Makes zero sense, and NSF's best answer is that they are soliciting ideas about how. Arecibo is somewhat remote -- it's in a karst terrain that was chosen because it was so bumpy that it formed a convenient bowl for the dish. Its easy for the roads connecting it to San Juan to get shut down or degraded by storms. Without the telescope, it's really hard to imagine which students would aspire to go there. But it's a great place for.... A telescope.
Arecibo isn't remote. From San Juan I can get there in 40 minutes and it's directly off the 22 which is definitely not an easy freeway to be shut down short of a hurricane. It's also directly in between mayaguez and san juan both of which have a ton of students.
I guess I don't see how using 1-3 million dollars to operate an educational center is nonsensical. It's a central area between major universities, fairly flat terrain, northwestern coast so it's generally not going to see the worst of the storms and also has some existing infrastructure.
With that said it's a tragedy that they aren't going to rebuild the telescope in it's original glory.
$1m a year is not gonna get much. It might not be the case, but it smells a bit like a token amount to keep something going - so they don't have to deal with the drama of closing the site.
In reasearch and education terms, that's literally peanuts. For comparison, the US Department of Energy operates 17 national laboratories, with an average budget of ~$700 million per year each.
evrydayhustling|3 years ago
boredumb|3 years ago
I guess I don't see how using 1-3 million dollars to operate an educational center is nonsensical. It's a central area between major universities, fairly flat terrain, northwestern coast so it's generally not going to see the worst of the storms and also has some existing infrastructure.
With that said it's a tragedy that they aren't going to rebuild the telescope in it's original glory.
tokai|3 years ago
photochemsyn|3 years ago