The budget of the Arecibo Observatory is being steadily decreased over the next three years (from $10.5 million in 2007 to $8 million in 2010) in order to free up money for another telescope that will be twenty times more powerful than Arecibo.

The report also recommends possibly reducing the Observatory’s astronomy operations to less than $8 million in 2011, or even the closing of the facility after 2011 if other sources of funding are not obtained. The NSF report also advised that 90% of the observation time be allocated to the surveys already in progress, which, in effect, reduces the number of new projects in the future.

In the meantime, in order to remove accumulated corrosion, the telescope platform is being cleaned and re-painted in 2007. The platform painting, a multi-million dollar project, will give the Observatory a structural lifetime of 20 years (thus, out to 2027). The improvements to the Observatory are an attempt to save the facility from the humidity ever-present in the Caribbean and to show that the observatory still has many useful years ahead of it.

Additional information on the panel’s report is found at: http://www.naic.edu/~astro/NSFSR/NAIC_implementation.html.

Thus, a “Call to Action” plan has been initiated to save the Arecibo Observatory, which is the world’s largest radio telescope. For more information, go to The Planetary Society’s website at http://www.planetary.org/programs/projects/space_advocacy/20070316.html.

The Arecibo Radio Observatory is located about nine miles (15 kilometers) south-southeast from Arecibo, Puerto Rico. It is in the northern coast of Puerto Rico, close to the Atlantic Ocean, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) west of San Juan, and west of Florida.

The Observatory is operated by Cornell University under the name of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center (NAIC), but it is still commonly called the Arecibo Observatory. Operations are directed by an agreement with the National Science Foundation.

The radio telescope’s main collecting disk is 305 meters in diameter, which makes the telescope the largest single-aperture telescope ever to be built. Its main collecting dish is constructed inside a depression left by a karst sinkhole. The dish surface, which is supported by a mesh of steel cables, is comprised of 38,778 perforated aluminum panels.

Each panel is about one meter by two meters (three feet by six feet) in area. Its mission is threefold, to perform research in radio astronomy (study within the radio portion of the electromagnetic radiation spectrum), aeronomy (study of the Earth’s upper atmosphere), and radar observations of solar system objects.

Besides these functions, the Aerecibo Observatory also is used to collect data for the SETI@home (http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/) project, a distributed computing project that uses Internet-connected computers either as a screensaver or continuously (whenever a computer has freed up computer space). SETI stands for Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.

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