur a penalty of about £8m for cancelling its Gemini membership early; but this would still save more than £15m in "subs" that no longer needed to be paid between now and 2012, according to the STFC's statement.

"We've effectively wasted £70m," countered Professor Crowther. "These facilities had reached their prime, but somebody else is now going to get to use them."

He said the STFC, if it had wanted to save money, should have maintained its membership and rented out a proportion of its time to another nation's astronomers. That way it would have saved the penalty fee, he argued.

"The STFC strategy just doesn't make sense." ...

...Researchers say they are aghast at the administrators' decision.

"To withdraw from the state-of-the-art Gemini facilities leaves the UK ground-based astronomy strategy in disarray - some would say deliberately sabotaged," said Professor Paul Crowther from Sheffield University.

"This will badly affect the UK astronomical community's ability to address questions such as how galaxies form, or look for planets around other stars, or be able to adequately exploit space observatories such as the Hubble Space Telescope," explained the current chair of the UK telescope allocation committee for Gemini.

"The loss of Gemini North is particularly acute, since the majority of the UK past investment has been focused upon the Northern Hemisphere," he told BBC News.

The sums of money mentioned are tiny in terms of the vast expenditure of the national budget - I heard somewhere the other day that the UK raises about £20m annually from car parking and removal fines alone (albeit at local government level), enough to easily cover the cost of the lapsed subscription.

Having utterly failed to adequately fund the Beagle 2 mission to Mars five years ago, when a miserly £50m was allocated, it would appear that politicians have somewhat nebulous ideas floating around their heads when it comes to ensuring that Britain and its scientists are adequately catered for, especially at the cutting edge of space exploration, where humankind is starting to reap the rewards of having developed extremely sophisticated hardware in its bid to better understand the cosmological context of the world in which we find ourselves, and its place in the greater Universe.

It might be asked how projects such as the ELT mentioned above are going to be able to attract UK scientists and graduates of the future to come on board, when the current batch of researchers have effectively been excluded from conducting astronomy of the very skies over their heads. Anyone considering embarking on a career in UK astronomy will only be dismayed at the apparent lack of faith in the field itself - after all, what would be the point of studying for years when there a few jobs to be had, and even the small number that do exist are under constant threat of summary budget cuts; as we see...

In future, the only way British astronomers can look at the Northern Hemisphere sky with the largest class of telescope is if they are working on projects with co-researchers whose national funding agencies are sponsors of one of these facilities.

Effectively, however, British scientists are now locked out from looking at what is directly above the UK with the world's best telescopes.

Update 29/01/08

News of other programmes set to have their budgets cut comes from this follow-up report from BBC News, 'Space Weather Science Rues Cuts', from which the following is an excerpt...

The field of science dedicated to understanding "space weather" - which can pose hazards to satellites and aircraft - may be wiped out in the UK.

That is the verdict of experts responding to UK physics and astronomy cuts made as administrators seek to plug an £80m hole in their finances...

... The organisation MIST (Magnetosphere, Ionosphere and Solar-Terrestrial) which represents the STP community in the UK, has issued a damning statement in which it says the cuts will prove catastrophic to this area of research.

Andrew Kavanagh, a space scientist at Lancaster University and member of the MIST council, said the STFC was "essentially scrapping an entire field of research in the UK".

Flares and coronal mass ejections - large clouds of ionised gas thrown off the Sun - along with their associated shock waves are among the solar phenomena which exert an important influence on the space environment.

The following comment from Professor Stan Cowley, at the University of Leicester, probably sums up the feelings of many within the field...

"This decision appears perverse in view of the existing and future potential [of this] high-impact world class research."

I seem to recall a recent initiative that aimed to promote the teaching of science in schools, and many will question the validity of a government's attitude towards science in general, when it appears that the same UK government cannot even scrape together a few tens of millions of pounds sterling to support and promote the work of professional astronomers, who as is apparent from the linked articles, are some of the best in the world - the last thing British science needs is another 'brain drain' which sees astronomers and other professionals heading overseas in search of jobs and adequate funding. More from the linked article...

Solar-terrestrial physics is also vital for understanding climate change on Earth, particularly in placing firm limits on the effect of solar variations compared to the contribution made by greenhouse gases produced by human activities. Space weather also affects many other aspects of modern life, from oil drilling operations to power grids.

But prominent researchers from the STP community question why, when the government has invested considerable amounts of money into research and innovation, an applications-based science such as solar-terrestrial physics has been one of the first to be cut.

In its statement, MIST also expressed concern over what it described as "a lack of transparency in recent decision-making" within STFC.

STP researchers have attacked the lack of availability of records for minuted meetings concerning the decisions leading up to the funding cuts. With many projects competing for financial support, scientists point out that the process must be seen to be open and fair.

In evidence to the House of Commons Select Committee on Innovation, Universities and Skills, Professor Keith Mason, chief executive of the STFC, defended his organisation's record on consultation.

He added: "The period of time we are talking about is essentially a period where all the research councils are making bids to DIUS [Department for Innovation, Universities & Skills] for funding and one of the reasons for so-called secrecy - or at least keeping this under wraps - is that it was a negotiating situation."

The STFC was formed as a new research council on 1 April 2007 through a merger of the Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC) and the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PParc).

It's not clear what, if any action can be taken to counter these ill-advised budgetary cuts, other than publicising what amounts to little more than a scandalous lack of foresight on behalf of those who fund our scientific institutions and associated researchers.

Meanwhile, over in the US, where the current Presidential race to the White House is well and truly under way, space exploration is prominent on the agenda, as we see from the latest newsletter of the Mars Society...

You may have noticed that space exploration is appearing in this presidential campaign more than in recent memory (see links below). We need your help to keep this momentum going!

Later this week, both the Democratic and the Republican candidates for president will be participating in the CNN/Politico/LA Times debates (the Republicans will debate on January 30th and the Democrats will debate on January 31st). The debate organizers will select the questions that recieve the largest number of votes. We need to make sure that a "humans to Mars" question is one of those questions. Please vote for a space question now!

You can see which questions have the most votes this far by clicking the "Most Popular" icon at the top of the Democratic and Republican pages. Both have a number of space questions, including one submitted by a Mars Society member that goes as follows:

"NASA can and should send humans to Mars in the short term. Will you support a manned mission to Mars, or will you keep NASA's hands tied by not giving them this mission that is worthy of the $16 billion they spend each year?"

You CAN have an impact. If thousands of members of The Mars Society (and as many of their friends and family as possible) vote for space questions, the debate organizers WILL notice. Let's work together to force humans to Mars into the presidential debates - again!

You should also send a fax to the candidates, letting them know that voters care about Mars, through the Mars Society's automated fax system . This is particularly critical given Tuesday's upcoming Florida primary, and next week's Super Tuesday primaries across the nation, which may determine the nominees for both parties. The candidates will be paying more attention to the voters this week than nearly any other time during the campaign - so be sure to make your voice heard!

1.Go to http://fax.marssociety.org

2.Fill in your name and address and then write your letter. The fax generator will automatically send faxes to the candidates or your United States Senators and Representative. It will also provide the proper heading to the fax. You do not need to add a heading.

3.If you have any problems getting the fax generator to work, contact Alex Kirk at alex@marssociety.org.