An oversight committee for Arecibo Observatory, the national
astronomical facility in Puerto Rico, has been established to act as
a management link between Cornell University, which manages the huge
radio telescope, and the U.S. funding agency, the National Science
Foundation (NSF).
“The NSF wanted assurance that more attention is being paid to the
management of NAIC,” says Martha Haynes, the Goldwin Smith Professor
of Astronomy at Cornell, who is chairing the new committee. The NAIC
is the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center, formed at Cornell in
1971 to manage the telescope for the federal agency.
“The NSF pays a lot more attention to the management of large
national research facilities than it used to, partly at the direction
of Congress,” says Haynes. “This places increasing demands on
institutions that manage these facilities, which is why both the NSF
and Cornell decided it would be a good idea to have this committee.”
Haynes also is chair of the board of the Associated Universities
Inc., the nine-university group that operates the National Radio
Astronomy Observatory research facility for the NSF.
One of the first tasks to occupy the four-person Arecibo committee —
officially called the Cornell NAIC Oversight Committee, or CNOC — is
the search for a new director of NAIC to succeed Paul Goldsmith, the
J.A. Weeks Professor in the Physical Sciences at Cornell, who is
stepping down after a decade in the post. The new director, expected
to be announced shortly, is going to face major changes in the way
science is done at the national observatories, says Haynes. “There is
an enormous amount going on.”
Among the changes at Arecibo Observatory:
will be made possible by a new instrument that will begin operation
around 2005. The so-called Arecibo L-band Feed Array, dubbed ALFA,
will enable major survey projects of the heavens and result in a
massive increase in the astronomical data that will flow out of
Arecibo. The NSF-funded $1.2 million array of seven “dual
polarization” receivers is likely to result in the further discovery
of many fast-spinning neutron stars, called pulsars, and possibly
even the first detection of the holy grail of astronomy, a pulsar in
orbit around a black hole. (Neutron stars are the highly dense,
collapsed cores of stars that are thrown out in stellar explosions
called supernovas.) “This instrument is going to offer a sea change
in the way science is done,” says Haynes.
University of Puerto Rico in San Juan and to the U.S. mainland has
made possible the remote operation of the telescope from computers in
most of the world’s universities. “I have just had a note from
graduate students at Berkeley [the University of California] who have
been running the observatory remotely and making maps of galaxies,”
says Goldsmith.
enabling Arecibo Observatory to cover the full frequency range, up to
10 GHz from the previous 2 GHz, allowing the observation of new kinds
of astronomical objects, in particular those regions where stars are
forming in galaxies from dense molecular clouds. (This upgrade
replaced the line feeds with a Gregorian reflector system as the main
method of focusing radio waves reflected from the 1,000-foot-diameter
dish.) “People from all over the world are beginning to see Arecibo
as a place they can use for studies of star formation, not just of
other galaxies or planets,” says Goldsmith. This requires fine-tuning
the telescope’s dish to an accuracy of 2 millimeters overall.
States and Europe are under way. The goal is to develop a very long
baseline interferometer — in which radio signals from distant
objects in the universe are captured by separate antennas and brought
together at a central processor — that could detect astronomical
sources never before seen. “We could watch pulsars move across the
sky in a matter of months, or watch supernovas explode,” says Haynes.
“It hasn’t been done before because Arecibo wasn’t adequately
equipped.”
Center at Arecibo is bringing many more conferences and workshops to
the observatory. In November the observatory hosted a conference on
pulsars, and a gathering on meteors is scheduled for January. In the
summer of 2001, the observatory hosted its first summer school in
radio astronomy, attended by 75 graduate students and astronomers.
“The whole education and outreach complexion at Arecibo has changed,”
says Goldsmith.
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